Not heroes or angels: the poise of Claudette Johnson’s figures

The Turner Prize nominated artist lets humans be human.

Jessica Scott

Jessica is Assistant Professor in Christian Theology at the University of Nottingham.

An artist's portrait show a figure turnng their head over their shoulder.

Figure in Blue. Claudette Johnson.

The Courtauld.

In the final room of this year’s Turner Prize exhibition hang portraits drawn by Claudette Johnson. Monochrome pastel, blocks of coloured gouache, and the contours of Johnson’s “raggedy” lines combine to depict black women and men. Many of them are Johnson’s own friends and relatives. These are monumentally large drawings, often spanning several meters; faces and bodies rendered unmissable. I think of these portraits in between the gallery’s opening times. In the stillness of the small hours, lights off, there they still are, eyes open, in no need of our gaze to make them real. Each emphatically there.

Johnson’s point is in part political: the presence she conjures is of those who have largely been absent from the canon of art history. These are works of redress, asserting the properness of Black presence and agency in a tradition at best closed and at worst profoundly hostile to such subjects. Readings of Johnson frequently underscore the labour of her portraiture in exactly this way: They weren’t there. Now they are. But to stop here risks relegating the presence Johnson invokes to a matter of mere attendance.

It’s not just that Johnson’s subjects are ~~there~~, present and correct, but that they are there, emphatically there, allowed to be there with an imprecision and capaciousness that ultimately evades our grasp. So many of her figures appear a moment away from motion - twisting, curling, stretching, turning - on their way to some other pose not yet found. They are regularly clipped by the boundaries of her paper, slipping beyond an edge into the void of the gallery wall. Johnson’s own marks can seem to wane, from the fine shading of a face at the top of a piece, to the erratic jolts that give way at its bottom (Figure with Raised Arms 2017). The waning mark reads as a confession: I cannot capture the whole of what is here. Several of her works are interrupted by swathes of space untouched apart from a sketchy single line. In such works, bodies are outlined like unchartered territories, whole untouched worlds still evolving (Reclining Figure 2017). The presence Johnson conjures is of lives still being lived and worked out. Unhemmed by definition, malleable and alive, her subjects become more than we can see or say.

In an interview earlier this year, Johnson spoke of her intention to ‘resist the urge to present heroic figurations… that offer a radical alternative to the negative imagery out there’.[1] I am reminded of a distinction theologians have worked with to distinguish angels from humans. Angels, outside of time, choose an orientation ‘once and for all’. The angel manifests their orientation to the divine forever and always, defined by that single choice. Humans by contrast, enduring in time, cannot give the whole of themselves over to any one thing completely. They are in motion. They cannot be fixed in one orientation forever. But that unfixed-ness, that distinctive plasticity, that lack of definition, is part of their crowning glory. It’s what permits human beings to image a God who himself is without bound, limit, or definition.

Johnson does not make her subjects into heroes or angels. The presence possessed by her portraits is neither precise nor still. It’s the presence of humans allowed to be humans. Humans who, in their distinctive glory, squirm and turn and dream and regret, who forgive and are forgiven, who change their minds, who grow and wonder and forget and remember.

Support Seen & Unseen

"If you were able to support us on Seen & Unseen with a regular gift of £5 or £10 a week, that would be a great encouragement for us and enable us to continue to produce the content we offer."

Graham Tomlin, Editor-in-Chief

Article

Assisted dying

Comment

Culture

Politics

3 December 2024

5 min read

The assisted dying debate revealed the real role of Parliament

MPs from areas where people are vulnerable and at risk were more sensitive to the dangers.

M. Ciftci

Mehmet Ciftci has a PhD in political theology from the University of Oxford. His research focuses on bioethics, faith and politics.

An MP stands and speaks in a parliamentary debate.

MP Diane Abbott speaks in the debate.

Parliament TV.

What would be the effect of allowing assisted suicide for those ‘people who lack agency, the people who know what it is to be excluded from power and to have decisions made for them’, asked Danny Kruger MP, as he wrapped up his speech? ‘What are the safeguards for them? Let me tell the House: we are the safeguard—this place; this Parliament; you and me. We are the people who protect the most vulnerable in society from harm, yet we stand on the brink of abandoning that role.’

