Unexpected Views- Ed Fornieles on Titian's 'Bacchus and Ariadne - National Gallery - YouTube

My name is Ed Forniles, I'm an artist, and I'll be talking about my work in relationship to this painting, Back a Scenario I Need, by Titian. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Daniel Herman. I'm the curator of modern and contemporary projects here at the National Gallery, and I'm delighted to welcome you to our Unexpected View tonight with the artist Ed Forniles. Unexpected Views are really our opportunity for us to talk with cultural producers and some of the best artists of the present to talk about the paintings of the past that inspire them. So we want to know, how do artists look at the paintings in the permanent collection of the National Gallery? We want to see what are the things that excite them in their own practice as artists today when they look at the masters of the past. This idea of artists looking at artists is really what a lot of the National Gallery is about, and we're really excited to be able to share that with you tonight. The way that we can do that is also due to one of our partners and one of our supporters, and that is Hiscox, which we would like to thank. Hiscox is our contemporary art partner, and we do thank them for their continued support. Now, we have Ed with us, and I'm gonna tell you a little bit of biographical things about him. So Ed Forniles is an interdisciplinary artist who's based in London, and he uses film, social media platforms, sculpture, installation, and performance to really express the interaction of family, relationships, popular memes, language, and subcultures of the 21st century. There's a very strong interest in your work, I would say, in popular culture and how it is being used, how it is being represented by our online culture today. Ed's work operates within immersive simulations which construct and enact alternative political and social spaces. His projects often involve cultural, social, and infrastructural production, and we'll give you a couple of examples of that later on as well. Ed's work can be quite hard-hitting and explores situations, simulations, and ideas that can be both aggressive, offensive, and deal with violence in popular culture today. So just be aware that some of the images that we might be showing you might be upsetting for some people, but I think they are quite important, and Ed's work is as well. Ed's work has been featured as part of many exhibitions, both in group and solo exhibitions, at Summer House most recently, at the Centre Pompidou Metz, at the Serpentine Gallery, at the New Museum in New York, and Ed is currently represented by Carlos Ishikawa here in London. Now, the painting that we're gonna look at is Bacchus and Ariadne by Titian. It's one of the most wonderful paintings in the National Gallery's collections, one of the most well-known paintings of the collection. And just to give you the basic framework, because once again, this is not going to be an art-historical talk, painted about 1520, 1523 by Titian, it's a fantastic work that shows us the mythological meaning of the god Bacchus and his bacchanal, his train of followers, the procession of chaotic gods and mythological figures that follow him. The meeting of the god Bacchus with Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos of Crete, who has just recently been transported to Naxos by her once-partner, who can be seen on the very left-hand side going away in a ship. We can also see that there's a moment of transformation in the sky that is being hinted at. The idea of transformation is, of course, where a lot of mythological stories in the National Gallery come from. The idea of transformation, of metamorphoses, is something that we can find in the works of Ovid, of Catullus, and many others. And the idea of transformation is one that we can find in lots of different ways, in lots of pictures, lots of paintings at the collection. Now, Ed, can we maybe start with two things? First, can you tell us a little bit about your practice as an artist today, what you're interested in? And then, at some point, can you maybe tell us why you chose this painting and how you look at it today? Okay, yeah. So my practice is varied. It uses a lot of different things from sculptures and film, but mainly, or at its core, is role-play. So I use LARP, which is live-action role-play, and specifically Nordic LARP. Within Nordic LARP, it's a structure with which you can adopt different characters and create sets of rules that sort of make up an artificial reality for a set period of time. And it can be used to explore various different subjects. So within this, or one of the works I want to talk about today is Animal House. And I think it resonates with the painting because of the Bacchanalian kind of parade that's sort of obviously the core feature of this painting. And thinking about what is this Bacchanalian mode and what is being presented to us and how we might have a relationship with it in our contemporary life, as well as other themes which we can talk about later. Do you want to maybe give us an idea about your own work, Animal House, that when you made it, and give us some examples of what your work looks like. Okay, so this was made a while ago now, in 2011. So the context is an American college experience. There was an online part of this work and an offline. And I'll mainly be talking about the offline work, which was an immersive performance that took an American college party as its theme and its core. The work was looking at these very broad archetypes, ones that are