What Does Art Do? Enter the ‘Labyrinth’ with David Bowie, Francis Bacon and Salvador Dali

Open on the Labyrinth, a 1986 British-American fantasy film directed by Jim Henson and produced by George Lucas. Perched in the tree of a suburban park, a white barn owl watches 13 year old Sarah (Jennifer Connelly), reciting lines from a play called ‘The Labyrinth’.

As Sarah struggles to recall the final line of her monologue, the town clock strikes seven, reminding her she has to babysit her little brother, Toby. Sarah rushes home to a scolding from her irate stepmother. Sulking in her room she discovers her teddy bear, Lancelot, is missing. She locates him in Toby’s room and resentfully wishes goblins would take him away.

Toby vanishes and the barn owl flies into the room, transforming into Jareth: King of the Goblins (David Bowie), sporting a cherry leather jumpsuit and lavender tinted space-do. Jareth tells Sarah that he will return her brother if she can solve his labyrinth within thirteen hours. He transports Sarah and himself to the labyrinth, and leaves her to begin her quest.

That plucky aspect in Jennifer Connelly’s bright brown eyes; her naïve determination to solve the labyrinth and retrieve her baby brother, is exactly how I felt exactly thirteen weeks ago, when a German hipster friend of mine asked me to write an essay answering the question….What does art do?

Honestly. Not even a Goblin king who kidnaps babies would be cruel enough to punish someone with a question so diabolically vague.

More or less immediately I found myself languishing in the contemplative equivalent of the oubliette, (a type of dark medieval dungeon, accessible only from a hatch in a high ceiling) in which Sarah finds herself trapped during the opening stages of The Labyrinth.

Unlike Sarah, who was swiftly rescued by a duplicitous dwarf called Hoddle, I spent a solid week waiting for a start in my own What does art do? labyrinth. Praying for someone to offer me a hand up those the slippery, slime covered walls of subjectivity.

Fortunately, just when I was about to give up the ghost, the hatch finally opened and thus appeared the ruddy faced apparition of my saviour (and British figurative painter), Francis Bacon — arriving on the scene via a boozy YouTube video of The Southbank Art Show, hosted by Melvyn Bragg. So it was Bacon, half sozzled on a carafe of Chianti, who reached down into the darkness lifted me out of the dungeon.

In the Labyrinth, Sarah is subsequently aided on her quest by Sir Didymus, a chivalrous, fox-headed knight, who guards the bridge above the ‘The Bog of Eternal Stench.’ In my What does art do? labyrinth, Bacon acted as my aide de camp too (very camp he was too). Yet rather than showing me safe passage above a rotten-egg belching bog, he shared with me an even more sobering stench bubbling up from the depths of the human soul.

“The reek of human blood,” he said, quoting the Greek poet Aeschylus, “is laughter to my heart.” And thereupon a nightmarish image of that shocking pleasure appeared in the bubbling murk — the black mouths of two buggering baboon-men, their howling black holes gripped in the violence of ejaculation.

“What is there but sensation? He goes on. “You live. You die…I seek to reform the reality of that which excites me…Modern man seeks sensation without the boredom of it’s conveyance.”

Gazing down into the howling black holes of those baboons, deep down into the primordial ooze from which we sprang, I pondered that perhaps all art, no matter how abstract or fantastic, is by degrees and degrees a dilution of that ooze — the “Deeply ordered chaos,” that Bacon believed in. That our existence is nothing more than a quick fuck within the cold cogs of the universe, and art simply an attempt to reconcile us against that grim reality.

But then I don’t know if I believe that, or if Bacon even believed it himself. Although he believed in nothing, he believed it with a “Profound optimism.” Sounds more like a profound paradox to me, a fantastic smile in defiance of his own nihilism, and one that seems to float above our basic animal instincts like flight, fight and fornication.

Back in The Labyrinth and clear from the bog, a weary and hungry Sarah eats an enchanted peach fed to her by the duplicitous dwarf Hoddle (working as a double agent for evil goblin king David Bowie). Upon ingesting the peach, Sarah falls into a surreal dream-state and is transported to a masked ball-room whereupon David Bowie attempts to seduce her with his snake-hipped ball-room dance swagger.

