At the height of Goya’s career, when he was deluged by demand for his brutal and profoundly cynical visions of humanity, the patron saint of young, angstful intellectuals and political revolutionaries painted a quiet and humorous work that has escaped much scrutiny. It is a self-portrait. Goya is working in darkness in front of his easel. He is wearing a large black felt hat, and on the brim blazes a halo of several dripping candles. He is looking out at us (at himself in the mirror, really), his expression one of wry and relaxed amusement, laughing no doubt at the paradoxes of his rapid climb to court painter and burning the midnight oil for the consumption of his less than flattering dark and apocryphal canvases. The painter encircles his head with the flickering flames of industry.
In prehistory, light, heat, and cooking were one and the same. You had your fire, you cooked up your meat, and you sat around in your cave (or wherever) to stay warm–the light from the fire drove back the hoards of hungry night predators. While cooking and heating stayed married for a great deal longer, light became its own entity early on. The discovery that any kind of oil (vegetable, animal, or mineral) with fiber in it could be lit and burn brightly led to the use of lamps, which were easily transportable.
The candle has most often been considered inferior to the lamp, due to its inconvenience and mess prior to the progressive changes made in its manufacture during the nineteenth century. Early candles were made of tallow, which could be any animal fat, though most often it was derived from mutton or beef. The fat was rendered before putrefaction had set in; nevertheless, it was difficult to thoroughly purify the tallow before it was made into dipped or molded candles, and the result was a smoky light, foul odor, and a candle that sort of collapsed into a puddle of hot grease rather than burned itself efficiently. Wax, either on its own or in combination with tallow, provided a cleaner light, but it suffered similar problems.
Candles made of either substance needed to be rigorously tended by the householder or servant, its wick needing to be trimmed (using a scissorlike device called a snuffer) several times an hour or else the candle would start to gutter, causing the wax or tallow to melt and drip instead of being consumed by the flame. The candle’s light would flicker annoyingly. Great occasions of state and church were always lit by candles (often several hundred or more), and it was common for these events to become overwhelmingly hot and smoky, with a constant rain of molten wax falling onto the spectators from chandeliers filled with guttering tapers. The invention of the self-snuffing, plaited wick in 1820 drastically revolutionized candles, eliminating the hazard, waste, and mess of the untended flame and pretty much bringing the candle into its present incarnation.
The ingenious but perversely gruesome use of “found candles,” if you will, abounds. Candlefish (a relative of the salmon) were used as bizarrely decorative lamps by Native Americans of Vancouver who caught the fish, dried them, propped them up on Y-shaped sticks, and lit one end at nightfall. On the Shetland Islands, the population caught a little bird called the storm petrel by the thousands, and after drying the bird threaded it with a wick, stuck its feet in a lump of clay, and lit its beak. In the West Indies, fireflies were caught and placed in small wooden boxes, and were adhered to the big toe with a gumlike substance to illuminate the path at night and spot any deadly snakes that may be lurking in the shadows.
The eternal struggle and expense to keep a light going before the modernization of illumination with gas and electricity cannot be exaggerated. Getting and keeping a light was almost as critical to survival as was food and shelter. Indeed, the choice between food and light was a constant for the poor–many lamp oils also being edible. This fact was duly noted by an increase in shipwrecks along the coasts of England in the nineteenth century, when lighthouse keepers used their surpluses of tallow candles for food instead of as warning signs for dangerous waters ahead. Being able to burn a candle anytime you wanted meant that you were rich, and probably literate. It signified freedom, order, and privilege. It also provided protection from the unseen chaos and the debauchery of the night.
Up until the latter half of the twentieth century, the candle was a necessary and sensible object, used thriftily and with reverence, for the most part because of its ability to turn night into a somewhat navigable situation. Its shape and color changed little over thousands of years, varying marginally from the cone to the taper, each dictated by the wick to candle-diameter ratio, and its color a result of the raw materials at hand. The candle gained symbolic significance within the spiritual realm as well, where its use in religious ritual has been prolific and widespread. The early Christian church discouraged the superstitious and pagan use of candles in services or in the common practice of guiding the dead to their final resting place. By the late third century, the church gave up this losing battle and embraced the candle. It then became a trinity of meaning: beeswax, the pure body of Mary; wick, the soul of Jesus Christ; and flame, Divinity.
Of course, candles served a sinister and lucrative role as a votive for fearful and guilty petitioners who wished to whisk their loved ones away from the jaws of purgatory and through the pearly gates. But more fanciful, empowering, and interesting uses of the candle as a sympathetic object can be found in fourteenth-century France, where a town, during pestilence or war, would make a taper the length of the town’s perimeter (which might be several miles), dip it in wax, and wrap it around a wooden barrel; the protective votive might burn for a couple of months or more. Similarly, a taper would be stretched around a sick animal and brought to the church to burn for the beast’s recovery. In both instances, the candle is thought to attain metaphysical power through the believer’s will and imagination. Magical practices have always employed candles, as literal and figurative constructions of reality through which the mind operates on an unseen level. Blowing out the candles on a birthday cake while making a wish originates in this transmutation of reality via a little bit of wax and flame.
In the mid eighteen hundreds, gas was beginning to replace the lamp and the candle in factories and homes. It was centrally supplied, required almost no maintenance by the householder, and provided bright and constant light that certainly revolutionized the dark and dangerous workplace. But there was a mysterious resistance to the use of gas light in the drawing rooms of the bourgeoisie. People clung to their candles and lamps. For decades, they refused to allow family meeting rooms to be converted to gas, though hallways and kitchens had gas installed almost immediately. Gas was accused of being poisonous and eating up too much oxygen! But the real reason was that gas did not have a mellow, warm flame that emulated the gentle, poetic, and hypnotic character of the hearth. The gas flame was harsh, and too bright. It did not do for the psyche what the flame of the candle or of the lamp could do: It provided no reprieve.
