“Decreation and Undoing: George Bellows’ Excavation

Paintings, 1907-1909”

David Peters Corbett

“It was – that is the name of the will’s gnashing ofteeth and most secret melancholy. Powerless against whathas been done, he is an angry spectator of all that ispast. The will cannot will backwards … its fury is thattime cannot go backwards. ‘What was’ – this is the stone

that the will cannot turn over.”- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

[SLIDE] I am showing you George Bellows’ great Excavation at

Night (1908, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art) – one

of a series of four paintings he made between 1907 and

1909 in response to the massive engineering works which

razed and rebuilt Pennsylvania Station in New York City,

and which transformed a large swath of midtown Manhattan

between Seventh and Ninth Avenues and Thirty-first and

Thirty-third Streets. [SLIDE, 1907] Art historians have

largely read these excavation paintings through their

historical context, associating Bellows with a more

general obsession with the size, scale, ambition and

sheer destructive bravado of the excavations, an

exorbitance that gripped the attention of New Yorkers

during the six years it took to complete the work.

Contemporary responses saw it as a violent scarring of

the city, a “gaping wound in the dirty earth”,1 and a

“long rectangle of devastation”,2 but were also fascinated

by it for its dynamism as a “very anthill of activity”

and for its promise of clean modern buildings after the

dirt and inconvenience of destruction.3

2

For art historians the paintings are instances of

modernist vigour and energy, or are understood to respond

to the early twentieth-century dynamic of “creative-

destruction”, as “all that is solid melt[ed] into air”

under the pressure of unleashed capital.4 [SLIDE] For the

most extensive and substantial scholarly commentaries

these works are signs of Bellows’ painterly ambition in

the face of the vivid modernity of New York. Marianne

Doezema calls the excavation Bellows’ “first opportunity

to create a great drama”,5 while Sarah Newman argues that

the paintings offer a return of the suppressed natural

world hidden beneath the stones of New York, so that “the

man-made, built-up city … comes face-to-face” with its

shadowy rival, a questioning and literal undermining of

modern life.6 In this paper I want to read Bellows’

excavation paintings rather differently to this emphasis

on their modernity. I will concentrate on other

implications of the series’ involvement with destruction

and its meanings to argue that the excavation series

offers us an image of the lure of undoing and decreating

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the world, obliteration as fantasy of compensation and

potentiality.

Even at first encounter, Excavation at Night is a

striking and ominous image. Bellows’ painting seems in

love with darkness, as well as with the potent flare of

the illumination he describes, falling heavily across the

middle ground and flickering out sporadically elsewhere

to reveal his urban scene. There are four paintings in

Bellows’ series: in chronological order of making,

Pennsylvania Excavation, 1907 (Smith College) [SLIDE];

Excavation at Night [SLIDE]; Pennsylvania Station Excavation, c.1907-

1908 (Brooklyn Museum) [SLIDE], and Blue Morning (1909,

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC) [SLIDE]. [SLIDE]

All but the second, the Brooklyn painting, were intended

for public exhibition and were immediately shown at a

number of important exhibitions of contemporary art.

These three are all large eye-catching canvases, each

measuring approximately 94 x 111cm. The Brooklyn picture

is visibly smaller at 79 x 97cm and was given by Bellows

directly to a friend without public exhibition. There is

some evidence that there was at least one further

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excavation painting which has not survived.7 It is

immediately evident that Blue Morning, the last in the

series, is also substantially different in tone,

picturing as it does the McKim, Mead and White Beaux-Arts

Station building for which the excavations were

preparatory. The first three canvases all show what

contemporaries thought of as the “great hole” of the

excavation,8 but ring the changes on their depictions of

it, moving from the monochrome of Pennsylvania Excavation,

through the deep black of Excavation at Night, to the shot

colours and brilliant sky of the Brooklyn picture,

colours that prepare the ground for Blue Morning’s soft

atmospherics and daylight illumination. As his

commentators have argued, at one level the series

presents Bellows’ ambitious variations on a theme,

capitalising on the success of Excavation at Night when it was

shown at the Carnegie Institute, the Art Institute of

Chicago and elsewhere in order to bring his art to the

attention of his audience.