His words capture an important aspect of Friday’s debate: what is the point of Parliament? Do MPs meet to turn public opinion polls into policies? If the majority are in favour of something, do MPs have nothing left to do but to follow the public and sort out the fine details? We might instinctively say ‘Yes!’ It seems right and democratic to treat those whom we elect as people we select and send to do our bidding. And the polls do seem to show the majority of people supporting assisted suicide, at least in principle – although there are good reasons to be sceptical about those figures and about the conclusions drawn from them.

But there are numerous times when the majority are known to be in favour of something but politicians refuse to endorse it. Polls repeatedly show that a majority are in favour of reintroducing the death penalty. Why might it be right for MPs sometimes to ignore what the purported majority thinks and to use their own judgement?

Because Parliament is not just a debating chamber.

An older way of referring to it was to call it the ‘High Court of Parliament’ because ‘parliament, classically, was where individuals could seek the redress of grievances through their representatives,’ as law lecturer Dr Robert Craig writes. It performed its function admirably in response to the Horizon scandal: a legitimate grievance was brought to its attention, and it responded to redress the wrongs done to the sub-postmasters by passing a law to ‘overturn a series of judgments that could only have been obtained, and were only obtained, by a toxic, captured and wilfully blind corporate culture’.

Friday’s debate featured many MPs who understood what they were there to do. They acknowledged the ‘terrible plight of the people who are begging us for this new law’ as Danny Kruger said. But they also spoke up for those who were in danger of being harmed and wronged by the bill: the disabled and the dying, and all the vulnerable who were not there to speak on their own behalf.

Many echoed the concerns expressed by Diane Abbott about coercion: ‘Robust safeguards for the sick and dying are vital to protect them from predatory relatives, to protect them from the state and, above all, to protect them from themselves. There will be those who say to themselves that they do not want to be a burden. … Others will worry about assets they had hoped to leave for their grandchildren being eroded by the cost of care. There will even be a handful who will think they should not be taking up a hospital bed.’ And evidence of coercion is hard to find and trace: ‘Coercion in the family context can be about not what you say but what you do not say—the long, meaningful pause.’

An analysis shared on X by law lecturer Philip Murray found an association between the level of deprivation in a constituency and how likely a Labour MP was to vote against the bill. He also shared figures showing that 2/3 of MPs from ethnic minorities voted against it. In other words, MPs from areas where people are vulnerable and at risk were more sensitive to the dangers of helping people to kill themselves.

The second reading of the bill on Friday was a crucial moment for them to decide whether the bill would fix an injustice or whether it would itself cause harm.

But it seems that many MPs did not appreciate what the debate was about or what they had gathered to do. Layla Moran MP said: ‘The media are asking all of us, “Are you for or against the Bill?”, but I urge hon. Members to think about the question differently. The question I will be answering today is, “Do I want to keep talking about the issues in the Bill?”’ But James Cleverly MP intervened: “she is misrepresenting what we are doing at this point. We are speaking about the specifics of this Bill: this is not a general debate or a theoretical discussion, but about the specifics of the Bill.” He was right to be impatient. Unlike the Oxford Union, the vote has consequences. Parliamentarians are not there merely to debate. As the term ‘High Court of Parliament’ suggests, when MPs (either on their own initiative or as a government) propose bills, what they are often doing is conveying a plea to redress some grievance, and their debates are to decide whether to respond by making laws to grant justice to the wronged.

The second reading of the bill on Friday was a crucial moment for them to decide whether the bill would fix an injustice or whether it would itself cause harm, because the scrutiny that the bill will undergo in the following stages is not likely to be as rigorous as with government bills. As a Private Member’s Bill, the assisted dying proposal is free to be scrutinised by a committee selected by the MP who has proposed the bill, i.e. Kim Leadbeater. When the bill reaches the stage for a final vote in the Commons at the third reading, no further amendments can be made and the time for debate is likely to be short.

It is rare but bills are sometimes defeated at the third reading. With eighteen abstentions on Friday and at least thirty-six MPs claiming they might change their minds later, there is still hope.

Each sitting of the Commons begins every day with a prayer by the Speaker’s Chaplain, who prays that MPs ‘may they never lead the nation wrongly through love of power, desire to please, or unworthy ideals but laying aside all private interests and prejudices, keep in mind their responsibility to seek to improve the condition of all mankind.’

We can only hope and pray that at their next opportunity, MP will consider this bill in light of their responsibilities as the country’s High Court, charged with protecting the most vulnerable in society from harm.