Jenny Saville, Voice of the Shuttle (Philomela), 2014/15. Pastel and charcoal on canvas. Ca' Pesaro, Venice.
(this is a machine translated text from a German blogpost.)
In the large Saville exhibition at Ca' Pesaro, at the end of the tour, in one of the last rooms, hangs a large-format pastel from 2014/15. It is titled Voice of the Shuttle (Philomela).
In the background, a shattered landscape, bare tree stumps like the paintings Paul Nash made of the First World War. In the foreground, a tangle of bodies, a woman, a child, half visible, with red traces that look like bloodstains. Above it all, two men's heads, almost frontal, with moustaches, neatly groomed, as if from a family album around 1900. Beneath the heads, in pencil, in Saville's handwriting, two names: Tereus and Pandion.
Tereus, King of Thrace, rapes his sister-in-law Philomela and cuts out her tongue so that she cannot tell what has happened. Pandion is her father. He is the one who entrusted his daughters to Tereus.
Philomela cannot speak. She weaves the story into a tapestry and sends it to her sister. That is how the crime finds its voice. Voice of the Shuttle.
Earlier that morning, I had finished a piece on Fritz B. Simon's Mittelmaß und Eifersucht — a systemic attempt to profile the type of the dictator, with Alfred Adler as the principal witness. Standing in front of Saville's painting, it struck me that she continues the book without knowing it.
What is unsettling about the heads is not their menace but their banality. They do not look demonic. They look like family men, like registrars, like fathers-in-law. Saville does not paint the monster. She paints the man who leaves the house in the morning and does what he considers his right.
This is what Simon writes about.
Tereus is the compensatory movement in its rawest form. A man who cannot be large from his own substance, so he reaches for what is not his and protects himself against the telling. The moustache, the neat hair, the bourgeois bearing in the painting are no disguise. They are this man's reality. This is what Tereuses look like.
The two heads with Saville's pencil inscription: Tereus and Pandion.
Pandion is the second half of the same structure. He is not a perpetrator, but without him the deed would not have been possible. He trusts the order of things, he hands over the daughter, he does not look. In Adler's logic of movement, he is the other side of the missing community feeling: not the active overpowering, but the passive complicity. The two movements complete each other. Without the Pandion, there is no Tereus.
What is missing in the painting is the third movement. The woman who guides the shuttle. Saville does not show her, at least not directly. She is absent from the painting because her tongue has been cut out. But the drawing itself is her voice. This is the point Simon does not make. Levinas would say: it is the face of the sister that sets Philomela in motion. Not strength, not resolve — but the call of the Other. Community feeling is not compassion. It is response.
Philomela does not save herself. She saves the possibility that the story will be told. She weaves for her sister.
Saville weaves for Philomela. The two names beneath the heads, in pencil, in handwriting, are not a title. They are the refusal of forgetting. They are what remains when the tongue has been cut out and the world burned.
Mediocrity and envy hold the world hostage. There is no other way to free it than to name those who hold it captive and to take one's place beside those who have been made weak.