Installation view of Margaret Noble's Drift at the Timken Museum of Art. Photo: Sisif J. Patrick.
A Tantrum in Charcoal
Margaret Noble: Drift, Timken Museum of Art, San Diego, through September 6
At the Timken, Margaret Noble draws death back into a Boucher paradise. The painters who first put death in Arcadia made it as beautiful as the paradise. Hers is scribbled on — though, to her credit, it comes off the wall in September.
SAN DIEGO, CA - The best idea in Margaret Noble's Drift is the title. François Boucher's Lovers in a Park, painted in 1758 for a decorative scheme in France, drifted to a Rothschild house in England and then to Balboa Park, where the Timken bought it in 1965 and has rarely let it leave since. Noble's five-minute video drifts too, a slow camera wandering the picture's surface. Nice. Then you look at the rest of the wall.
To the left of the projection, an animal skull the size of a car, somewhere between wolf and crocodile, jaws open, spine trailing toward the floor, painted in black ink that reads as charcoal across the room. A black ribbon runs from its mouth to the edge of the projected image, so it appears to be spitting on the Boucher. Dead branches reach in from the right. Between them, framed by two small gilt ornaments, is the only color in the room: an AI-restored copy of the painting, the camera drifting over powdered hair and a red coat while painted black silhouettes creep across it. Hunched shades, a cat, crows, bodies dropping out of the sky. Sliding drones on the soundtrack.
The premise is truth confronting fantasy. What's actually on the wall is fantasy confronting fantasy, and the newer one loses. Boucher's is disciplined: one composition, every fold decided, a whole society's self-aware artifice behind it. It holds still and rewards looking. Noble's is a starter kit of the gothic, skull, crows, black cat, shadow people, dark but oddly lightweight, and it never holds still. The camera drifts because nothing has been composed. The muddying is a mood, not an argument.
There is a serious defense available to her, so let's hear it. Death used to live in the pastoral. Virgil's shepherds mourn through whole eclogues. Around 1620 Guercino painted two Arcadians finding a skull above the words Et in Arcadia ego, even in Arcadia, I am; Poussin calmed the scene into shepherds gathered at a tomb, one tracing the inscription while his own shadow falls across the stone. Arcadia was invented with a tomb in it, and Boucher's century is the one that hauled the tomb out. On this reading Noble is only moving the furniture back. But look at how those painters did it. Their death sits inside the picture, in the picture's own language, at the picture's own stillness, found and read by the shepherds themselves, the tomb composed as carefully as the trees. Noble's death comes from outside, in another medium, at another speed, imposed on lovers who never see it. Poussin's shepherds read the inscription. Boucher's lovers get scribbled on. Death earned its place in Arcadia by being as beautiful as Arcadia. This one doesn't try.
The eviction wasn't blindness, either. Boucher's buyers buried half their children. They knew exactly what was being left out, and the leaving-out was what they paid for. A garden is made of its walls, and a knowing holiday from death is not a lie about it. He even kept one memento mori, scaled to his manners: the flowers are cut, in the basket, in the garland the young man winds into his lover's hair. Dead by evening. The subtler statement about mortality in this room was made in 1758. Even the accusation is old. Diderot told the Salon of 1761 that Boucher had everything except truth, and the painting lost that argument in public and survived it. As for the twilight of the ancien régime, that's hindsight. Nobody in the picture knows they're doomed. Only we know, and the show invites us to enjoy knowing.
Now the credit, because it's real. The Boucher is oil on canvas. Noble's mural is ink on the museum's wall, and after September 6 the wall gets repainted. She has made a defacement that signs its own erasure, a tantrum with a checkout time, and in an artist this deliberate I doubt that's an accident. It is a kind of humility the genre of talking back to old masters almost never shows. For a summer the skull shouts. The lovers have time.
The wall text splits the viewer into the child who sees pure fantasy and the adult who knows what fantasy costs. The room reverses the roles. Boucher is the adult, finished and composed. The intervention is the child, and not the wide-eyed one the text imagines. This one found the charcoal. The skull is a good drawing, I'll give her that, confident and legible from the doorway. Then walk the thirty steps to the real painting, still free to see, still holding still. It has survived Diderot, two centuries of shipping, and, as of this September, the crows.
