I didn’t post The Temple, Luc Tuymans’ 1996 portfolio of aquatint etchings, in 2017 because I’d tried but couldn’t figure out the source of his images. Also, unlike his painting and his Edition Schellmann sandblasted photo edition of Altar (2002), related to the second image above, of a sealing room in the Salt Lake City LDS Temple, I hadn’t ever seen The Temple in person.
Nothing’s changed on those fronts, but seeing the original version of Altar yesterday, the [stolen] 1996 painting The Heritage X, relit the blogging fire. And while I still don’t know the source of the “European TV” documentary about Mormonism Tuymans photographed, I know some facts, which feels like the diametric opposite of Tuymans’ project here.
The main source of information about The Temple is an interview Tuymans gave to Faye Hirsch in Sept. 1996, which ran in the Nov/Dec 1996 issue of On Paper, the publication formerly known The Print Collectors’ Newsletter, and soon to become Art on Paper. That’s less accessible than the 1997 Tate Modern text on the portfolio, which introduces some errors. But then, according to both of these sources, the portfolio’s page at its own publisher Peter Blum Editions has some errors, too, or inconsistencies.
The clearest explanation of how Tuymans made these prints is also the most complicated, which is the point: He recorded a TV show on a VCR, played it back, and took “dozens of” Polaroid stills of images on his screen. He painted watercolors of these 1st gen Polaroids, then took [2nd gen.] Polaroids of the watercolors. “From these Polaroids I made Polaroids again [3rd gen.], and then I made the final watercolors that look nearly the same as the prints.” [Hirsch, 33-4.] These images include traces of their TV screen origins, as well as the painterly interpretations and degraded resolution of their interim transformations, and that’s before Tuymans takes ten of them to printer Peter Kneubühler for their transmutation into 3-to-6-plate prints.
Tuymans seems to consider the portfolio a single work, The Temple. The individual prints are untitled, and are to be arranged in a specific sequence. Blum’s image doesn’t show this, and Tate’s paraphrase of this sequence non-trivially misstates Tuymans’ description of the print subjects. So I’ll just go with his explanation to Hirsch:
Hirsch: So this is an actual building where they keep these genealogical records.
Tuymans: Yes, in Salt Lake City. The Mormons have the biggest genealogical data bank. They can add souls of people who are dead. That’s why they have millions and millions of members. The first print is the tunnel through which you go, which has this big door like in a bank, and then you come in to the genealogical databank. And the second is a centralized room where they get married. The third is one of those bureaus in the databank whoere you get waited on by the Mormons. The fourth is a blessing, a baptism. The fifth, is microfilm of the data—one frame of it. The sixth is the missionaries, somwhere in South America, crossing the street. The Seventh is the museum about the history of the Book of Mormon. And the last one is the temple itself.
In Tate’s 1997 recap, this becomes, “(2) the room in this same building where Mormon marriage ceremonies are carried out,” which is incorrect: the room for marriages—called sealings—is not in the genealogical records facility, which is rather famously not a building, but tunneled into a granite mountain; it is in the temple itself. And “it is the artist’s wish that they are displayed in the sequence described above,” which, I feel ever less clear about as I type it.
Almost immediately, the discourse around a work takes cues from the work—and an emerging practice—centered on mediated images, memory, unreliable history, and, to quote Hirsch, “that feeling of loss of clarity.” To which Tuymans immediately agrees: “Completely, completely, that is exactly the word. The whole work is about the loss of meaning, but also about the failure of representation.”
Tuymans’ interpretations of the Church are only interesting to the extent that they inadvertently embody his own thesis: he’s reacting to and remembering and processing a TV show about a subject he doesn’t know, which was itself made with a point of view, which shaped the narrative and the images, and which was distributed in a specific medium and context. All this then feeds the images Tuymans chooses and makes and the narrative he applied to them.
That he happened to choose a subject I know about is immaterial; Tuymans enacts a process we all experience when we encounter something new or unfamiliar to us. To the extent Tuymans’ images evoke the unstable memories of that encounter, or are reconstructions of what we think we saw, their representational failure is as inevitable as their emotional and aesthetic power. But there’s another force at work here: the artist himself. Because the meaning of the images Tuymans saw was not lost; it was removed, transformed away by the artist’s own process. And these prints end up as testimony of that abstraction, indexing the distance Tuymans moved and the moves he made from the images whose source he could disclose but so far has not.