About the Cover

Atticus Bergman, ‘Untitled composition,’ 2023. Crayon illustration. Courtesy of the artist

The cover for this special issue, ‘Legacies of Medieval Dance,’ is an original illustration by contemporary American artist Atticus Bergman.¹ For this commission, Bergman reimagined an archival photograph of the great Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova (1881–1931). He removed Pavlova’s head, torso, and tutu, replacing them with a patch of blue to evoke water, as well as a trio of dolphins. A green cactus provides another splash of colour without overwhelming the composition. Bergman deliberately combined Pavlova’s dancing appendages with haphazard shapes and objects to gesture toward the concept of movement, rather than movement itself.²

In my interview with Bergman, he explained how this illustration strives to manipulate the legibility of movement:

This illustration does not have anything to do with medievalness per se. But there is something about the artificiality of Pavlova’s pose that interests me in this context. Not only has the camera frozen her movement, but the pose itself was already a mannered tableau vivant, which she had adopted specifically for the lens of the camera. In other words, by arranging her body into a diorama that anticipated the enduring stasis of the image that was being staged, Pavlova was enacting a performative interpretation of performance itself, and therefore engaging in an activity that was both dance and, at the same time, also not-dance. Emphasizing this ambiguity was one way of adding an element of complexity to the image (2023).³

For the postmedieval cover, Bergman employed a mostly reduced colour palette. ‘There is a smooth background that does not clutter the composition and puts the foreground in relief. I did not want too many colours in the frame. Since it’s a fairly minimal drawing, adding more information would have weakened the impact of the forms and their interaction,’ says Bergman (2023). As is the case with his other larger-scale, gallery works of art, Bergman embraced the medium of Crayola crayons. He is drawn to wax for many reasons. ‘There is a long history of wax being used in encaustic paintings in the Church,’ says Bergman. ‘For instance, monks harvested beeswax and infused it with pigment, not only so they could spread the Word, but also so that they could preserve it through subsequent generations—an intention that resonates with the practice of using wax to embalm cadavers’ (2023). Moreover, Bergman is drawn to the Crayola brand. These aggressively marketed objects have a secure place in the modern imagination as creative implements for young children. ‘I gravitate toward serious thoughts, and the garish, unserious colours that result from using children’s playthings challenge my own pretensions and, in so doing, create the conditions for a useful dialectic’ (Bergman 2023).

When I first encountered Bergman’s work in the 2010s, I sensed similarities between his crayon drawings and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Salvador Dali. However, Bergman corrected this assumption. Since encountering the writings of André Breton as a teenager, he became very influenced by surrealism, but in a very particular way. As Bergman explains:

Instead of Dali’s stylistic surrealism, I am more interested in a kind of generative, psychoanalytic surrealism, which begins with the proposition that reality, as we understand it, is impoverished. And the reason why it’s impoverished is because there are unconscious constraints that narrow and stiffen our perception of what reality actually is. As such, the surrealistic principle of going ‘beyond reality’ does not necessarily involve anything ‘zany.’ On the contrary, surrealism, in this sense, is merely a tool for renegotiating an image of reality whose flaws would otherwise continue to congeal. By jostling the structure of reality as we perceive it, and challenging it with foreign elements, it becomes permeable—or at least subject to an immanent space of transformation that counteracts the biases that tend to inhibit the ambition of thought (2023).⁴

While Bergman does not imitate the theological formulas of Christian iconography, he is extremely interested in medieval art.⁵ Indeed, he is fascinated by the Iconoclastic Controversy in Byzantium during the eighth and ninth centuries. During these debates, people pondered over what relationship was permissible, theologically speaking, between graphic images and sacred concepts. ‘If theology required physical ambassadors to reach a largely illiterate public, then what sort of visual language would have to emerge in order for those vessels to endure the insinuations of idolatry that their existence would provoke?’ asks Bergman (2023).⁶ The complexities that undergird Byzantine iconoclasm continue to inform his thinking and art-making.⁷

According to Bergman, Byzantine image theory has a direct correlation with postmodern thought. Jacques Lacan, for instance, ruminated over language in the same way that iconoclasts and iconophiles ruminated over images:

Lacan spent a lot of time describing the complex structure of communication, which he modeled using a sort of fractured or discontinuous topological map. From a structural perspective, there are similarities between the way that the space of the divine is presumed to intervene in the transmission of ecclesiastical imagery and the way that the abstract, invisible space of the unconscious is presumed to intervene in the transmission of thoughts using language. If nothing else, the commerce between the visible and the invisible is an abiding preoccupation of mankind, especially when it comes to transactions that not only attempt to be meaningful, but also to characterize what meaning is or where it can be found (Bergman 2023).

Another issue that arose during my conversation with Bergman was the concept of resistance. According to Bergman, aesthetics and art-making often constitute an act of resistance. However, when taking on the more utilitarian task of creating a cover illustration for an academic journal (rather than a gallery or museum piece), Bergman stresses that he is not exercising an act of political resistance. ‘This kind of resistance is purely formal, which is to say that it’s about generating tension or points of aesthetic interest,’ he says. ‘As an artist, it is good to have humility about the ambition of your project—or at least a realistic understanding of its actual scope’ (Bergman 2023).

Although I understand Bergman’s position, I could not help but link resistance—both in its formalist and political capacities—to medieval dance. Medieval Europe unleashed an abundance of dance polemic and dance prohibitions. And yet, as recent scholarship reveals, premodern people were compelled to dance, and did dance (Dickason 2021). The contributions to this volume help us understand why.