Art&Phil 2008 Conference Proceedings

Veils
First Annual Philosophy and Art Conference Stony Brook University Manhattan March 28-29, 2008 Conference Proceedings
The Inaugural conference of the Stony Brook Manhattan program in art and philosophy took place on March 28 th and 29th, 2008. It was organized by Professor Megan Craig as well as the following Stony Brook graduate students: Phil Bouska, Katie Brennan, Eric Charles, Audrey Ellis, Nick Fortier, Susan Henry, Paul Jaissle, Ryland Johnson, Rebecca Langley, Paul Netter, Dave Smucker, Heather White
The conference would not have been possible without the support of our sponsors: SBU Philosophy Department, SBU College of Arts and Science, SBU Humanities Institute, SBU Fine Arts Department, SBU Comp. Lit. & Cultural Studies, SBU Sociology Department, SBU Graduate Student Organization, SBU Office of the President
Contents Editors' Preface ........................................................................ 1 Opening Remarks - Dr. Megan Craig ...................................... 3 Panel I: Aesthetics and Photographic Vision ........................... 6 Barnett Newman and the Aesthetics of Totality Clay Matlin .............................................................................. 6 The Question Concerning Bernd and Hilla Becher David Smucker ...................................................................... 25 AL-ADHAN Michael Knierim .................................................................... 36 Panel Response Isaac Fer ................................................................................. 46 Panel II: Identity and Seeing Others ...................................... 50 A New Narcissism: Refracting the Self in Contemporary Video Max Razdow .......................................................................... 50 Baudrillards Butterfly Athleticism Ryland Johnson ...................................................................... 59 You & I Clare Samuel .......................................................................... 68 Panel Response Heather White ........................................................................ 74 Panel III: Feeling and Interaction .......................................... 76 Unveiling the Life of Feeling Nikolay Tugushev .................................................................. 76 Karen Joan Topping ............................................................... 86 CENTRE-LUMIRE-BLEU Sophie Lavaud-Forest .......................................................... 100 Panel Response Marlene Clark ...................................................................... 105 Panel IV: New Perspectives for Architecture ...................... 108 Reversing and Folding the Language of Architecture Bryan Norwood and Aaron Speaks ...................................... 108
A One Thousand Square Meter Veil: Truths Double Concealment Musetta Durkee .................................................................... 117 The Reminiscing Eye Simona Mihaela Josan ......................................................... 130 Panel Response Inna Osipova ........................................................................ 139 Panel V: Imagery and Consumption .................................... 142 The Abject and the Ugly: Modern Art in Kristeva and Adorno Surti Singh ........................................................................... 142 Piercing the Veil of Law:A Schizoanalytic Critique of the Obscene Aesthetics of Control Kyle J. McGee ..................................................................... 153 Affirmative Fashion Marijke Bouchier ................................................................. 165 Panel Response Amir Jaima .......................................................................... 172 Keynote Address The Parergons Veil Dr. Rosalind Krauss ............................................................. 175 Closing Remarks: The Veil's Edge Dr. Edward S. Casey ............................................................ 182 Contributing Artists: ............................................................ 188 'com()pass40n75w' and 'symchronaut' Constantina Zavitsanos ........................................................ 188 The Brown Study eldritch Priest ....................................................................... 192
Preface
Editors' Preface The first annual philosophy and art conference at Stony Brook Manhattan was an attempt to further the ongoing dialogue among a vast array of modes of inquiry and expression, and included presentations on architecture, politics, photography, prose, painting, installation, theory, interpretation and many other approaches, all constellated under the categories philosophy and art. The purposefully ambiguous theme 'veils', as well as the broad disciplinary schema indicated in the call for papers intended to bring participants from a variety of fields and media to respond to a truly interdisciplinary set of problems, concerns, and projects. The results were overwhelmingly successful, as evidenced in the following papers collected here, as well as in many ways that cannot be reproduced. In her opening remarks, Dr. Megan Craig explores the implications of 'veils' for both art and philosophy, as well as the intimate relation of these two disciplines. What was hoped for by all involved is indicated clearly here: that we see the obscurity of veils as the condition of possibility for approaching the faces, beings, places, and discourses that only appear enigmatically. The keynote address from Dr. Rosalind Krauss and the closing remarks of Dr. Edward S. Casey both respond to the veiling nature of art, as well as the un-veiling of truth that occurs at the edges of art and theory. The panel discussions reproduced here represent and explore the deep and fruitful connections between art and philosophy, as well as demonstrate some of the most current research and work in the area. This collection falls short, however, of conveying the fullness with which each participant and audience member contributed to the days events, especially in the case of presentations of actual works of art, both within panels as well as parts of the larger conference event (see Contributing Artists at the back of this volume), which are here only represented by digital images and text, offering only a trace of the truly revelatory aspects of these works and projects. What lies beyond the veil is of utmost interest to seekers of truth and beauty alike. The provocation that follows
Preface
from the presentation of a veil has been unavoidably tempting to curious and dedicated minds throughout history, and this exploration has become increasingly central in instantiations of art, philosophy and inquiry alike since the dawn of time, This conference was one, albeit powerful and revealing, among many attempts to explore these murky waters that flow in and out of not only philosophy and art, but human expressivity in general. This collection is a testimony to the success of this inaugural conference and attempts to show just how this gathering set the tone for a continued tradition of challenging and fruitful dialogue on the essential and continually evolving relationships between art and philosophy, as well as many other fields of inquiry. Thus, we not only recognize those involved in the conference, but hope to foster further exploration and dialogue. Editors: Phil Bouska Paul R Jaissle
Dr. Megan Craig Opening Remarks
Veils: Opening Remarks Dr. Megan Craig Welcome. We are so happy to have all of you here at our first annual conference in philosophy and art. Youve come from several continents and multiple disciplines. As we drafted the call for papers and discussed the possible theme for these two days, we knew we were casting a net far and wide. We could not anticipate how rich the catch would be. And the real rewards are yet before us, as we stand on the edge of one shore here together and have no idea where we might travel over the next two days or what we might find. In these few minutes before we set sail, Id like to say a few words about the title of our conference: Veils. This gathering is essentially plural, and we are dealing with not one, but several veils. We might envision these as a cascade of finely woven materials hanging in front of us. They may be more or less opaque, more or less transparent. Together they diffuse the light and create a scrim of ambiguity. We might glean the dim outline of something behind or beyond them, perhaps the contours of a body or a face. Or perhaps, like the screens aligned at the back of a stage, they rise and fall to reveal an ever-changing scene. Perhaps these veils part and close together and separately, veils upon veils. Veils conceal. There is something rare, valuable, fragile, or vulnerable beyond the veils. A veil conceals and protects a mystery. Veils conceal, but as we learn from Heidegger, every concealing is also a revealing. The double concealment Heidegger describes in The Origin of the Work of Art includes concealment as refusal and concealment as dissembling. In the first case, concealment as refusal, things resist or evade us in a distinctly opaque way. Something refuses to appear or come to light. In the second case, concealment as dissembling, one thing stands in front of another, or parades as another. In this case, something appears enigmatically, semi-transparently in a half-light. We are never sure which form of concealment were dealing with: refusal or
dissembling. We might say, we can never be certain whether the veils we encounter are opaque or transparent, and to what degree. Heidegger takes this essential uncertainty to mean that: The open place in the midst of beings, the clearing, is never a rigid stage with a permanently raised curtain on which the play of beings runs its course. Rather, the clearing happens only as this double concealmentthis is never a merely existent state, but a happening.1 The curtain doesnt rise on the stage to reveal a lighted set where a story unfolds. A curtain rises on a stage that is composed of infinite curtains rising and falling. The stage itself, the clearing, moves afloat or adrift. And we dont find ourselves in seats in the dark, looking on from below at the dim lights and moving shadows as Platos prisoners found themselves in the cave. We find ourselves in the midst of the bright and dim lights, neither above nor below, but enmeshed in the veils that are rising and falling. We are, ourselves, veils that rise and fall, that refuse and dissemble, open and close. Heidegger describes this clearing as a complex performance piece. It is a happening in which we become or embody the very veils we attempt to hide beyond and to lift. Art and philosophy, if we can say these separately, are also entangled in this double concealment. It is not clear whether one refuses or obscures the other. It is not clear where one begins and where the other ends. We may be tempted, as any veil tempts us, to lift these veils quickly, to get underneath them and uncover the enigma to make philosophy and art, at long last, show their faces or meet face to face. But rather than rush impatiently, my hope is that we will see the obscurity of veils as the condition of possibility for approaching the faces, beings, places, and discourses that only appear enigmatically.
1
Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Rowe, 1975) 54.
We lift one veil to find another. We are together today to move among the veils. Not to go behind the curtains, but to join together for this multivalent happening. In a short story called Conversation in the Mountains, Paul Clan writes about two people whose eyes are filled with veils. There is not a single lid to the eye, but an infinite series of lids opening and closing deep in the hearts of vision and memory. Meeting on a mountain, on a steep and arduous climb, these two make their way towards each other, drawing back the curtains in their eyes. Today, as we open our own conversation, we draw back an initial veil, the first of many, to begin to establish the clearing that is never clear. One veil draws aside barely and we begin to grope our way towards each other, in and amidst veils.
Aesthetics and Photographic Vision
Panel I: Aesthetics and Photographic Vision
Barnett Newman and the Aesthetics of Totality Clay Matlin School of Visual Arts As he looked over his newly finished painting on January 29 th 1948, what might Barnett Newman have thought? It was a modestly sized canvas (27in by 16in), covered in Indian red paint and cleaved in two by an electric stripe of light cadmium red, like some Technicolor lightning bolt come to set the world on fire. Do we picture Newman clad in that formal outfit he is so often photographed wearing: pants hiked up over his waist, sports jacket unbuttoned, white dress shirt and wide tie? Perhaps he sat for hours, as his friend Mark Rothko did, in a comfortable chair smoking endlessly while contemplating the newly finished Onement I. After all, it was his 43rd birthday. Newman would come to regard Onement I as the turning point in his art: perhaps the exact moment when all his ruminating on both the need to paint and the question of what to paint merged into one perfect concrete presence to guide him forward. The English critic David Sylvester writes of Newman, As Athena sprang fully formed from the brow of Zeus, so Newman the artist sprang fully formed from Newman the dreamerNewman of course, did more than meditate during his years of preparation; he wrote. He wrote, it appears, in order to define for himself what had to be done. 1 Indeed, Newman the artist could never have existed without Newman the dreamer. This essay will inquire into the aesthetic philosophy of Newman the dreamer and especially his assertion that the role of art is to make the Nietzschian task of living more bearable.
1
David Sylvester, About Modern Art, 2nd Edition (Yale University Press, 2001) 322.
Clay Matlin Barnett Newman and The Aesthetics of Totality
In his Plasmic Image, a collection of short statements from the mid 1940s, Newman writes that abstract art is not a thing to be loved because it is abstract, it is to be loved because of the means it possesses to communicate new ideas.2 Before Onement I Newman had experimented with the bands that would later become known as zips. Yet these early paintings, with their tapered bands and canvases often divided into thirds, have the feeling of tense experimentation. There is roughness to the work, the same searching touch that Rothko had before his own breakthrough. The pooling of paint, thin in some areas, thick in others, different shades of the same color dominate the canvases; the zip is there in nuce but it is not yet focused. The later tightness and power that Newman would come to possess is only evident in infrequent flashes. He seems to be working out what he believed to be at the foundation of all art, the handling of chaos.3 Onement I bound Newman to his craft; it became a moral need: what it made me realize is that I was confronted for the first time with the thing that I did, whereas up until that moment I was able to remove myself from the act of painting, or from the painting itself. The painting was something that I was making, whereas somehow for the first time with this painting the painting itself had a life of its own in a way that I dont think the others did, as much.4 No longer separate, the painting became an extension of Newman, just as alive as he was. The act of painting was transformed from the simplicity of the action of making a
2
Newman called the image Plasmic because he felt the new artist would give life to the abstract, converting the arts plastic elements into what he called mental plasma. The ideas were to be made tangible. 3 From the Plasmic Image in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. ONeill (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1990) 139. 4 Newman, David Sylvester Interview, 256.
painted work, into the creation of something that would not merely live in this world but communicate with it. Onement I gave Newman a sense of both who and where he was. It grounded him. The life it possessed linked him to the world. His intent was to move away from nature, to distance himself from the flaws he saw in the abstraction of European painters such as Kandinsky, flaws that, in his view, allowed for abstract shapes to be construed as objects from life. Newman believed that the goal of abstract painting should be to remove the painter from the presence of nature but not from that of life itself. For Newman, the artist is an individual who delves into the mysteries of the world so they might then come to present the unknowable. Newmans vocal espousal of his vision led him to be characterized by his fellow Abstract Expressionists, according to Sylvester, as either the groups sage or fool. What Newman hunted after was a new artist, one who believed, as he did, that the truth is a search for the hidden meanings of life. To practice it, art must become a metaphysical exercise. That is why the new painter is dissatisfied only to titillate our sensibilities. That is why he has no intention of giving us cut and dried journalist answers (The Plasmic Image, 145). The boldness of Newmans assertion is that the truth in painting is not a concrete thing but is instead a search for meaning and that such searching can be represented only in abstraction, a medium that does not trade on the easy susceptibility of our emotional arousal. Representational painting had ceased to be capable of showing the truth of the worlds problems. The role of the artist was to move beyond the visible and known world, to work with forms mysterious even to him, to invent new modes and symbols that will have the living quality of creation (The Plasmic Image, 140). Under Newmans formulation, the artist must attempt to wrest truth from the void, for the void is incomprehensible, it is the graveyard of truth. Thus the artist must pull truth from its prison so that she might have the opportunity to search for those hidden meanings that life offers. Newman sought to present mans connection to man as well as mans relation to the absolute, by attempting to bestow living thought, the desire to know lifes mysteries, to the
language of painting.5 Newmans new painter, however, was of a decidedly American variety. In The Sublime is Now, perhaps his most influential though not necessarily his most accomplished essay, he argues that contemporary European artists are incapable of achieving sublimity because they continue to insist on living inside the reality of sensation, building artwork within a framework of plasticity based on Greek ideals of beauty. It was his belief that these artists were trapped under the crushing weight of their own history, a history that followed them wherever they went. 6
5
Perhaps the best way to approach Newmans conception of the absolute is if we turn to the German Romantic poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). Schiller believed that mans search for the absolute is a search not only for a grand truth about the nature of existence but a chance to recapture the unity man once possessed, both internal and in relation to ones fellow man. He saw reason as the means to approach the absolute, for reason is there to direct us in the face of Natures devotion to the sensuous and the shortcomings of the imagination. It is reason, according to Schiller, that gives us a glass with which to peer into the absolute (Schiller, 43). This is not so different from Newmans attempt to create an art of ethics and content by removing his own painting from a reality of sensation. Indeed, for Schiller writes in the Ninth Letter of On the Aesthetic Education of Man, that the pure moral impulse is directed towards the Absolute. For such an impulse time does not exist, and the future turns into the present from the moment that it is seen to develop with inevitable Necessity out of the present. In the eyes of a Reason which knows no limits, the Direction is at once the Destination, and the Way is completed from the moment it is trodden (Schiller, 59). If we consider Newmans desire to present to his viewer that viewers connection not only to her fellow man, but to the absolute as well then we can interpret Newmans quest as one that seeks to engage with the same sense of immediate presentness that is alive in Schillers vision of mans desire to come to know the absolute. 6 It is interesting to note that Donald Judd would make a
Newman writes: I believe that here in America, some of us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding the answer by completely denying that art has any concern with the problem of beauty and where to find it.We are asserting mans natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions.The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history (The Sublime is Now, 173). The European painter, the old painter, the painter forever burdened by history was constantly besieged by the crush of the past. It was impossible to be European, in Newmans opinion, and in some way not be incapable of dealing with the similar claim in December 1963 when he wrote the Kan sas City Report for Arts Magazines Nationwide Reports section. Judd writes: If you take an elementary course in art at a university, it is a survey of the history of art. It is considered normal to give the student a stiff dose of the past before he knows anything about the present. It is a confusing arrangement. The first fight almost every artist has is to get clear of old European art (Judd, Kansas City Report, 103). For Judd the old European art to get clear of was painting, for the rectangle of painting existed in his opinion as an entity, one thing, and not the indefinable sum of a group of entities and references (Judd, Specific Objects, 182). Of course Newman wanted to fashion a one thing, and Judd knew this. In fact Judd, oddly enough, supported this in Newmans work, it was the quality of wholeness that Judd viewed as vital. Everything is specifically where it is, Judd writes, This wholeness isnew and important.The openness of Newmans work is concomitant with chance and one persons knowledge; it doesnt claim more than anyone can know; it doesnt imply a social order. Newman is asserting his concerns and knowledge (Judd, Barnett Newman, 202).
10
record of previous accomplishments that lurked around every bend. How could the sublime be achieved when there was already such a robust framework for artistic thought? What terror, or even awe, would the artist be able to muster when strict guidelines always loomed? Newman declares: The failure of European art to achieve the sublime is due to this blind desire to exist inside the reality of sensation (the objective world, whether distorted or pure) and to build an art within a framework of pure plasticity (the Greek ideal of beauty, whether that plasticity be a romantic active surface or a classic stable one) (The Sublime is Now, 173). In Sylvesters opinion the fact that Newman lived 6000 miles away from European art history allowed him to deal with the likes of Giacometti and Matisse; he was able to learn the lessons they imparted and move on: In the search for the absolute and commitment to the new, Sylvester writes, it was advantageous not to be European, not to be steeped in a tired culture (Sylvester, 324). The European masters were the starting point for Newman, but their style of painting had ceased to address the world in which he lived and the answers he craved.7 Newman sought to free himself from the nostalgic glasses of history, glasses that tinted the world so the past was seen as glory and the present as failure. The image Newman wanted to present could be seen only with unencumbered vision. The naked eye of the present was the only means of viewing his art, as the present is vastly more capable of terror than the past. The present is painful while past pain is but a ghost. It was this specter that haunted the Europeans. But in America, with a mere couple hundred years of history, Newman sought to make known the present. And the present appears specifically as the new. Consequently, in his formulation the sublime is the new. 8 It
7
Although Newman did regard the Surrealists as having opened the worlds eyes to the possibility of real tragedy. 8 It would appear that Newmans conception of the sublime is not at all reconcilable with Edmund Burkes. Yet Newmans sublime can be viewed as a re-imagining of Burkes. Burke describes the sublime as that which is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and dangerwhat is in any sort
11
is the terror of stepping forth from the protection of history and allowing the unknown, the ever-changing present, to potentially strike the artist dead. The painting of the European masters did not possess the qualities of the sublime. Their work was representational and Newman, like Burke, believed that representational painting did not have the power to make the individual aware of the sublime. 9 However where Newman departs from Burke is of major importance. Though Burke saw all painting as incapable of portraying the sublime, he had never witnessed true abstraction.10 Newman believed that abstract painting could have sublime qualities if the abstract marks were incapable of being mistaken for nature. If we use Newmans idea of the sublime and modify it to fit with Kants mature vision of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment then we might begin to understand what Newman was attempting. For Kant, the sublime is that which surpasses our standard of sense, or to put it another way, that which drowns our imagination in the waters of the incalculable. The sublime succeeds because it overwhelms our senses, leaving our imagination to attempt to reconcile the magnitudes of the infinite, until reason comes to rescue the terribleconversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terrorproductive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling, and that strongest emotion is, for Burke, the fear of death (Burke, 39). Now if we think of Newmans sublime as having a power like Burkes, that is it has a two part function making one aware of the pain that is living in the unpredictable present and calling for the death of an old form of art making then we begin to see the particular type of sublimity that Newman sought to bring forth. 9 See the essay Newman: The Instant in Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Inhuman (Stanford University Press, 1991) 85. 10 Burke on painting: When painters have attempted to give us clear representations of these very fanciful and terrible ideas [the terror of death, incomprehensible darkness, etc.], they have I think almost always failed; insomuch that I have been at a loss, in all the pictures I have seen of hell, whether the painter did not intend something ludicrous (Burke, 63).
12
imagination from the abyss: [What happens is that] our imagination strives to progress toward infinity, while our reason demands absolute totality as a real idea, and so [the imagination,] our power of estimating the magnitude of things in the world of sense, is inadequate to that idea. Yet this inadequacy itself is the arousal in us of the feeling that we have a supersensible power; and what is absolutely large is not an object of sense, but is the use that judgment makes naturally of certain objects so as to [arouse] this (feeling), and in contrast with that use any other use is small. Hence what is to be called sublime is not the object, but the attunement that the intellect [gets] through a certain presentation that occupies reflective judgment.11 Newman desired a sublime that, while unable to be depicted, could be felt and somehow known through marks on canvas. He wanted to bring forth the sensation of the infinite and inestimable. Newman sought to make the viewer aware of himself in relation to the universe. Kant writes: Nature is sublime in those of its appearances whose intuition carries with it the idea of their infinity. But the only way for this to occur is through the inadequacy of even the greatest effort of our imagination to estimate an objects magnitude (Third Critique, 112). Perhaps it was Newmans desire to speak for our imagination when it had failed us, to show mans relation to both magnitude and insignificance as we exist in the present. French postmodern theorist Jean-Franois Lyotard writes: When he [Newman] seeks sublimity in the hereand-now he breaks with the eloquence of romantic art but he does not reject its fundamental task, that of bearing pictorial or otherwise expressive witness to the
11
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987) 106.
13
inexpressible. The inexpressible does not reside in an over there, in another world, or another time, but in this: in that (something) happens. In the determination of pictorial art, the indeterminate, the it happens is the paint, the picture (Lyotard, 92-93). Lyotard lights on a fundamental truth: that Newman did not seek to make apictorial paintings. If anything, Newman believed that his work was a new way of painting and drawing, a new draftsmanship for the post-WWII world. The inexpressible, as Lyotard observes, is not somewhere else, it is always present. Newman sought to express the inexpressible, but he had come to the realization that the classic pictorial image did not permit him to accomplish the work he believed to be the artists duty. European painters, in his estimation, no longer possessed the capacity to make the viewer self-aware while standing in front of the canvas. Instead, these painters were cursed to create images that were merely aesthetic. Beauty served as the culmination of their craft. 12 For Newman this
12
Oscar Wilde shares a similar dismay in his dialogue The Critic as Artist. Wilde laments the shortcomings of the painter in relation to the poet, an artist who, in Wildes opinion, uses the whole sphere of feeling, the perfect cycle of thought. For Wilde the painter is bound to the finite qualities of his medium: The painter is so far limited that it is only through the mask of the body that he can show us the mystery of the soul; only through conventional images that he can handle ideas; only through its physical equivalents that he can deal with psychology. And how inadequately he does it then (Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 241). Wilde, like Burke, had not yet seen abstract painting, yet it is no stretch to imagine, in my opinion, that he would have found Newmans aesthetic philosophy similar to his own. While Wildes aesthetic focused on the beautiful and Newman sought not to make beauty the thing, both men were involved in a search for arts unifying power as a means to make the task of living at once both richer and easier.
14
was akin to the death of painting. His was a painter who felt that the shapes wielded, must contain the plasmic entity that will carry his thought, the nucleus that will give life to the abstract, even abstruse ideas he is projecting (The Plasmic Image, 141). If we return to Onement I it is apparent why Newman saw it as his breakthrough. There is no way to confuse the zip with an object in nature, it strikes through the canvas, severing arts relationship with the sensuous and installing art, in Newmans view, as an expression of the mind. If art is to be moral, that is if it is to promote an awareness of the self in relation to others, it cannot be bound to the senses, for the senses mislead and leave no place to lay responsibility for the actions they instigate. The senses activate desire and desire exists in neither a realm of morality nor plurality. Desire is about wanting, not about the moral, and under Newmans conception of his new painters moral service, the want that is bred by the senses is involved strictly with the individual, not with society as a whole. Thus, by abandoning the sensuous the new painter embraces the art he produces as one built upon a foundation of moral responsibility. Since realism is bound to the senses, it gives the viewer an impression of the way things should be, how one would feel in that setting. Newmans new painter removes himself from realism, but does not deny the intent behind it, that intent being subject matter. To deny subject matter would only force the painter to paint in a vacuum, to paint with no reason, and only as a response to something else. This would not be his new painter, as Newman writes in the Plasmic Image: These men considered that the artistic problem was not whether they should or should not have subject matter; the problem was, What kind of subject matter (The Plasmic Image, 154). In Onement I we see and experience the subject matter Newman intended. The painting confronts us. The viewer is granted an awareness of the present, of the self at the exact moment the painting is seen. The zip is the link. No one is transported to another place, the zip does not open a door to some other land.13 It is a transcendent experience, but
13
As was Rothkos intent with his three part paintings: the
15
one where the viewer ends up where he began. Yet the awareness of place is stronger. The knowledge of the self in relation to the world is more profound. The zip is the lightning flash of being human. To return to Lyotard: If, then, there is any subject-matter, it is immediacy. It happens here and now. What [quid] happens comes later. The beginning is that there is[quod]; the world, what there is (Lyotard, 82). Newman sought to make the moment of looking most important. It was the here and now, the immediacy of the act of looking. By making a painting that offered transcendence without offering a new world, Newman granted the there is of which Lyotard spoke. There is is the moment where t he viewer feels a relationship to the present and seeks to live in this reality, not step into another. If Newman endeavored to teach his spectator anything it was not a message of this world then the fireworks, out of this world and the fireworks. The zip was not welcoming, not some nebulous inviting entryway to salvation. While Rothko wanted to flee this world, Newman could not imagine being anywhere else. Wounded and awkward, Rothko was desperate to make a world that he could live in, where he would always feel at home. If he could have painted some magical painting that he could step through he would have. Newman took no part in this surrender. While both men were consumed with the idea of representing tragedy, Newman sought to make the tragedy that was intimately bound to life a reconcilable thing, to reveal it and destroy it, Rothko wanted to run away, dive into those clouds of color and be reborn again and again.14 He once said of his paintings, I express my bottom and top bands acting as a doorway, with the center part being the entrance into another world that he might escape into. 14 Newman credits the Surrealists with prophesying our experience of modern tragedy. In his opinion, the art they produced was not the work of mad men, but was a prophetic tableaux of what the world was to see as reality, that reality and tragedy being World War II (Surrealism and the War, 95). Yet Newman also realized that tragedy must be combated, it must not be allowed to root itself into the world. In his essay
16
not-self.15 In effect he was painting the symbol of Rothko as whole, what he wished he could be. A luring presence posing both inventive resource and hovering danger, it was a promise of a new life, weightless and free, but at the same time entirely alien an invitation to become something and someone else divorced from the pains of history. 16 Newman in contrast believed that, What has to be done is to discover the proper theme that will make contact with reality; what has to be The New Sense of Fate Newman takes a stand against our giving ourselves over to tragedy, declaring that man was given a new fate with the advent of the atom bomb and that it is the role of the artist to combat both tragedy and fate: What we have now is a tragic rather than a terrifying situation.In this new tragedy that is playing itself out on a Greek-like stage under a new sense of fate that we have ourselves created, shall we artists make the same error as the Greek sculptors and play with an art of overrefinement, an art of quality, of sensibility of beauty? Let us rather like the Greek writers, tear the tragedy to shreds (The New Sense of Fate, 169). 15 James E.B. Breslin, Mark Rothko A Biography (The University of Chicago Press, 1998) 273-274. 16 Of his own paintings, Rothko declared: Im interested only in expressing basic human emotions tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted by my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions.The people who weep before my paintings are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you [Selden Rodman], as you say, are moved only be their color relationships, then you miss the point (Rothko, Notes from a conversation with Selden Rodman, 1956, 119-120). Rothko characterized painting as an act of breaking free from solitude and silence, of breaching and stretching ones arms again (Rothko, The Romantics Were Prompted, 59). Newman, on the other hand, as we have seen, did not share the same self-pitying approach to painting that Rothko did. If anything, Newmans aesthetic philosophy resided in a sense of the celebratory experience of the power of the image, not in the emotional weight of ecstasy and doom.
17
discovered is a new subject matter (Painting and Prose, 91). Unlike Rothko, Newman chose to deal with the present, while Rothkos paintings provided a means to put to canvas the solitary quality of his internal journey, beckoning a single spectator to the painting, as psychoanalyst Hannah Segal writes, evoking in the recipient of his art the same constellation of unconscious feelings that motivated him.17 Rothkos paintings allowed him a way out of the confines of his wounded mind and awkward body. He saw his art as an expression of tragedy. Thus his not-self becomes the symbolic representation of all his dreams waiting to be fulfilled, freed to wander and manifest itself in what the art critic Dore Ashton refers to as a numinous floating world, a place where all his obstacles were left behind.18 Rothko may have wished to express the tragic, but he wanted to walk through his paintings to a world where his not -self would be his real self. It is impossible to imagine Newman having a notself. Newmans work was not made to save him or anyone else but to foster an awareness about what it means to be human in this world. There was no desire to escape, no dream of some place other than here. The creation of the painting was a moral need; the subject matter of his own self was of least importance. Newman writes, It is not enough to use a large canvas and make a literary work encompass a wide and large theme, which is what most critics believe to be the definition of an epic. The subject matter of epics, it is true, is a large theme, but it must be a moral theme if the writer is at all to catch any part of the absolute (Painting and Prose, 90). While this passage pertains to writing it can nonetheless be applied to Newmans own vision of painting. The idea of the epic needing to have a moral theme if it is at all capable of apprehending any part of the absolute, is intimately linked to Newmans belief that the new painter is to produce an image that is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete.
17
Hanna Segal, Dream, Phantasy and Art (London: Routledge, 1991) 89. 18 Dore Ashton, About Rothko (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) 105.