Nevertheless, that dimension of the series does not

exhaust its meanings, any more than the insistence on

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their modernity does. I want to suggest now that Excavation

at Night offers us an image of potentiality and

incompletion [SLIDE]. It is full of brevity, flickering,

transient moments and sudden, often enigmatic, glimpses

against the darkness. Things emerge into the space,

command our attention, and collapse back again into the

formless dark. The flume of sparks rising from the flames

at bottom right temporarily stop-frames into a scatter of

orange discs across the surface of the painting [SLIDE],

and then, as we watch, accelerates back into its

trajectory again; while the white nimbus of light from

the street lamps at the right triggers another dialogue

arcing across to the snow lying near the fence at the far

left, and seeming to stretch out the central space as it

does so. Indeed, size and scale seem problematic

throughout [SLIDE]; they lurch into perspective and out

again as we grasp, and then forget, the implications of

the figure outlined in front of the fire towards the

picture’s lower edge. The fire itself flares in a

declivity that we only intermittently register as it

flexes towards and away from depth and the picture plane.

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Houses and machinery loom into visibility and disappear

back into the void in a mechanical rhythm like that of a

conveyor belt, chugging past our eyes as they pulse one

by one into and out of perception; farther to the right

other houses and buildings emerge from the dark as the

reward for our attention, and fade away again as we

withdraw and transfer it elsewhere. When we eventually

focus the space, with whatever difficulty, we realise we

are gazing across a vast hollow. Its farther walls

glisten and shimmer with light as we watch. But the paint

seems to extend these heavy, precipitate, cliffs out

towards the viewer’s left, stretching and squeezing them

into a skipping, dragged, line of pigment which ends up

poised and hovering over a limitless depth.

The subject of the painting is arguably less the

details of the city or even the excavation than it is the

embrace of the darkness that wraps around them. The

night, spun out of Bellows’ sumptuous creamy mark-making,

has a enfolding, velvety, quality. The spark and flutter

of contingent elements of the world – street lamps,

buildings, the fire, the fence, fallen snow – are set in

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a silky void out of which the world briefly crystallises

and back into which it repeatedly falls. Those dark

masses at the centre of the painting grow and pulse as

they define our visual experience, engaging our eyes in a

rhythm of obscurity and light. These aspects of the

painting give it qualities of flow, emergence, and drift;

it seems a dialogue of materialisation and

dematerialisation. Presences and absences slide past in a

slow visual dance, moments of the contingent world of

objects and events flaring out of potentiality and the

formless night.

When I began to think about this paper, I found

myself looking for terms and concepts that would nuance

the harsh contrasts that seemed suggested by the phrase

“crash and burn” or by more or less blunt oppositions

between creation and destruction. The unforgiving flavour

of these formulations - while they could be argued, as

the conference call seemed to want to do, to express

something about the attitudes of contemporary and

historic American culture - seemed too stark to respond

to the spectrum of thoughts and feelings that Bellows’

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paintings throw up. Excavation at Night seems equally

concerned with the decreation of the world as with its

creation; contingency and potentiality vie for our

attention: this is not a world that is being violently

dismissed and done away with, despite the chronically

apocalyptic tenor of the period commentary, but neither

is it a triumphant materialisation out of destruction. As

much as it is emergent, the city Bellows depicts is de-

materialising, fading back into the void which surrounds

it.

One way of understanding this unfixed element in

Bellows’ painting is to see it as reflecting a strand of

aesthetic thought prominent in the art world of the time.

Important work by Sarah Burns and scholars such as

Kathleen Pyne has traced developments in late-nineteenth

century American art theory that emphasised the

subjectivity of the painter as interpreter of reality.