very present within popular fiction and that you all know. And one of the things I'm very interested in is this knowledge that is just present. I can show you a poster to one of these films and you'll probably know who everyone is, who everyone is in relationship to each other, and the narratives that are going to be played out. So as you see here on the top left, there's an image taken from a blog in which an individual is having their face decorated by marker pens. And then this is the action that gets enacted during the performance. And as these things began to occur, a sort of energy sweeps over the room. And one thing that I was interested in, and I think is present in the painting, is this parade is occurring in which people are sort of being moved along by it. They're being propelled by this force in which the individual sort of loses autonomy for a moment. It's something that I think is important to look at, especially in relationship to the American college moment, because it's at a time in someone's life when someone is asking the question of who am I and where do I fit in in this sort of cast of characters that I find myself with in a real context. And I think that these Bacchanalian moments for us can in some part go to answering those questions where you're navigating a relationship to the social group. And then, yes, yes, sorry. Yeah, what I think is maybe interesting as a contextual frame is what you're doing is an interest in popular culture and how forms that we find in paintings from 1520 can find their own expression in artworks today or in social behavior today. So in a way, you're using popular culture as a source to locate both iconographies and the common interest. Is that true? Absolutely, and I think my interpretation of this painting, I don't know if it's correct, but it has, for me, a very dark side to it in that she's recently experienced heartbreak and the person that she's loved has gone. And this is meant to be a moment of, this eye contact is a moment of love, of falling in love. But what is she falling in love with? This pure form of Bacchanalian excess, this giving yourself up. And to me, that talks about a moment of addiction, potentially, a moment of completely losing yourself to a state that is all-consuming. And after this, she gets turned into these stars, which were above her head, which I think is emblematic of a complete and utter giving over to this force, to this relationship and to this parade. And I think it's interesting to think about that. Can I maybe ask you, Ed, how did you first encounter this painting, Bacchanalian? Which, in your memory, what is the first time that you've actually recalled this painting or encountered it in some form? I think probably art school, I wanna say. But I definitely ignored it for many years and most of my life. But it's been very interesting and eye-opening to walk through the galleries with you and to think about these images in relationship to one's own practice. There's a lot going on. Yeah, I mean, if we talk about an iconic painting, it's something that we say quite often. We're very lucky that we have a lot of iconic paintings in the National Gallery. But the question is, how do we think of that today? What makes it an icon? And we get a lot of interest in this painting and other paintings, but particularly in Bacchus and Ariadne from a lot of artists today. And I would just wonder how you encountered it maybe at art school together with peers, if not in this form. What interested you about this painting? Yeah, I guess the themes. I've spoken a little bit about these archetypes that we have relationships to, and I think they function in some way a little bit like gods in that gods become symbolic in nature and they're condensed, they're symbols to something. And in this instance as well, it's a mode of being that's being offered to us and it's understandable. Presumably somebody from Titian's time would have been able to understand what Bacchanalian is, what Bacchanalia is, what a Bacchanalian mode is. And I think that's what's attractive to me from as a painting. And also to understand what heartbreak is, yeah. When you look at the painting with these ideas or how, just tell me, how do you look at this painting? How do you come up with your ideas? What is your way as an artist to look at Bacchus and Ariadne? I don't know, that's a good question. I don't know, I think that the more that I've been looking at it, the more I've been able to identify themes, modes, ideas that are just sort of present. I read about this idea of immersion and reflection within art and that involves performance as well. That you're in, for instance, an animal house where you're in this mode of complete immersion where you are unable to think, you're just simply doing or being or perceiving. And then you have other moments of reflection in which you're able to make sense of what's going on. And I think the same is true for looking at a painting and that you can have moments of total immersion, you can have moments of being present with the characters and then you get these other moments which are reflective and you can sort of make sense of your experiences within the painting as well. I think it's fascinating what you, you're basically drawing parallels between what is a represented Bacchanal. We are being shown the Bacchanal of Bacchus, the train of his follower, including certain characters that we might actually see in our own experiences with Bacchanalia in our own lives. We see the drunken Silenos being dragged behind the very, very inebriated gentleman right here