18
Newman desired a moral theme that revealed the absolute. The revelation that is self-evident is communicable with the spectator who is able to know the intent of the painter and be made aware of the truth at that single moment of viewing. For Rothko, the painting was also a moral issue, but the absolute could only be found by gaining entrance to a different world. In a way, the individual who is consumed by the richness of a Rothko painting chooses a life other than this one, where Newman forces the present to have all the meaning. Sylvester writes that a Newman canvas presents us with a sustained experience of ourselves. We confront the reality of what and where we are: Newmans art does not have to do with mans feelings when threatened by something in the air; it has to do with mans sense of himself. The painting gives a sense of being where we are which somehow makes us rejoice in being there (Sylvester, 327). Sylvester is correct: Newman attempted to make the present more present. The painting silences the world, eliminating all distraction and commotion. The viewer is rooted to the spot, confronted with the vertical, whether it is the single central line in Onement I or the blood red stripe on the left side of a black canvas that defines Joshua. As the gaze fixes upon it, the straightness of Newmans zip draws the viewer in. The experience becomes one of wholeness, making that thin line the missing piece of the viewers existence. As Lyotard asserts, The purpose of a painting by Newman is not to show that duration is in excess of consciousness, but to be the occurrence, the moment which has arrived (Lyotard, 79). The viewer is aware of herself at the moment of looking. That is Newmans subject matter: awareness of the self. If he had given the viewer the means to escape this world he would have failed at his task. Like Rothko, Newman wanted his painting to affect people, but he did not long, as Rothko did, to free his viewers from the weight of their lives. Both men hoped to give salvation, but Newman desired it be found in this world, while Rothko wanted to paint a new universe where all the wounded could feel whole.
19
In an interview with Sylvester from 1965, Newman remarked that he sought to give his viewer a sense of place, that the viewer should know where he was: In that sense he relates to me when I made the painting because in that sense I was therestanding in front of one of my paintings you [Sylvester] had the sense of your own scalethis is what I have tried to do: that the onlooker in front of my painting knows that hes there.I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality, and at the same time of his connection to others who are also separate.I think you can only feel others if you have some sense of your own being (Selected Writings and Interviews, 257). That Newman rejected the episodic is an unequivocal fact in his painting. His art is not snippets of time or loosely connected sections of experience, instead each work is a single event unburdened by temporality. One does not pick up where one last left off with Newman; one experiences ones connection to the work at that exact moment of seeing. Totality does not come in installments. Perhaps Newmans greatest moral act in his art was the desire to give the individual a feeling of his own individuality, and at the same time of his connection to others who are also separate.19 If the viewer were to look at a
19
When Alexis de Tocqueville traveled through America in 1831, he observed that democracy, and specifically its American form, does not foster individuality, but instead breeds individualism: Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself. Individualism proceeds from erroneous judgment more than from depraved feelings; it originates as
20
Newman painting and feel only ones self and no relation to others then Newman would have failed. This is what Barnett Newman, sage and fool, yearned to destroy. One cannot look at Onement I and think only of oneself in relation to ones self. The zip does give the viewer the sense of scale that Newman wished for. Standing before the painting spectators know they are not alone. One maintains ones individuality in front of these paintings. The spectator remains a self, still filled with ones own personal feelings and thoughts, but remains linked to the rest of society. With that simple, asymmetrical line, Newman tries to connect the world. Newman makes us one among many; we come to know ourselves so that we might live among others. Again we return to the zip, it is there to root the individual to the collective, yet in that rooting Newman sets in motion the tearing to shreds of tragedy. For Newmans ideal artist is there to present to us not just the pain of living in the present, but to demonstrate that as a unity of individuals we have the capacity to be more than the tragic nature of the world in which we find ourselves. Newmans is an art of ethics and moral need: I would say that if my painting were properly understood, Newman once remarked in an interview, society would change (Newman, 276). Each time we view a Newman we go on a journey of transcendence that ends where it began. What Newman imparts to the viewer is the lesson that there are no other worlds to travel to, no places to escape the difficulty that is life; the paintings tell us, This is the world that matters. In much in deficiencies of mind as in perversity of heart (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America - Vol, II (New York: Vintage Classics, 1990) 98). Individuality on the other hand, allows one to assert ones sense of self, to proclaim oneself as an individual, but still retain a commitment to ones fellow man. In contrast, individualism, as Tocqueville, argues, gives one no sense of ones own being, it merely clings to the basest desires and misplaced hungers, putting the individual at variance to the rest of society. We can think of Tocquevilles distinction when we look at Newmans work and thus be able to see the paintings as a testament to Newmans struggle to try to combat this destructive separation.
21
Newmans sublime we feel the terror of selfhood, the gift of being an individual, and the realization that one cannot exist alone.
Works Cited Dore Ashton, About Rothko (Oxford University Press, 1983) James E.B. Breslin, Mark Rothko A Biography (The University of Chicago Press, 1998) Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968) Donald Judd, Complete Writings: 1959 1975 (Halifax, Nova Scotia: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2005) Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987) Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Inhuman (Stanford University Press, 1991) Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. ONeill (Alfred A Knopf, 1990) Mark Rothko, Writings on Art, ed. Miguel Lpez-Remiro (Yale University Press, 2006) Hanna Segal, Dream, Phantasy and Art (Routledge, 1991) Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). David Sylvester, About Modern Art, 2nd Edition (Yale University Press, 2001) Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. II (New York: Vintage Classics, 1990) Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism & Selected Critical Prose, ed. Linda Dowling (Penguin, 2001)
22
Onement, I, 1948 Oil on canvas and oil on masking tape on canvas. Barnett Newman. (American, 1905-1970).
23
White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose), 1950 Oil on canvas. Mark Rothko. (American, 1903-1970)
24
David Smucker The Question Concerning
The Question Concerning Bernd and Hilla Becher David Smucker Stony Brook University Bernd and Hilla Becher have been photographing industrial architecture since the 1950s. Their work provides an interesting artistic reaction to the ways that modern technology has become an issue for contemporary life. It is the purpose of this paper to attempt to look at their photography through a Heideggerian lens, taking its main cues from Heideggers The Question Concerning Technology. After an explanation of Heidegger and his thoughts on the matter, we will see how these can be applied critically to the Bechers, looking to Blake Stimsons essay, The Photographic Comportment of Bernd and Hilla Becher, for a thorough description of their work. 1 One of Heideggers opening remarks, that the essence of technology is nothing technological, 2 outlines the approach he takes to the issue. He is not looking at any particular technological advance or use of technology, but for what makes the manner in which man uses technology possible, for the way that man relates to the world through technology. He says that the most prominent way of seeing technology is as a means to an end, a way of achieving a human project, the instrumental and anthropological conception of technology.3 He believes that this conception does not understand the full importance of technology. Heidegger wants to contrast a Greek understanding of techne with a modern one. For the
1
This article was accessed online at http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/04spri ng/stimson_paper.htm on 4/21/2007. hereafter it will be referred to as Stimson. 2 The Question Concerning Technology in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, 311. hereafter referred to as QCT 3 QCT 312
25
Greeks, techne was a way of knowing, in the sense of alatheia, or revealing. He thinks that the idea, prevalent when he was writing, that techne designates the capability to produce both art and craft objects is incorrect. Quoting Plato, he says that every occasion for whatever passes beyond the nonpresent and goes forward into presencing is poiesis, bringing-forth.4 Since Technology is involved in bringing something forth, it seems to be a kind of poiesis, but Heidegger thinks that while Plato may have been right about his own historical situation, technology has created a way of bringing forth that is not accounted for in the sense of poiesis. Poiesis is an allowing of something to be brought forth as itself, to be created or revealed (remember alatheia for revealing) according to its own inner essence and necessity. This is different that what modern technology does: Heidegger says the revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis. The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such. 5 This extraction of energy that challenges forth instead of bringing forth imposes categorical thought upon the world, interested in the world only in terms of how anything and everything can be made into a resource for achieving our goals. This organization and ordering of the world according to usable energy makes things appear to us not as themselves, but as a standing-reserve which we can use at will.6 The kind of thinking which causes man to think of the world as a standing-reserve Heidegger calls enframing, which is in direct opposition to a poetic frame of thought (poiesis from above) which allows things to be present to us as themselves. In fact, the opposition between these two modes of thought is so intense that Heidegger believes that enframing blocks poetic thought. Since, in our age, man is born into a world where the most common way of thinking is through this enframing thought, it is possible that he will understand only
4 5 6
QCT 317 QCT 320 QCT 322
26
through this technological or enframing lens. If this happens, if man engages in the world only through enframing thought, the other possibility is blocked that man might rather be admitted sooner and ever more primally to the essence of what is unconcealed and to its unconcealment, in order that he might experience as his essence the requisite belonging to revealing.7 It is clear that Heidegger values poetic thought instead of enframing. This is because of the way that these kinds of thought understand human beings. In enframing thought, mankind is viewed only as a means to an end, a kind of energy that can be used to achieve some project or other. On the other hand, poetic thought, which is more in touch with the essences of things, sees man as the only kind of being who can understand things precisely though poetic thought, who can come into contact with the essences of things. If enframing thought blocks his ability to do this, Heidegger believes that it will put mankind out of touch with his own essence, will make man homeless in the world. It makes sense then, when he says that where enframing reigns, there is danger in the highest sense.8 He finds some hope for man, though, in the words of the poet Hlderlin, who says that Where danger is, grows/ The saving power also. 9 The saving power is not so immediate, though, that it can bring man to an immediate victory over technology. Instead, it is requisite that man begin to pay heed to the essence of technology.10 This will happen when man examines his relationship to the world, and sees that enframing is blocking him from his proper essence, his proper way of comporting himself to the world. It seems that only through an encounter with the danger of our technological way of thinking will modern man be able to reassert his proper essence. But if most people are already under the sway of enframing thought, then who can we call on to provide this critical reaction? Again Heidegger takes guidance from Hlderlin, who, in addition to the lines above, also says that
7 8
QCT 311 QCT 333 9 QCT 333 10 QCT 335
27
poetically man dwells on this earth. 11 If we think of poetry in a sense which includes all of the arts, at least when theyre in touch with mans essence as a poetic, as opposed to enframing, being, then art is precisely the arena in which technology and its essence as enframing thought can be opposed. Heidegger adds the important warning that this will only work if reflection upon art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth, concerning which we are questioning.12 Now the question becomes whether or not the Bechers works are ones which engage technology and enframing in the way Heidegger wants them to. Do these works show man the essence of technology, and do they do so in a way which also shows man his own essence as a nontechnological, non-enframing being? Blake Stimsons article The Photographic Comportment of Bernd and Hilla Becher will be our guide as we approach the Bechers work. Stimson quotes from an interview with the Bechers that their work was largely focused on the idea of making families of objects that become humanized and destroy one another as in nature where the older is devoured by the newer.13 This short phrase already says much about the Bechers photography. The concept of introducing family relationships amongst the various industrial buildings can be seen as an attempt to organize them under rational thought. The fact that their books of photography are organized according to the kind of technology photographed speaks to this, as does the fact that one of their publications is titled simply, Typologies. The problem here is to discern whether or not these typologies are natural (poetically revealed) or artificial (the result of enframing thought). That were dealing with industry, which appears to be, at bottom, an enframing approach to nature, leads us to the idea that whatever heterogeneity we find in the buildings is a result of their ability to acknowledge only the aspects of their location that are suitable for bringing into a standing-reserve. These
11 12
QCT 340 QCT 340 13 Stimson 2
28
aspects, the resources challenged forth, are bound to be similar, and so the industrial architecture and machines used to extract this material will also likely be similar, if not exactly the same. So while the typology may not have been previously articulated as such by the creators of these industrial sites, it seems fair to say that the Bechers project does not impose an artificial schema onto these buildings. The next part of the phrase may be more problematic for a Heideggerian reading of their work. The idea that the objects become humanized and destroy one another as in nature where the older is devoured by the newer speaks to an enframing mode of thought. Heidegger warns that when man is in an enframing mode of thought, he believes that he recognizes himself in everything. Everything seems to behave according to certain patterns of his thought, and so it seems as if these things are essentially related to man. 14 This idea seems to be present in the idea that the buildings become humanized and in the idea that the process of industrial advancement is like the process of both human and natural advancement, where the older is devoured by the newer. For Heidegger, there is a fundamental difference in the way that natural things, humans, and technology relate to the world. Technological advancements quicken the pace of the worlds being put into an unnatural standing-reserve of energy, and it seems a strange idea to associate a plants relationship to the earth, where it only takes what it needs to live, to that of technology. The overturning of one industrial paradigm for another more technologically advanced and efficient one seems at the root much different than a sapling growing out of the fallen rotting trunk of its ancestor. If the reference here is not to generations immediately following one another, but the evolutionary process, then this is still problematic. We must remember that the natural process of evolution is not a teleological one, is not motivated towards an ever-morethoroughgoing domination of the world in the way that technological development (at least from Heideg gers perspective) has been. Another aspect of these photographs that Stimson
14
QCT 332
29
investigates is the system by which they are produced. System is an important factor in their work, as the photographs are based on a rigorous set of procedural rules which re sults in a group of photographs that are, at first glance, nearly identical.15 This desire for nearly identical results from all of their photographic activity (at least within any given project) together with their rigorous application of a procedure to produce them seems much like the process Heidegger describes when hes talking about enframing. When we investigate the reasons for this procedure, though, we find that they dont seem to be motivated by an enframing desire. By placing their photographs together in grid format, as the Bechers do consistently, though not exclusively, they find that they are able to see new things about each particular object photographed. While for the most part the objects look so similar it is as if they came from a production series, like cars, the Bechers have found that only when you put them beside each other do you see their individuality. 16 Through an interesting circumstance, it is only through a rigorously technological process which, following Heidegger, we assume will produce homogenous results, that we can actually see the heterogeneity of the objects in question. They have produced a taxonomy which is not exactly a taxonomy: while it does gather the tokens of the type together, we learn little more about the type from this gathering, instead what we learn is about the individuality of its members. We are reminded of Hlderlins phrase where the danger is, grows the saving power also. The Bechers photography, in a sustained engagement with technology, has shown us something about it that we could not see before, and that is the ability of a technological/enframing method to enable the perception of individuality and difference. What, though, does this difference amount to?
15 16
Stimson 7 From an interview by Ulf Erdmann Ziegler in 2000, found online at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_6_90/ai_87022 990/print on 4/21/2007
30
Certainly the essential qualities of the industrial sites that they photograph are still bound to enframing, to producing a world of a standing reserve of resources. But, each individual industrial site is different, as weve seen. This difference must then be the result of a conceptual movement away from their impact on social reality to the level of shape and rhythm, formal interest and analysis. Stimson says their project is one of aesthetizing industry rather than industrializing art. 17 I think that in a way, it really is both. While thei r work doesnt take on the proportions of Warhols factory (nor, as Stimson notes, does it take on Warhols sense of irony), it remains industrial in that it is tied to industrial / scientific / enframing modes of thought during its production.18 The crucial point, though, is that, in moving into the realm of the purely aesthetic, our investigation loses the ability to be critical of the relationship of man to technology. It seems that it no longer is in search of truth, at least not in the way Heidegger urges us to keep focused at the end of his essay. Instead, at this point our search can only point to the hollowness that stands now in these buildings where there was once ambition and a sense of progress.19 The Bechers seem to have moved into the Kantian realm of disinterested appreciation where there was once a search for truth that could lead to social critique and change. At this point in our investigation, if we maintain a position in line with Heideggers, we might have to take a negative view toward the Bechers work. It seems that their work manages to combine enframing thought and a conception of art that is unbound to truth, and this is totally unacceptable, or at least un-poetic or inartistic, from Heideggers standpoint. I think, though, that there may be a final saving element. If their work is really drawn from the soul of industrial thought, and if the feeling we get when we look at their photography is one of disappointment and melancholy, then perhaps through an engagement with their work we can see the essence of technology as something
17 18
Stimson 14 Stimson 16 19 Stimson 10
31
dangerous, disappointing, and melancholy. 20 If the only positive thing we can get from their work is on a formal level, then perhaps by noting this we can see that that is all that there is to be gained from technology. The photographic work of the Bechers can lead us to the conclusion that looking at the world through the enframing lens of technological thought is unfulfilling unless we are disinterested in the worldly consequences of that kind of thinking. At this point we can start to think critically about technology, and the Bechhers photography can be seen in a positive (Heideggerian) light at last. The Bechers work draws itself extremely near to the danger of technology, modeling itself on technological procedures to show how unfruitful, how disappointing they can be, and for someone interested in the truth about technology, the questioning that follows this realization may have the ability to lead them out of an enframing mode of thought. Before concluding altogether, I would like to briefly investigate photography itself and its relationship to enframing. As a technological development, photography seems dangerously allied to enframing. This idea gets some backup from the fact that when we talk about photographic composition we ask about what the photographer has put in the frame. In investigating any particular photographers work, then, we are investigating their relationship to putting into the frame, to enframing. Photography is the trace, not only of the object that was placed before the camera, but also of the photographers relationship to that object, to their understanding of the world when they took the photograph. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, in her feminist analysis of erotic and pornographic photography, says: Images, in other words, do not causally produce a world of female objects and male subjects; rather, they may articulate, naturalize, and confirm an oppressive order whose roots are elsewhere. 21 What I want to focus on in this quote is the idea that photography can
20 21
Stimson 13 Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices, in the essay Reconsidering Erotic Photography: Notes for a Project of Historical Salvage. 221.
32
articulate an order, an ordering scheme. Heidegger also has something to say about how enframing thought is related to public opinion: the newspapers and illustrated magazinesset public opinion to swallowing what is pr inted, so that a set configuration of public opinion becomes available on demand.22 The images that we create are related to our understanding of the world, the public opinion that is articulated in places like the newspapers is a result of a certain way of thinking, and its instantiation in print and images shows us the trace of that thought. Photography can show us what, for a certain photographer, has been accepted as the truth. Photography may not always be a result of enframing thought, but through a close analysis of a photographic work, it seems that we ought to be able to determine whether or not the photographer has been held under the sway of enframing thought. In the Bechers work, I believe we have two options as to what to believe their relationship to enframing thought and technology is. First, we can believe that they are wholly under its sway, and a critical investigation of how this manifests itself in their work is as good as an investigation of enframing thought itself. Second, if the Bechers are aware of the negative consequences of enframing thought, then this has manifested itself in their work by way of exemplification: to show us its problems, they have recreated it for us, with a little aesthetic kick thrown in to show us that whatever positive value there is in the manifestation of enframing thought and the creation of a standing-reserve, that value is not related, and indeed stands in opposition to, the consequences of technology and enframing. In either case, a sustained attention to the photographic work of Bernd and Hilla Becher ought to produce exactly what Heidegger would want, a critical attitude towards technology, which may be enough to help save us from the danger of enframing thought.
22
QCT 323
33
34
35
AL-ADHAN Michael Knierim Northern Illinois University
I have thought much about what I would say to you today. I am not a theoretician, but a creator of objects and images. I have come to the conclusion that the recounting of my thoughts and actions during the creation of this video would be the most illuminating veil to unfold for this conference.
36
Michael Knierim Al-Adhan
While having a conversation with my sons, Max and Ben, we discussed the lack of real war imagery presented in print and on television in the United States. That began my investigation into the mass medias representation of the conflict in Iraq. Why were there no images of the real carnage that was occurring? The major news networks report the escalating death tolls using slick animated graphics which spin into place. Field reporters are shown inhabiting isolated sets usually indicating evidence of the destruction of the physical environment. The covers of our weekly news magazines use cleverly constructed design metaphors to represent the war. The one reliable U.S. media source that comes the closest to showing what is truly happening is the New York Times. There have been numerous remarkable photo essays concerning the events in Iraq - but I was looking for something more. The Times photographs, many showing the wounded or dead, were all highly aesthectisized. Through composition, perspective and lighting, they rivaled the best of Renaissance masterpieces.
37
It became apparent to me that I was not going to find the imagery I was looking for in the U.S. media. I then turned toward mainstream Islamic internet news sources. While these began to show slightly more graphic imagery, they were still far from a true representation of the carnage and chaos of war. It was time to reach out into harsher territory. In todays virtual world you can Google your way across enemy lines. It was on Jihad and Al-Qaeda websites where I began to find what I was looking for: uncomposed, unvarnished photos of startling events. Just by entering these sites I had the peculiar feeling that I was behind enemy lines. Many of these websites were there one day and gone the next. The majority of these websites seemed to be both recruiting and propaganda sites. Most of these sites contained two types of images; first, strange digital montages which showed the valor n sacrificing oneself for the cause. In the other category of imagery were the raw unsettling photos of true carnage (such as the one shown); dead and dismembered American soldiers shown as trophies; dead, wounded and mourning Iraqis shown as victims. These were not professional photographs, but most likely low-resolution cellular phone images. Although they were meant as propaganda, they depicted the ravages of war from all sides of the conflict.
38
I decided this would be the imagery I would appropriate for my work.
Antique Persian Carpet / Herati Pattern / Tehran
39
Antique Wall Tile / Herati Pattern / Al Basra
Digital Montage / Herati Pattern
40
Al-Adhan / Video Projected Image of Digital Montage Above
Decollate / Floor Installation UV Curable Inkjet Print on Tumbled Marble
41
My intent was to veil the appropriated images by using them as the basis for creating patterns. Historically, throughout the Middle East, patterns appear to organize space and beautify the built environment. By their very nature, patterns in Islamic culture are seen as expressive of a worldview in which multiplicity exists in relation to the unity of all existence. Through replication and mirroring of the source image, I have produced patterns reminiscent of Herati patterns. These ancient patterns are a widely used motif for creating Middle Eastern textile, rug and tile designs. The patterns I created became the basis for several bodies of work. Al-Adhan is a video installation set to the vocals of the Muslim call to prayer. During the video, the patterns are interrupted by brief, disturbing flashes of the source images. Decollate is an installation consisting of 25 tumbled marble tiles, each printed with the identical Herati pattern. The installation configurations are flexible and endless...
Decollate
42
Shown above is a larger view of the appropriated source image for the graphic at left. The image was obtained from an Al-Queda website.
Decollate Shown above is a tumbled marble tile printed with UVcurable ink. Twenty-five of these tiles form the installation shown at the bottom of the preceding page.
43
The patterns in these works become things of beauty which veil their source imagery. The overall images are metaphors for the way each side in the Iraq War represents itself as having a noble and just cause, while the source imagery represents the day to day suffering of individuals involved on all sides of the conflict. All contemporary human conflict has its ideological rationale for taking place as well as its actual acts of violence and suffering. Our own media represses the visual imagery of bloodshed and reports the suffering by referring to body counts of the dead each day. While these counts are necessary and saddening, they also become an abstraction which cannot communicate the true carnage occurring.
44
These images are a commentary on how the actual daily ravages of the war are obscured by each governments ideologies, the media, and our own psyches. My hope is the brief flashes of the source images within the video are startling enough to lift the veil and bring into consciousness the ongoing suffering. Awareness is the first step toward change.
45
Panel Response: Ethical Demand and Technological Replication Isaac Fer Stony Brook University In the first paper, we have the presentation of what might be called an ethico-aesthetics of totality, or of the sublime. In the second, we have a question of what might be called the mechanisms of the modern art process. In our series of images, we have the geometric replication of what might be called terrifying or even sublime photographs. It is with these characterizations that we may attempt to proceed in examining the possibilities of thought that they offer together. While many of us may question the aesthetic success of Newman's works, this is fortunately not under consideration here. Instead, I am interested in the reverberations of Newman's ethico-aesthetics with Heidegger's claim that art should provide a clearing for poetic truth to be revealed. I take it that David Smucker's argument supports the work of the Bechers insofar as it embodies this Heideggerian-privileged mode of art. But how does the work of the Bechers stand in relation to Newman's ethico-aesthetics of the sublime? And that of, as a work under consideration here, Michael Knierim? In order to begin to hear these reverberations, we must consider photography not only as representational art, but also as rhythmic art. Is photography always a strictly representational art form? It is not immediately clear. It is certain that many photographs are representational, identification photographs for instance. But it not so certain that this is the function of the photograph in either the Bechers' or Knierim's work. Let us consider the role of repetition and of rhythm in these works. One note may sound precisely like a car horn, but in a song, if it is taken as such, we feel it to be 'wrong'. That is, even if a car horn is in a song, we are not meant to think that a car was in the recording studio or something equally ridiculousit is not meant, nor taken, to be representational.
46
Isaac Fer Panel Response
Similarly, one photograph may resemble its 'object' precisely, but in sequence, a sort of 'melody' can be achieved, and the individual photograph is like a note, or a movement in a symphony. And a symphony, not without its immediate sensuous pleasures, is best appreciated when its movements are mentally overlapped, recombined, taken apart and reassembled, so that each is seen in its particularity as well as its relation to the whole (It seems we have come back to Newman. Only here, the art relates back to itselfto its universe if you will, while in Newman the viewer is placed, vis a vis art, in this relation to his universe). Let us also recollect a 'representational' work such as Raphael's 'The School of Athens.' The simultaneous juxtaposition of figures whose lives spread several centuries should not be taken as 'representational,' insofar as it taken to represent an actual simultaneity of these figures. The goal of this work is not the sensuous, or the representational. Instead, it presents to us the historical 'dialog' of philosophy, the grand and nearly mythical nature of this history as a sort of symposium or conference. Hence it is not certain that we should take the individual photographs in these works as such, outside of their relation to one another and to the whole work. Following David Smucker's argument, we see that the effect of the single image can be precisely opposite of that of the montage taken as a whole. It is only in this configuration the movements and variations of this visual symphony may reveal what their similarities and differences contain. While it is true that comparison reveals the technological essence of these objects, it is also true that their contrasts reveal the poetry of the architecture. But while the Bechers' montages can be seen to be a break with direct representation, the trace of representation has not been entirely effaced from their work. Knierim takes us a step further. With his geometrical replication of single images in a montage, Knierim manages to float in between the distinctions we have considered thus far. From a distance, or on a small scale, his works appear as geometric abstractions. My experience of the work began as such, with it impossible to make out the details of the pieces. Here his work appears directly in line with the Kantian sublime. With each repeated
47
frame, we are offered an aesthetic estimation of magnitude. Our imaginations attempt to comprehend simultaneously the unit and the unity of the work. With the failure of this attempt, we are presented with the sublime. Both the extreme abstraction and the presence of sublimity puts this work directly in line with the ethico-aesthetics of Newman. But once again we must confront the questions of both representation and of technology. Knierim's work achieves its abstraction by the geometric replication of 'representational' images. As we approach these works, we break through the barrier of representation and a world is revealed. Suddenly Newman's aesthetics recede. On this scale, the images present to us a different sublimity, that of terror (or of what Kant called the dynamically sublime). Images of the overwhelming might of nature and of humanity's resilience combine to make us simultaneously aware of our fragility and our strength. They make us aware of the suffering of others and violence which causes it. They make us consider our role in that suffering and violence. Hence, while Newman's aesthetics recede, his ethics come to the fore. But what of the replication of these images? Does it not distort or conceal these truths? Does it not carry with it the danger of technological en-framing? That is, to reduce these units to a standing-reserve, to replace their suffering with the demand that they be challenged-forth in order to produce the 'work'? In a way, all photography carries with it this danger; to reveal its subject not poetically, not as poesis, but as techne, as an object to be 'made into a photograph' (photography as exploitative or objectifying). But perhaps Knierim's especially, as not only may the individual photograph be a challengingforth of its subject/object, but that also here the photograph itself is challenged-forth as a tile or brick in these configurations. It is perhaps undecidable whether these photographs cause their subjects to emerge and rise in themselves, as Heidegger says in The Origin of the Work of Art, or make of their objects a standing-reserves. What is important though, is to recognize that the photograph wavers between these two modes of revealing, that it presents each opportunity, or danger. Moreover, that as we move to and from abstraction
48
Isaac Fer Panel Response
and representation in the works of Knierim, distinct worlds are opened for us. On the level of abstraction, we are presented with a Newmanian sublime, with the individual's relation to the absolute. On the level of representation, the world of the subject, and that of ourselves in relation, is made present. But if the movement between levels is cause for praise, it is also cause for criticism. For Newman, Knierim's work would appear too representational. For Heidegger, the mechanical (or more likely, computational) replication of the image in a geometric pattern would appear essentially technological. In this way, Knierim's work may be seen as a sort of interference pattern between the sine (sign) waves of Newman and of Heidegger. One way of seeing these waves would be the of relating the viewing distance to the aesthetic 'value' of the work. The peaks of Newmanian abstraction and of Heideggerian poetic revealing combine their amplitude to reach a new intensity of aesthetics which reveal an ethical demand to consider our relation with others. The troughs of Newmanian representation and of Heideggerian technology fall to the depths of what may be called technological escapismthe challenging-forth of entities as a means of leaving 'our obstacles behind,' in Ashton's phrase. And when the peaks of Newman and the troughs of Heidegger come together, in the middle zone between abstraction and representation, we find them nearly canceling one another out, the only remainder being the work itself. In this way, we can see Knierim's work as piercing or tearing many veils simultaneously: those of individualism, of technological enframing, and finally, perhaps, of philosophical ideology. Questions on Revealing: The dawning or revealing of a world, the appearance of truth in Heidegger How does this relate to the work of Rothko, who also wanted his viewers to be opened into a new world? Or: is the dawning of this world in Heidegger an altogether 'new' world, distinct from the one which we previously inhabited? Or is it the same world, re-presented? Would the Heideggerian art project resemble that of Newman or that of Rothko? How might we see the relationship between poetic revealing and that revealing which Newman's seeks to accomplish?