More recently, Rachael Ziady De Lue has shown that for

the turn-of-the-century art critic Sadakichi Hartman

“what is recorded is not the world as we know it to be,

but the person seeing and knowing that world, by way of

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the transcription of that seeing and knowing”. As a

result, she goes on, for Hartman, ‘a painting is not only

a picture of the world as viewed by one person but a

portrait of that person, of the individual who created it

—[so that it is] a document that says as much about who

did the seeing as it does about what is perceived”.9

Bellows and the Ashcan artists are not usually

thought of in this context, yet it is entirely

contemporary with them, congruent with the position the

Ashcanners’ teacher Robert Henri promoted, and strongly

influential on them as they developed a distinctively

urban rhetoric and set of themes. Noting this influence

unsettles the conventional interpretation of Ashcan art

as a gritty modernising realism. This is particularly

true of Bellows, whose interests and background diverge

significantly from the lines laid down by “painting of

modern life” studies of his Ashcan colleagues, and in

whose art psychological and subjective states play a

larger role than has been acknowledged. Bellows’ few

recorded statements about his art suggest as much.

Paintings are a record of “the mind and heart of the man

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who made it”, he said, and “an artist must be a spectator

of life” so that “the great dramas of human nature will

surge through his mind”.10 Bellows’ working methods

reflect this way of thinking. He shaped Excavation at Night

from memory after visiting the scene, so that Marianne

Doezema writes of his paintings at this period as

recording “an interaction between perception and

recollection, between … visual apprehension and the

translation of that visual experience through memory”.11

The flow of emergence and dematerialisation I have

noted in Excavation at Night, the movement between the

presence of the world and its vanishing away, might from

this perspective be understood to mime the flow of

flickering, temporary connections between the personality

of the painter and the objective world he observes.

Things come into or fade away from attention as

consciousness observes the world, moving across the

visual surface of things and focussing and releasing as

it does so. But there is a further way of understanding

these qualities, one which complements this aesthetic but

is distinct from it. They might additionally be read as

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responding to the entreaty which destruction as a subject

makes to us.

Sarah Newman has noted the negativity and darkness

of the paintings. “Bellows’s paintings are, in their

essence, pictures of holes—that is, of nothing”, she

writes. “They are quite literally the negative image of

the modern city, one both upturned and destructive”.

Newman goes on to propose a strongly positive reading of

this situation: “In their baseness, their insignificance

… the excavation pictures are … the apotheosis of the

Realist ideal”, she says, “straddling the line between

the exploration of the banal, the neglected, and the

forgotten, and the transcendence of that subject matter

by way of representation”.12 But if Newman makes something

positive out of this “literal” act of negation, I want to

hang on to the destructiveness and disavowal at the

centre of Bellows’ painting.

This is the aspect of the painting that I have been

referring to as “decreation”. This is a term with

profound implications in theological discussion. For

Giorgio Agamben, who discusses it at length in his 1999

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collection of essays Potentialities, decreation is linked to

theological questions of potentiality and contingency.

God, in creating the world, also “decreated” an

infinitely vast number of potentialities, things that

might have existed but did not.13 The contingent world is

what happens into existence from this vast pool of

potentialities most of which remain unrealised.

Potentiality is what could have been and was not and will

never be. It is a vertiginous idea. For Agamben it is

“not simply the potential to do this or that thing but

potential to not-do, potential not to pass into

actuality”.14 This formulation throws the focus of the

concept onto the moment of decision, the decision of God

to make the world in this way and thus to jettison all

those many other ways it could have been. The potential to

do something is never just concerned with bringing into

existence, but is also bound up with the denial of

existence. Because it is also about not choosing, not

doing, and not bringing into existence, each act or

decision has two aspects, the potential to do and what

Agamben calls “the possibility of privation”, the potential not

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to do.15 That latter decision Agamben associates with

“darkness … shadows”, what is not but might have been.16

One implication of this is that the past – those

things that once happened and now cannot be made to have

unhappened – is irrevocable. Decreation in the sense I

have described it is a powerful way of thinking about the

consequences of this. All that exists is contingent. That

infinitely multitudinous galaxy of things which did not

happen, which never emerged into contingency, are

decreation. They cannot be returned to, recovered, made

to happen when they did not, or rescued at some future

time for the dubious advantages of contingency. They are

the shadows of the things that did happen, imaginable

(some of them) but not perceptible in any other way than

through the imagination. Under certain sorts of pressure

- despair at the horror of the contingent world, misery

at choices gone bad or stale - those non-existent things,

events and sequels become clamorous, calling to us as

fantasies or resolutions of the fallen state in which we

live contingent lives. The Freudian psychoanalytic term

“undoing” refers to an attempt to alter or transform the

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past in order to feign a positive outcome, or to veil

negative or unhealthy impulses by acting out, strongly

declaring, or performing their opposite. Undoing is a

“mechanism whereby the subject makes an attempt to cause

past thoughts, words, gestures or actions not to have

occurred”.17 Dreaming of an order that cannot be - that

one might desire to have been but which wasn’t, or which

was and is and which you now wish undone, decreated,

unmade and consigned to the shadow multiverse of

potentiality beyond and outside the contingent world –

dreaming that impossible dream, we meditate on

contingency and potentiality, and dwell upon the potent

lure of destruction.

