A few years ago, during a walk through the Louvre I found myself standing in front of Théodore Géricault’s ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ trying hard to memorise the massive painting and trace the swelling, toppling heap of bodies — some dying, some dead, some desperate to live. Almost musical in its makeup, the painting has an effect that is immediate, final and crushing.

My first viewing of it was filled with emotion unmediated by a complete knowledge of the context of its making. That knowledge arrived later, like a dignified, royal procession clearing its way through some of the brambles of raw effect.

Political injustice and human tragedy make up the context of this work, painted by a 27-year-old Gericault who went to great lengths to prepare for it. But how does knowing all this change my perception of the work, if it changed my perception at all? Is it important to know that the painted raft was fashioned after a real raft that floated away from a real, sinking, French warship captained by an inefficient viscount? Or that this captain saved his own life and consigned 150 others to the sea? Or that Gericault shaved his head before embarking on this work? Do I need to know these facts to marvel at the indomitable human will to survive so ferociously illustrated by the painting? These men, in a way that echoes Hemingway, seem to come alive with their deaths in them. They are all of us — by turns unified, torn apart, and reconciled in the face of mortality. Everything but their, our, will to live becomes secondary. How important, then, for a viewer, is awareness of the context in which a work of art is made?

For certain kinds of art, the context is crucial. It can be a specific set of circumstances (such as the fiasco of the ship Méduse) which is addressed more conceptually than emotionally. Works by artists such as Emily Jacir and Mounir Fatmi, inspired and moulded by contemporary geo-political and religious debates, can be seen as belonging to this category.

Can art operate outside of its initial context and speak to us across boundaries of time, place and setting?

Or a context can be given to an object or a text by an artist, to turn it into an artwork. Marcel Duchamp famously rescued a urinal from obscurity by touting it as a fountain, and a fountain it became. In fact, it became the fountain. The artist played fairy godmother to a ‘readymade’, reversing its fortunes by renewing its context. Similarly, succeeding generations of artists began to look at what was already around them and question the given contexts of things by confounding them and proposing new ones.

Sarah Charlesworth’s Modern History series, for example, ingeniously reveals the unreliability of a single context by presenting the front pages of newspapers from around the world, as they appeared on certain dates, with everything but the mastheads and images blanked out. The remaining images (pertaining to the same stories, therefore identical to each other, but varying in size and placement according to the emphasis each paper laid on them) comment on the importance of contextual viewing while subverting that same importance.

A context is just a construct, they seem to say, and it is mutable.

So do we, as viewers, bring our own context to an artwork? Is there always a context in which we view the work provided by our own psychology, longing and memory, which makes the work meaningful to us in some way? That is certainly what has happened with works such as ‘Mona Lisa’ and ‘The Scream’ — we now approach them largely because of a sense of being starstruck. That itself becomes the context in which they function. But perhaps that is one of the ways in which art becomes timeless. It begins to work independently of its original context. It is perennially relevant. It is always inclusive. If, in the event of some cataclysm or pandemic amnesia it were to survive without any piece of paper expounding its significance, it would still command a response.

A passage in Iris Murdoch’s The Bell, which locates the harrowed protagonist in an art gallery, gently discloses how art that transcends its actual context becomes a gift to the viewer: “She felt that the pictures belonged to her, and reflected ruefully that they were about the only thing that did. Vaguely, consoled by the presence of something welcoming and responding in the place, her footsteps took her to various shrines at which she had worshipped so often before...”

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 15th, 2017