49
Identity and Seeing Others
Panel II: Identity and Seeing Others A New Narcissism: Refracting the Self in Contemporary Video Max Razdow New York University We are familiar with the concept of the narcissistic gaze in a pejorative sense. To view ones self in absolution, to ignore the calls of the nymph Echo, is to flirt with a moral sentence of fossilization. According to the Narcissus myth, as was retold memorably in Ovids Metamorphoses, one must be wary of self involvement, lest one perish under the stony reflection of his or her own image. We are begged by the moral of this tale to associate acute self observation with vanity, isolation and fallibility, to understand introversion as akin to a sort of blindness, one which throws a cloak upon the world and leaves us at the waters edge, immobilized. Ovid eulogized that Narcissus fell in love with an insubstantial hope, mistaking a mere shadow for a real body. Spellbound by his own self, he remained there motionless, with fixed gaze. Emphasizing the Platonic associations of the myth, the Roman writer then asks: Poor foolish boy, why vainly grasp at the fleeting image that eludes you? What you see is but the shadow cast by your reflection; in itself it is nothing. 1 Independent of myth, the deleterious sense of narcissisms veil has become a trope for the Western mind, manifesting a totalizing responsibility to external phenomenon which has arrived from the empiric persuasion of the classical Greeks. Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, lamented upon the turn of Greek thought to the teachings of Socrates: While in all productive men it is instinct that is the creative-affirmative force, and consciousness acts critically and dissuasively, in Socrates, it is instinct that becomes critic,
Ovid, The Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innes (London: Penguin Books, 1955) 85.
50
Max Razdow A New Narcissism
and consciousness that becomes the creator.2 For Nietzsche, Socrates one great Cyclops eye denied his follower s from enjoying the pleasure of gazing into the Dionysian abysses, severing art from its initial pre-Classical grace.3 Indeed, under the obscurant scrutiny of the Socratic sensibility, images of the self in art become leveled off at a mirrors glance, the figural image thus becomes a forthright establishment of the selfs ultimate physicality. This defers to a manner of dues ex machina for its ultimate teleology, denying feeling in deference to that which appears in an optical or physiological sense. Inhabiting solely the realm most tenable by the scientists outlook, we are thus veiled from an instinctual sense of ourselves kept apart from a level of deep introspection for its potential inconsistency with the facts of our physical environment. The self portrait as a strict mimesis of the objective has a direct lineage from Greek culture we can track its passage through Classical, Renaissance, Enlightenment and Modern ideals in Western art. For Plato, as Nietzsche notes, all art was degenerate, an imitation of a phantom, which implored art to strive for greater allegiance to that which could be verified the ideal, whereby: philosophic thought outgrows art and compels it to cling close to the trunk of the dialectic.4 Despite sojourns by the disaffected, the sway of this veneration of the ideal manifested freshly in each era. Called to mind are Sir Joshua Reynolds adulation of the concrete memories of history painting, ongoing even during the height of Romanticism, or Clement Greenbergs high Modernist reaction to the kitsch of pictorial articulation via a call to stark opticality.5 More recently, in the Postmodern landscape in which we currently stand, we find a vigorous turn away from the reductionism of the Modern, yet one
2
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Toronto: Random House, 1967) 88. 3 Nietzsche 89. 4 Nietzsche 90-91 5 Ken Carpenter, Greenberg, Clement ,Grove Art Online. Oxford University Press, [1/15/07], http://www.groveart.com/
51
accompanied by a coterminous persuasion by another sort of empiric veil, that of the culturally coherent. For Pop artists, from Warhol onward, the self is implicit, but always with the specified litanies of our current cultural grid (in the Foucauldian sense) as a defining pretext. Here, despite a renunciation and general dissatisfaction with the purely physical, the self remains inexorably entwined with the very current cultural housing which it aims (ineffectually) to critique. It is vitally interesting that research into the origins of the myth of Narcissus has recently established a potential basis for the myth in the same divinatory practices of pre-classical cultures which informed Nietzsches Dionysian, lyric urge. This research offers a view of Narcissus past life as a boymedium for hydromancy, or scrying, and underscores the vast scope of value systems that have been demonized by the Greek pronouncement of the myth. Scrying, which emerged with the divinatory arts of the ancient Chaldeans around the middle of the 4rth millennium B.C., was a practice that required the seer (the priest, the augur, the sorcerer) to stare into a pellucid or reflective object until he observes the future.6 As the scholar Max Nelson explains at length in his essay Narcissus: Myth and Magic, many versions of the Narcissus myth seem closely linked to prescriptions for an ancient scrying ritual in which a young boy would stare motionless, in a prone position, at his own reflection in calm, clear, resplendent spring water in ord er to summon an apparition.7 For the water-scryer, it was not the mimetic reflection of ones image that was pursued, but rather a refractory visual experience that revealed divine messages or dream-like visions, at times personifying themselves as deities or ancestral spirits. In the still waters of the hydromancer, reflections of the self and the environment would mix with surface patterns, expounding an integrated abstraction that could be used for
6
Eric G. Wilson, The Spiritual History of Ice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 10. 7 Max Nelson, Narcissus: Myth and Magic, The Classical Journal Vol. 95, No. 4. (Apr. - May, 2000) 383.
52
divination. This was not self absorption, but rather an act of looking that was ultimately embarked upon to reveal deep meanings and truths about the outside world, cutting through a reflective sense of self to instead find an immersive one. This action incorporates ones environment and subjectivity as one, with each having equal recourse over the other. A solitary state was often a requisite for scrying, but with the distinct aim of communication with a mystic sense of the other this was less an act of meditative isolation than an active reach toward inter-subjectivity. As Nelson notes, in Ovid, Narcissus is not always still. He speaks about having stretched his arms to his image and it having reached back among other reciprocal movements.8 Psychologically speaking, it is this reciprocity that becomes key in the divinatory practice of the scryer, granting an animistic sense that the universe at large is not merely inert and mechanistic, but rather causally tied to ones own perceptions and mental agency. The world then becomes, as William James intoned in his writings on pragmatism, a world in which personal forces are the starting-point of new effects9 In contemporary art, particularly in the mode of video, the narcissistic act has been established as a primary mode of discourse. Rosalyn Krauss pointed out the early narcissistic bent of the video genre, from its very inception, in her seminal 1976 essay Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism. For Krauss, videos like Vito Acconcis Centers (1971) highlighted the reflective nature of the medium of video, and led her to dub narcissism the condition of the entire genre.10 Krauss narcissism, appealing to Freudian and Lacanian psychological takes on the condition, is one that leads to an unchanging condition of a perpetual frustration and undergoes a bracketing-out [of] the world and its conditions, at the same time as it can reassert the facility of the object
8 9
Nelson 377. Horace M Kallen, ed, The Philosophy of William James. Selected from his Chief Works. (New York: Random House, 1953) 206. 10 Rosalind Krauss, Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism, October, Vol. 1 (Spring, 1976) 50.
53
against the grain of the narcissistic drive towards projection.11 Inherent in Krausss read of the video art of the 1970s is the periods pervasive ur ge towards Minimalism, which channeled narcissism to attempt to find an eminently concrete stillness, a reflexive sense of the self as pure object. This was true in this period even when faced with the effusive inertia of video, a medium where the object at hand was little more than a gathering of electron charges. The tranquil reflection of 1970s video artists which Krauss pointed out seems to have been but a passing vision. Released from the minimalist aesthetic, a number of todays video artists are engaged in a form of narcissism irregardless, but one that seems much closer to a divinatory, refractory narcissism than to the reflective myth of the Greeks and Ovid. Called to mind in this vein are Mathew Barneys Cremaster Cycle (1994-2001) and Sue de Beers The Quickening (2006), both works of complex esoteric and personal myth by contemporary video artists who were influential to the two younger artists, Jason Kendall and Alex McQuilkin, that I will focus on in this essay. Like the hydromantic Narcissus, these artists use the abstractive lens of their own subjectivity to find a handle on their social environment, letting empiric certainty fall by the wayside in deference to an immersive, potentially animistic, sense of the subject and the external world that are intimately intertwined. While this work follows from a Postmodern commandeering of the self, it has emerged in the last decade as a mode of art making that is not fettered by any objective role within an established cultural archetype, but rather one grasped with a full realization of the plastic omnipotence of the irresolute mental flaneur. Within this work, by undergoing an act of narcissistic distension from the everyday, these artists establish their control over a flux of nuanced cultural, personal and mythopoeic artifacts in defiant acts of reframing, costuming and montage. In Jason Kendalls performance-for-video Blitz (2007), the artist created a scenario of narcissistic sport, testing his physical limits in confrontation with an inanimate
11
Krauss 58-63
54
object of his own making. Entrapped in his studio, which he had transformed into an Astroturf covered stadium, Kendall attempted to destroy a dummy adversary clothed in a vinyl sheath that matched the colors of the antagonists football -byway-of-bushido uniform. The combat spectacle ensued for over two hours while onlookers observed from a scaffold outside the studio and multiple cameras within the studio captured the battle from every angle. The artist was cast in Blitz as a present-day Narcissus in struggle with his past, as a college football player, turning away from the peripheral to struggle with the interior. Kendall established himself, in this act, as a titanic figure against the indestructible object of the tackling dummy. By the end of the performance, the artist lies splayed out on the Astroturf amongst the eviscerated remains of his indestructible materials, exhausted but not defeated, having destroyed the object and letting only his self remain. By pairing the violence and momentum of the athletic imperative with an urge toward negation of the objective self, Kendall allows us to glimpse an instance of non-ascetic narcissism in its most contentious state. We are ill prepared by our mythological backgrounds for the viability of this sort of barbaric onanism, to the point where even our most stalwart oppositional thinkers sometimes become dubious. As Nietzsche himself contended: the rapture of the Dionysian state, with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits, contains, while it lasts, a lethargic element in which all personal experiences of the past become immersed. 12 Kendalls act of violent object effacement defies Nietzsches doubt toward the worth of narcissisms attempted annihilation of ordinary bounds, refusi ng to adhere to the mythic consequences of immobility and intoning, instead, a revolutionary act of reclamation against external signifiers. Kendalls ecstatic energy finds cause to meld introversion with impacting action, asserting the immaculate presence of the self both augmented and restrained by accumulated manifestations of role in this case those of football player, gladiator and samurai. By the performances end, Kendalls prone warrior has nullified the object, exhausted his masculine
12
Nietzsche 59.
55
capability and asserted a nuanced sense of personhood not longer controlled by the objects siren call. In this act of narcissism, the immaterial opponent by which the warrior is defined is eviscerated, and the self is ultimately freed. In Alex McQuilkins recent two channel video Joan of Arc (2007), the artist emulates and considers an idealized image of the 15th century saint through the medium of film, intoning an instance where the narcissistic urge becomes attached to an external image, resulting in a conflation that comes to herald its own sense of freedom. As McQuilkin shaves her head in adoration of Maria Falconettis 1928 Joan of Arc, a narration of self doubt and earnest affiliation with the martyr is spoken in a voice-over by the artist, one that Roberta Smith noted as maintaining a voice of disarming directness, restraint and authenticity.13 As we listen, we are simultaneously transfixed by McQuilkins implied stare at the mirror of her cameras viewfinder, becoming implicated as viewers into the narcissistic loop of video. While the filmic Joan of Arc burns at the stake, McQuilkin tilts her head in a muted reflection, straining to attain the same postures and expressions as the actress. This is a closed circuit between McQuilkin and her idol, yet one that establishes throughout an acute possibility of escape through the implied nuance of Joan of Arcs autonomous and destabilizing action. As a montaged clip of Dreyers film focuses momentarily on the passage of birds overhead Falconettis pyre, we are reminded that Joan of Arc inhabited fully this sense of autonomy in her own life through her visions, rebellion and, ultimately, in her death. If we are to imagine McQuilkins viewfinder as a mirror in the manner of the narcissistic pool, we can entertain the images conjured of Joan of Arc as projections, in the psychological sense. The distant celluloid memory of Falconetti being executed becomes a figment of the artists desires and subconscious memories, which appear in the screen in a manner so as to become available for mimicry. As Krauss noted, projection is a primary feature of the mediumistic aspect of video art, constituted by the
13
Roberta Smith, Art Listings: Last Chance, New York Times, 23 Nov. 2007.
56
simultaneous reception and projection of an image; and the human psyche used as a conduit.14 For McQuilkin, staring into the cameras pool of refracted vision, thereby tying self and culture together amid a kaleidoscopic psychic abstraction, allows a spirit to be summoned, in this case that of Joan of Arc, whos legend is one which reinforces the practice itself. Nietzsche might have called this summoned specter an Apollonian dream image, one that grants an inkling of the abyssal mystery of the Dionysian without succumbing to the chaotic lack of form that is inherent in that state of vision. For Nietzsche, the Apollonian remains a necessary companion to the freeing mentality of the Dionysian, existing as the apotheosis of the principium individuationis -- a stabilizing reminder of our discrete individuality in which alone is consummated the perpetually attained goal of primal unity.15 New videographic acts like a ritualized destruction of the materially external, in Jason Kendalls Blitz, or a projective summoning and donning of silver screen deities, in Alex McQuilkins Joan of Arc, lend credence to the worth of the narcissistic action in a manner that escapes the Socratism which has previously made notions of narcissism culturally problematic. This is hardly the morbid narcissism expounded by Freud, or the imaginary order inhabited by the narcissistic in Lacan, but rather a narcissism with acutely implicit social and political worth. By peering at the self within a refractory lens rather than a reflective one, these artists are exercising their ability to escape the overwhelming catcalls of commercial machinery and cultural imperative, attempting to establish a personalized lens through which to abstract and commandeer the world into which we have been placed. The very self absorption that was established, by the Narcissus myth and subsequent Socratic thought, as a veiling of the empiric has been reclaimed instead today as a conduit to renewed clarity. For these artists, the water-lens of the camera becomes multifaceted, retaining aspects of history, culture, memory and physicality to be recomposed personally in a manner which grants full license to the pragmatist creative
14 15
Krauss 52. Nietzsche 45.
57
capability. As George Santayana wrote in his 1905 Reason in Art, Life is an equilibrium which is maintained now by accepting modification and now by imposing it. 16 Through a new narcissistic practice, some of todays artists are reclaiming their independence from the false Echo of empiric certitude, and, in their wake, a malleable, self created equilibrium may become a possibility once more.
Jason Kendall, Blitz (2007).
Alex McQuilkin, Joan of Arc (2007).
16
George Santayana, Reason in Art, (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1931) 3.
58
Ryland Johnson Baudrillards Butterfly Athleticism
Baudrillards Butterfly Athleticism Ryland Johnson Stony Brook University Last night Chuang Chou dreamed he was a butterfly, spirits soaring he was a butterfly (is it that in showing what he was he suited his own fancy?), and did not know about Chou. When all the sudden he awoke, he was Chou with all his wits about him. He does not know whether he is Chou who dreams he is a butterfly or a butterfly who dreams he is Chou. -Zhuangzi
aim for the point of no return. -Jean Baudrillard, America We read Baudrillard from the desert; for many of us, it is desert life from the beginning. Simulacra and Simulation, the work which is so often called Baudrillards entrance into theorizing the postmodern, and which, for the student of Baudrillard, is an obvious place to begin, appropriately, begins in the desert as well: Borges fable of the cartographers of the Empire, drawing a map so grand that it covers the real exactly and entirely the most beautiful allegory of simulation 1 It is in the desert where, if we could somehow view the unfolding of this map and its slow decay across a wasteland of time, we witness the last vestiges of reversibility in decline: the erosion and fraying of the maps edges as it lies exposed to a continuous elemental onslaught of wind and sand, to dead time, to constant, unflinching, desert time here, a failed phoenix, an impossible resurrection, a nostalgia for that which has passed away, for the Manichean play of light and shade, of
1
Baudrillard, Jean, America. Trans. Chris Turner. (New York: Verso,, 1989) 1.
59
real and unreal, of sweet referential paradigms, sugar-coated candy dreams: this, the very quaintness of second-order simulacra. Now, pure simulation: all is exposed in the view of innumerable, disembodied eyes, in the omni-spectral gaze of a virtual contextuality, and it is the real which is fraying, eroding, dying out as its space, its corpus, is consumed by the simulacra. The simulacrum, Baudrillard has said, is the predator of the real. In its wake: the desert infinite, irreversible remainder a Zen garden of dry stone in the wet grass beneath bare feet. Today, in being true to my home and to our home, we must contemplate the desert, as Baudrillard would wish, in the character of this place, in the character of Georgia and Appalachia. I imagine Kennesaw Mountain in Spring, namesake of my undergraduate institution, - a place whose name in Cherokee means a place to have a good conversation - site of an endless continuum of Civil-War reenactments and health-conscious joggers. It is this mountain that I see in my minds eye: it is midnight, moonless. There is a lush, cacophonous drone of cicada scratch, and humanity directs against the face of the mountain a yellow spotlight, which, as it moves, lucidly, reveals not our sentinel pines, heavy in their aromatic sap and their Spartan verticality, whose sex cover everything, (this pollen that makes the world glow yellow), nor the pointillism of the lilacs coming into bloom, as they are this in time of year, whose effect in gesture, in their constellated purple-ness, always produces what strikes me as a distinctly shattered, but uniquely French provincial quality, nor the towering, mute, protestant uprightness of tulip poplar and live oak, but, rather, the illumination of this spotlight in my mind hollows out to the bones, to the earth and rocks the side of the mountain, so that all around the spot there is the volume of life, of groaning flora and cawing fauna, but within it, the immanence of the catastrophe to come: the desert of the real underlying the infinity of the wildlife preserve Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, where ball playing, Frisbee throwing, and kite flying are prohibited, but playing reality is not. As day breaks on the mountain, the Civil War reenacters are already there, arising out of the ether like the
60
shimmer-vision of an oasis in the distance: a play at the notion that the war never ends, that it recurs eternally, that these soldiers will war perpetually forever in a space outside time, but without bloodshed, without death, without, even, hunger and thirst, without dukkha, suffering (they sip water from plastic, Deer Park water-bottles and cook steak and eggs on Coleman stoves, surreptitiously sequestered in the covered wagons they have painstakingly crafted to look just so, as if in response to Scarlett OHaras, As God as my witness, Ill never be hungry again). In this way the war is reclaimed, sterilized: the Souths loss, the ugliness of its cause is expunged, rendered by way of Xerox and reducto ad absurdum into a gleeful meaninglessness, into a continuous sacrificial rite. In this way, its ghosts are told to go home, for the re-enacters have taken up the labor of haunting. Everywhere, there are all the components of a theatrical production, but there is no audience except those plugged in to the simulation: a closed circuit embodied, organic. Everywhere, there are all the signs of military encampment - bodily smells; the hum of conversation; the acrid taste of gunpowder dispersed in the air; the distant, cracking staccato of a line of fire everything except bullets flying upon their trajectories, ripping flesh, killing: cause without effect, on one hand, while on the other, effect that has gone beyond cause, effect which no longer requires there be a causal referent, in either case, continuous, infinite, virtual. What has replaced the bullets? It is the unstoppable trajectory of the simulation itself. The re-enacter cannot be brought to bear witness to the absurdity of his actions. Nothing can be said to him that will stop his re-enactment, no rationalization gives him pause: he will continue in the face of any question, insulated from all possible inquiries by the hyper-prosthetic of his authentic accessories. His attire, the equivalent in our time of the scramble suit of Philip K. Dicks paranoiac, dystopian near-futurism, does not re-create an identity the re-enacter doesnt play the part of a particular soldier rather, it holds identity at bay, produces an escape from identity by projecting simultaneously the possibility of all identities within the field of the genre (here, Gone With The Wind), effectively rendering all possible account of this or that
61
re-enacter equivocal and meaningless. The re-enacter cannot be identified; his anonymity is ensured by replication and excess. Again, the quintessence of this phenomenon is already intoned by Hollywood: in Sweet Home Alabama, Reese Witherspoon yells, Daddy! out across a field where, lying in the dirt, feigning death, a score of re-enacters lie in happy, stuck-pig-in-the-sunshine stillness (as if to suggest that if the citizens of Nakasaki and Hiroshima were to lay in the dirt, covered in slag and ash, to commemorate the dropping of the atomic bomb, there could be no better way to spend an afternoon) each of the re-enacters rise and fall back to the Earth as one, each equally culpable to the cry of family (whose voice accent and colloquialism have ensured this is the same for each of them, as indistinguishable as they are in their collectivity), each of them equally eager to lie back down again and go on playing dead. On Kennesaw Mountain, the perfect double of the Civil War re-enactment comes and goes, like worker ants on a mission, in the form or the jogger, billy-goating his way up and down the dirt trails, lost in himself, seeking the same annihilation the Civil War re-enacter seeks in collectivity and excess in independence, ascetic discipline, and self-denial. Where the re-enacter prides himself in the absolute necessity of his hyper-prosthetic accoutrement, in how much he requires to re-enact, the jogger prides himself on needing nothing to jog. Here, each species is in its natural habitat, mingling in and around each other, rarely directly interacting, but sharing the mountain. Presumably, and by appearances, the jogger and the re-enacter share nothing in common, but each is bound inextricably to the other beyond proximity in that they each are wholly invested in being virtual, in the process of simulation: eachs practice of being produces the same effects, follows the same strategies, and strives for the same goal to slip out of ones own being, like a butterfly wet from the chrysalis, into a substitute for itself in the virtual. They inherit the same sarcophagus: being in the desert garden. They are faced with the same demand: cultivate the nothingness of this place desert gardening in desert time. Nothing stops the jogger either. We can each imagine the jogger at the crosswalk, running in place, continuing to jog
62
even when there can be no movement forward, when automobiles pass by in their own equivocal endless migration. There is a marathon in Nashville another great example where, every year, stages are set up all along the course of the race, and rock bands, country western bands, rappers, electronic musicians every sort of musician that can be brought to take up stage space play for the racers all day without pause. Never do the racers stop running their marathon to rock out with the bands in spite of the fact that they are placed all around the city for them (they might even, in spite of this, plug themselves into their iPods, just like always), but this, again, is not the goal; the goal is to create and be subsumed in a total simulation, in a community that is wholly virtual. It is the same, yet more sublime on Kennesaw Mountain, where the jogger need not stop at all: a jogger might flow endlessly along the network of interconnected trails, criss-crossing over and back and around the mountain, projecting a perpetual wilderness that arises by way of being lost intentionally, by continuous doubling back and turning over ones own way the origami of annihilation. I have, myself, jogging on the mountain, come upon a congregation of re-enacters in full regalia and run straight through them, unperturbed, never slowing, only absently thinking, Ive run so slow Ive gone back in time. In America, Baudrillards chronicle in postcards of his automotive and aeronautical adventure across astral America, Baudrillard has much to comment on joggers: the true Latter Day Saints and the protagonists of an easy-does-it Apocalypse. Baudrillard observes: Nothing evokes the end of the world more than a man running strait ahead on a beach, swathed in the sounds of his walkman, cocooned in the solitary sacrifice of his energy, indifferent even to catastrophes since he expects destruction to come only as the fruit of his own efforts, from exhausting the energy of a body that has in his
63
own eyes become useless.2 The jogger becomes a synecdochic glyph for the whole of hypermodernity, a metaphor for the social gone beyond the end of history. Baudrillard continues, stating that [t]his entire society, including its active, productive part everyone is running straight ahead, because they have lost the formula for stopping (39). The embedded premise: the velocity of the growth of the human species, accumulating strength and speed exponentially over the last few hundred years, has reached a critical mass. The human species cannot anymore muster the energy to restrain its growth, and as a result, the expectation is that the social itself will implode, collapse, consume itself, destroy itself: humanity, inevitably, will suicide. If the eclipse of God signaled the ascendance of man into responsibility for his own fate, this is the eclipse of man, the eclipse of the social, which signals that mans fate has passed beyond the grasp of humanity, beyond the grasp of the social into what amounts to the pure calculus of catastrophe: fate, it seems, has flown off the wheel, and now hovers above our heads in an uncertain, precarious orbit. The final solution to this crisis, as it is exhibited by the jogger, is the expenditure of all energy in useless, ineffectual banality: simulate a suicide to simulate a rescue operation. I stress here, that Baudrillard is not speaking (at least not entirely) infinite gloom, irreconcilable doom. Rather, this is the point of entrance into the legendary black humor that Baudrillard is famous for. This is our point of entrance into the Baudrillard that I want to celebrate today: not the dissatisfied, cynic nihilist that so many are over-eager to depict him as being, but Baudrillard, in a gold velour suit, reading poetry in Vegas, athletically engaged, entangled in being virtual in the world, in being the laughing skull of the pure simulacrum speaking the trembling and the uncertainty at the heart of the desert of the real, and of the humor that precedes this reals own arrival, without place, without double, and without history. Baudrillard invokes the reader throughout his work to go forward to the point of no return, to go be beyond the end
2
Baudrillard, 38.
64
of history, but more so to go in the spirit of lucidity. I suggest that what becomes the lucidity pact in the late work of Baudrillard, at bottom, is the secret agreement the virtual person in the virtual community makes ahead of himself to go forth in the hyperreal with the greatest degree of virtue, and from which there emerges, alongside an understanding of being in the virtual context, an aesthetic of virtue, a humor, that precedes the arrival of the face of the virtual. What drives this behavior (the suicide simulation; being the butterfly situation) is the absolute conviction, the anorexic impulse: I must save myself from myself, or the collective, we must save ourselves from ourselves. Meaning: We must museumify everything. Everything must become the preserve. We must desertify existence, for in the desert there is nothing by which we can destroy ourselves. The suicide simulation, the extermination, however, must always precede its counter-gift, which is always in the order of redemption, but similarly, is a simulated redemption. The irony of this is that preservation, museumification, desertification asceticism in the American idiom is achieved by, through, and in there being excess, overflowing abundance in every sphere. It is the irony that Baudrillard observes in the apparent absolute opposition between the behaviors of the anorexic and the morbidly obese, which is nullified when one considers that the project of the anorexic and the morbidly obese is absolutely the same, and further, exactly the same as the project of the jogger: The anorexic prefigures this culture in a rather poetic fashion by trying to keep it at bay. He refuses lack. He says: I lack nothing, therefore I shall not eat. With the overweight person, it is the opposite: he refuses fullness, repletion. He says: I lack everything, so I will eat anything at all. The anorexic staves off lack by emptiness, the overweight person staves off fullness by excess. Both are homeopathic final solutions, solutions by extermination. The jogger has yet another solution. In a sense, he spews himself out; he doesnt merely expend his energy in his running, he vomits it. He has to attain the ecstasy of fatigue, the high of mechanical annihilation, just as the anorexic aims for the high of organic annihilation, the ecstasy of the empty
65
body and the obese individual seeks the high of dimensional annihilation: the ecstasy of the full body.3 Desert Humor: There is nothing here; I must cultivate this nothingness. Yet, this point in the desert, equivocal with every other point on the planet by means of the network of global exchange, like a point in a hologram, enables me to bring anything I want to my doorstep. So, I build a rocket car, paint flames on the side, and break the sound barrier with it in my backyard. This is the humor of the B.A.S.E. jumper2, who has the worlds most incredible fashion, the most contemporary aesthetic, who sees the jagged, rock pillars and canyons of the desert the same as the glass and chrome cliff faces of urban, architectural verticality: he will, like a ninja that infiltrates a space to assassinate himself, fling himself over the edge of anything to achieve total rush, to become pure image. He wears a mask, a balaclava, the height of hypermodern fashion, so much like the anarchist, or the terrorist, ostensibly to protect himself from the law, which will immediately incarcerate him for his insanity, for his death seeking behavior, his potential suicide. But, in B.A.S.E. jumping, the mask does not indicate there being a face behind it, it signals that the mask has become the whole of the body, out of which the B.A.S.E. jumper wills himself; at such a velocity, there is no distinguishing him anymore. Take his picture, and he will appear as a blur, or as an infinite sequence of emergent doubles along a line of flight. The B.A.S.E. Jumper leaps out of his being. His flight out of the mask is irreversible; from such egress, there can only be staged a rescue, an opening of a parachute that reclaims the body from the infinite, from the exponential accumulation of velocity, of speed in space, from the unspoken imperative that states that anyone who fails to achieve such a velocity never truly leaves the womb. Speed [Baudrillard writes] creates pure objects. It is itself a pure object, since it cancels out the ground and territorial reference points, since it runs ahead of time to annul time itself, since it moves more quickly than its own cause and
3
Baudrillard, 39-40.
66
obliterates that cause by outstripping it. Speed is the triumph of effect over cause, triumph of instantaneity over time as depth, the triumph of the surface and pure objectality over the profundity of desire. Speed creates a space of initiation, which may be lethal; its only rule is to leave no trace behind. Triumph of forgetting over memory, an uncultivated, amnesic intoxication. The superficiality and reversibility of a pure object in the pure geometry of the desert.4 The humor we a speak to here Baudrillards humor is, as weve indicated, an ironic humor, like that which arises in the Zhuangzis butterfly situation, where a fundamental uncertainty arises in reference between that which is lived and that which is dreamt: a quaint and innocent situational representation of exactly the same kind as Borges fable of the cartographers of the Empire, of the desert of the real. The kernel of wisdom to be derived from this is thus: hyperreality, as Baudrillard contends, never arises for the subject as illusion or as delusion, nor does it constitute fundamentally either such thing. Rather, hyperreality corresponds to the subjects situational reflex to the destabilization of the subjects own reality principle, to, in a more poetic language, the innocence of birth into the being of a butterfly. As hyperreality arises in being and practice, hyperreality arises as the strategy of innocence, of innocence set upon being as a result of mans own eclipsing of himself, of his own liberation from the social and the historical, of his own birth into the infinite childishness of virtual living.
Baudrillard, 6-7.