on the right hand side. We have also a certain dark underbelly of the party that we're being shown. There is a threatening element to the Bacchanal. There's the Maynards that accompany the train of Bacchus, the followers of Bacchus who also tear apart animals and people if they have a chance depending on the text that we read. How do you relate to that moment of something that is in the encounter between the mortal and the God, something that is both joyful and there's a moment of love, but also there's a moment of threat and undercurrent of violence? No, for sure. I think within this painting, those themes are, it is exactly that. It's loss of control. It's joy, as you mentioned before, and then the danger of going too much into that state. I think all those things are present. And I said, I think that the gods in these paintings or the ancient Greek set of characters, well, the gods specifically are stands in for ideas of things. And I think that Ariadne here is an instance that she is an example of somebody who is getting caught up in a mode that is bigger than her that is potentially consuming. Yeah, there's a personal danger for her as well. The encounter with the gods does not usually end well for mortals. Yeah, and indeed being in a college party does not end well for many college students, I'm sure. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and the reason why I find it dark is because I feel that it's an all-encompassing moment for her, that she's gonna be completely subsumed. And what I find interesting about an American college experience, the party or those few years, it's a moment. And so the Bacchanalian mode seems less scary at that point, less all-consuming. Now, you work in performance, or a lot of your practice has performative elements to it. And from an art historical point, we're now in 2024. Depending on how you count, performance as a mode in the arts and the visual and fine arts, if you wanna go with that, has been around for about 100 years, give or take a decade. But very often, and especially after 1945, especially in the 1960s, performance art was very dangerous, was something that had a lot of bite to it, that had claws and fangs and it resisted both commercialization, but also musealization. It was very difficult to integrate the idea of performance art into the traditional settings of the museums. If anything, very often, performance art resisted quite deliberately exactly that integration. Since the 1970s and 80s, I think museums have found more and more interest and ways and means to integrate performance into collections, into our public programs. And very often that means that it's potential for disruption and its potential to explore the violent sides and the dark sides of culture have become almost declawed and defanged. What I find fascinating in your performances and the aspects of your work is that your way of working with the rules of life action role play almost gives it back its claws and fangs. Your performances can be very dark. They have the capacity for representing violence in a way that's extremely affecting and even threatening to viewers. How have you thought through this and how did you get to that? Yeah, it's an interesting one. I should say, so one of the rules with the work in both Animal House and this work, the excel that I'm about to show you is that you have to be in it to see it. So you have to be a participant. So there's no one looking into the work as it's being made. And I think there are lots of dangers that go with that in that total immersion. But that's why it can be very potent for the people who are participating. For me, I feel very changed by my own works and probably is one of the reasons why I made them as sort of an alibi or an excuse to go there for myself. And in terms of showing them at the gallery, it's complicated and hard. Maybe that's a good end to move to the next work. I'll move past that one quickly, which is called Cell, which is an investigation into a hypothetical alt-right group. It was made just after the 2016 election when sort of the alt-right were on the rise. And specifically, I wanted to look at male identity and how the alt-right were giving young men a kind of template to get behind for self-betterment and improvement that led them in a pipeline that would often lead to quite an aggressive culture, but also quite lots of violent outcomes. This work itself is based on such groups that existed in Miami, and they ended up committing a murder-suicide on each other and killing each other. And so this work is kind of an attempt to understand where those impulses are coming from, to not just simply dismiss them and criticize them, but to try to embody them for a moment and then to try to deconstruct them and see what can be done, how one might move beyond it. So the performance itself consisted of 10 individuals who were organized into a hierarchy. So we had our leader, a character called Sam. We had two enforcers who would sort of ... They would be the muscle within the group and then everyone else, and I was included in the third group of everyone else. Within this performance ... Just very quickly, these were all volunteers? Oh, yes. These were all ... There was a ... These are a mixture of people, so they're all volunteers, yes, and we worked a long time before to, within the Nordic Club tradition, to create a system of safety and trust, which is really vital if you want to go to quite extreme places. So within this work, for instance, I was waterboarded, I had my head shaved, I was beaten up a lot, but all within the context