This is a profound human desire and a profound

aspect of the aetiology of destruction. In Nietzsche’s

words, quoted by Agamben, “It was – that is the name of

the will’s gnashing of teeth and most secret melancholy.

Powerless against what has been done, [it] is an angry

spectator of all that is past. The will cannot will

backwards … its fury is that time cannot go backwards”.18

We wish things to have happened otherwise than they did

15

and when we confront the event of destruction we are

reminded of the flowering of potentiality and difference

that contingency has suppressed. Destruction can thus be

a scene of possibility, desire, fantasy and longing; but

those melancholy urges are defined by impossibility, by

the irrevocable nature of what we wish had been, or, wish

had been other than it is.

Destruction’s promise to rip down of the contingent

world allows us into the fantasy that we might pursue

that disassembling of reality to the point where we can

start again. Destruction calls up for us an image of this

desired possibility, that the irrevocable nature of the

world can be undone but then remade, potentiality

restarted, the past begun again. That reminiscence brings

with it as well the “fury” that Nietzsche speaks of, the

sense of rage at the irrevocable reality of “what was”,

that “time cannot go backwards”, so that the other side

of destruction is the expression of that rage. The very

fact that ripping down, destroying, obliterating cannot

undo the past - which remains intact and unmoved in the

face of our anger - adds energy to the act of

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destruction. To observe the violence of a destructive

act – one writ large and dramatically across the face of

a city, for instance – is to take part in this dual

fantasy. Firstly, of the hope that destruction can return

us to the imagined ground from which choice can begin

again; secondly, rage that it cannot.

I have already described Excavation at Night as an image

of the contingent world enfolded in its shadowy

background, its twin potentiality. I can now be more

explicit. We are presented in Excavation at Night with an

image of an act of destruction. The excavation tears up

the past and disaffirms it - the surface of the world,

even, gouged out and eviscerated in a brutal act of

negativity and darkness. But that destructive event,

confronting us in the painting, is a prompt to other

thoughts, a reminiscence of the fantasy of undoing we all

entertain; it prompts the dream of a return to an

unsullied beginning where the trade-off between potential

and contingency can be differently arranged, and where

the world can be rethought to match desire.

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The painting doesn’t attempt to picture such a

rethinking, of course, but it does offer us images of

emergence, of being as becoming. What emerges, crucially,

does so as if materialisation were always still a matter

of choice, of the opportunity to select one option from

many. The buildings offer themselves up and then slide

away again to make way for further opportunities. Sparks

fly out as glimmering, transient, particles of

contingency, but are then held, in paint, as an image of

stability and decision [SLIDE]. The fantasy the painting

speaks to here is that we still have the luxury of

choice, that we have not made the choice, yet still can,

in the future, so that potentiality is preserved, those

things undone; what we should have done and haven’t, or

what is done and should not have been, are suspended,

sent back to face an undecided future because our

decision has yet to be made. The experience of viewing

the painting is therefore one of flow, possibility, and

occurrence-as-process, as if the act of destruction the

excavation represents makes possible the thought of the

re-creation of the world in an act of undoing, even if

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the painting inevitably images that thought as

possibility instead of example.

I want now in concluding to turn- very briefly - to

the remaining three paintings in Bellows’ excavation

series. One of the qualities of any series is to

introduce temporality into the static world of painting,

to narrativize the unfolding of time and therefore to

clarify or focus the consequences of decisions or acts

[SLIDE]. The four paintings of Bellows’ excavation series

spin narrative out of the brute, dark, fact of the

excavation. The culminating moment in Blue Morning [SLIDE],

when the world is raised up against the background of the

completed building, closes off the act of destruction.