67
You & I Clare Samuel Concordia University I will be speaking about my photographic series You & I, six images from which are on display in the adjacent room, and I will be showing more of them during my talk. This body of work was completed in 2006. The photographs are portraits of people of different ages and ethnicities, situated within their homes. Most of them I knew only vaguely, many of them I had never met before and a few are my friends none of them are my family or partner. The subject is framed mid-length, a standard composition in portraiture which emphasises the face and hands the most socially expressive parts of the body. But in each image I positioned myself between them and the camera, embracing them a very different scenario from the disembodied gaze of the photographer behind the apparatus in traditional portrait-making. I believe this work pertains to the theme of this conference in two ways; first how the hug or embrace can be seen as an expression of the desire to be joined with another, to remove all barriers or veils between the Self and Other, and second the way that the representation of a person in photography involves many complex layers of identity construction between the artist and the individual portrayed. I want to talk about the process of creating the work, the ideas that it stemmed from and those that it generated both during production and afterwards when I looked back at it as a completed piece. Many philosophical theories and most artworks, develop from an intense and visceral feeling, which is then processed through thought and language to become an idea, or a new set of questions. This project developed from the powerful basic human need to touch or be touched by another. Obviously we are social animals, we need friends and family, we need to engage in communication and establish a sense of belonging within a specific network. But I began to question the extent to which this need for physical affection is directly
68
Clare Samuel You & I
personal, or individuated. I think most people have experienced the thought I really need a hug, and often immediately afterward something kicks in and we adjust the feeling/thought into a desire for the embrace of a particular person in our life often a lover or parent, as these are the social relationships where contact is least inhibited. But is there some more primal truth in that immediate thought? Can this basic compulsion to be held by an Other be assuaged by just anyone? Sometimes it seems like it could be. For anyone who has seen Judi Denchs portrayal of an almost psychotically lonely woman in the film Notes on a Scandal (2006), this is expressed in her brutally honest monologue as she slumps alone in the bath smoking a cigarette. She speaks of the intense alienation of her routine, and how even the casual accidental touch of a bus conductor sends a jolt of longing to her groin. The human desire for touch is related to sexuality, but I think it is a more complex than that, as the following passage from Margaret Atwoods novel The Edible Woman, suggests. The character has entered a cinema and the seats around her are empty: She had made sure of that. She didnt want any trouble with furtive old men. She recalled such encounters from early school days, before she had learned about movie theatres. Hands sqeezing against knees and similar bits of shuffling pathos, although not frightening (one should just move quietly away), were painfully embarrassing to her simply because they were sincere. The attempt at contact, even slight contact, was crucial for the fumblers in the dark. I began to think about what would happen if I did follow this urge, if I reached out and embraced a stranger on the street or on the subway, I wondered if before they panicked, before they had any conscious response, would something pass between us? And how would I feel? For a split second would I feel a connection to them, a mutual knowing that in there there really is something -something like myself, before I too panicked, felt invaded, or oddly repulsed by this unknown flesh in my arms. Later I discovered the work Touching 1000 People by Canadian artist Diane Borsa to, which I think also deals with some of these questions. Having read a study which suggested that when people are touched
69
deliberately or even unconsciously tapped, it seems to subtly affect their behaviour and well-being, she embarked on a performance where for a month she went out of her way to covertly bump, rub past and touch strangers on the street. Borsato was dealing with the most minimal of touches, and the idea of using of the smallest possible gesture to create an effect in public. But I was particularly interested in the extremism, the all-encompassing nature of the specific gesture of the embrace. I thought it was interesting that in our society touch is so ritualised and regulated. A handshake is the most common and accepted form of contact, whereas to touch someones face would be appropriate only if it signified a fairly intimate relationship. Relatively few contact gestures are clearly categorised and have their own specific terms the concept of a kiss vs the rather more long-winded touching someones arm with your hand. It seems strange that of these linguistically coded and most frequent gestures among friends, a hug is second only to a handshake, when in fact it comprises so much more contact really the most contact possible in public. In the embrace the two bodies are fully connected frontally the way we orientate ourselves to the world, and the locus of the face and hands -the intimate tools of social expression. In this position there is a simultaneity, each is both holding and being held.. Early on I had been aware that the project commented on the degree to which all portraits are self-portraits they never capture or unveil the essence of the sitter, but rather reflect the construction and choices of the artist who is always in a sense in the picture something I had made literal. But there seemed to be a more complex tension occurring between these forces of identity in the photographs I was taking. I realised they reminded me a little of Casper David Friedrichs paintings, in the way that I was foregrounded with my back to the viewer. Friedrichs work speaks of the human dwarfed by and lost in the sublime landscape, de-individuated in the vastness of nature they are a faceless stand-in for the viewer. A few people I had shown my images to had remarked that the blankness of the white shirt and jeans I had chosen to wear meant that I tended to disappear, that one focused much
70
more on the other person rather than speculating about my identity or even what the relationship between us was. In earlier test shots I had experimented with wearing different clothing in each shoot to convey a sense of variance of time and place, but I abandoned this when I found that people did not realise I was the same person in each shot. I realised that the choice to simplify my outfit did suggest a strong sense of anonymity -aside from gender and to a certain extent race in the ones where parts of my skin are visible. I began to wonder if the work related to a alternative idea of the sublime to that evoked by Casper David Friedrich,s conception of an overwhelming Nature. That perhaps this human urge for the embrace relates to a desire to be engulfed, absorbed into, obliterated by something greater than or simply external to oneself, in this case another person. By concealing my identity was I attempting this erasure of myself? Or in asking them for this gesture, in arranging them in a certain way, taking this image from them, was I in fact engulfing them, making them into objects? Are they portraits or self-portraits? As I was struggling with these issues of both representation and how fundamentally we encounter the Other, I discovered the work of philosopher Martin Buber. It is from his 1923 text I and Thou that I derived the title of the series -You and I, because I was so struck by how what he was saying related to my feelings about the work. A full and adequate summary of Bubers conception of Self and Other is beyond the scope of this talk, and my own academic abilities would not do it justice. But he maintains that Man becomes an I through a You positing the I-Thou relationship in contrast to the I-It, in which the perceived is merely for the use by, or reflection of, the perceiving I. This It subject -object dynamic is necessary for life to proceed, for us to move through time, but whoever lives only with that is not human. A genuine I-You encounter occurs as a pure present, it is uncanny and can only be fleeting, it involves a simultaneity, a reciprocity of giving: you say You to it and give yourself to it, it says You to you and gives itself to you, a simultaneous acting on and acted upon. I would not argue that this project explicitly
71
illustrates Bubers theory, or that I had glimpses of such a connection in the creation of these images (although I think with some of them I did). But I believe that this concept of a profound connection, a mutual shedding of pretences or ego that allows us to really see an I in You, is what the human need for the embrace expresses. Perhaps these photographs, with their amorphous figure made up of two figures, reach toward this idea of unity, or maybe they simply mourn its absence. Either way I hope they attest to a positive desire to truly be there with another person, to be held and holding, to see and be seen; without veils.
72
73
Panel Response Heather White Stony Brook University Many thanks to Mr. Razdow, Mr. Johnson, and Ms. Samuel for their thoughts and the thoughts theyve inspired. Their work shares an urgency in addressing fundamental issues of identity and otherness, and their strategies - both of revealing the problems and of offering potential solutions have been innovative even to the point of seeming counter-intuitive. Mr. Johnson asserts the innocence of annihilation, and posits a kind of authenticity through hyperreality; Mr. Razdow defends narcissism as a productive and even necessary pursuit, and lauds the artist who wages war (civil war, perhaps) on what might determine him. Ms. Samuel visually anchors the conversation by foregrounding the confoundment of self and other; our attention is directed to ambiguities between care and animosity, between protection and oppression, between veil as obstruction and veil, in Mr. Razdows words, as conduit. The force of each of these arguments is physical; I am struck by the bodiliness of all three analyses. The war and athleticism discussed by Baudrillards Butterfly Athleticism appears in A New Narcissism vis a vis the battle described between video artist James Kendall and his indestructible object tackling dummy. In this context one is tempted to read the embraces of You and I as stills from a movie like Kendalls, although not without considering the connotations of immobility and inertia, of playing dead and of lost formulas for stopping. In any case, the body its force, its movement or lack thereof, its physicality - is emphasized by all three presenters, who nevertheless are concerned with the emotional and intellectual. What kind of mind/body relationship is at work, and how does art figure here? It seems uncanny that, in this panel on identity and otherness, the emphasis the films of Kendall and McQuilkin, the You and I series, the scenarios on Kennesaw mountain falls on what could be taken for real or documentary but is somehow beyond: it is art, or for Mr. Johnson, hyper-reality.
74
Heather White Panel Response
In Ms. Samuels photographs and in the video art that Mr. Razdow describes, the camera records a reality that is staged but otherwise (*relatively) undistorted. How would the films Mr. Razdow describe change if they were, for example, animated cartoons? If Ms. Samuels photographs were paintings? And what if Mr. Johnsons literary self -portrait-asjogger were a film? What is (or would be) the role of the lens? Mr. Razdow insists that the lens is not reflective but refractive, and implores us to think pond- or lens-gazing not as a manifestation of vanity but as a method of prophecy. Might the artists scrying, then, be construed as a conjuring of audience? Not of the observers in the scaffolds outside Kendalls studio, but of a future audience who would thus become ingrained in the work itself. Both Mr. Johnson and Mr. Razdow allude to closed -circuit systems; what happens when a whole troup of civil war re-enactors fall in the forest on Kennesaw mountain and no-one knows? And when, like today, an audience is made privy to their activity? I wonder whether the appropriate audience for narcissistic work is a collaborator or a voyeur. The question, posed by Ms. Samuels series, is ultimately a question of depth. It is a question of knowing not only how the artist, the audience, and the subject relate, but where each stands in the picture: behind the lens or in front, occupying the place of the lens itself, or somewhere else entirely. The tropes of mobility and immobility arise again here in considering whether it is possible to move between these positions as, for example, between the linguistic designations you and I. Ill conclude by noting how each presenter here has stood in different proximity to his/her analysis: Ms. Samuel has presented her own art, in which she appears (or, perhaps, does not). Mr. Johnsons presentation bridged a personal and academic account, and Mr. Razdow has deployed the work of others to analyse concepts of self. I thank them again for sharing their positions and invite further discussion on the issues I have raised or others - from the audience.
75
Feeling and Interaction
Panel III: Feeling and Interaction
Unveiling the Life of Feeling Nikolay Tugushev Stony Brook University In the task of unveiling feeling, we cannot presuppose that the aim is to define feeling. Beginning with this goal would presuppose too much. We would be postulating a certain relation between feeling and language that only covers up our access to the phenomenon of feeling. The possibility must remain open that feeling and language are intertwined in a way that prohibits any clean separation between them. Therefore, we must be cautious not to fall into the prejudiced belief that feelings are among those phenomena that are susceptible to subsumption under universal concepts, and can be comprehended with attainment of their definition. Instead, the starting point for the study of feeling must be the very phenomenon that initiates our inquiry, the phenomenon where language and feeling make their most conspicuous contact. This phenomenon is the act of describing ones feelings, and without it we would not know to puzzle over the life of feeling. Luckily we engage in the activity of describing our feelings often enough and would have little trouble identifying this phenomenon. For example, I recently attended a dinner party in celebration of a relatives birthday. Now I am at my desk describing the feelings that accompanied my experience. I recollect a calm but distanced enjoyment of the affair, helped out by a few bottles of strong Belgian beer. In general, I felt subdued but merry while listening to the conversations of others. The first thing to notice in the above description is the degree to which we are able to relate our feelings to others. In this task, we have little choice but to resort to descriptive words like sad, disappointed, eager, etc. It is analogous to describing the experience of color by using color-words (light
76
Nikolay Tugushev Unveiling the Life of Feeling
red, deep blue, etc.).1 The success of such descriptions presupposes the interlocutors familiarity with the very experience being described in order to make color-words or feeling-words meaningful. These words are only encryptions that the listener is expected to decipher in terms of his own experience. Otherwise, these descriptions are as helpful as color words are to a blind person, and one would have no hope of gaining anything by using them. We see that description of feelings is somehow impoverished of content. It merely sets certain guidelines that may be used to approximate the experience. In a sense, feeling always outstrips any attempt to describe itto grasp it with words. This is evidenced by the fact that, no matter the depth or extent of the description, there is always more intricacy to any feeling than the description discloses. In the example of the dinner party, the description may be nuanced by relating particular conversations that made me disenchanted with the discussion, or more adjectives can be supplied to describe the sense of dread that came over me at certain moments. But even if an indefinitely long list of such details is provided, still it would only further the descriptive effort without ever exhausting the peculiarity of the feelings involved. In other words, there is a gap that can only be approximately bridged by description, but never closed. The actual feelings remain wider, deeper, and more multi-layered than the straightforward description can ever capture. Feeling appears inherently particular and resistant to subsumption under general concepts. That is, every instance of feeling is singular and peculiar to the time during which it takes place. There is no identity between feelings, but only similarity and proximity of individual feelings. For this reason, Collingwood considers the function of art-proper to be the expression of emotion (which we take here to be one pole of feeling).2 Art is suited for this role precisely because
1
This example is more than a mere analogy since experiences of color are feelings in a limiting sensuous sense. One could talk about the feeling of texture or heat and cold in this same sense. 2 According to Collingwood emotion is one aspect of the dual
77
artworks are individual in the way that feelings are. In fact, Collingwood suggests that artworks are individual because their purpose is to express feelings. That is why, according to Collingwood, the poet goes through great labor to individualize the emotions being expressed in the poem. Collingwood writes, The artist proper is a person who, grappling with the problem of expressing a certain emotion, says, I want to get this clear. He does not want a thing of a certain kind, he wants a certain thing [expression of emotion].3 What we might call anger at any given instance is not just another experience of anger, but rather an experience that for all intents and purposes may be called anger. The particular anger felt now is an experience all its own, which feeds off of all the other experiences that have been called anger in the past, but is not identical to them. I have been angry before about having trash dumped in my front yard, but the particular anger this time around is not the same anger I felt before. This anger now is combined with those previous instances of anger directed at a similar situation. Whereas before I was angry that there was trash in my front yard, now this anger is also combined with frustration at my helplessness to prevent it from happening again. In a similar way, each feeling is as unique and individual as the person undergoing the feeling at that moment. Further investigation into the description of feeling shows that such descriptions rely on accounts of the situations within which the feelings took place. Undoubtedly, in the case of the dinner party, relating the conversations that took place as well as describing the people that were present would further the effectiveness of the description. In fact, it is problematic to describe feelings without supplying the world situation in which they were experienced. Saying that one is sensation/emotion nature of feeling. Here also we have a general activity of feeling specialized into various kinds, each with its proper specification of what we feel. It is not, clearly, of quite the same kind as sensation; to distinguish it, let us call it emotion, p. 160. 3 Collingwood, R. G. The Principles of Art. (New York: Oxford, 1958), 113-114.
78
happy, content, or exhilarated presupposes an entire apparatus for communicating feelings, which description simply cashes out. Yet, by themselves, these words are only minimally descriptive. They require qualification and context in order to gain full significance. This significance must be provided by the relations of the subject to the world, as in I was walking through the park on a warm September afternoon and felt calm. Here, the word calm is almost an afterthought of the description. It is more of an indication that a feeling is being described, rather than the descriptive element itself. If I were to substitute the expression downtrodden for calm it would be dismissed as a mistake. Either the world situation should be described differently, or more must be said regarding the world to justify the downtrodden feeling. The description as it stands, with the word calm replaced by downtrodden, presents a puzzle because the world-situation already indicates a feeling, which in the above case clashes with the descriptive word downtrodden. Several important results can be derived from the above investigation. Firstly, description of feeling is a superficial and derivative relation between feeling and language.4 Mainly, such description is marked by the turn of phrase it felt as or its equivalent. This phrase is an indicatora sign that feeling is being talked about, whereas actual understanding of feeling comes from a deeper source. Description of feeling can be contrasted with cases where feelings are communicated without making such superfluous indications. These instances are called expressions of feeling. We can provisionally differentiate between expression and description of feeling based on the presence or absence of the phrase it felt as. With this loose distinction in mind, let us look to the phenomenon of expression of feeling to further clarify the idea. When I stand in front of an audience and speak, my words become rushed and slurred while the sentences I use become incomplete and repetitive. In this instance we are inclined to say that I feel nervous. In the actual moment, the phrase I am nervous or it feels nerve 4
Perhaps the point is belied by this phenomenons conspicuousness.
79
wrecking never appeared. Still, the feeling wa s understood through its expression; it was ex-pressed in making an extrinsic appearance through my speech. In his investigation of expressive functions of art, Collingwood also makes a distinction between description and expression of feeling. He writes, to say I am angry is to describe ones emotion, not to express it. The words in which it is expressed need not contain any reference to anger as such at all. Indeed, so far as they simply and solely express it, they cannot contain any such reference.5 The reason why expression should not contain descriptive words is because then the feeling is severed from the peculiarities of the world that first brought it about. Furthermore, descriptive words tend toward abstraction that strips away much of the uniqueness of feeling. Collingwood points out that description tends toward generalization and so misses the individual character of the feeling itself. The anger which I feel here and now, with a certain person, for a certain cause, is no doubt an instance of anger, and in describing it as anger one is telling truth about it; but it is much more than mere anger: it is a peculiar anger, not quite like any anger that I ever felt before, and probably not quite like any anger I shall ever feel again.6
We may further support Collingwoods claim in the following way; in description, it is the feeling that is intended, not the world situation in which the described feeling finds its orientation. Feeling comes into focus and stands at the center of attention, but as an intentional object one no longer experiences the world through it. If one were to describe how exhilarated one felt in some situation, it would not help to actually feel exhilarated. In fact, when describing a feeling, the person is certainly in some psycho-somatic state that can
5 6
Collingwood, 111-112. Collingwood, 112-113.
80
itself be considered a feeling, but this is a feeling associated with describing, not with the feeling being described. 7 The person is experiencing a unique description-feeling at that moment, which has more to do with his reasons for providing the description (to draw sympathy, humor, admiration, etc.) than with the feeling described. On the other hand, expressing some feeling through language requires that the feeling be at the source of the expression. The feeling must be on-hand8 so as to show up outwardly. And the more effectively we try to convey a feeling, the more we tend toward expression. We begin to gesticulate or act out the situation, i.e. we relive our experience of the world situation that gave rise to our feeling. For this reason it is difficult to notice and pursue this otherwise essential distinction between expression and description of feeling. This is especially true because the possibility of the latter (of description) relies on the former. That is, in general, for description to be possible, expression must already be available. As was previously suggested, descriptive feeling-words would be useless unless a preexisting intersubjective understanding of feeling was already in place prior to their use. This kind of understanding cannot itself be generated through description, but it may develop through expression. How this is possible would take us beyond the scope of the present study. Nevertheless, from what has been said, the dependence of description on expression must be admitted.
7
This point is analogous to Collingwoods idea that consciousness of feeling is itself colored by feeling (274). However, despite this view, Collingwood attributes a high degree of volition to consciousness that seems unwarranted and phenomenologically unsupported. 8 By on-hand is meant that the feeling has to be felt to some degree. For instance, an actor expressing some feeling on stage does not necessarily undergo grief or bewilderment, but must project himself into a situation where grief or bewilderment would be present. The actor is expressing the feeling of grief or bewilderment, not what grief or bewilderment is.
81
At this point, we are in a position to employ the difference between description and expression to derive an invaluable point about feeling. We have seen that with expression, feeling makes a connection with the world. Description, on the contrary, must supply the world-situation of the feeling in order to be effective. Therefore, whereas with expression the feeling is experienced, with description, the feeling is contemplated as a generalized and isolated object. Consequently, by way of this difference, we come to an essential phenomenological feature of feeling: feeling is oriented toward a world. In this sense, being toward a world means standing in relation to a system of situations; it implies dwelling in a meaningful context. Thus, feeling cannot be understood as something inside the subject who is isolated from the world of his possibilities and intentions. A feeling of fear, for instance, cannot be made sense of without relating it to the feared thing and the fearful situation. In short, feeling is always a correlate of a felt world. For Heidegger, the state-of-mind is an existentiale of Daseina categorical structure of Being of those entities which we ourselves are.9 Such a state-of-mind, which manifests itself ontically as mood or attunement, is primordial precisely because it constitutes the there of Dasein, its being there-in-the-world. It is the reason why we are always concerned with something or other, and, on an ontological level, our Being is an issue for us. In Strassers words, feeling is the primordial inter-esse and whoever is interested in persons, things, situations lives with them. What is not of interest to us in this sense is as such not there for us. This interest is the presupposition for all forms of life and the a priori condition for acts of whatever sort.10 Similarly, Heidegger expresses the characteristic of state-of-mind as mood has already disclosed, in every case, Being -in-theworld as a whole, and makes it possible first of all to direct
9
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Tran. Macquarrie and Robinson. (New York: Harper, 1962) 134. 10 Strasser, Stephan. Phenomenology of Feeling: An Essay on the Phenomena of the Heart. Tran. Robert E. Wood. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ., 1977), 242.
82
one-self towards something.11 Heidegger means that things matter to us in virtue of our always already being in a state-ofminda disposition. Indeed from the ontological point of view we must as a general principle leave the primary discovery of the world to bare mood (Heidegger, H137). We see confirmation in Heideggers interpretation that the I world complex is primordially disclosed through feeling. Therefore, feeling is the condition of possibility of finding oneself resisted by and striving toward a world. In order to further unveil the life of feeling, we should study in more detail the relation of the subject and world in expressions of feeling. This will put us in a position to understand how it is that feeling, although veiled from others, can still be shared, communicated, and discussed. We shall look at a phenomenon of expression that is rich enough yet paradigmatic of such expression in order to unfold the structure underlying feeling. The phenomenon we mean is that of artistic expression. To be more specific, we will take a look at the act of painting. A painters task begins with an unexpressed feeling that orients the painter toward the world and his intended activity of painting. His perception of the world is colored by his feeling. That is, he sees the world through his feelings, yet for this very reason they are withdrawn from his view they engulf the artist in their immediacy. With the first few strokes the canvas begins to fill with patterns of color. These colors become part of the world. Now, the painters attention moves back and forth between the subject-matter of the painting and the canvas in front of him. With the first few paint marks now before him, there is an externality to the painting which allows the artist to turn his attention either away from it or toward it. Being affected by the colors on the canvas, the artist proceeds to layer paint further and further. This is the process of building up the painting as well as his feelings. The artists initial disposition his state-of-mind begins to play out and is externalized through a mark left in the world the feeling is impressed upon the world in the form of the brushstroke. But this impression, as part of the
11
Heidegger, 137.
83
world, then influences the artist as an affect. This affect burgeons into further feeling that then orients the artists subsequent stroke within what is now a slightly altered world (because of the impression left by the expression of the artists previous feeling). There is interplay of feeling between the subject and the world, which is paralleled by the act of painting. The artist engages in a kind of dialogue with the world through continual externalization. Hegel ascribes mans need to create art to this drive to leave a trace a mark on the world. Hegel writes, Man is realized for himself by practical activity, inasmuch as he has the impulse, in the medium which is directly given to him, and externally presented before him, to produce himself, and therein at the same time to recognize himself. This purpose he achieves by the modification of external things upon which he impresses the seal of his inner being, and then finds repeated in them his own characteristics. Man does this in order as a free subject to strip the outer world of its stubborn foreignness, and to enjoy in the shape and fashion of things a mere external reality of himself.12 We here take the movement of expression literally on the individual level. Similarly, Dufrenne writes a need for selfexpression or communication arises from the fact that the foritself exists only in its self-exteriorization.13 Hence, mans need to impress his seal on the world comes from an essential disposition, which then returns through the felt affectivity of ones world. In other words, interaction of man with the world as well as himself occurs through feeling. This movement of
12
Hegel, G. W. F. Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics. Ed. Michael Inwood. Tran. Bernard Bosanquet. (New York: Penguin, 2004), 36. 13 Dufrenne, Mikel. The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. Trans. Edward S. Casey. (Evanston: Northwestern Univ., 1979), 380.
84
feeling is precisely what is involved in the artists production of the artwork. The artist unfolds his own feelings through a back and forth movement of externalization and perception an interaction with the world. The back and forth interaction structure underlies feeling. It exhibits both an orienting and an oriented aspect; the inner life of the subject is externalized through an inevitable expression, and the alien world is internalized through the induced feeling. We can now see why thematic objectification of this primal interaction structure falls short as in the case of description. A person cannot detach himself from the oriented and orienting aspects of feeling in a way that would allow such reflection. Hence, the life of feeling is veiled from our view not because it is rare, hidden, or suppressed, but because feeling is the condition that makes it possible to find oneself in the world. It is too proximate to sight.
85
Karen Joan Topping University of the Arts I spent a decade pursuing art as painting and eventually had to come to terms with the fact that no matter how much I loved it, I found painting limiting in terms of communicating my experiences. Still, I cant deny the language and aesthetic of painting are subtly ingrained in my current work. It has only been in the past five years that I have begun to explore sculptural, sound and video installation and performance. This has opened a whole new litany of theory for me to explore. Exploring the richness of objects and experiences and to coopt and paraphrase a quote from Hans Georg Gadamer that I use later in this paper the promise of meaningful and openended dialogue that leaves no party the same as they were is my intention with these new works. Communication of content in media easily begets a representation of a false present-ness. Manipulating media for presentation as art is not a matter of flawless technique resulting in representation, but a restructuring of the layers of content to create recognition of the primacy of thought within artistic process. As an artist, I present in this proposal extensive analysis of three of my own works that I believe exhibit the desire to elevate the unveiling of thought within the arena of the appreciation of art as object. Communication is an accumulative process which functions like a veil, gossamer layers that individually are insubstantial, but through sheer accumulation create mass that obscures the nuance and sensitivity of thinking that is needed to accrue into understanding. The accumulation obscures meaning and understanding by creating distance, and simplifying viewpoint. This is representation, not art. I see the stuff of philosophy as the investigation of the function of individual layers of thoughtand the stuff of art as the reconfiguration of those layers. Both capture these process in
86
Karen Joan Topping
forms that can be recognized as thinking as much as a representation or a product. A solely representational focus on perception and medium in art appreciation and criticism cannot do justice to this process. As an artist using technology I struggle to lead art back to into the realms of the experience of communication rather than the appreciation of objectification. It is between distance and nearness (or immediacy) in all media that communication occurs. Given the complex nature of perception and how we understand and interpret it relative to communication, it is hardly surprising that objectifying experience has been the overwhelming concern of many humanistic disciplines for thousands of years now. In the essay Hermeneutical Experience, Hans-Georg Gadamer posits that: The understanding of a text and the understanding that occurs in conversation-is that both are concerned with an object that is placed before them. In the successful conversation they both come under the influence of the truth of the object and are thus bound to one another in a new community. To reach an understanding with ones partner in dialogue is not merely a matter of total self-expression and the successful assertion of ones own point of view, but a transformation into a communion, in which we do not remain what we were.1 I believe that the lasting artist has always pushed the boundaries of the traditional conversation with their viewer, and we have learned to intrinsically appreciate it as similar communion that we experience in text. Objectification may serve as a means to an end, but is not the goal. You would think that the advent of the use of audio
1
Gadamer, 515.
87
and image recording technology in art would have subsumed this objective and shifted the focus of art to thinking, content and understanding experience. Now, more than a hundred years after sound was first recorded surround sound technology promising unrivaled realistic experience is in more homes than art galleries. It would seem we know no fear of being in the midst of recorded sound; letting it be inside our head, letting it represent all manners of loves and horrors. Likewise, the recorded image has the power to baby sit children as well as turn terror and repulsiveness into a twodimensional backdrop. Are we just adapting ourselves, learning with the help of technology to keep the past and the future at a distance? Technology in art is scattered into forms as numerous and varied as painting or sculpture. Representational focus on perception and medium in art appreciation and criticism cannot do justice to the use of technology. The artistic struggle to lead art into the realms of the experience of communication and thinking rather than the appreciation of objectification is subtle and complex, bearing meaningful comparison to not just philosophy but other forms of cultural analysis. Reflecting on the appreciation and understanding of the place of sound as part of a video or stand alone amplified sound in an installation environment I think sound is an integral contemporary tool used to confront the subjective perspectives and objective stances taken in the dialog that is forming the contemporary understanding of culture. When asked about the role of sound in their art installation projects, artist Emilia Kabakov, Ilya Kabakovs installation collaborator, answers that we find it easy to appreciate paintings because we have thousands of years of cultural experience looking at them. She says: In order to be good art, an installation must be complex and viewers have to learn to spend time with an installation to appreciate it. Her belief is that: Sound lends an integral dimension of complexity to any art installation, and installation art is integral to understanding culture (Kabakov).
88
Karen Joan Topping
Kabakov ended her answer here. I assert that the individual desire to fit into a context greater than yourself while still remaining unique and whole is where the innate confusion regarding the objectivity of perception is often brought to bear in all communicative pursuits. The transmission of narrative information, no matter how disjointed the presentation, becomes the imperative integral to understanding culture. This transmission of narrative between the individual and their surroundings is also well described in William S. Burroughss reframing of the internalized subjective nature of hearing. In the signature contextual jumble of his essay It Belongs to the Cucumbers, this conflict is simply and poignantly expressed in the lines: Some time ago a young man came to see me and said he was going mad. Street signs, overheard conversations, radio broadcasts, seemed to refer to him in some way. I told him Of course they refer to you. You see and hear them.2 Like this young man in It Belongs to the Cucumbers, I suggest that in the type of complex art installation experience that is called to mind by Kabakov, both the artist and the audience create parallel, poetic space and time when sound and spoken word is used. Instead of being a harbinger of mental illness, the representation of hearing things in your head establishes an existential proving ground: a subjective necessity for finding ones place and relationship with objective experiences of the world. This art installation Build It Up, Knock It Down (Figure 1) is a work that combines theatrical visuals with recorded sound, resulting in a surprisingly complex experience of psychological and philosophical overtones. Walking into a room with muted lighting that has had the walls painted the same color as the floor in an effort to create a horizon-less environment we see an unremarkable tableau of a pile of sand, a childs pail and a single sand castle in a spotlight. The
2
Burroughs, 53.