of play that allowed me to communicate to the people that were doing it that I was okay, and they were able to communicate to me as well. It happened over three days and was completely immersive, which means we never left character, apart from one time every morning for about 15 minutes, we'd have a debrief where we would check in with each other and we would talk about the effects of our characters on ourselves and just generally how we were doing. But apart from that, we would completely remain in the mode of play. The ... I don't know if I maybe took this one out. Yeah, I took this one out. The one rule we had was, in the first stage of this performance, was you should always have someone lower than yourself, and so there were mechanics for enacting that, which, as I mentioned before, would often involve physical aggression, but also ways of undermining and demeaning people. There were also mechanics for how that could affect the hierarchy as well. So I was at the bottom, and I did a thing called playing the bottom, which means that I opened myself up to the most extreme experiences on offer within play. But because of that, I was able to move up the hierarchy and become an enforcer for a moment. Just very quickly to frame that again within the history of performance as well. So this is a framework that's adapted to allow performances to explore particular cultural phenomena, which you and all the other volunteers controlled at every time, but it makes for very hard watching, and it is something that completely explores the dark underbelly of the Bacchanalian mode, as you call it. Yeah, maybe Bacchanalian mode and other modes, I guess. I mean, I think it simulates probably more accurately hierarchies you might find within school or within the military. At the same time, what I find very important is also that it allows for criticality because you're not underwriting what this performance depicts. You're not subscribing to it, but it's a mode of exploration and investigation. Yeah, so that brings ... Okay, so here are some moments of kind of resting within the first stage. In the second stage, so this is a moment in which the fictional death occurred, and to your point, it's very important that there was a second stage. The idea behind the second stage was that the rule you should always have someone lower than yourself gets removed, and we go from having kind of mechanics which were taken from, as I said, the military or from maybe school bullying to things which were coming from gestalt therapy, from prison therapy, things that are used to try and decode people from this mindset with the idea that you can't really understand something unless you experience it yourself. These things are playing out within us already. I mean, one of the main motivations for this work was for me to understand things that happened to me as a kid and to confront them, and so that became a major driving force. I do feel that I was able to do that within this work, yeah, and I guess there's a greater question, a political question, which is to say that even now, you know, the white is on the rise, and it's very attractive to a lot of, especially white young men, and so what can be done to disrupt that pipeline? We need to fully understand the reasons as to why people go in that direction, and we need to sort of foster and generate alternative narratives as opposed to simply just criticising and alienating those individuals, and so I guess the work was trying to be in dialogue with that, and a lot of work was done around sort of framing that conceptual framework with a lot of individuals who were involved professionally in the de-radicalisation of white young men. To bring it back to the painting, what we're seeing, of course, what you're talking about in your performance, what we are exploring were also modes and means of catharsis, of encounters that are at a pivotal point where things can go one way or the other, and in a way, I feel this is very much what Bacchus and Ariadne is about as well. It's a moment of encounter between mortals and gods, between land and the sea, between the woods and the wild and the city and civilisation. It's a very pivotal painting in all of those ways. Absolutely, and I think her narrative, as we keep coming back to, is really important to understand her attraction to Bacchus in this moment. When you talk to artists' friends about older works, how would you go about, what would you ask them to do when looking at a painting like Bacchus and Ariadne? How would you like to talk to other artists about this particular work? It's a good question. I mean, it's been interesting to feel how condensed and how many layers and how a work like this plays out on a symbolic level. It's been, because not much contemporary art does, it's using lots of mechanics and devices that have kind of fallen out of practice. And so I think that's something that I would talk to my hypothetical peers with. And also to remember that this is mimetically and technologically on the avant-garde of when it was created. It uses all these devices like perspective, it uses oil paint, it has lots of mimetic positions, which I find deeply fascinating. Like Titian himself, he's calling on, he's part of a movement of his own peers who are calling on ancient Greek motifs within a very Christian context. And what is the point of that? I think that he's bringing to the fore some narratives which are really important. I think, in a way, this is a meme for the Enlightenment. Thank you very much for joining us tonight and thank you very much, Ed Fernandes. Thank you.