But it does not do this in a wholly satisfactory way. One

is prompted to read the lusciousness and sensuality of

Blue Morning as a deflection, in which the major statement

of consequence – the McKim, Mead and White building

itself – turns our attention away from the evocation of

undoing in the earlier works.

In a short presentation I don't have time to tease

out the implications of this narrativization of

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destruction and potentiality at any length. But I do want

to make one final observation. Bellows’ paintings narrate

the psychological stresses of undoing through the tiny

human figures they introduce and which grow through the

series to occupy the centre of the canvas in Blue Morning.

The psychological literature associates undoing with

ritualistic, magical or delusional modes of thought and

with compulsive and obsessional behaviours. It is of

course impossible to undo the past, and fantasies of

making it so are understood as an unhealthy mode, even

though “counterfactual” thinking of this type can be

readily observed in normal behaviour. [SLIDE] The

enigmatic Bruegel-like figures who appear as a frieze

along the lip of the excavation in the Brooklyn Excavation

painting function as brief stand-ins for these modes.

They gesture, jerking out an arm, or they are hunched,

abject, crawling across the mud and rubbish of the edge.

Clinging together or thrust away they act out magical

rituals of response as cues for the picture’s spectator.

Fascinated by the squalor and glory of the excavation,

they gaze, spasm and break down, tiny figures crawling

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before the veils of colour that leap up from the pit of

destruction.

That seems to me to qualify the deflection I have

attributed to Blue Morning. If we put aside art historians’

emphasis on modernity in Bellows’ excavation paintings

and concentrate on the implications of the series’ deep

involvement with destruction, I think we can read them as

a nuanced interrogation of the impulses and implications

around the undoing of the world. There is a horror in

decreation, but there is also a lure because it is an

image of our dread at those things not done, or done but

denied and cast away, those things which press, often,

more forcefully on our consciousness than the contingent

world of accomplished creation. But “will cannot will

backwards … its fury is that time cannot go backwards”,

as those fierce, jerking, aberrant figures in Blue Morning

imply. Like Nietzsche they refer to the obduracy of the

contingent world. “What was”, says Nietzsche, “this is

the stone that the will cannot turn over.”

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NOTES

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1 New York Sun, 1907, cited in Sarah Newman, “Working Life: Pennsylvania Station Excavation, 1907-1909”, in Charles Brock, ed., George Bellows, exhib. cat., National Gallery of Art: Washington DC, 2012, p.91.2 “Biggest Hole Ever Dug in the Island of Manhattan”, Washington Post, 20 August 1905.3 “The Great Quarry in the Heart of New York City”, New York Herald, 29 October 1905.4 Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon & Shuster, 1982.5 Marianne Doezema, George Bellows and Urban America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982, p. 26.6 Sarah Newman, “Working Life: Pennsylvania Station Excavation, 1907-1909”, in Charles Brock, ed., George Bellows, exhib. cat., National Gallery of Art: Washington DC, 2012, p. 93.7 See Sarah M. Newman, “Excavating New York: George Bellows’s Landscapes of Modernity”, PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2005, footnote 8, p.42.8 Newman.9 Rachael Ziady De Lue, “Diagnosing Pictures: Sadakichi Hartmann and the Science of Seeing, circa 1900”, American Art, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Summer 2007), pp. 42-69 (pp. 60; 65).10 Bellows, cited in Doezema, George Bellows and Urban America, p. 26.11 Doezema, George Bellows and Urban America, p. 42.12 Sarah M. Newman, “Excavating New York: George Bellows’s Landscapes of Modernity”, PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2005, pp. 40-41.13 Lissa McCullough, “Decreation in Agamben and Simone Weil”, unpublished paper. http://www.academia.edu/3684548/_Decreation_in_Giorgio_Agamben_and_Simone_WeilAccessed 4 May 2015.14 Giorgio Agamben, “On Potentiality”, in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy., trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 1999, p. 180.15 Agamben, “On Potentiality”, p. 181.16 Agamben, “On Potentiality”, p. 180.17 J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: Hogarth Press, 1983, p. 477.18 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, cited in Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby,or On Contingency”, in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy., trans.

Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 267.