89
objects remind of childhood memories, the spotlight resembles a cinematic flashback and the starkness of the interlocking trapezoidal forms of the castle and bucket strongly evoke a minimalist art aesthetic. The very real pile of sand unassumingly references visual and literary images of the sands of time and unfathomable vastness, while the childs pail refers to play and building and being in the moment, as well as more psychological metaphors of vessels and carrying or spilling. In the end all they are, is terminology that the viewer is familiar with, the hook that they feel easy and comfortable with: real sand, real pail. Yet the sum parts add up to a complex nexus of thinking and language and hopefully communication when you realize that alongside this simplistic, referential sculptural installation is a roughly seventeen minute performative, vocal recitation of repeated phrases layered and alternated with the recorded sound of the lapping of ocean surf. The repeated phrases Build it up; knock it down; go ahead; you know you want to; youve done it before along with the babbling of the relentless waves of the ocean brings to mind an interior monologue as well as the exhortation of outside voices: both real and imagined. The addition of this recording to this installation creates an environment that transcends aesthetic and perceptual qualities and clearly attempts to investigate issues of control and creativity on the part of the individual. The constant repetition that is so apparent in the craft of the artist, making and remaking objects and ideas in an effort to communicate them more effectively, is the real text of this tableau. The struggle and violence inherent in grasping to communicate our hearts desire is what is experienced in the presence of Build It Up; Knock It Down. Once again the words of Gadamer suit the experience of understanding this work of art; when he describes the nature of language as So uncannily near our thinking [that] when it functions it is so little an object that it seems to conceal its own being from
90
Karen Joan Topping
us.3 Part art and literary reference, part theatrical performance, part sandbox, Build It Up; Knock It Down, in its use of objects that require no technique, uses the media of sound to shift the appreciative focus to the thinking instead. Acknowledging the challenge of how we construe images within the techniques of film and video are an important component of using recording media in art. According to artist Bill Violas musings on idea spaces and memory systems: We view video and film in the present tense-we see one frame at a time passing before us in this moment. We dont see what is before it and what is after it-we only see the narrow slit of now. Later, when the lights come on, its gone. The pattern does exist, of course, but only in our memory.4 I think this description of Violas also aptly describes the attitude, space or place for magical poetics that was ascribed to shamans, religious rites and artists for millennia before our Modernist antecedents, who more recently enjoyed the analytical mantle of self expression to use as a culturally appropriate place to work out their existential anxiety. Instead of becoming a powerful, accessible, mnemonic device that records and represents the present for use in the future, the ability to record and transmit sound and image to a popular audience enforces our confusion about perception and objectivity in these spaces and places. The sounds and pictures that come out of our televisions, computers, cell phones and some artists are like a medieval morality play or Victorian hymn. The modern equivalent is still selling you a now that is part of a contiguous life
3 4
Gadamer, 514. Viola, 318-319
91
everlasting achievable through obedience to an earthly church. As long as you approach it all with a healthy dose of nave fear and dont ask yourself too many questions the sounds and images of media can be blithely perceived and appreciated as an active parallel reality; another now that will also pass on into the gaping past of memory. Rather than language conceal[ing] its own being from us as in Gadamers essay, the language of lasting art strives to create an environment where the interaction of layers of thought are not simplified, but the veils of meaning are perforated so the content can be experienced and picked apart and perhaps appreciated for generations to come. We have learned that understanding complexity of viewpoint, in art, culture, and philosophy is rarely taken from the surface but rather achieved in picking apart processes and contents. Challenging simplistic representation or viewpoint is not a simple matter. In the video installation Apple of My Sensory Perception, it takes over sixty-four minutes to show the painting and repainting a Red Delicious apple with various colors of nail polish. First yellow. Being over an hour in length - the silent work must almost be viewed out of the corner of the eye to be tolerated: a direct challenge to this concept of media presentness. Even with a low production value, this installation takes on media, still life, painting, gender, food production, time, memory, work, creativity, illusion, symbolism, religion, technology, vanity, and mortality; all within a simple, silent, strange act that begs the question Why paint over this delicious apple with nail polish? Taking on the media as background, and as baby sitter, its the elephant in the room altering the real experience and communication. From yellow to green. The color choices represent real apples, as well as symbolic apples that are clearly in the mind, not in our scientific perception, but in our use of the symbol of the apple in society, especially Christianity. The decidedly feminine act of putting on nail polish, the color, the bottle and the brush juxtaposed with rough hands and a
92
Karen Joan Topping
backdrop of plywood adds to these symbols questions of identity, gender, self-determination and creativity. From green to silver. In this installation, the video must be shown on a TV monitor like a late night infomercial; silently furling out only to start over and over again without a noticeable beginning or end. Presented adjacent to the monitor is a similarly sized Plexiglas vitrine holding the product of the video, the real apple deteriorating under four coats of nail enamel. Even in the arena of art, the preservation and rotting of food in addition to the illusion of altering it to fit a need, like we now genetically alter food to fit all kinds of unnatural conditions must be brought to mind. From silver to red. It takes a significant amount of time to see how mutable the apples s kin is in the video, yet the unsettled real apple, collapsing and rotting inside its varnish is immediately apparent in a glance. Sitting in its vitrine, watching itself in its former incarnations, held in a present that doesnt exist (Figure 2). The real apple is always changing; going forward. Rather than the analysis of the representation or technique, the presentation of the sensuousness of the image and the perception of the object; the illusion of the media next to the reality; all in one bundle, is set to make the thought and idea; the reason for representation and technique the paramount subject. Nowhere is the traditional artist-viewer conversation centering on formal and representational concerns in the modern, western idiom, torn apart more directly or effectively than in the words of artist Martha Rosler. In the appreciation and analysis of contemporary art that employs recorded media, there could be no worse sin than to confuse questions of aesthetics and perception with questions of influence and philosophy. In her essay Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment, artist Martha Rosler succinctly lays out that she sees a warmed-over art historical paradigm of distinctly modernist concern with the essentials of the medium applied
93
to video artists.5 She concludes that this formalized approach portray[s] artists in the act of objectifying their element, as though tinkering could provide a way out of the power relations structured into the apparatus [of media].6 Rosler, prophetically, warns against this mystical approach to video art by saying: Formalist rearrangements of what are uncritically called the capabilities of the medium, as though it were God-given, a technocratic scientism that replaces considerations of human use and social reception with highly abstracted discussions of time, space, cybernetic circuitry and physiology; that is a vocabulary straight out of old-fashioned discredited formalist modernism. 7 Her argument rings true in regards to technologies of sound as much as her application to video art. The battleground of the new cognoscenti looks beyond magical idea spaces and the scientific objectification of psychology and the senses to, in Roslers words, who controls the means of communication in the modern world.8 I believe that as technology blends more and more seamlessly with human product and principle, we can no longer afford to monopolize the discussion of art with our perception of technology. In the performance 21st Century Crumb Trail, like Apple of My Sensory Perception, I once again don the mantel of info-mercial or a how-to show, this time costumed in beige apron and black slacks. Like a cultural retail warrior I tear open a package of clear packing tape, arm
5 6
Rosler, 463. Rosler, 471. 7 Rosler, 472. 8 Rosler, 473.
94
Karen Joan Topping
myself with it like Amazonian wristbands and load it into a familiar commercial tape gun. Setting the first piece of tape on the ground I proceed to dispense the tape by walking this selfimposed line like a tightrope. The result is an unnatural choreography that shifts from plodding, to militant goose-stepping to completely falling off the line; all accompanied by the excruciating sound of releasing adhesive, breaking tape and the unavoidable jamming of the gun. Missteps are patched over as I improvise in my continued mission to an unseen and unknowable space. In no time it becomes clear that this gun is leaving a silvery trail like a slithery wake of snail slime; an instrument of escape and forwardness it also leaves a remnant of what has passed by in both time and space. Like the apple artifact the tape remains as evidence that must be figured out by the viewer who might witness the performance as escape from convention; or may happen upon it later in time when it is unclear if the tape is a trail to be followed or a boundary not to be crossed. The end of the performance is unknown in time and space, but not unclear. It must end when the artist can no longer be seen, can no longer go forward or runs out of tape. As in the other two works, the fragility and difficulties of the artistic process is played out in the course of the manipulation of everyday actions, objects and the media that records it. In these works I work to see that a host of contextual symbols are elevated in order that they may be assessed: powerless-retail- minimum-wage-worker-tape-guntool becomes a weapon. The unnaturalness of the petroleum based tape and adhesive, the sound and iridescence furling out over an excruciating long journey becomes an unavoidable player in our daily narrative. The direction the tape-rope walker must take to continue the escape is hampered by the thought of what will be done to eventually clean up the resulting path of tape. To be edifying on a greater cultural level, the artistic process must make everyone question his or her actions. Martha Rosler thinks that artists must do better than the
95
museums, better than the media; saying that surely [artists] can offer an array of more socially invested, socially productive counterpractices [sic], ones making a virtue of their person-centeredness, originations with persons-rather than from industries or institutions.9 In Bill Violas even simpler terms, the tool of technology cannot be allowed to infringe on development of self.10 I hear their urgent rallying cry for artists working in all mediums and making objects, that rather than seeking the plums of representation and appreciation; investigation and investiture of oneself in communication, context and culture, is an important step that we as artists must make in order to set the stage so others may learn how to define and converse about their relationships with the objective experiences of the world.
10
Rosler, 473. Viola, 325.
96
Karen Joan Topping
Works Cited Burroughs, William S. The Adding Machine: Selected Essays. New York: First Arcade. 1993. Gadamer, Hans-Georg Hermeneutical Experience. Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics. 3rd ed. Ed. Joseph Margolis. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1987. 499-517. Kabakov, Emilia. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Conversations with Artists 2007-2008, Artistic Partnerships. The Phillips Collection, Washington. 14, Nov 2007. Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat: A History Of Sound In The Arts. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. Rosler, Martha.Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. Stiles, Kristine and Peter Selz, eds. Berkley: University of California Press. 1996. 461-473. Topping, Karen Joan. Apple of My Sensory Perception. Collection of the Artist. Washington, DC --. Build It Up; Knock It Down. Collection of the Artist. Washington, DC. Viola, Bill. Will There Be Condominiums In Data Space? Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. Packer, Randall and Ken Jordan, eds. New York: Norton. 2001. 316-326. Viola, Bill. Viola and Ross on notions of time. June 26, 1999. Viola on Video. 12 Jan. 2008. http://www.sfmoma.org/espace/viola/dhtml/content/fr_intervie ws.html.
97
Figure 1
98
Karen Joan Topping
Figure 2
99
CENTRE-LUMIRE-BLEU Sophie Lavaud-Forest University of Paris I Panthon-Sorbonne PREAMBLE First of all, let me thank the steering committee for having invited me to present my work at the First Art and Philosophy conference, at the Stony Brook, Manhattan. I am going to speak about Centre-Lumire-Bleu, an artistic installation I have designed in 1994. I have chosen this one, in particular because it is perfectly related to a reflection on the theme of veils. Maybe you could already have seen some of the items exhibited, just nearby, in the room where two videos are running in loop. Or, if you have not already looked at the exhibition, I hope you will be interested in doing it after, during the break time. I also take the liberty of warmly recommending to you the last Frank Poppers book entitled From Technological to Virtual Art, published at the MIT Press, if you want to learn more about this installation and my artworks in general and if you want to get more familiar with critic analysis of the digital artworks creations. Centre-Lumire-Bleu is an installation that was exhibited several times and especially during an exhibition curated by Frank Popper entitled Virtual Art - interactive and multisensory creations. DESCRIPTION OF THE INSTALLATION This installation can shortly be described as a "dematerialised painting for an interactive installation." The installation uses techniques called Virtual Reality, generally intended for industrial and scientific applications and appropriate here for artistic purpose. It hybridises information and communication technologies with video display. The audience is invited to enter into an enclosed space through two openings set to the right and the left of a white wall on which is hung my painting also called Centre-Lumire-Bleu. This installation provides, at the beginning, to the spectator the ability to experience
100
Sophie Lavaud-Forest Centre-Lumire-Bleu
and perceive the physicality of the painting. Pursuing the visit into the installation space, the spectator comes into a dark room where a screen, facing him, displays (by overhead projector) the computer-generated images derived from the data emitted in real time to the computer by a position sensor that the spectator can wear on his/her head. These luminous abstract paintings projections, made from the digitalized real painting, create a specific space that the audience can virtually visit, by detaching the different coats, going from 2D to 3D depth by moving their bodies. The real painting is a metaphor of the ocean seen as an accumulation of many transparent superimposed coats of water. In the same way that a painting is an illusion based on a representation consisting in covering and hiding the support with superimposed coats of coloured matter to reveal a truth about the human condition. THE YI-KING PHILOSOPHY The picture was digitalised, then dissected into 6 layers whose overall structure matches an hexagram from the Book of Changes: the Yi-King (Chinese ancestral tradition divinatory treaty ), resulting into a fragmentation of every coat of painting in the virtual space distributed in accordance with a certain order. The first arrangement of the device when the computer animation begins is the one of the hexagram n52 whose name is Stillness/the Mountain. This hexagram talks about t wo complementary states: stillness and movement. These two opposite states are those that the spectator intuitively experiences when entering the living and digitalized universe of the painted ocean, continuously moving and autonomously changing while the spectator is detaching the different coats, going from the foreground to the background. Searching to define a balance position while looking at the dynamic images between an usual habit of a meditative contemplation on the appearances and a new way of perception by the action on the image depth, the spectator reveals physically and metaphorically the existence of something beyond the skin of reality, beyond the sensitive experience of the world.
101
ARTISTIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL STAKES ABOUT THIS WORK One of the main purposes of art is to ask questions. The scientist, by demonstrating a hypothesis with mathematical arguments tries to verify his/her intuition. Checking his/her hypothesis, he gives relevant answers to issues aiming to increase our knowledge about us and our environment. Using another method for knowledge, the artist dont give answers but asks questions and, in a cognitive and reflexive feed back touching our senses and our consciousness, makes us think. For example, overturning generally accepted ideas, suddenly the scientist declares that: the earth is round, is a sphere (and the first one that tells this truth had a lot of troubles). On an other side, the French poet Paul Eluard, writing in a dream his collection The love, the poetry declares that: the earth is blue like an orange. So, where is the truth? What is beyond this provocative address? Reading or listening to the poet, you wonder with scepticism: is the earth really blue? What is the colour of the earth? Am I a disable blind person not to see this? Asking questions about yourself, about how you perceive and feel the world, you finally agree: the earth is blue. But, immediately, new doubts beset you! Yes it is blue but not like an orange! Or, may be, exactly like an orange, when you have in your mouth the both sweet and acid taste of life. Completing the scientists truth, the powerful metaphors poet takes you off the beauty of images, and representations that are illusions. Art is a lie. But, as Picasso has said: a lie that tells the truth. And you begin to believe in lies, to doubt truths, exploring yourself what the painting practice itself talks about for many centuries. What I am trying to do, by conceiving such an installation as Centre-Lumire-Blue is to explore and investigate the specificity of this new technological medium, the Virtual Reality. I presently explore how emerging technologies and scientific approaches for computer programming can expand the traditional issues usually raised by the painting and the act of painting. With this installation, the purpose
102
Sophie Lavaud-Forest Centre-Lumire-Bleu
is that the audience asks question with his/her body by moving it while perceiving the dynamic image that reacts in a real time feed back to the spectators behaviour. The 3D technology allows the audience to get through the coats of painting as so many superimposed veils to take off and get immersed into the virtual painting, going into the abyssal zone of the next world of painting. The spectator doesnt passively face the representation anymore; he is an active part of the computerized simulation. By moving and acting some gestures he triggers some hidden mechanisms in the dynamic artwork. He (she) is the developer who makes visible by his (her) physical and cognitive behaviour the apparition of linkages and relationships between the elements of the virtual painting (colours, shapes, coats, lights, luminous tracings, rhythms, movements and dynamics). These relationships,usually are hidden in the fixed result of the real painting. The living virtual painting reveals the process of the creation that the audience perceives in a phenomenological aesthetical experience close to what the British theoretician Roy Ascott calls an aesthetic of apparition instead of what is called, in a Cartesian spirit: an aesthetic of appearances. The Phenomenology of Husserl and then, Merleau-Ponty [1945] has to do with the idea that we have a body, we are embodied with a physical and mental body [Berthoz, 2003], and consequently we experience the world in the same time that we construct a representation of it. That is the experience lived by the spectator in the Centre-LumireBleu installation space.
103
104
Marlene Clark Panel Response
Panel Response Marlene Clark Stony Brook University I will begin by playing a little fast and loose with remark 115 from Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations: A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. Karen Topping speaks of the artistic struggle to lead art into the realms of the experience of communication and thinking rather than the appreciation of objectification, and it would seem that Sophie Lavaud-Forests painting, hung in its interactive space, partakes of that struggle and leads viewer/participants into the realms of the experience of communication and thinking just as it ushers them from the appreciation of objectification, i.e., away from mere static observation of the blue canvas hung on a white wall. Both this installation and Karens Build It Up; Knock It Down seem, as Karen puts it, to investigate issues of control and creativity on the part of the individualboth artist and spectatorand to make and remake objects and ideas in an effort to communicate them more effectively. And both, it is suggested in the making and remaking of ideas, wish to reveal, perhaps communicate, a truth about the human condition: the struggle and violence inherent in grasping to communicate our hearts desire. Likewise, Karens sixty-four minute Apple of My Sensory Perception in which a red delicious apple is covered with successive veils of nail polish brings me round to Wittgensteins five red apples in remark 1: As Wittgensteins shopkeeper removes the fifth red apple from the drawer and says the cardinal number five, he is in fact holding just one red apple. In other words, Wittgensteins shopkeepers lone apple collapses inside the varnish of the word five. <Explanations come to an end somewhere. But what is the meaning of the word five? No such thing was in question here, only how the word five was used.> Even if we disagree about what precisely is the message of Apple of My Sensory Perception, literally and/or figuratively, we
105
probably can all agree that some meaning was conveyed. And the meaning conveyed has something to do with the way the apple is used.Nickolay Tugushev takes on the elephant in the corner, communication. If we agree that these works of art wish to communicate, and that what is communicated connects with feeling, however veiled from the producer and/or consumer, and if we want to talk about the making or reception of art, we must admit to the additional difficulty of having to translate these feelings into language at some point. Here Nickolayss distinction between describing a feeling and expressing a feeling becomes crucial. According to his essay, descriptions of feelings are as if, while expressions of feeling ex-press feeling, i.e., make the feeling extrinsic through speech, as his example of expressing nervousness when speaking publicly makes clear. Furthermore, Nickolay, citing Collingwood, concludes that expression should not contain descriptive wordsbecause then the feeling is severed from the peculiarities of the world that first brought [the feeling] about. Nevertheless, the possibility of description relies on expression, i.e., one must experience a feeling in order to be able to describe it. I think Nickolays point is in keeping with Wittgensteins question, Why does it sound queer to say, For a second he felt deep grief? Only because it so seldom happens? The referent of it is vague: Does it seldom happen that one feels deep grief for only a second, or does it seldom happen that one says, For a second he felt deep grief? In explaining Wittgensteins point, readers often collapse the difference between a mental state and its expression. The question is often posed in terms of "How does one 'master' a mental state?" rather than, "How does one 'master' language about mental states?" which is clearly close to Wittgenstein's question in 244, "how does a human being learn the meaning of the names of sensations? - of the word 'pain' for example." Wittgensteins answer would seem to be something very like Nickolays: Being toward a world means standing in relation to a system of situations; it implies dwelling in a meaningful context. In other words, one expresses pain, and is then able to describe it as a collective subject part of a world constituted by language. Given Nickolays phenomenology of feeling, let us say that Karen
106
Marlene Clark Panel Response
Topping and Sophie Lavuad-Forests pictures hold us captive. And we cannot get outside of them for they lay in our language and language holds us captive. What is their language? And what is ours?
107
New Perspectives for Architecture
Panel IV: New Perspectives for Architecture
Reversing and Folding the Language of Architecture Bryan Norwood and Aaron Speaks Mississippi State University SEDIMENTATION AND EXPRESSION Elaine Scarry, in The Body in Pain, focuses on the act of making through the nature of our involvement with objects. The participant (we are trying to avoid the divergent terms of subject/object dualism here) projects (creates) a made object and in return gets reciprocation out of that object. Scarry describes these acts of projection and reciprocation as the pieces of a leversuch as a shovel.1 Projection begins at the handle end of the tool, the action is magnified by the lever (the distance between the handle and the opposite end), and the reciprocation occurs at the end acting upon the ground. All made objects act like a lever in that they become the mid-point of the total arc of projection and reciprocation. Scarry divides objects up into three categories: the unreal, the real, and the superreal.2 In unreal objects (such as art) the projection act is emphasized and reciprocation is deemphasized, in real objects (such as buildings, chairs, most made things) there tends to be more a balance between the projection and reciprocation acts, although reciprocation is usually an act of magnification. In super-real objects (such as God) the act of reciprocation is emphasized and projection is almost non-existent, for we cannot project a being that is supposed to be unmoved. So where does Scarrys theory of the object-as-lever get us in terms of the phenomenology/structuralism divide? Merleau-Ponty sets up a very similar arc with his idea of the reversibility of the flesh that informs us of the nature of reversibility, the interplay between the immanent and
1
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 307-311. 2 Scarry, 312-316.
108
Bryan Norwood and Aaron Speaks Reversing and Folding...
transcendent. The process of a phenomena unfolding in spacetime is observed by a participant and is an act of expression accompanied by the epistemic companion of perception. The phenomena, however, is only this first part of the total arc of the flesh. Sedimentation, which language is a part of, is the act of the participant folding back on the world the flesh coiling back over on itself. It is the process of a thing unfamiliar becoming familiar and known. For example, how I drive my car is a sedimented process for me because my experience of driving my car is not new every day, instead it is something known. With language, the way we describe the world modifies our world. Some would tell us that sedimentation keeps us from having full access to the worldlanguage is only used to describe the world-out-there, the thing-in-itself. This view of language casts a negative light on the sedimentation process. Instead, Merleau-Ponty writes: Language is . . the life of the things. Not that language takes possession of life and reserves it for itself: what would there be to say if there existed nothing but things said? It is the error of the semantic philosophies [Semiological reductionism] to close up language as if it spoke only of itself: language lives only from silence; everything we cast to the others has germinated in this great mute land which we never leave. 3 What Merleau-Ponty tells us about language is that it is involved in a reversible relationship with the flesh of the world. Language modifies the world just as the world modifies language. How we describe the world does not simply modify our perception of it, but it modifies the world itself. In this way, through perception the flesh may reveal itself to us, but
3
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and The Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Ed. Claude Lefort. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 126.
109
through sedimentation, language modifies the flesh of the world through each individual act of becoming, each act of individual speech. Ultimately, language is carnally rooted in the world, but the world is also transcendentally rooted in language. Thus, phenomena and language are resolved into one ontology in which the architectural event and the participant reverse upon one another and in which the phenomenon and the language constantly modify each other. Merleau-Ponty's view of the relationship of language and the world is much more akin to the idea of institutions than a simple phenomenological reduction. So what does it mean for Architecture? . . . an existing object, by recreating the maker, itself necessitates a new act of objectified projection: the human being, troubled by weight, creates a chair; the chair recreates him to be weightless; and now he projects this new weightless self into new objects, the image of an angel, the design for a flying machine. 4 Ideas and experiences don't just rise ex nihilo, they are always the result of other ideas (objects). Thus all objects rise in response to other objects. Experience of things happens in response to the experience of other things. Make a building that can be made by the viewer and you make the viewer think . . . this in turn remakes the viewer . . . and they remake the building. The building must be an object that can be remade by the individual. We are searching for an architecture that is involved in this process of reversibility. The reversible process of projection and reciprocation is a never ending process. An architecture of this sort would hold open the gap between when we perceive and when we shutdown our experience of the built environment. Architecture that focuses only on the
4
Scarry, 321.
110
phenomenal experience can only hold open the gap of unnameability for so long. Sedimentation will, undoubtedly, eventually enter into the equation and if there is only one phenomena to perceive the viewer will stop engaging the object. If architecture's only goal is to emphasize phenomenal experience, it will eventually lose its potential for meaning because it is attempting to avoid the process of being involved in sedimented language. The idea is to not let this happen with our architecture. Instead, we want sedimentation to modify the phenomena so that it must be perceived again. This process makes architecture a constant experience of the made world which is always in the process of remaking the viewer and itself. This does not simply happen through dense number of parts though, because this can take on the characteristics of a field condition. That is to say a condition in which their is so much overwhelming information that we just shut down to it. In a similar sense, a built unreal object can do the same thing. We are searching for an architectural experience that can be involved in a constant reversibility with the perceiver. OBJECT / SPACE One way to illuminate and involve the participant in the cycle of making and remaking architecture is through complex relationships that are in constant flux. Complexity, which can be defined as one architectural element doing more than one thing at once, stands in contrast to density, which is multiple architectural elements only doing one thing. Reversibility is a powerful way to achieve complexity, and in architecture the literal reversibility of elements that constantly change phenomenal states plays a major role in accomplishing experiential complexity. Elements stand out as selfannouncing objects at some moments and at other moments they recede as boundaries of space. Individual colored translucent panels weave in and out of a system of walkable ramps and tie together in a system that can never be perceived in its entirety, but must be assembled with connections made through experience. One feels the enclosure of space defined by a hovering panel above or to the side while perceiving another instance of the same
111
event farther away. The contrast and contradiction of simultaneously experiencing an element one way and perceiving a similar situation in the distance in another sets up a reversible relationship between the two instances and within each individual element. The element is either a space-maker or an object, but it is also a space-maker and an object. Reversibility preserves alterity while keeping unity within the flesh. The translucent panels that make up the railing are placed together with slight irregularities and gaps so that they are perceived as individual objects. However, when they are not the focus, the edges blur creating the bounding planes of the ramp. The hand rail itself twists and turns slightly so that, though it is continuous, a segmentation is felt reflecting the objectification of the panels. The constant reversibility between individual objects and the edges of space makes perceptual finality allusive. SKIN / PIECES Another way of achieving reversible relationships with architecture is the subtle layering of parts that have a synthetic relationship to one another. A seemingly contiguous and seamless surface upon closer observation usually reveals itself to be more pieces in complex relationships. Is human skin a contiguous whole or is it many cells? All cells dont make up skin, but all skin is made up of similar cells. The nature of reduction is rarely straight forward and the experience of reduction in architecture is no exception. The relationship of parts to whole is one of a reversibility in which neither the part nor the whole can fully be explained in the terms of the other. By playing up the kinship and contradiction between explanatory levels we can delay the comprehension of architecture and thus leave the participant open to experience longer. The elevation of the south facade is a composition of disparate elements, though it is never experienced that way. Because of the constraints of the site, the south facade is always experienced in perspective. At moments, the panels seem to make up a ribbon-like skin encasing the edge of the building. However, small shadow breaks contradict the idea of
112
skin and hint at the separation and displacement of each panel from the others. The change of material from metal panels to a mesh in one place and to channel glass tubes in another also breaks down the idea of skin and contradicts the continuity of the facade. As one moves along the facade, spatial and formal variations in panel sizes and locations reveal themselves. Each panel is composed of more individual pieces that reveal shadows in different ways. A contradiction reveals another layer of ordering which is once again contradicted by something else.
INTERIOR / EXTERIOR Once the building, element, or sign can be named as something, the participant will begin to shutdown perceptual and intellectual consideration because that which was unknown is now considered to be known. Nameability implies a sedimented epistemic status of an object that quite often removes any further ontological consideration. To build unnameability suggests the use of complexity and ambiguity to reduce the ease of interpretation. If the order of the building completely reveals itself to the perceiver, it becomes sedimented and, once again, the perceiver will shutdown her perceptual openness, but if the nature of the phenomena is partly veiled and ambiguous, perception is forced. Ambiguity, strictly defined here as having multiple meanings, does not necessarily entail thirdrate postmodern relativism. Complexity can lead to an ambiguity that will reduce recoverability and, in turn, keep the perceiver perceptually open to the building longer. If perceptual openness merely depended on phenomenal uniqueness, the resort to nameability only takes one cycle of recovering. If, in contrast, perceptual openness is also dependent on the modification of the participant once she perceives and names, then multiple cycles of recovering are necessary to name. The perceptual building envelope consists of multiple layers. One layer is the external paneling, perceived as thin, flat sheets separate from the glass wall in places and thicker volumes that meet the glass in others. The actual intersection
113
of interior and exterior is mediated by a double envelope system (two layers of glass separated by a large airspace). Dots (which form a larger image) embedded on the glass make the glass envelope a more tangible thing, contradicting its transparent nature. In side the envelope, steel tube columns add to the spatial complexity of the interstitial space. The interior layering consists of the ramps and its constituent railing as well as other colored panels. In places, the experience of the layers merge as the double envelope and the external panels can actually be occupied. The glass can become so overwhelmed with reflectivity that it appears only to be an extension of the interior space, while at other times it perceptually disappears, except for the dots which give away its corporeity. The interaction of, and the relationships that form across, the layers blur the edges of the building envelope and the division between interior and exterior takes on an ambiguity and complexity. A buildings edge is ambiguous and complex. UNREAL / REAL As mentioned earlier, Scarry divides made objects into three categories: super-real, real, and unreal. Super-real objects with their lack of emphasis on projection and their non-recoverable nature make for metaphysically impossible architecture. We may attempt to remove a lot of the contingent nature of building, but in the end the building will bear the marks of its maker. The real question is how recoverable should the madeness of architecture be? Should it veil its contingent nature as much as possible or should it be self-announcing? We again turn to the reversibility process to resolve this question. The building is not statically a self-announcing work of art, but it is also not a necessary being that is independent of its maker. The building can manifest itself in multiple ways at different times. Dots printed on the south side glass envelope form the image of a face. The image is broken up by exterior panels, and is never fully visible as an entire face, but lips, eyes, a nose, and other facial features are visible from certain vantage points. Not being able to see the entirety of the image at once makes it less recoverable, but in contrast the human face is easily
114
identifiable because it is an anthropomorphic condition with strong symbolic power. The ease in recovering the human face moves the image into the realm of unreal objects; its madeness is readily apparent. When viewed up close the image dissolves into a colored pattern that becomes part of the surface. In this way it takes on more real qualities in which the madeness is less obvious. The reversibility of realness allows an object to be both made and unmade.