In keeping with this absurd parallel, I found myself there too, even deeper in What does art do? labyrinth, circling amidst perfumed, codpiece swinging courtiers and contemplating just how wonderfully high above Bacon’s Darwinian ooze the human imagination can fly.

In the Labyrinth it’s the ticktocking of the ball-room clock that eventually breaks Sarah free from her seducer’s thrall, reminding her of the thirteen hours she’s been given to solve the Labyrinth and rescue her baby brother. Fortunately, a horological intervention also spared me from any further new romantic molestation — Salvador Dali’s melting clocks in fact.

The symbolism of the clocks helped by a marvellous exposition directly from Dali’s flamboyantly moustached mug — Salvador Dali Tragicomic Genius @ 15:53 / 52:17

“Jesus is cheese.” Explains Dali. But then, reconsidering the dimensions of his fromage-God enlightenment, he continued to rectify the statement. “No. Jesus is mountains of cheese.” Okaaay then. So Dali’s melting clocks are perhaps the diametric opposite to Bacon’s belief in nothing. Dali believed in everything but reality, seeking through his ‘Paranoiac Method’ to unshackle himself from the illusion of the physical world and become the Salvador, saviour of the Spanish, wet-nursing their minds with his camembert fuelled visions.

So at least now we have two opposing poles to orient ourselves in the final stages of the What does art do? labyrinth. One pole, the flesh and blood reality of Bacon. The paintbrush as the lightning rod, conducting sensation from a deeply ordered chaos. Opposed to this, the surrealist dreamscapes of Dali. The phantasmagoria of the unconscious, a mystic metamorphosis toward God. The paintbrush as the sacred staff.

With the thirteenth hour fast approaching, we have a compass bearing. Sort of.

Back in The Labyrinth Sarah and her motley crew arrive at the entrance to the Goblin kingdom. Hoddle the dwarf redeems himself of his earlier peach transgression by disabling a giant robot, gaining them access to the inner sanctum. After defeating various goblin hordes without serious injuries to either party, Sarah confronts the Goblin king… alone.

Cue dramatic synth-pop soundtrack as we enter the heart of The Labyrinth, Bowie’s throne room; an Escher like mind-bend with stairs running upside down along the ceiling. Stairs cascading upward, rising in downward spirals, intersecting planes in brain paralysing ways. Just when you think you’ve got your bearings, the labyrinth warps the compass needle. So which way is up and which way is down? Where does fantasy end and reality begin?

Welcome to the epicentre of the What does art do? labyrinth. From across the void Sarah glimpses her baby brother crawling sideways along a vertical wall only to emerge on the far ceiling. Beyond her reach. Crawling for a fleeting moment atop the opposite stairwell and gone again. Wide-eyed and desperate she vainly seeks a path to him until Bowie makes his gravity defying entrance, pivoting up from beneath a stone ledge and serenading her with Within You, a slightly pervy plea to abandon the baby and stay with him forever.

Resisting his mesmerising crystal ball twirling antics and lyrical acrobatics, Sarah finally recites the complete monologue from the beginning of the film, recalling the elusive line:

“You have no power over me.”

Jareth, thwarted, spirits Sarah and Toby safely back to their home.

So where does that leave us, and the dramatic conclusion to this essay now that the awesome synth-pop crescendo has died away? Still in the labyrinth is where. Along with Salvador Dali and Francis Bacon and the cast of all humanity. Each on a lone quest to find little Toby, an ultimate purpose to draw us on through the bewildering labyrinth of our existence. Like a mincing minotaur, Bacon’s was a quest for sensation, lured down into the primordial murk by the reek of human blood. Dali’s was a quest for sainthood, ascendency above the illusionary corridors of reality to a fantastic seat beside God.

Or perhaps I have it completely topsy turvy? Is that David Bowie sitting on the ceiling? The compass needle slowly spins…

What does art do? Art navigates us through the supreme, inscrutable labyrinth of existence. Art is the glimmer of a golden thread, a shadow on the cave wall, the hands of a molten clock, the directions of a duplicitous dwarf, a crystal ball with a confounding reflection of ourselves. Unlike the conclusion to the Labyrinth, there will be no timely recollection of a lost line to resolve our quest, only The Neverending Story…but that’s another, um, story.

Originally published at magicfromthemachine.com on February 4, 2014.