Nowadays, candles reside as blurred relics to their forgotten spiritual and domestic functions. They have lost their critical necessity, and in so doing have been given the time and luxury to expand from their tried-and-true modest singular form into the most fantastical, horrific, hilarious, and kitschy forms imaginable. Springing up and spreading like wildfire in the nineteen fifties through the seventies, the populist arts and crafts movement derived its momentum from a revolution in domestic life, whereby labor-saving devices and the sudden availability of inexpensive, factory-made goods altered the role of women in the home. As an adverse reaction to the modernization of housework into bland consumerism, the craft boom was in no small part a nostalgic re-creation of childhood memory, as well as a collective and unquenchable desire for individual creative activities that required skill, attention, and care. As a consequence, candle-making, along with macramé, ceramics, braiding, crocheting, quilting, rug latch-hooking, and decoupage, became hugely popular handicrafts in the postwar era, spawning specialty stores, books, magazines, television shows, classes, societies, and fairs.
Novelty candles flooded the marketplace, appealing to all tastes and embracing the bohemian counterculture’s aspiration for a chilled out, homespun, eastern-flavored, artsy, incense-burning exoticism that has seeped into every nook and cranny of the culture. Who does not remember making the hippie (or sand) candle at school or as a stay-at-home project? Or how about the multicolored drip candle, which, when placed in an empty wine bottle, would develop the counterfeit patina of a rich kaleidoscopic past of love-ins, happenings, and consciousness-raising sessions? The Hari Krishnas adopted the psychedelically patterned candle as their trademark and money-generator. And there are the gigantic trophy candles bought by upwardly-mobile suburbanites, those elaborately poured, dolloped, dripped, and sculpted forms–always a god-awful wood-brown color whose wick never tastes the bite of the match: a final footnote on the candle’s road from service to ornamental home décor.
Less swingin’ your-pad-or-mine candlealia is perhaps even more glorious and unbound: note the Santa Claus Winter Wonderland candle, the pressed-flower candle, the ice-cube candle, the head-shop skull candle, the layered candle, the fake-rock candle, the fake-woodgrain or brick candle, the pop-confection ice-cream-sundae candle, the little boy and girl candle (you light their heads), the many assorted animal candles . . .
Perhaps only artists have clearly understood our complicated relationship to the candle, or the vast possibilities of narrative, allegory, and pictorial promise of a candlelit space. Yet, surprisingly, representations of the candle in art are slight in number. In making Barry Lyndon, a 1975 film set in the eighteenth century and shot entirely in period lighting, director Stanley Kubrick was obsessed with using only candles and natural light in order to visually recreate the tone of Romantic-era paintings. When told that filming would be impossible without fill lighting, he adamantly made his own camera lenses and specially developed all the film. The technical difficulties facing painters have been similar; the challenge even more onerous. Candlelight is not stable: The flame changes continuously, shuddering palpably under the slightest air current, while expanding and contracting at will–moving like water over all it touches. Many artists just haven’t bothered, painting during the daylight, then adding a few candles here or there, hoping that their addition would be enough of a clue that the depicted scene occurred at night.
Postmodern resurrection of seventeenth-century French painter Georges de La Tour is a notable exception. His late portraits of Magdalenes–born through a demand for trifling voyeuristic portraits of morally repentant and anonymous women of clandestine reputation–are exquisitely reverie-inducing and brilliant studies of lighting. The object lesson of the fallen is overridden by the sheer transformative wonder of de La Tour’s technical virtuosity. Likewise, Gerhard Richter’s photobased paintings of skulls and candles critique Romanticism, while delivering a healthy hit of sensuous swoon. They recontextualize the dichotomous versions of the candle as both soulful reflection of the vanities and as parabola of sensorial seduction. Furthermore, the spiritually and sympathetically symbolic effects of Robert Gober’s candle pieces–a stubby, white candle with pubiclike human hair growing out of its base, or a truncated and formally clothed human form with candles sprouting from its limbs–mine the well-submerged but unconsciously recognized powers of the candle as a vehicle of wish fulfillment on the physical plane. Nam June Paik’s technological translation of a single candle into a multitude of variously scaled and colored video projections in One Candle of 1988 meditates upon the transition of our attention from the flame of the candle to the glow of the monitor. And picking up the thread of the nineteen-seventies aesthetic candle explosion is Jorge Pardo’s extravagant avocado, yellow, and orange drippy chandelier.
Just about the time that art was taking a major nosedive in significance as the main game in visual communication, the candle was being replaced by gas and electric light, and its significance in religious life was being devalued and forgotten. (Today, the Catholic Church in Rome has converted to electric votives; you pay and then hit the switch). With similar persistence–in the face of humiliation, debasement, and criticism leveled at its frivolity, self-indulgence, and lack of substantial meaning–the visual arts and the candle soldier on. As a consequence, they have become more ridiculous, exaggerated, inventive, and grand as time goes on. Indeed, the existence of the visual arts today is a testimony to a kind of faith, endurance, and desire for an illusionistic experience of life. The line between fact and fiction is wherever you want to draw it; undeniably, for the imaginatively evolved, the distinction is moot. Still, like the individual efforts of the artist, a dim candle burning in a darkened room continues to assert its right to blur, dream, trip, disguise, and pull the rug out from under everything else.