115
116
Musetta Durkee A One Thousand Square Meter Veil
A One Thousand Square Meter Veil: Truths Double Concealment Musetta Durkee Independent Scholar and Artist, Pittsburgh The relationships between art and truth and practice and theory have long been positioned as oppositional to one another: art is beautiful, but has no place in metaphysical inquires into truth and artistic practice deals in the production of objects while theory deals in the production of knowledge. However, some philosophers have looked at these binary oppositions between art and truth and wondered if art could actually unveil truth inaccessible through other, purely logical, means. In Martin Heideggers The Origin of the Work of Art, for example, he claims that art, as originary and foundational to both the artist and the work of art, is a distinctive way in which truth comes into being.1 According to Heidegger, art does not merely reveal a particular fact about what is (i.e. art is not mimetic representations of or transpositions from reality via an artistic practice); instead, in art, truth, or what Heidegger defines as unconcealedness, is defined as being at work and thereby revealed. In this paper, I would like to explore how the trope of the veil as something that supposedly conceals and limits access to truth can actually set truth to work in and through a work of art. Even though Heidegger defines truth as unconcealedness, this unconcealedness is actually constituted by a double concealing2: in every act of revealing, therefore, there is a doubled act of concealing and any attempt to access pure, unadulterated truth is rendered futile. To explore such a theorization of truth, I would like to turn to the so-called wrapped works of Christo and Jeanne -Claude, and to their
1
Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter. (New York: Perennial Classics, 2001), 75. 2 Heidegger, 58.
117
Wrapped Reichstag (1971-95) in particular. In keeping with Heideggers notions of concealedness and truth, as well as with his discussion of earth and world (which will be explained shortly), I will look to Wrapped Reichstag in order to explore Heideggers claim that truth is not a fact to be apprehended through an act or process of revealingi.e. truth is not some fact whose presence is merely hidden from our viewbut instead that truth happens in and through a dialectical struggle between concealment and unconcealedness and between earth and world. I will attempt to understand Heideggers positioning of truth as a double restraint or refusal3 by critically examining Wrapped Reichstag and showing how, far from masking or hiding the truth of what is being wrapped, this work actually reveals the essence of the Reichstag and thereby sets this notion of truth as double concealment into being. Christo and Jeanne-Claude are artists who work on a monumental scale, not only spatially and aesthetically, but politically and historically as well. Even though each of their wrapped works last, on average, two weeks, the time between their conception and their actualization takes years, even decades. It could be said their works actually create their own temporary environments in and through their large-scale alterations and in doing so, cause a shift in the viewers perceptions and experiences of the permanent environment: years after the actual work has been disassembled, the affect of the experience remains and traces of the experience linger on in the memories of the viewers. In addition to the time needed for the preparation of the final project, there are political, social, and environmental bureaucratic hurdles that need to be negotiated. In an interview about Wrapped Reichstag in 1982 before its realization in 1995, Christo relates how the volatile political situation had prevented the manifestation of his plans. He explains: Chance has always been a factor in all of my projects. The international situation
3
Heidegger, 58.
118
can tighten up and both sides can become hysterical.4 He continues by proclaiming that with the wrapping of the Reichstag, we will find ourselves in a remarkable situation in which it shall be possible for a work of art to be perceived simultaneously from East and West Germany (ibid). The wrapping of the Reichstag, therefore, is not only an aesthetic act; it is a political one as well. Christo and Jeanne-Claudes wrapped works engage in an act of veiling on a massive scale. They cover historically and culturally rich and controversial buildings and urban structures (for example, Wrapped Reichstag, Wrapped MoCA, Wrapped Pont Neuf, Wrapped Monuments), to both the outrage and excitement of local residents and politicians. And yet, through this concealing and veiling, a glimmer of truth, not previously perceived, is revealed. As Christo explains in that same 1982 interview: The cloth will obviously efface all details and accentuate the proportions. The building will become much more organic. The symmetry, which is very banal, will be upset by the new forms created by the roof. The movement of the cloth, puffed out by the wind, will give a feeling of grandeur.5 As described by Christo, the act of concealing by the thick cloth, actually 50% thicker than the surface of the stone, reveals a feeling of grandeur not present in its unwrapped, banal symmetry, it emphasizes the dimensions of the building, and it creates movement where there was none previously. The building will be transformed into something different, more organic, and more structural. It could be
4
Selz, Peter and Kristine Stiles, eds. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists Writings. (Berkeley: University of California Press, Ltd., 1996), 553. 5 Selz, 556
119
argued that this feeling of grandeur and its accentuated proportions are not truth precisely because, when the cloth is removed, so are those transformations. However, to counter this objection, I would have to emphasize, not only the lingering effects of these wrapped works on both the viewers and the structure itself, but also the historical and political dimensions of the Reichstag that are at work. The grandeur conferred to the Reichstag is not merely architectural; it is also political. The Reichstag is a potent historical structure burned in 1933 by Nazi Germany, bombed in 1945 by the Allies, embraced by Stalinist Russia, and then divided between West and East Berlin (its faade is in Eastern territory). The truth being set to work in Wrapped Reichstag is not, thereby, only creating a previously absent aesthetic feeling of grandeur; it is also creating a political and historical feeling of grandeur. As Christo described in the same interview: The project will electrify that place, give it new energy, and not just the energy of memory which it has now. [] [The project] will give the Reichstag a new currency in the future.6 In other words, it is the historical and political particularities of the sites of these wrapped works, as well as the aesthetic characteristics, which are transformed through Christo and Jeanne-Claudes wrapping. And, somewhat misleadingly given presumptions of veiling as concealing and hiding truth, it is actually in and through this act of veiling that truth happens. As described on Christo and Jeanne-Claudes website: For a period of two weeks, the richness of the silvery fabric, shaped by the blue ropes, created a sumptuous flow of vertical folds highlighting the features and proportions of the imposing structure, revealing the essence of the Reichstag (http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/wr.shtml, emphasis added). And, according to Heidegger, truth is precisely the revealing, not of the fact of the object, but of the objects essence. To further understand this notion of truth as engaged in an act of double concealing, I would like to now
6
Selz, 554.
120
turn to Heideggers The Origin of the Work of Art. In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger begins his inquiry by claiming that the artist and the work of art originate from each other and therefore neither is the sole source of the other. Instead, both the artist and the work of art originate in art itself. However, before examining the origin of art, Heidegger must first examine the work of art so long as the question of how art comes into being, Heideggers inquiry must examine that being in which art undoubtedly holds sway, mainly the work of art. The work of art, Heidegger begins, is a thing. But what is a thing? Heidegger makes a tripartite distinction: the thing, the equipmental thing (i.e. having come into being through human making 7), and the work of art. Since the equipmental thing occupies the position between mere thing and work of art, and since the equipmental thing involves the interpretation of matter and form, Heidegger begins with the analysis of the equipmental thing. He focuses on a Van Gogh paintingobviously, a work of artof a pair of peasant shoesan equipmental thingand writes: The art work lets us know what shoes [that is, the shoes of this Van Gogh painting] are in truth. It would be the worst selfdeception to think our description, as subjective action, had first depicted everything thus and then projected it into the painting.8 The art work, therefore, not the subjective description of the equipmental things represented in the art work, reveals the truth of the equipmental thing. But before returning to Christo and Jeanne-Claudes work the Reichstag is not merely an equipmental thing let us continue with Heideggers argument. According to the previous quote, for Heidegger, a subjective description of a work of art does not access or reveal truth. Instead, he claims, only by bringing ourselves before Van Goghs painting c an this painting [speak].9 This is extremely important in
7 8
Heidegger, 31. Heidegger, 35. 9 Heidegger, 35.
121
understanding Heideggers notion of truth as being set to work in art: it is not the description of a work of art that is to say, a critics or even an artists own description of a work of ar t that reveals truth; instead it is the work of art itself which, when faced with viewers or an audience, speaks. In this distinction, instead of maintaining that truth is the agreement with what is i.e. faithfully and accurately depicting an actual pair of peasant shoes thereby understanding the work of art as a successful transposition from something actual to an artistic product Heidegger claims the work of art participates in the reproduction of the things general essences.10 In other words, for Heidegger, the work of art does not translate what is into an artistic product; instead, the work of art reproduces the essence of the thing and it is only by bringing ourselves [i.e. the viewers] before the work of art that such essences are revealed. Heideggers language here is strikingly similar to that used in regards to Wrapped Reichstag. The work of art, instead of being that which depicts what is, is that which reproduces the things general essences: in Christos interview, it is clear that he is not concerned with restoring the Reichstag to its former glory, but with electrifying the Reichstag for a richer future; furthermore, the effect of their wrapped works function on the level of the viewer (the works, they say repeatedly, are not meant to be viewed aerially); and finally, through the wrapping of the thing, Christo and JeanneClaude reveal, not the fact of the Reichstag (since they are actually concealing the Reichstag), but its (structural, aesthetic, political, historical) essence. Truth, therefore, only happens when the work of art reproduces the essence of the thinginstead of producing a depiction of the thing and viewers are brought in front of the work of art to experience the speaking of this essence. But what is this essence? How do we know when a work of art reproduces a things essence instead of merely
10
Heidegger, 36. Emphasis added.
122
depicting it as fact? To answer these questions, we must explore Heideggers discussion of earth and world and how they exist together in a work of art. The earth, according to Heidegger, is the existing reality of the work of art; the world is the being of the existing reality of the work of art. The earth, however, can never be completely revealed (and this is where the double concealment comes into play): at best, when set in the context of being, i.e. the world, the earth can exist in an open, relational context 11 which allows the earth to be. The work of art, according to Heidegger, is a mechanism that sets up such an open space. Therefore, the act of wrapping the Reichstag which brings a feeling of grandeur and movement to the building that was not perceived previously, sets the Reichstag forth in an open and relational context which allows the earth, i.e. the existing, sociopolitical, historical, and aesthetic reality, to be. With the wrapping of the Reichstag, both a world is set up that is, all of the political and historical factors discussed earlier and an earth is set forththat is, all the aesthetic transformations of the building itself, for example its proportions, scale, movement, grandeur. It is in this relationship between earth and world, a relationship that is mediated through Christo and Jeanne-Claudes wrapping, that the Reichstags true essence is revealed. But how exactly do earth and world work together to reveal this essence and allow truth to happen? For this, let us turn to Heideggers example of the Greek temple and, since the Greek temple and the Reichstag are both particular, situated historical structures, let us go through Heide ggers argument with Wrapped Reichstag alongside. The Greek temple both sets up a world, i.e. the world of ancient Greece (all the affects, impressions, facts, geographies, etc. associated with ancient Greece), and sets forth the earth, i.e. the temple itself (its materials, dimensions, specific location, etc.). Together, the earth and world make up a work of art and, in
11
Heidegger, 47.
123
this unity, the world and earth set forth the truth of what is in the work of art. In regards to the Reichstag, the world is the world of Berlin in the 20th century and the earth is the architectural particularities of the building. Together, earth and world make up a work of art and set forth the truth of the Reichstag. However, this obviously cannot be the most interesting conclusion to come to with regard to either Heideggers aesthetic theory or Wrapped Reichstag; there must be something more in this relation between earth and world than their simply uniting together to reveal truth. There is; and it is in this next step that I find Wrapped Reichstag particularly poignant in Heideggers theorization of art and truth. Earth and world do not join together and find repose in a work of art, Heidegger claims; instead, they exist in a constant dialectical struggle through which the openness, which allows earth to be, comes into presence. However, Heidegger asks, how does truth happen in the fighting battle between world and earth?12 He answers with the following: The nature of truth, that is, of unconcealedness, is dominated throughout by a denial. Yet this denial is not a defect or fault, as though truth were an unalloyed unconcealedness that has rid itself of everything concealed. If truth could accomplish this, it would no longer be itself. This denial, in the form of double concealment, belongs to the nature of truth as unconcealedness. Truth, in its nature, is untruth.13 In this passage, Heidegger claims that truth is not a pure truth of a complete and utter unveiling; that is to say, truth is not
12 13
Heidegger, 48. Heidegger, 53.
124
accessed through a removal of something blocking our view. Instead, truth happens in and through the constant struggle between concealing and unconcealing, veiling and unveiling; truth is dominated by denial and contradiction; it is tinged with the battle between earth and world. As earth and world exist, not in repose, but in constant struggle to overcome the other in other words, as earth juts through the world and world grounds itself on the earth 14 truth happens in this conflict. In the work of art, truth happens when that which is as a wholeworld and earth in their counterplayattains to unconcealedness.15 What is unconcealed is not truth itself, but rather the struggle and the primal conflict between earth and world; it is in the unconcealment of this struggle that truth happens. Therefore, in Van Goghs shoes, truth happens, not through an accurate depiction of the peasant shoes but in the revelation of the equipmental being of the shoes; in the Greek temple, truth happens in the temples standing where i t is and thereby bringing the whole being of earth and world of structural particularities and historical significance together into unconcealedness. And finally, in regards to Wrapped Reichstag and the importance of the wrapping, or concealing, of the building in revealing truth, I would like to put forth the following suppositions. Christo and Jeanne-Claude, in wrapping the structure of the Reichstag, add an additional element to this discussion of earth and world. What Heidegger assumes in his example of the Greek temple is the general acceptance of and agreement upon the world of ancient Greece. However, histories are complex and ever changing and the Reichstag is a prime example of a world that is multifarious, even in the seemingly simple question of to what country it belongs. Furthermore, the earth of the Reichstag is likewise complex and multifaceted having been constructed, burned, and reconstructed within decades of its creation. Therefore, the
14 15
Heidegger, 54. Heidegger, 54.
125
conflict between earth and world in the case of the Reichstag is actually a conflict between earths and worlds. By concealing the mundane earth i.e. the base structural particularities of the Reichstag, Christo and Jeanne-Claude are destabilizing the very foundation upon which the world grounds itself. But in doing so, they bring a different earth into the work of art: the architecture, which was once banal, now imparts a feeling of grandeur; the roof, which was static, now moves; the particular details of the structure are now veiled and the dimensions are emphasized. With these changes, a different earth and world are struggling and the veiling of the earth is an explicit act of double concealing the wrapping of the Reichstag is both covering the earth and setting up an openness through which the earth can be revealed. As such, the truth that happens, i.e. the struggling unity of the earth and world that is brought into unconcealedness in Wrapped Reichstag, is actually brought into being through an act of concealing. In this way, Wrapped Reichstag embodies the very denial, in the form of double concealment, which Heidegger identifies as belonging to the nature of truth. Therefore, even though Christo and Jeanne-Claudes wrapped works may, as some opponents charge, seem to conceal the truths, particularities, histories, and cultures of the monuments and buildings they are covering, in fact, through the covering of these buildings, the struggling unity of earth and world of architectural and aesthetics particularities and of political and historical particularitiesis revealed, and through the unconcealedness of this struggle, truth happens. The relationship between theory and art, which is at the heart of this conference, is at work in the very structure and argument of this paper and any paper that engages theory and art. While I do not mean to suggest a one-to-one or causal relationship between Heideggers theory and Christo and Jeanne-Claudes works, I can understand the objection to interpreting their wrapped works using Heideggers theory of art and truth. However, my goal was not to merely read Wrapped Reichstag through a Heideggerian lens; instead, my goal was to create dialogue between theory and practice and,
126
through such a process, actually experience what Heidegger means when he writes that Artis the becoming and happening of truth.16 I chose Christo and Jeanne-Claudes Wrapped Reichstag with the explicit aim of engaging notions of truth as the unconcealedness, with a double concealing, of the struggle between earth and world. If more time were possible, I would also have liked to explore Wrapped Trees (1997-8) or Wrapped Coast (1968-9) to see how wrapping a thing of nature, instead of an equipmental thing or a work of art, changes the understanding of truth and the struggle between earth and world. Overall, I tried to highlight, not only the futility in trying to access the pure truth of an object, free from any sort of concealment or veil, but also how art and truth are not opposing spheres of inquiryone having to do with beauty, the other with logicbut are themselves dialectically engaged. My aim was for theory and practice both through my own practical engagement with theory and through the aesthetic theory and works of art I have explored in this paper to engage in a dialogue that in itself leads to an unconcealedness and a repose in the space between them, albeit one that is constantly struggling.
16
Heidegger, 69.
127
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped Reichstag (1995), photos: Wolfgang Volz
128
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped Reichstag (1995), photos: Wolfgang Volz
129
The Reminiscing Eye Simona Mihaela Josan Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts The Greek word for return is nostos. Algos means suffering. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express that fundamental notion most Europeans can utilize a word derived from the Greek (nostalgia, nostalgie) as well as other words with roots in their national languages: anoranza, say the Spaniards, saudade, say the Portugese. In each language these words have a different semantic nuance, Often they mean only the sadness caused by the impossibility of returning to ones country: a longing for country, for home. What in English is call homesickness. Or in German: Heimweh. In Dutch: Heimwee. But this reduces that great notion to just its spatial element. [] The dawn of ancient Greek culture brought the birth of the Odyssey, the founding epic of nostalgia. Let us emphasize: Odysseus, the greatest adventurer of all time, is also the greatest nostalgic. -Ignorance, by Milan Kundera The human vision is a mechanical and physiological process which gives us our capability to see and interpret visual information. The intricate system starts when the lens of the eye focuses an image of its surroundings onto a light-sensitive membrane in the back of the eye, called the retina. The retina is actually part of the brain that is isolated to serve as a transducer for the conversion of patterns of light into neuronal signals. The lens of the eye focuses light on the photoreceptive cells of the retina, which detect the photons of light and respond by producing neural impulses. These signals are processed in a hierarchical fashion by different parts of the brain (information which gets scrambled when passing through the optic chaism to be reconfigured later), from the retina to the lateral geniculate nucleus, to the primary and
130
Simona Josan The Reminiscing Eye
secondary visual context of the brain. The ancient Greeks, however, had quite the opposite theory. Euclid theorized that lights was projected out of the eye, exiting the pupil and flooding the object of the image, thus making it apparent. The world was called into being by the seer. Later, to explain the human incapability of seeing at night even though the eye was wide open, Plato added that vision had happened when the light projected from the eye met the light emanated by other objects, an idea similar to Eastern concepts of personal radiating energy fields. The discarded emission theory of optics became a crucial element in my work. I find it to be a perfect metaphorical representation of the memory process, images being projected forward from the eye, while the object of the gaze is actually gazing back, or better said, it is gazing forward. The function of memory has four distinct phases: registration (or learning), retention (or storage), retrieval (or recollection), and recognition. My work uses these capacities as a basis for the creative act. Visual images (the the apartment buildings of my childhood) are registered with the use of the photographic eye acting as a camera, and are then stored/documented in predetermined chambers of the brain. Their retrieval allows for recreation and/or reenactment in the world of art, where the reminiscing eye can project life-giving-light onto the materiality of the fabric that acts as a projection screen. Gazing upon the work allows the process of recognition to take place in the mind of the artist, and reintroduces the image in the registration phase, thus starting the cycle anew. In the case of the audience, the viewing of the work allows for either the recognition phase to take place (for those viewers with a similar geographical and/or cultural background to my own), or for the cycle to being with the first registration of the images which will be recalled in future interactions with them (as both art-mediated and in real time). I once had a thin little splinter stuck under the skin in the top of my foot. Walking barefoot in the countryside can do that to you, I didnt notice it until the skin closed over. By that point it was a painful throbbing red bump. My grandmother tried compresses wax and chamomile teas. It did nt word, so I
131
started thinking that a tree might grow out of it. I day-dreamed in school what kind of tree it would be, and I thought that it would have fruits of all kinds and women from all over the world would come to pick them and make jams and I would be some kind of a tree martyr especially since the roots would be stuck to the ground. I was just start to feel pretty good about my fate when right after that class period somebody stepped on my foot. My white sock was covered with puss and blood and at home I found the frail little splinter. I saved if for a while on a shelf above my bed. One day, when I was feeling lonely, I ate it. This cycle, however, is not circular. Each path from eye to brain and back render the material creation slightly different, as well as further away from the first recall and recognition. I welcome these changes as an organic deterioration and also as a present-informed reformulation, viewing temporal and spatial distance as opportunity for analytical depth. The memory is not a cycle but a spiral, where with each new recoiling back it moves ever so slightly further from its original path, pushed and pressured on both sides by new information, forging a unique path for the present into the future. The concept of nostalgia appears first in Western thought as a disease. The term was coined in 1678 by Johannes Hoffer (1669-1752) from Latin roots, to refer to the pain a sick person feels because he is not in his native land, or fears never to see it again. Swedish mercenary so ldiers were becoming apathetic, depressed and physically unsound as they spent more time thinking of their homeland and less time wanting to be heroes. In her book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym comments: the outburst of nostalgia both enforced and challenged the emerging conception of patriotism and national spirit. With the epidemic of nostalgia spreading throughout Europe, as more and more soldiers and mercenaries found themselves away from their homeland, the disease became less of a point of nationalist pride and more of a war hindrance. Soldiers were less likely to die for a cause, even when the cause was the protection of their own country, since things like the taste of milk, the smell of soup and the sounds of
132
familiar tunes brought about lethargy. Cures for nostalgia varied from opium and leeches, to psychological terror and pain. Russian soldiers were threatened to be buried alive if they allowed themselves to contract nostalgia (there are documented cases in which the threat was pursued to its lyrical punishment of being buried alive in the ground they longed for), whether American soldiers were treated with a healthy dose of ridicule and physical punishment. A Klee painting, The Angel of History shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open. His wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to say awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him. This storm is what we call progress. -Walter Benjamin The spreading of the nostalgia epidemic is important not only because of its connection to a developing nationalism, but because it coincides with a new attitude towards ideas of progress. In my view, the spread of nostalgia had to do not only with dislocation in space but also with the changing conception of time.[] Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values. The backwards gaze can only take place when time has lost the mythological capability of circularity, and progress has no push towards expectations, and faster past experience. Thus
133
the nostalgic, just like Walter Benjamins angel of history, is in himself the connection between the fast racing future and the forever distant and unrepeatable past, between expectation and experience, between the universal and the local. Since its first apparition as a tragic disease, nostalgia had moved up the social ladder, branching the intellectual and bohemian melancholia, complete with its parlor scrapbooks and curio cabinets, and later institutionalized nostalgia of museums, monument building and ruin preservation efforts. Svetlana Boym distinguishes between two types of nostalgia, restorative and reflective. Restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch memory gaps. Reflective nostalgia dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of rememberance. The first category of nostalgics does not think of themselves as nostalgic; they believe that their project is about truth. This kind of nostalgia characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which engage in the antimodern mythmaking of history [] while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patterns of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time. Nabokov called these nostalgics amateurs of Time, epicures of duration. It is this latter kind of nostalgia that I invoke in my work. It is not the recovery of a time past, an irretrievable moment or setting that I am interested in, but the reflective potential of this meditative state. It is an attempt to compress time and experience it as a personal narrative, an individual memory inside the collective memory. My work tries to collapse to words, a far away and a right here, external and internal. I try to do it using elements that are symbolic for particular cultures social and economic developments. The world represented in my work is not necessarily a real one. I am interested in manipulation of history, spatially and temporarily. The world of my childhood existed for a very finite period of time in that place. But then again, this world might never have taken place and its possible it is only a construct of my mind. It is the idea of this construct that I want to play with The house that my mother was born in was just a little large than my studio. There was a tall wood-plank bed,
134
covered in layers of my grandmothers colorful weavings; her dowry, some of which is now mine. One window in the south and one to the north. The house was made out of mud, dung and straw, painted bright blue-green. There was also a sour apple tree growing at the corner of the house. By the time I was born, they used the little house as a cupboard for wool, honeycombs, and apples. As a child I broke in many times and emerged covered in honey and dust. One day, the house was torn down and a new cement house was built over the old foundation. In 1999 the Romanian art collective subREAL, composed of losif Kiraly and Calin Dan, shot a series of photographs entitled Framing Bucharest. The images showed the two artists holding a large piece of black fabric on which a lavished decorated frame cropped and focused on a scene of the city. The picture isolates and frames a fragments of architecture, in temporal discontinuity and ideological opposition to the rest of the setting, while the tropes of mimetic representation are brought into play in the historical and political trompe loeil. These works, which partly fed into the huger for Eastern European art exoticism after the fall-of-the-wall, also marked a new beginning in the Romanian contemporary art scene, where political and social commentary are a common discourse. Architecture, and the Palace of the Parliament is a favorite structure used for its inherent ideological weight, is used extensively as a tool and symbol in a path to meaning. In 2006, the artist Daniel Gonts recreated one of subREALs photographs, in the same exact location, where the urban landscape of the location has stayed the same in spite of passing years. Mircea Mircan comments: Nothing has changed architecturally and urbanistically, therefore Gontzs piece is not to be understood as a demonstration of all-conquering liberal prosperity[] the Remake of the two photographs closes, in a sense, an era: it renders the model classical by the fact that it has triggered reproduction. It forces the previous generation into a master status, untouchable but also distant. Gontzs maneuver simulates the canon first reproduced, then pushed away through acts of differentiation. My relationship to these works lies in the ways that past and
135
future utopias are reconstructed and demolished. This cycling and re-cycling of past mythologies places the artist at the point of present reflection where the recollections of the past always and inadvertently include other past meditation on times passing. The mutability of personal, and thus collective, history allows for a constant reshaping of both present perspectives and points of origins alike. Curtains as domestic objects have the purpose of blocking or filtering out the outside world for the benefit of a more intimate, introverted, and ultimately more controlled environment. My images are photo transfers on sheer fabrics, installed in windows and thus functioning as objects. They are personal photographs of mostly outdoor communal environments, apartment buildings, houses and landscapes, which are brought inside a domestic space, invading it. The architectural space is treated as the shell or skin of an entity with a personal history and social weight. As such, the window-eyes have been covered with printed eyelids that at once shield the eye and expose it to inescapable images. Blinking is implied through the transparency of the curtains that allows outside images to come into and disappear out of focus. Domestic (Of concern to or concerning the internal affairs of a nation; of or involving the home or family; At last, w know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think, Thoreau). Domestic space, intimacy. vs. public space Nostalgia in the time of a political reconstruction, or a revolution, is a defiance of progress, a heresy. It is a bad word in present-day democracy driven Eastern Europe, just as it was a bad word in the days of socialist utopia. The photo transfers in many of my works are monumental recreations of what is typically considered a symbol of a horrific bygone era. They are deconstructed images, transferred in sections that often dont line up perfectly, semitransparent and flexible. They allow interaction with whatever environment they inhabit, changing opacity according to the time of day and direction of light, disappearing onto the outline of real buildings existing outside the window, or overpowering them.
136
At night, when viewed from the exterior and lit from the indoor lights, the size relationship to the original is such that they appear as fantastical worlds inhabiting the dioramas of the window frames. Nostalgia used as a medium, not an end, is a powerful tool for exploring and questioning social and cultural relationships. Photography offers the superb possibility for recording and replaying a past. The materialization of nostalgia comes in the form of recreated settings, where images act as stories or sensations attempting to fulfill the longing for a lost past. These images are thus projected forward, from the reminiscing eye, shooting onto the projection surface of the curtain. Regurgitated, manipulated, fragmented memories recreate an ephemeral world where meaning unfolds through the overlapping, transparency and opacity play of the screens.
137
138
Inna Osipova Panel Response
Panel Response Inna Osipova Stony Brook University The project Curtains locates us in the situation of the modern city. Because in cities and especially in their industrial districts buildings are so dense, people have to use curtains in order to veil their private life from the glance of the neighbour from the opposite house. It is especially typical for the Soviet and the post-Soviet industrial city, where the rhythm and repetition of the windows of the identical houses can give you a sense that you are trapped. At the same time the paradox of this dense life is that in this rapidly changing and alienated urban reality people often feel nostalgic about the past. I remember the windows of the old ramshackle house in front of my house, but now I can see only the lights of the highway instead of it. And the most important memory from childhood could be the view from the window to the opposite house. This project reveals the essence of human memory about the life in the city, our desire to be veiled in the reality of our mundane life, and unveiled in our memories. I think this very poetic project allows us to imprint the transient life of the city in our mental life. Simona Josan distinguishes reflective and restoring nostalgia, and through her projects outlines productive possibilities of reflective nostalgic feelings. The project Reversing and Folding the language of Architecture is a bold and successful attempt to connect architectural and philosophical discourses. The authors relate architecture not only to the sphere of language and structure, but also to the phenomenological sphere the sphere where objects are perceptible by people. The authors said: Language is carnally rooted in the world, but the world is also transcendentally rooted in language, and it reminded me of the prominent relations between Earth and World in Heidegger. Architecture could not be just a strict and logical
139
language of forms; its aim is to organize the living or working space of human beings. It is true that architecture can be regarded as a sign of power and the sign of the history or certain social order, but at the same time it can constantly reveal its meanings to the visitor, dweller or participant in every concrete moment of his(her) life. In the modern urban reality architecture becomes the permanent human environment. My questions to the presenters are the following: Firstly, did you mean to regard architecture and human body, stone and flesh in a dialectical union? Or do you prefer to talk about the architecture in terms of phenomenology? Secondly, it seems to me that we can regard every kind of great architecture (Gothic, Classicist, Modernist) which creates the body of the modern city in terms of phenomena-participant-sedimentation. So to speak, the building reveals its entity and essence to the different spectators in different times, epochs by different ways. In this case, every building can be remade by the individual. Does the flexible architecture which is constantly veiling and unveiling itself to the participant exist in the context of an architectural history, or is it just the project of the future? What is the main difficulty in the embodiment of such projects of open and reversible architecture? And what is the difference then between works of art such as installation and architecture? The project of Mussetta Durkee A One Thousand Square Meter Veil: Truth`s Double Concealment is an interesting work dealing with the installation of Jean-Claude and Christo The Wrapped Reichstag. The paradox of understanding this project in terms of Heidegger is that JeanClaude and Christo revealed the essence, the truth of the Reichstag by concealing it. The cloth of the Reichstag transforms it into the work of art, as the sculpture or painting. At the same time, this installation tells us a certain political truth, uniting the Reichstag, divided between Eastern and Western Berlin. For me, a couple of questions remain: Could
140
Inna Osipova Panel Response
the truth of the Reichstag in terms of Heidegger be the political truth? Could we join the politics and the work of art? When we deal with such an outstanding project as the project of Jean-Claude and Christo we cannot avoid a certain contradiction between theory and practice, the project and its fulfilment. I was always interested in their works, but the spectator can see only the result, not the process. My question is, how did they elaborate their project? How did they negotiate it with the administrative forces? Did they have to change something in their authentic project? My last question, and also the questions for the previous panellists, bring us to the broad problem of the freedom of the artist in the modern political situation.
