Series V & VI
by Mia Johnson
David Haughton's Kindertotentanz series is difficult and disturbing work. Kindertotentanz literally means "children's dance of death". The paintings depict infants and young children struggling and suffering from the most brutal of diseases and disorders.
Each painting bears the name of a fatal condition. The clinical titles even prod us to adopt an academic view in order to confront them. But to understand meningomyelocele, encephalocele, or congenital cytomeglovirus is to detach ourselves from the pain and passion that twist and distort the very work itself.
Anguish is defined by every arching back, by every chaotic contour, by skeletal fragments of bone and breath. Like Franz Liszt's own Totentanz, in which the piano is pitted against the orchestra, Haughton's paintings evoke the hapless struggle for life that death arouses, even in the smallest beings. These paintings convey such stark, blackened reality that one only wishes they were surreal. The pain of the artist who produced them is unimaginable.
Looking at Haughton's Kindertotentanz, it is difficult not to think of Saturn Devouring his Son, one of Goya's series of "black" paintings. In the 18th Century, the Spanish painter Francisco Goya was known for his scenes of violence, especially those prompted by the French invasion of Spain. Historians have asked of Goya's black paintings, "Do his prints and paintings show us the war-torn world that the artist saw around him -- or fantasies that swarmed through his demon-ridden dreams?" In Haughton's case, both the former and the latter would be true.
Scores of artworks throughout history have been produced by people recovering from tragedies: tragedies of war; of rape, murder and mutilation; of poverty; of natural disasters and plagues. During the great European plagues of the 1600s, the figure of death — walking ghoulishly among the living — was depicted everywhere: painted on chapel walls, carved into cathedral vaults and even designed in stained glass windows (www.totentanz-online.de).
The links between these early totentanz pieces and Haughton's work are obvious. But rarely has an artist taken the socially verboten step of depicting children in death. Children in art traditionally symbolize innocence, purity and vitality. In a ideal world, childhood struggles are absorbed by adult members of society, who, with their advanced wisdom and experience, can dispel the nightmares. Yet Haughton, like Goya with his Saturn, depicts adult vanity and selfishness destroying its own progeny.
Circling and witnessing the fateful struggles between infants and medical practitioners are the saints of Greek Orthodoxy. In worship, the Greek Orthodox Church makes no sharp distinction between the spiritual and the aesthetic. God's presence becomes known through the senses in the experience of "splendor" and "beauty." But where are the saints when all around is torment and despair? This is a central theme in Haughton's Kindertotentanz. The saints have been granted the special gift to pray and intercede for those still living in this world, yet they appear puzzled and afraid.
The most affirmative spirit in the work can be traced to art created by the Maori people of New Zealand, through which Haughton found the language to structure his work.
Figuring prominently in Maori design are the lizard and other reptiles; male "posture" dancing; birds, eels and fish; the night, heavens and the moon.The lizard, signifying death, is a key element in the Maori theory of disease. They believe that the doctor's task is to stop the lizard from entering the mouth. In many of Haughton's images, the infants themselves are left to wrestle with the lizard.
Like Maori art, Haughton's paintings cause us to react spontaneously and in a physical way. This reaction becomes even stronger when we consider the odds faced by children in the Western world today. Between genetic disorders, premature births, fetal alcohol syndrome, neurological development disorders and more, 3 to 5% of all births in North America result in congenital malformations. One in 200 newborns has a chromosomal abnormality and 20-30% of all infant deaths are due to genetic disorders. With figures like these, the simplicity of "normality" seems at staggering odds.
Yet the Greek painter Giorgio de Chirico once wrote, "A work of art must narrate something that does not appear within its outline. The objects and figures represented in it must likewise poetically tell you of something that is far away from them and also of what their shapes materially hide from us."
In the Kindertotentanz paintings, Haughton strives to illustrate something about religion, ritual and research in a way that is profoundly vulnerable. His work raises many more suggestions than answers, and that is probably his greatest gift to us.
Mia Johnson, 2003
Hydrancephaly
Anencephaly
In Utero
Ship of Woe
Ship of Woe
Kindertotentanz Series VI,
1996
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