141
Imagery and Consuption
Panel V: Imagery and Consumption
The Abject and the Ugly: Modern Art in Kristeva and Adorno Surti Singh DePaul University
In this paper I explore a convergence between the psychoanalytic theory of Julia Kristeva and the critical theory of Theodor Adorno on the role of modern art in society. I argue that Kristeva and Adorno share a similar methodological approach that privileges modern art as an object of mediation between the individual and society. In particular, both view certain kinds of modern art as able to illuminate the relationship between the individual and society in a way that theory alone such as a psychoanalytic account of personality formation or a Marxist account of class conflict is unable. This methodological approach is grounded in the assumption that the appearance of reality in modern society is ultimately false. For both Kristeva and Adorno, society proliferates false images of a happy, fulfilled life even though the experience of reality engendered by individuals in crisis is vacuous and empty. Within a totalizing society, modern art is one realm that lifts the veil on this false reality and allows for a different reflection and identification of the subject1. This capacity of
1
For example, Adorno writes in Aesthetic Theory: If thought is in any way gain a relation to art it must be on the basis that something in reality, something back of the veil spun by the
142
Surti Singh The Abject and the Ugly
art is based on its ability to reveal the repressed origins or foundations of such a society, which for Kristeva occurs in abject art and which finds its counterpart in Adornos discussion of the ugly in art.
1. The Individual and Society Kristevas theorization of the relationship between the individual and society in her most recent work is rooted in an analysis of features particular to the late twentieth century. In Intimate Revolt, for example, she often describes this society as the society of the spectacle in Guy Debords sense of the phrase. She views this spectacle as totalizing. That is, society is a mediatic universe of the image,2 which contains all information in a visible form: everything is visible and transparent and thus everything can be represented. In this allencompassing spectacle, nothing negative remains. Within this social context that perpetuates the illusion of total consciousness, Kristeva notices through her clinical work individuals who have unstable boundaries, lack a complete or coherent experience of the self, have feelings of emptiness and are beset by an inability to love. These individuals, who according to Kristeva appear more frequently in this changed climate, undergo an experience of negativity that finds no correspondence in the external world of the spectacle. Thus, individuals are unable to conceptualize their relationship to and place within society because the specular images erode interplay of institutions and false needs, objectively demands art, and that it demands an art that speaks for what the veil hides (18). 2 Kristeva, Julia. Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeanine Herman. (New York, Columbia UP, 2002.), 140.
143
our capacity for imagination and fantasy. Kristeva writes, It has often been said how the society of the spectacle and certain aspects of the contemporary family (the lack of relationships, lack of authority, and so on) lead to phantasmatic poverty if not vacuity. As a result, primal drives and fantasies, their reduction, their abolition threaten to abolish inner depth itself, this camera obscura that has constituted the psychical life of the speaking being for millennia.3 The images perpetuated by television, advertising, and Hollywood movies, for example, are precisely the images that for Kristeva cause the erosion described in the above quotation. This is of concern for Kristeva because she views our capacity for fantasy as integral for giving expression to the drives and instincts that otherwise have no expression and thus produce a sense of emptiness, anxiety and other various maladies of the soul. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer also conceive of the individual in relationship to a totalizing society produced by the enlightenment. This society is rooted in a false conception of reason, one that equates reason solely with calculation and utility. Correlatively, the most rational behavior in such a society is considered to be behavior that can be standardized. Thus consumer society, based in this conception of reason, reduces individuals to functions and erases their qualitative differences. The numbing sameness produced by mass culture and the regulation of individuals according to an instrumental reason concerned only with abstraction and calculation produces an impoverishment of experience:
3
Intimate Revolt, 68.
144
Through the mediation of total society, which encompasses all relationships and impulses, human beings are being turned back into precisely what the developmental law of society, the principle of the self, had opposed: mere examples of the species, identical to one another through isolation within the compulsively controlled collectivity.4 In this context, individuals are unable to conceptualize their relationship to society because the capacity for self-reflection is eroded. Furthermore, our experience of society is structured according to the same patterns of rationality that it perpetuates, thus there is no conflict between the public mind and individual experience: The senses are determined by the conceptual apparatus in advance of perception; the citizen sees the world as made a priori of the stuff from which he himself constructs it. Kant intuitively anticipated what Hollywood has consciously put into practice: images are pre-censored during production by the same standard of understanding which will later determine their reception by viewers.5 In the above situation, the capacity for critique or for occupying a negative stance is extinguished since the conditions for the possibility of our experiences are predetermined by consumer society.
4
Adorno, Theodor, and Horkheimer, Max. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott, (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002), 29. 5 Dialectic, 65.
145
In this context, both Kristeva and Adorno have an ambivalent view towards art that is both a product of a totalizing society and thus subject to its logic, and autonomous from society and thus able to critique its logic. Kristeva asks in Intimate Revolt whether cinema perpetuates the sadomasochistic logic central to the society of the spectacle or whether it can also contest it. At the same time, she views art and literature as allies of psychoanalysis; they open the verbal path to the construction of fantasies and prepare the terrain for psychoanalytical interpretation.6 Similarly, Adorno and Horkheimer write that concerning art: [E]ven its freedom, as negation of the social utility which is establishing itself through the market, is essentially conditioned by the commodity economy.7 Nevertheless, in its autonomy, modern art reveals that which is repressed or excluded by contemporary societyorigins that form the repressed foundations of the totalizing socio-symbolic system. The next section will explore the way in which modern art is able to reveal these origins.
2. Art and Origin Although a totalizing society prevents one from directly addressing the decline or impoverishment of experience, modern art is decisive for both Kristeva and Adorno in facilitating this capacity. In particular, I will examine the way in which Kristeva views abject art as fulfilling this role, and then turn to the counterpart of this analysis in Adornos examination of the ugly in art. It is instructive to briefly consider Kristevas notion of the abject before turning to her analysis of abject art. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva describes abjection as something
6 7
Intimate Revolt, 68. Dialectic, 127.
146
that is neither subject nor object, but always in conflict with the I. Intimately connected to experiences of disgust, one of the earliest examples of the abject that Kristeva gives is that of an encounter with the corpse: The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life.8 For Kristeva, abjection is something that disturbs identity, system and order. Furthermore, abjection is not only the experience of some object that threatens the subject externally by disturbing its boundaries, it is an experience internal to the subject. This internal experience of abjection reveals a loss or emptiness at the individuals core. Kristeva calls individuals beset by abjection borderline patients. Borderline patients experience their emptiness as a threat, something that will pull the subject in, overwhelm and destroy it. For Kristeva, this sense of emptiness has a cause but contemporary society does not allow for its identification. Within her psychoanalytic perspective, Kristeva explains that the onset of abjection in adult life is attributable to the primary relationship an adult has as an infant with their mother or primary care-giver. At a certain stage, the infant must reject the mother in order to form an individuated sense of self. Thus the first instantiation of subject formation is not mimesis or becoming like another, but rather is the experience of separation. Furthermore, there is an ambivalent relationship to this primary experience of separation. On the one hand, the infant wants to retain the emptiness that comes out of this separation from the primary care-giver because it is only in this way that a separate identity can be established. On the other hand, the infant wants to cover over this separation in order to protect itself from suffering. The return of abjection in adulthood is thus an indicator of an unsuccessful transformation in this phase of subject formation.
8
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. (New York: Columbia UP, 1982) 4.
147
Kristeva believes that the borderline case who is beset by abjection can be approached through psychoanalysis, which would build up a discourse around the braided horror and fascination that bespeaks the incompleteness of the speaking being...9 Interestingly, Kristeva views art as performing the same function as psychoanalysis for society as a whole: Ab-jection is also set in motion in the imaginary experience when repression fissures in order to make the drive and anxiety available, and representation takes the regressive path in order to symbolize the subjects states of instability: states of horror and fascination. From Dostoyevskys idiots to Celines journeys to the end of the night, form Biblical abominations to the sufferings of Marguerite Duras10 Abject art provides a kind of discourse or representation for the experience of the individual, which cannot find any other counterpart in the society of the spectacle. In this way, art opens up the possibility of self-reflection and transformation in the individual. For Adorno, the inability of audiences to experience certain art forms in consumer society signals a change in the structure of experience itself. The regression of listening in the case of music, for example, is perpetuated by the products of the culture industry that do not challenge reified perceptions in society. Yet within the realm of modern art, the ugly is that which opposes the works ruling law of form and thus produces a dissonance not present in objects of the culture industry: The anatomical horror in Rimbaud and Benn, the physically revolting and repellent in Beckett, the scatological traits of many contemporary dramas... ( Aesthetic, 46). What appears in art as ugliness is what is historically older, what art rejected in order to establish itself as art: The concept of the ugly may well have originated in the separation of art from its archaic phase: it marks the permanent return of the
9 10
Powers of Horror, 209. Intimate Revolt, 158.
148
archaic...11 Picassos work, for example, carries the mark of the frightening,12 that is, the shock produced in the viewer by the deformation of the represented object. According to Adorno, the presence of ugly elements in art shock the viewer because they are confronted with something that challenges their equation of art and beauty. Whereas for Kristeva, the abject in art is a representation of the abjection experienced by the individual, for Adorno, the appearance of the ugly in art plunges the viewer into a negativity that he or she is otherwise unable to experience. This negativity produces a selfreflection or capacity for critique in the subject that is suppressed by society. For Adorno, it is the viewers engagement with modern art that produces a refusal of understanding, rather than what the artwork represents, that returns to the viewer a capacity to experience in terms of being transformed by an object, even if it is only in the negative sense as a refusal of meaning.
3. Art and Reparation Kristeva and Adorno reveal that it is in the most degraded aspects of art that we can perhaps catch a glimpse of the truth that has been shunned, repressed, and excluded from the dominant meaning making, socio-symbolic system in which we live. Both the abject and the ugly are links to origins that have been suppressed by identity formation in the former case and the advent of art in the latter. For Kristeva, abject art enacts the function of psychoanalysis and can heal the debilitated western subject by aesthetically enacting a return to the origins of personality formation--the attachment to and the repulsion of the maternal body through which abjection
11
Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert HullotKentor. (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1997) 47.
12
Aesthetic Theory, 287.
149
occurs--and thereby allow a culture or society that is cut off from its past to heal itself and re-find the lost capacity to love. Adorno is much less reluctant to proclaim that art is a conduit for the betterment of the individual or society. Instead, art itself is tormented by the return of that which it must expel in order to constitute itself as art. In this respect art on the one hand experiences its own decay, that is, its inability to live up to its conceptthe ideal of beauty that has been the aim of art historically. On the other hand, this failure or decay also carries a redemptive quality in the recuperation of that which has been shunnedthe ugly or archaic origin necessary for art to exist in the first place. The main difference between Kristeva and Adorno, then, can be seen in their respective focus on contentKristeva is interested in art that portrays the abject, whereas, for Adorno, this is only symptomatic of a deeper crisis within art itself, which brings to light the true nature of all artworks: they can only exist on the initial rejection of the ugly and the archaic. Whereas the representation of the abject affects the viewer by bringing him or herself in touch with their own abjection, in a way analogous to transference in the clinical setting, for Adorno, it is the resistance to meaning, the sheer refusal of the minds capacity to understand and harmonize dissonant artworks that brings our capacity to reason closer to self-reflection. The main difference between Kristeva and Adorno, then, is their understanding of whether the individuals depreciated experience in society can be restored through art. Whereas for Kristeva, abject art participates in a transformative role for the subject, for Adorno, the ugly in art participates in revealing the crisis that is at the center of both society and the individual. In other words, transcending or healing the subject is a capacity that is attributed to art on Kristevas terms, whereas it is much less clear what the effects of critical selfreflection are for the subject in Adornos terms. It seems that for Adorno the aporetic nature of art itself, where it is both in decay and yet redemptive, entangles the subject in a process that is negative, that refuses meaning, and that rejects identity,
150
for only what does not fit into this world is true .13 The reparative function that Kristeva finds in abject art is clearly something that Adornos thinking about reconciliation in art gestures toward, but the crucial difference is that for the latter, it is uncertain whether this possibility can exist within the current social system.
Conclusion For both Kristeva and Adorno, as the individual struggles to make meaning from its debilitated standpoint, it becomes clear that the nature of our society, however it is characterized, is a false reality: the society of the spectacle, the semblance of reality, a phantasmagoria mediated by a slew of commodified images, a world where illusion holds sway and truth or reality is obscured. In this context, knowledge of the relationship between individual and society becomes problematic within an epistemological model that relies on our rational capacities. For both Kristeva and Adorno, the debilitated subject experiences challenges to its ability to reason. Within Kristevas perspective, the subject experiences threats to his or her sovereignty by the state of abjection that infuses the conscious state of the individual with the unconscious, that blurs the boundaries between subject and object, I and other, and that reveals a center of emptiness that is nonconceptualizable. Within Adornos perspective, it is the reified categories of our concepts that reproduce the stifling conditions of a repressive society that enacts the dissolution of the subject by mimicking the structures of irrationality that reason intended to conquer. Within this social context, both thinkers instead of looking forward turn toward the past in order to find clues about the future, Kristeva by investigating the origins of the crisis character of the borderline patient
13
Aesthetic Theory, 59.
151
and Adorno by investigating the origins of the crisis of enlightenment subjectivity. It is in this context that both Kristeva and Adorno, although widely differing as theorists, share the common project of redeeming the western subject.
Works Cited Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. Aesthetic Violence: The Concept of the Ugly in Adornos Aesthetic Theory in Cultural Critque 60 (2005) 170-196 Krauss, Rosalind. Informe without conclusion in October 78 (1996).
152
Kyle J. McGee A Schizoanalytic Critique
Piercing the Veil of Law: A Schizoanalytic Critique of the Obscene Aesthetics of Control Kyle J. McGee Villanova University
The object of the law and the object of desire are one and the same, and remain equally concealed. -Deleuze, Coldness & Cruelty, 85. The contemporary law of culture is the infinite expansion of the law: infinite responsibility, infinite culpability, infinite sadness in the Spinozan sense. Here as elsewhere, this law unfolds itself in the paradigms of our cultural milieu: in deconstructionism and the joyless ethics of alterity; in philosophies of language that question what may, rather than what can, be done or said, in a discursive situation; in our most trophied commodities, morality and security. Indeed, morality-security has become the touchstone of our situation, the transcendent operator of control and the emblem of the privatization of the political. Control here signifies an administrative faculty, a management of the offices and affairs of life itself. Life itself, administered and managed, requires security in order to thrive and morality in order to be secure. Freedom consists in the moral-secure action of passivity, of being administered and canalized through channels of rights and obligations. The public letter of the law secures and safeguards our morality. This infinite expansion of the law tracks the logic of modulation. Gilles Deleuze claims that in the context of such a socio-juridical formation of control, the corporation replaces the factory: no longer is it a principle of maximum production and minimum wages, i.e., a principle of cold efficiency, that dominates the administration of socioeconomic situations, but rather a principle of modulation, a gaseous and metastable set of coordinates working to divide and hierarchize operative units (that is, employees and officers) and to elevate
153
competitive accumulation to the highest sustainable level. As he writes, drawing on Simondons distinction between mold and modulator, [Disciplinary c]onfinements are molds, different moldings, while controls are a modulation, like a self-transmuting molding continually changing from one moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another. [] In disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never finish anything business, training, and military service being coexisting metastable states of a single modulation, a sort of universal transmutation.1 As is frequently the case, Deleuzes claims here echo those of progressive economists: in this case, we find resonance with Gardiner Means and Adolph Berle, who claimed that [t]he corporation has become both a method of property tenure and a means of organizing economic life. Grown to tremendous proportions, there may be said to have evolved a corporate system as there was once a feudal system which has attracted to itself a combination of attributes and powers, and has attained a degree of prominence entitling it to be dealt with as a major social institution.2 We ought not be fooled by the inscription of the letter of the law, or by the figurations of judicial and legislative fictions, Deleuze seems to say; rather, we should cognize the obscenity of the continuous variation subtending the static identity of law, appreciate its incoherency and indeterminacy in its very secrecy. All this is to say that it is necessary to pierce the veil of law, disfigure its figuration, scramble its codes. Though you can undoubtedly follow my meaning in this use of piercing the veil, allow me a brief detour through the doctrine in its native law of corporations. Piercing the corporate veil is a legal remedy available to a jilted creditor when a director or officer fails to respect
1 2
Deleuze 1995: 178-179; emphasis in original. Berle and Means 1968: 3. Though the piece from which this quote comes was originally written in 1932, it remains commonplace in corporate law to refer to the Berle Means corporation or the Berle-Means problem when discussing the efficiencies of separating ownership from control in corporate governance.
154
the separation of ownership and control in the firm by, for instance, commingling personal and corporate funds, failing to hold board meetings, or undercapitalizing the firm, and circumstances are such that adherence to the fiction of separate corporate existence would sanction a fraud or promote injustice. In such a case, where there is a unity of ownership and control and some considerable inequity, the court can be persuaded to disregard the corporate fiction and to hold the director or officer, in her capacity as owner, personally liable for any outstanding claims. The court cognizes the representation as representation and strikes through to the material or subrepresentational social actor understood to have caused the nonpayment of the creditors bill. Piercing the veil of law itself is not a task for the legal scholar, however, or for the philosopher as such. It is for the artist and artistic praxis. In this paper, I argue that arts determinate and specific action is that of disfiguration, going always to what a body can do rather than what a body may do. And law, or its gaseous matter that we have been calling control, coextensive now with management and the economy of life itself, always reacts to the thrust of the pierce. In fact, when art pierces the veil of law, law in turn deploys an aesthetics an obscene aesthetics of its own. This obscene aesthetics of control is a discursive recursion, controls defense or stitchingover of arts piercing maneuver. We might countenance this quite literally as a saving-face, insofar as it is the faciality of the social that suffers the puncture. Yet this refiguration can never be total, for a scar is always left behind. The Logic of Modulation and Its Disfiguration If it is possible, Deleuze and Guattari write in the plateau Year Zero: Faciality, to assign the faciality machine a date the year zero of Christ and the historical development of the White Man it is because that is when the mixture ceased to be a splicing or an intertwining, becoming a total interpenetration in which each element suffuses the other like drops of red-black wine in white water.3 The abstract machine of faciality of which they speak refers to the continuous (productive) variation
3
Deleuze 1987: 182.
155
subtending the biunivocal mechanisms and binary conventions of a given sociohistorical regime, the face of the situation. Thus the faciality machine and the face are at least roughly synonymous with the aforementioned vaporous materiality of control and the public letter of the law. If the logic of modulation charters a contemporary control society, yet the year zero is the point of transition between the discontinuous and the continuous flow of power, in what manner is control, in this narrow sense, specific to us, the post-disciplinarians? The answer lies in the nature of the movement or circulation of power. The year zero marks a rupture that will take millennia to unfold, and power will over time condense, contract, and mutate according to folding operations specific to it. For instance, power telescopically amplifies as it diffuses and becomes broken up (the black holes or pores of the face). Control is thus the logical extension of discipline, yet a decisively different organizational phenomenon; for control differs in nature from discipline, despite following from the latter. Again, this is demonstrated by the proclivity of power to swell as it permutes into smaller particles, becomes imperceptible. Control is, then, the closest approximation to the truth of year zero, its point of crisis, at least to date. Another way of framing Deleuzes hypothesis on control societies is this: Control produces the face of our world. What is the face, that organ-carrying plate of nerves,4 for Deleuze? For one, it is never separable from a landscape, there is always a face-landscape assemblage at issue: All faces envelop an unknown, unexplored landscape; all landscapes are populated by a loved or dreamed-of face, develop a face to come or already past. 5 But the face itself is always the face of the other, the expression of a possible world, of a possible landscape. It is impersonal and inhuman, Deleuze will say, the inhuman. Moreover, we do not have a face, it is never a question of possession or if it is, we are the possessed, not the possessors. That is to say, a face is something to be slipped into, to be born into. My face precedes me, I become it. It is not the individuality of the face that counts but the efficacy of the ciphering it makes
4 5
Deleuze 1986: 87. Deleuze 1987: 173.
156
possible This is an affair not of ideology but of economy and the organization of power.6 The ciphering or coding made possible by faciality is figurative and follows its own logic, that of modulation. The codes of control are always at a distance, abstract and representational. In his work on Francis Bacon, Deleuze claims these codings are digital, terms seriated in opposition (according to Kandinsky, vertical white-activity, horizontal-black-inertia, and so on7). Rights, for instance, are facial codings modulating affectivities or what a body can do, transforming and reducing these capacities into what a body may do. In a society organized around the passwords of representational rights, the effect is that the material question is obscured, no longer makes it to our ears facial traits, more like the big ears of the braying-ass than Ariadnes tiny, hyper-perceptive ears as such. The efficacy of modulation is such that we can no longer tell the difference, can no longer mark a determinate point of disjunction, between the two questions (immanent capacities for action vs. transcendent rights), where life ends and law begins. Well note without here pursuing the consequences of the fact that the paradigm of control effectively combines the incompatible notions of modulation and code, infinite continuity and binary discontinuity.8 The materialist task par excellence, therefore, is to disfigure these figurations, articulate a violence of sensation, of the percept-affect circuit; and this requires, Deleuze and Guattari intimate, all the resources of art, and art of the highest kind. 9 The point is to carve out uncivilized spaces in which decoded flows and waves of desire and belief, color and resonance, can articulate themselves without reference to ordering principles of control or faciality, modulation or law. The schizophrenic Antonin Artaud scavenged for words that assaulted the senses and the body itself (the lo menedi / bardar / ta zerubida / lo menedida / bardar of Interjections,
6 7
Ibid.: 175. Deleuze 2003: 84-85. 8 On this question, see ibid.: 91-98. 9 Deleuze 1987: 187.
157
composed in the asylum at Rodez10); Leopold von SacherMasoch created a language designed to get under the skin and probe around11; Francis Bacon sought a brutal art, an art without mediation that would go to work directly on the nerves. Of course we could multiply examples. In Bacon, Deleuze claims, the goal of the work is to eliminate every spectator, and consequently every spectacle12 or, better, to dismantle the face.13 This is achieved in Bacon, in a merely ostensibly paradoxical maneuver, through the isolation of the Figure, the sensible form related to a sensation [which] acts immediately upon the nervous system. 14 Deleuze struggles to articulate the relation of sensation to faciality, claiming first that sensation has one face turned toward the subject (the nervous system, vital movement, instinct, temperament), and one face turned toward the object (the fact, the place, the event). 15 But he immediately corrects himself: sensation has no faces at all, it is both things indissolubly.16 Pulling in both directions at once, sensation subtracts itself from the aesthetic economy of representation. As in MerleauPontys ontology of the flesh, the logic of sensation is such that the selfsame body gives and receives sensation; sensation affirms disjunction as such. This is more than the face, which always takes on the function of biunivocalization, or binarization,17 could possibly demand of the body. Sensation defaces the face through an excessive acquiescence to faciality, a hyper-orthodoxy that shatters orthodoxy, or a destruction, as Bazin liked to say, of clarity with clarity. Is this not a striking hypothesis, considering arts originary banishment from the republic in Plato on account of its power of semblance, its falsity? We (with
10 11
Artaud 1995: 248. As Deleuze notes: It would appear that both for Sade and for Masoch language reaches its full significance when it acts directly on the senses. Deleuze 1991: 17. 12 Deleuze 2003: 13. 13 Ibid.: 19. 14 Ibid.: 31. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Deleuze 1987: 176.
158
and through Deleuze) are effectively claiming that paint, the sensation encountered in painting, obtains to the truth of fact, even, as in the title of Sylvesters monograph of interviews with Bacon, the brutality of fact. Arts antiPlatonism consists in affirming the truth of brutal fact. It is also in this way that the veil of law is pierced: disfiguration by disjunction. Obscene Aesthetics: Stitching the Veil Affirming the brutality of fact communicates with controls own aesthetic progra m. We are all too familiar with the procedures of stitching the veil, controls deployment of its obscene aesthetics. At one point in time, before the disintegration of the nation-state as a political entity and its reduction to a trading floor for the global economy, we would have called this program a state aesthetics, perhaps an aestheticized politics. As this is no longer possible, and following the corporatist paradigm set out in our introduction, we refer to it as stitching the veil. Its breadth is wider than any possible state aesthetics. Though this corporatist-control aesthetic saturates our lives, it is rarely noted as obscene. Only its most devastating figures express themselves in a mode colorable as obscene. The obscenity of the imperceptible processes underlying the devastating expressions consists in their products, namely, psychic formations such as paranoid neuroses and psychoses; perhaps the most pervasive symptom is that which Kenji Yoshino has recently dubbed covering, that particular quasi-hysteric denial of identity in the service of acquiescence to social or facial codes.18 Commercial marketing strategies,
18
See Yoshino 2006. Yoshino, through a highly readable mix of anecdote, intellectual discourse, and popular politics, focuses on the techniques of covering ones sexual orientation and race, but also discusses those utilized in covering gender, economic status, and many other parameters playing into the construction of a social identity. The opening words of the preface are worth repeating here as an indication of the content of the text: Everyone covers. To cover is to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream. In our increasingly diverse society, all of us are outside the mainstream in
159
exemplified today by the most indiscernible of viral marketing tools that sew advertising seamlessly into the fabric of everyday life, form one group of such processes. Perhaps Fernand Braudel is the principal historiographer of this aesthetics becoming, up until the 18 th century. The Western, particularly American, invasion of certain Middle Eastern nations has generated a number of these most obscene aesthetico-political figures. The imprisonment of suspected enemy combatants without due process of law (famously, that of American citizen Yaser Esam Hamdi in South Carolina and of Yemeni citizen Salim Ahmed Hamdan in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba) and the tortures, rapes, and homicides perpetrated at various military holding facilities throughout the world (Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Camp X-Ray and other sites at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, and so on) have received the most attention, both popular and scholarly, since the deployment of the war. Recently, 19 legal scholar Joseph Pugliese has argued with erudition that the cultural intelligibility of the tortures at Abu Ghraib, given to us photographically, is made possible by a shadow archive, a self-effacing historical repository of spectral images that works to obscure the real of the events represented and allowing for a public disavowal of those events (such as the claims of government officials to the effect that these are isolated incidents).20 This shadow archive, according to Pugliese, structures the subjectification and sexuation of the personae involved or, in his own terms, positions a subject within the terrain that [the archive] encompasses whilst effac[ing] its constitutive role in a subjects some way. Nonetheless, being deemed mainstream is still often a necessity of social life. For this reason, every reader of this book has covered, whether consciously or not, and sometimes at significant personal cost. Yoshino 2006: ix. 19 Pugliese 2007. See especially 250-252. 20 The notion of a shadow archive might be seen as incompatible with the logic of modulation. The archive is indissolubly tied up with the disciplinary paradigm of the mold. I retain the term for dialogues sake but conceive of it in a manner suited to the corporatist-control paradigm and recognize that the term should be rejected in future analyses of the cultural intelligibility of images.
160
process of visual production and consumption[.]21 Where, however, Pugliese ties this archive to a neofascist aestheticized politics and a determinately colonialist objective,22 I prefer to situate it and the Abu Ghraib tortures (including the photographs and their circulation as a necessary part of that torture) within a corporatistcontrol network that can also be said to theoretically subsume the war on terror itself, as a product of the infinite expansion of law and the commodification of morality-security. Abu Ghraib, thus made possible by the selfeffacing imagistic economy known as the shadow archive, cannot be understood as the excrescence of a geopolitical militarism with nationalist roots. Territory and nationalism and their colonialist practices can no longer be the explanation; if they have any salient role, that is, any role other than one which fits inside the corporatist-control model, in contemporary political problems, this must itself be explained from within the corporatist-control model. This is not to claim that explicitly political motives, in the popular sense, do not and are not feeding into the corporatist logic. The drive for recognized power on the world stage remains, and will likely always remain, a significant determinant of national bellicosity. My claim is rather that, insofar as ours is a control society, all of the lines connecting the nodal points in this network are corporatist rather than statist, vaporous and errant rather than solid and rectilinear, and completely lacking in territoriality. We will develop this theme through a brief exploration of the obscene aesthetics of control. The deployment of an obscene aesthetics of control has the object of resecuritization and remoralization. The idea is to imagistically reinstate the law, and so we can say that security and morality return through a general process of relegalization. This may seem paradoxical given the disbelief and disgust engendered by events such as Abu Ghraib. Hence, we here discover another obscene veil to be probed and pierced, though in a purely conceptual manner. The essential legality of stitching the veil consists in its shock value, its radical indecency. The effect de jure if not de facto is
21 22
Ibid.: 251. See ibid.: 272.
161
to forcefully coerce the public demand to adhere to traditional morals and to put a premium on security, i.e. to insist on the continued expansion of law. How does this happen? The shadow archives force resides in its apparent but unreal discontinuity. The images circulating in a given shadow archive, e.g. that of white supremacism or colonialist torture, sever themselves from one another on one plane yet remain sutured together on a deeper stratum.23 This allows for subjective identification with one image or set of images while others, equally inscribed in the archive, can appear as unfamiliar, even frightening or shocking. Pyramids of denuded Arab bodies, for instance, contrast with the smiling American faces sending regards home on the evening news, though a deeper, shadowy resonance prevails. Whether situated as producing, consuming, victimized, or victimizing bodies, the subjects against which these images take form are figured into the logic of modulation, educated as faces in Deleuzes terms. 24 All cruelty in Artauds sense, all immediacy, becomes conflated with cruelty in the popular sense, the cruelty of the Abu Ghraib photos, for instance. Morality, security, and decency become recodified and recommodified as the corporatist veil recursively weaves into itself a patch without seams. Conclusion: The Criminality of Art Let us leave the domain of aesthetics and reenter that of art. Arts immediacy is, weve seen above, its criminality, its threat to the morality-security-decency series, its capacity to pierce the veil of law. Let us conclude with a comment on Masoch. Though Masoch creates a language that does exactly this, the masochistic text is draped with decency. Of Masoch it can be said, writes Deleuze, that no one has ever been so far with so little offense to decency.25 The art of Masoch consists in the manner in
23
Hence, for instance, Puglieses insistence on the stratified nature of the shadow archive. See ibid. 24 Again, youve been recognized, the abstract machine [of faciality] has you inscribed in its overall grid. Deleuze 1987: 177. 25 Deleuze 1991: 34.
162
which the conventions of faciality are skillfully redispositioned and shifted around to create new landscapes. The blank page or canvas, the empty sonic space, the unused film are already invested with the clichs, conventions, and other facial traits of the situation. The artistic task is to flee, to get out through a non-preexistent line. The canvas is already so full that the painter must enter into the canvas. [] He enters into it precisely because he knows what he wants to do, but what saves him is the fact that he does not know how to get there, he does not know how to do what he wants to do. He will only get there by getting out of the canvas. 26 The mutations proper to masochism, to the judicial spirit of masochism,27 work to create a world in which guilt absolves instead of leading to atonement, and punishment makes permissible what it was intended to chastise. 28 When facial codes are scrambled and the omnipresence of control is called into question through art, through hyper-orthodoxy or hyper-legalism as with masochism, control convokes the juridical privatization of the political by way of a deployment of obscene aesthetics. This recursive refiguration of saving-face, however, cannot be complete, since the piercing thrust of art leaves the face of law scarred, a phenomenon culturally attested to by the persistence of critique.
26 27
Deleuze 2003: 78. Emphasis in original. Deleuze 1991: 33. 28 Ibid.: 102.
163
Works Cited Artaud, Antonin (1995). Watchfiends and Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period. Trans. C. Eshleman and B. Bador. Boston: Exact Change. Berle, Adolf and Gardiner Means (1968). The Modern Corporation and Private Property. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Deleuze, Gilles (1986). Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press. --- and Flix Guattari (1987). Trans. B. Massumi. Minnesota Press. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: U. of
--- (1988). Foucault. Trans. S. Hand. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press. --- (1991). Masochism: Coldness & Cruelty. Trans. J. McNeil. New York: Zone. --- (1995). Negotiations, 1972-1990. Trans. M. Joughin. New York: Columbia UP. --- (2003). Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. D.W. Smith. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press. Pugliese, Joseph (2007). Abu Ghraib and Its Shadow Archives. 19 Law and Literature 247. Simondon, Gilbert (1992). The Genesis of the Individual in Incorporations, ed. J. Crary and S. Kwinter. Trans. M. Cohen and S. Kwinter. New York: Zone. Yoshino, Kenji (2006). Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights. New York: Random House.
164
Marijke Bouchier Affirmative Fashion
Affirmative Fashion Marijke Bouchier Concordia University Given that it is most common for my thoughts and imaginings to regularly travel in divergent and erratic patterns, it has been no small task for me to formulate a cohesive story to tell you today. When writing the proposal for this conference I had at best given the concept of veils, what can only be described as cursory attentions. Due to this I had in this proposal suggested that a primary role of artists today was to endeavor to lift and dissect social, cultural, personal and political veils of perception. Only later however, when I began pondering on how best to elaborate this proposition, did I realize the relative absurdity and arrogance of such a statement. To use the analogy of veils is to suggest a revelation of some kind of truth previously unacknowledged. But truth being the relative and intangible beast that it is, I suspect that were I in the habit of spinning fantastical tales, I would have more luck convincing people I was born in Middle Earth and lived next door to Frodo Baggins, than I would of convincing them I was in possession of something as elusive as a universal truth. Although this might simply be true due to the surprising number of people who have mistaken the Lord of the Ring film trilogy for a 3 part documentary series based on the lives of everyday New Zealanders their greatest confusion being the distinct lack of sheep present in the footage. Certainly I believe that as an artist I must, for my own sake, address those issues I find most problematic and in need of attention, but I must give credit where credit is due and point out that while I as the artist and critical thinker seek to ask the right questions, it is the role of the viewer to lift their own veils of perception and reveal their own truths. Over the last few years, my own critical art practice has involved asking questions and proposing new relationships between multiple elements consumer
165
culture, idealism, religion in the 21st century, emotional states and communication. What these concerns seem to have evolved into over the last 6 months (since relocating from New Zealand to Montreal where I am now based) is an investigation and inquiry into what defines happiness and its pursuit within society today. Needless to say it has been slightly overwhelming. What seemed at first a simple question, has unfolded before me like an endless desert. For anyone who has ever suggested that artistic practice holds the virtues of catharsis has never contended with making art about happiness for in this scenario there is nothing more masochistic. In his 1873 autobiography John Stuart Mill stated; Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. Now, while I am reluctant to say that as a result of undertaking this exploration of happiness I have ceased to experience any, it is perhaps fair to say that I have been forced to look closely at how I myself define it what happiness means to me, how it feels, and how I myself choose to pursue it. What it also resulted in was for me an admission of the lack of distinction I had previously drawn between happiness and its superficial and temporal counterparts joy, elation, ecstasy, pleasure, bliss. I had I suppose been sharing the sentiments of Robert Frost who said that Happiness makes up for in height what it lacks in length but maybe he had it wrong too. However you try to characterize or define it, the only fundamental trait of happiness that seems to have been agreed upon is its inability to be defined though a Google search of the word will quickly reveal that this elusiveness has not yet proved hindrance enough to stop people from trying: Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise man grows it under his feet Happiness often sneaks in through the door you didnt know you left open And my personal favorite; Happiness: an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another To count these quotes and profound insights into the true nature of happiness as the tip of the iceberg would be a vast understatement. While the topic has been debated for centuries over chapters and novels, there is
166
nothing more appealing to the lost and unhappy soul than a shot of the good stuff wrapped up in a tidy 20 words or less catch phrase. Dont get me wrong if I thought it would work I would be leaving all the doors in my house open to give happiness a better chance of sneaking in. Even with the odds vastly stacked against me and knowing it definitely wont work Id probably still try it if Canada werent so bloody cold. Convincing art is rarely made on any topic without first hand experience of its content, and far from trying to pass judgment on those who have wisely allotted significantly less of their leisure time to obsessively dissecting their emotional state in order to better understand it, my intention is simply to contribute to the existing discussion surrounding happiness and share my personal insights. My sense is that we are succumbing to the information overload that defines this generation, defaulting to a complacent acceptance of what we are told happiness is and how we can best attain it in the shortest amount of time. We want it bigger, better, newer, faster and shinier than it has ever been before a new breed of happiness worthy of the 21st century, and if consumer culture is to be believed it is in no short supply. From the nostalgic italics of Walt Disneys happily ever after sloganism, to Oprahs 10 steps to feeling good naked there is an undeniable appeal to the immediacy and simplicity of this kind of thinking. In a age when it is possible to be transported anywhere in the world in under 24 hours, to transmit messages globally in a matter of seconds and to Botox 10 years off of ones face in an afternoon, it seems only logical that a few shortcuts to happiness must have been discovered along the way. In fact, anything advertising happiness in 12 steps or less seems to be an instant best seller. Here however I must resist a purely consumerist critique. I am not a Luddite, and try to dabble in hypocrisy only when absolutely necessary, so to launch an indiscriminant crusade against the culture that has shaped who I am as a person, and the technology that has provided me with so many of the creature comforts that dare I say it have been known to make me happy, is to do more than simply bite the hand that feeds me it is to take to it with a chain saw. What I can say instead, is that while my new handheld blender and the spiffy computer I typed
167
this presentation up on are not intrinsically problematic or emotionally destructive, they are invariably inseparable from the marketing ploys that accompany them. I dare say it would be an impossible task to count the number of happy faces that appear next to these products with promises of improvement and guaranteed satisfaction. And with no fundamental definition or clarity of understanding surrounding happiness, is it really any wonder that the obscure social forces that be have taken advantage of our uncertainty and set out to chain the term to such seductive packages? So what to do? How to counter such widespread cultural manipulation? It seems to me that the best way to draw happiness away from its current problematic associations is not to try and define what it is, but what it is not. Happiness is not an entitlement. It is not a prize to be bought or captured, not a destination one can arrive at permanently, I dont know of any short -cuts and to the best of my knowledge it isnt really to be found in the contemplation of the misery of others unless of course youre a bit of a sadist at heart. All of these things seem silly to say almost too obvious to point out. But if there were anything obvious about it there probably wouldnt be a multi-billion dollar self-help industry dedicated to pointing out the obvious or in some cases the obscure. Yes, self-help mania is a particular fascination of mine. It is an easy phenomenon to dismiss so outrageous are some of the claims that they almost defy response but when an industry starts tipping the scales at around 12 billion dollars it somehow ceases to be a laughing matter. Something is happening a veil is being lifted before self-help I never knew how much help I needed. How desperately my life was in need of repair or that (with the right help) I might just be able to fix it myself. A brand spanking new me everybody loves an upgrade. And try it I have at least $60.00 of that 12 billion has come from my own pocket titles that spring to mind are Choose To Be Happy, Dont Sweat The Small Stuff (that one was actually a gift apparently word is getting around that Im in need of some fine tuning), another upper came in the form of a DVD called The Secret (I heard about that one from Oprah), and the last I struggle to remember but I almost positive it have the word Love in the title and consisted largely of ways to manifest all that good stuff you need to get happy.
168
Having been recently accused of being a cynic, I feel compelled to mention that I didnt read these books with a critical attack in mind. I read them possessing a genuine desire to somehow improve my situation. What I experienced while reading them was something I can only describe as phantom happiness. A kind of elation at discovering all the power I had and never knew I possessed according to these books I was an infinitely powerful being, capable of manifesting anything I wanted, limitless in my potential. But after the last page of the book was turned, all that potential came crumbling down around me. Could I really manifest anything? What if I wanted to be the next Oprah? What if everyone in the world read the same books as me and we all wanted to be the next Oprah? Would it boil down to a battle of the most heart-felt positive affirmation? Or do we all get to be Oprah? If were all Oprah then whos left to sit in the studio audience and collect all that free stuff she gives away? The self-help gurus would have their clients believe that if it aint manifesting then you just aint doin it right, and it might be time to invest in a new (updated) book to help you help yourself a little better the next time round. I fear for the day that these books start appearing on high school reading lists. Now, to put all these thoughts in context, I suppose I should come full circle and get back to talking about art making. Essentially my work is about happiness but as I mentioned earlier, my greatest skill seems to lie in chasing tangents, and in an attempt to better grapple with such a heady topic I have elected to narrow my field of inquiry to a small and seemingly disparate set of curiosities. Beginning with an interest in childhood propaganda and ideals and the mirroring of these naive ideals in adulthood I was led to my fascination with the self-help market. The inter-changeability of the magical world experienced in my youth and the life-changing magic promised by this industry seemed too surreal to resist. Next came my fascination with anthropomorphism, personification and animism. As far back as has been documented, animism has played a significant role in our cultural development. Stories of Mother Earth and Gods of the heavens have been with us from the beginning and are here still,
169
defining not just our relationship to religion and culture, but to objects and consumerism. From Walt Disneys anthropomorphic mouse, to the poodle shaped soft toy I named Moof and my first pet cat Fluffy-bum I have never ceased to see the human elements in the world around me. I have named every car I have ever owned, I speak to animals as if they understand what I am saying, I yell and scold any technological device that refuses to do as I say, and I have seen few un-named boats, always referred to in the feminine. The world around us is alive with the meaning we give it and if it is alive then does it not also have the power to turn on us? Most recently, and I suppose most unexpectedly, I have become fascinated by fear. Fear seems to me to at once have an obvious and obscure connection to happiness. Obvious because it is most commonly our fear of failure or lack that keeps us from happiness, and obscure because when doing a Google search of the words fear and happiness all I got was a lot of guff about fear of happiness I may be afraid of a lot of things but happiness Im pretty sure isnt one of them. The subsequent trickle down effect of this has been an even more morbid fascination with not only fear, but also violence and horror. I must again emphasize that I am not cynical, but I do however have a tendency to see the ironic and uncanny in the world around me and if movies like Chucky, Alfred Hitchcocks The Birds and The Terminator are anything to go on then I am clearly not the only one. Haunted by the ghosts of fairytales past my current work is best characterized by uncanny furry blobs, domestic objects that whisper sweet affirmations in your ear and the ever-present worry that there is a monster under my bed who looks suspiciously like Dr. Phil. I am unsure where these projects and the pursuit of these ideas will lead, but I suspect you know what I am hoping for.
170
171
Panel Response Amir Jaima Stony Brook University What first struck me were the similarities between the three panelists. Marijke J. Bouchier, Kyle McGee, and Surti Singh all begin their arguments by positing that that which we casually refer to as the world is, at least in part if not entirely, constructed and inescapable. Singh says that society is the all encompassing spectacle [from which] nothing negative remains. McGee says, the contemporary law of culture is the infinite expansion of t he law. And Bouchier says that it seems only natural that the social structures and definitions to which we were exposed during our susceptible youth a developmental stage through which we must all inevitably pass would leave a permanent impression. This common claim, however, only becomes a point of criticism by granting a subsequent assumption, also which they have all acknowledged. As Singh says, This methodological approach is grounded in the assumption that the appearance of reality in modern society is ultimately false. In light of that assumption, and with a nod to the logic of the parergon, they continue to argue that art retains a privileged yet paradoxical position as being both of society and providing an avenue of perennial self-reflection and critique. McGee cleverly calls this arts criminality, which refers to arts disfiguration or scrambling of social codes[as contraposed to the role of art in] the redeployment of law, or in other words, the construction of new codes. Similarly, Singh presents Kristevas notion of the abject in art and Adornos notion of ugly art as analogs for art within society, society that also defines itself in terms of its negative. Societys tendency to define itself negatively, however, is contraposed to its redemptive quality, which, based upon societys claim to be allencompassing, re-incorporates the negative into its positive self-understanding (consider the politics of sexuality, for example, where certain behavior was initially considered abnormal, but now is understood more along the lines of lifestyle choices). And
172
Amir Jaima Panel Response
phenomenologically, Bouchier simultaneously acknowledges Disneys fabricated and narrow definition of happiness, and the permanent and exclusive consequences of youthful exposure to Disneys definition. For example, one can easily see Disneys notion of the happily-ever-after ending as unrealistic, yet the idea of the happily-ever-after ending does indeed make us happy. Even more interesting, however, are the differences in our panelists conclusions and their implied ethical implications of the aesthetic. McGee, Bouchier, and Singhs presentation of Adorno emphasize the destabilizing effect of art, yielding self-reflectivity. Embedded in the emphasis is the assumption that such self-reflectivity is correlated to progress. None of the panelists explicitly argue that change is always inherently progressive; but there is also unsettlingly absent, any discussion of a secondary measure to evaluate the destabilization. Whereas, Singhs presentation of Kristeva places the emphasis on the redemptive quality of art, on its potential to heal the debilitated western subject[to] return to the origins of personality formation[and to] re find the lost capacity to love. Controversially, (at leas t in the U.S.) this implies more of a focus on the communal than the individual, and a greater faith in society than currently exists.
173
Other questions: What is the strength of totalizing claim of society? What of nature? Is nature necessarily outside of society, and if not, could a distinction be made between a natural aesthetic and a constructed one? Does art enable an epoche only within a society where art is inherently discontinuous from life? If so, is the epoche already configured into our western contemporary definition of art?
174
Dr. Rosalind Krauss The Parergons Veil
Keynote Address The Parergons Veil Dr. Rosalind Krauss Columbia University The Parergons Veil is transparent to most of you, I am sure, since you will remember from Jacques Derridas Parergon the centrality of the veil as one example of the types of supplement to the ergon or intrinsic work of art- which Kant strongly censures in the Critique of Judgment. There are four Parergona in the Critique. Added to the veils or drapery on statues, are the columns on palaces, and frames on paintings, all the more when they are gilded. Writing of the veil as exemplary parergon, Derrida says: One makes of art in general an object in which one claims to distinguish an inner meaning the invariant and a multiplicity of external variations through which, as through so many veils, one would try to see or restore the true, full, originary meaning: one, naked. Naked, because the objection to drapery on statues is that, as mere ornamentation, it conceals the unitary meaning of the nude body. By speaking of the naked body as having a unitary meaning, I am, of course, opening up the notion of a center, of something within, or intrinsic to the proper concept of the sculptural nude. The center and the proper, are, as you all know, the main targets of deconstructions attack on metaphysics and its assertion of presence. In launching that attack, the Parergon briefly leaves the subject of the veil and addresses itself to the prohibition of the frame. Meditating on this proscription, Derrida shifts to the center of the ergon which the frame supplements as parergon, and asks if this supplement is summoned forth by the work itself, and if so by what in the work? Derrida answers that it is a missing inside; because every parergon is added, only because of a lack within the system it augments. In this logic, the frame is an outside that comes into the work to constitute the inside as an inside. The parergon is thus the
175
Keynote Address
ex-trinsic on which the very notion of the in-trinsic depends. We read this as expressing an ergons missing part that the parergon comes to supplement in a secondary action. But, to the contrary, we must object that it is the parergona, which are primary, creating the lack inside the work and hiding it at the same time. First, by constituting the outside of the work, the frame cuts the work off from the ground of its interior surface, the very frame separating itself at the same time, from its own ground: namely, the wall on which it hangs. Second, by raising the issue of castration, since it hides the sexual organs of the nude, the veil creates the lack in the nude bodys unity, at the same time rendering it undecidably ambiguous. Third, the architectural column becomes parergon when it expresses itself as carved pilaster, or here, on the Erectheon, the caryatid, representing the human body, raising another ambiguity into infinity of where the figure cuts itself off from its background, here, the architectural stone lintel--that is, where it begins and ends. Due to the logic of the frame, the lack of the ergon, inside the ergon, is, in each case, the absence of end: of finality or telos, or purpose. The Parergons deconstruction of specificity, of the proper, of an autonomy that declares both the specificity of painting and its distinctness from its context, emptied modernism of its most cherished belief. Post-structuralism parergonal logic thus joined with both postmodernism and Conceptual Art in their contempt for the very idea of medium specificity; of artistic meaning depending on the act of figuring-forth the nature of a works medium, or support, and further, of modernisms resistance to the supplementary logic of the frame of an outside imported into the inside to pervert (this is a word Derrida uses in this context) to pervert the purity of its inside, to distance itself from itself or its telos into infinity. I mentioned Conceptual Art along with poststructuralism and the postmodern. The Conceptualist attack on the specific medium is well known. Its practitioners pursued the idea that in order for art to "think itself," it must be reconstructed as language, as proposition: thought only available as speech. "Art after
176
Philosophy" was the bible of this belief and Joseph Kosuth its prophet. Viewing himself as an apocalyptic historian the Oswald Spengler of aesthetics Kosuth sketched the profiles of both philosophy and artistic practice in broad strokes. Philosophy was seen as descending a slope that led precipitously from the heights of transcendentalist reflection to the depths of ordinary language: analytic philosophy's focus on the nature of the proposition having voided all metaphysical considerations. Art, Kosuth reasoned further, is the Phoenix of this situation; it is the life that bursts into flower on the ashes of philosophy's exhaustion. Further, he argued, arts bloom assumes the very form of the philosophical conflagration, since the rebirth of the aesthetic will depend on its newly won configuration as language. In Kosuth's account, the prophet who had come before him was Marcel Duchamp, the first artist to reconceive objects as statements, insofar as the readymade only exists as a form of ostensive definition: "This is art." By circumventing the "trivial" issue of specific artistic practice, the readymade strategy overleaps the problem of the aesthetic medium with the single bound that takes it directly into the central question of parergonal logic. As Kosuth expressed this: "Being an artist now means to question the nature of art. If one is questioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioning the nature of art. If an artist accepts painting (or sculpture) he is accepting the tradition that goes with it. That's because the word art is general and the word painting is specific. Painting is a kind of art. If you make paintings you are already accepting (not questioning) the nature of art. Kosuth could have added Installation Art to the readymade, with its demand for language as a kind of questioning of the nature of art-in- general. As an unregenerate modernist, I want to resist the parergonal logic in order to examine that part of contemporary artistic practice that insists on finding the in-trinsic ground of a works support its medium, in short which it can represent, or as I would rather express it, can figure-forth. Figure-forth implies summoning up the ground or support for the work as the figure of a representation. Within the time of modernism, it was believed that the representation of the support was selfsubsistent and completed itself inside its frame; indeed, if
177
Keynote Address
it represented its frame as well, as so many Mondrians do, the inside calls the outside into the inside not to constitute the inside, but to represent its telos, by completing it inside the inside. Since this 1921 Neo-Platsticist abstraction carefully pulls the black bars of its grid from the edge of the painting, they resist the possibility that the canvas is merely punched-out from a continuous lattice outside the work. In the case of the Man Ray photogram, the photographic support is figured-forth doubly: first by the translucency of the Lucite phonograph records reminding us that photography depends on light to strike and transform the light-sensitive emulsion and second, by counterfacing the two identical records, to remind us that photography is a mechanical reproduction, a multiple without an original. I spoke before of contemporary artists who continue to figure-forth the meaning of the medium in which they work. In these cases that medium needs to be self-referential because it has abandoned those very traditional supports for the work that postmodernism regarded as obsolete supports such as paint on canvas, or wooden or marble block. If Ed Ruscha figures-forth a medium, it is one he has himself invented by taking a readymade industrial or commercial object which I will be calling here a technical support. In Ruschas case this is the automobile, supporting his Parking Lots, or his books such as Royal Road Test or, most importantly, his 26 Gasoline Stations. We often think of a traditional medium as a set of rules that the artisan apprentice learns from the guild to which he belongs. The Los Angelino Ruscha expresses this need for the mediums rules when he reflects: "I used to drive back [to Oklahoma] four or five times a year, and I began to feel that there was so much wasteland between L.A. and Oklahoma that somebody had to bring the news to the city. Then I had this idea for a book title Twenty-six Gasoline Stations and it became like a fantasy rule in my mind that I knew I had to follow." Another aspect of Ruschas figuring -forth the automobile as his technical support is his decision to issue his work in the form of booklets, multiple copies like the mass-produced automobile itself, which the slots on the tarmac figure-forth. William Kentridge has adopted the animated film as his own technical support, making drawings which he records on one frame of film, then modifying by erasing a
178
part of the figures contour, recording it on the next film frame, modifying it again, and recording it still more. The frame of the single film image follows the parergonal logic in both creating lack and hiding it at the same time. The persistence of vision that produces the illusion of motion, as one frame of film is superimposed on the next, not only demands that each frame calls for its outside within the sequence but, as well, makes each frame invisible as the illusion of motion slides imperceptibly from one to its successor. As an animator, Kentridges technical support is erasure. Each modification in the contour of the figure blurs the cut that separates figure from ground. Each figure calling for its outside may, therefore, be said to be framed. By figuring-forth erasure, as in this sequence from History of the Main Complaint, while one of Kentridges characters is driving through the rain, we are both shown the framing edge of the windshield and, within it, the representation of erasure as the figuring-forth of animations technical support. Kentridges insistence on figuring-forth his medium focuses his attention on the filmic frame. We see this in the superb Ubu Tells the Truth with the cells in the Voerster Square Police Station in Johannesburg appearing as lighted rectangles within their surrounding darkness. Notoriously, prisoners were taken to the roof of the building and pushed to the ground in what was reported as an accident. As the black bodies fall past the lighted windows, they create the illusion that the film strip, with its cinematic frames, is rising behind them as if to spool itself backward into the gate of the projector. I show you these examples to suggest that when the inside of the work is a frame, it is not merely an adjunct but becomes an intrinsic constituent in the complete representation of the object that forms the specific field of the ergon. I will return to this presently. My concluding example of the veil will be the series of books Ed Ruscha called Stains, saying that oil on canvas had come to an end for him. "I'm painting on the book covers, he explained. I guess I'm just looking for another support. Maybe I'm moving away from the canvas, but I can't predict. I still paint on canvas, but I think there's another shift about to happen somewhere, maybe not so radical, but at least one that I know I will want to stick with."
179
Keynote Address
As Ruscha uses the word, medium can mean either the element in which color is suspended, traditionally oil, but for his "Stains," iodine, chocolate syrup, chutney, or blueberry extract; or it can be the technical support for the image, traditionally canvas, but for him, book covers like taffeta, or the photography of the books' contents. Besides the extravagance of his invention of matrices, Ruscha's interest in the idea of the stain as a type of support, reaches back into the history of his tradition, the way the rules of a medium force its practitioner to do, in this case back and outward into the practice of stain painting everywhere around him as a contemporary avantgarde. Made up of colors that bleed into one another, stain painting suppressed the edge of any color or figure, resisting at the same time the appearance of the frame. If I have been resisting the parergonal logic by daring to defend the notion of modernisms call for medium-specificity, which is to say an autonomous or unperverted inside to the ergon, or work, I have been resorting to another essay by Derrida himself to have the daring to do so. This is the text Signature/Event/Context, which depends on the iterability made possible by the linguistic code, such that any mark is repeatable, in the absence of its receiver, or of its sender (and a fortiori) its senders intention, and even in the absence of its context or referent. It is this iterability, made possible by the linguistic code, which Derrida calls a finite system of rules. He continues, the possibility of repeating, and therefore of identifying marks, is implied in every code. Let us repeat identifying marks--the work of iterability. Self-identity is the mark of a specific medium in its persistence; and further its specificity is the ground of what Ruscha had called the rules revealed to him in the name 26 Gasoline Stations, or, finally, how the figuring-forth of the support, differentiating as it did in the building of cathedrals, the artisanal codes of glass painting, from carving, or from tapestry weaving, sorted these apprentice artists into guilds, and then, with the advent of the Ecoles des BeauxArts, into different ateliers to receive the transmission of different masters. Two laws address the truth in artthe law of the parergon with its perversion of the works purity, and the rule of repetition, as it permits the constancy of the same,
180
or, we could say, the self-same. These two laws reveal the veil between theory and art, with their two different notions of what the conference calls the horizon of truth in art.
181
Closing Remarks
Closing Remarks
The Veil's Edge Dr. Edward S. Casey Stony Brook University
Everything will flower at the edge... -- Jacques Derrida, Parergon, p. 81 Veils: we assume that they mainly cover up and cover over, conceal: that they hide something from view. Certainly so. Yet they also reveal at their edges. Edges are not the mere termination of veils, a cutting-off point, an ending. They are there where something is shown. Indeed, they do the showing themselves they escort it to the eye or hand. They show just enough to inform (say, what color of skin a veiled person has) or to tantalize (by suggesting that something more, and still more attractive, perhaps more lascivious, lies under the veil). But this not to say that we are speaking of the usual part/whole relation, according to which a part counts as a part only insofar as it belongs to a whole as if the edges around a veil showed just part of something whole, entire and intact, as if they merely ushered in the whole. But the part shown by the edges of a veil count for a lot more than this. It counts for itself: it is its own whole. It stands on its own, and for this we are perceptually grateful, given the occlusion of the veil. We are only permitted to see the part on the other side of the edge and must speculate as to (or remember) the whole to which it belongs. The veil has taken this whole the whole face, the whole body from us. All we are given is what the edge allows, what it brings forth. The edge is where the action is: it is where our eye actively goes and sometimes our hand too (as in lifting the veil). Accepting the veiling that has already happened a veil is put on somewhere else, back at home, off-stage we have no choice but to accept it as we are
182
Dr. Edward S. Casey
presented with it: the fact of the veil. A brute fact that conceals what is actually under the veil: the veiled fact. The edge intervenes in this circumstance of redoubled fact; it offers a brief but decisive respite, a way out of it or rather around it since the eye or hand does not dote on the edge as such but on how it leads vision or touch beyond what is obscured by the veil. But only just beyond, beckoning to the unseen or untouched underside of the veil. Yet this just is just enough to let us escape from the veils tyranny. It undertakes the undoing of this tyranny. At the same time, the edge is the absolute beginning of the veil (rather than its termination: where it runs out). A veil takes off from its own edge, and in this sense the edge is indispensable to it, sine qua non. The proof of this is that an edgeless veil would be no veil at all: it would be a Borgesian world-map that is exactly coextensive with that of which it is the map, every point of the map touching its geographic equivalent on earth, with nothing left over a map that is a complete cover-up having no edges. We see the (veiled) thing through, indeed in, its edge(s): being held there, a captive of its own edges, it is there not literally all of it but it nonetheless: it itself: .... say the person in the eyes left exposed at the edge of the veil of a Morrocan woman; or the sexuality of a veiled dancer: we sense the person, we feel the vibrant body, we are presented with it: it is not just appresented, as in Husserls alternative to direct perception, it is not only adumbrated, it is itself given.... So the edge is a priori: it is the necessary condition of the veil itself: no edge, no veil. But this is a very special a priori that of texture, at once visible and palpable. For veils are linked intrinsically to cloth, which means that they are made, manufactured, WOVEN. A man of the cloth, we say, referring to the masculine analogue of a womans veiled face or body: each is covered by textiles that are notably drab often black in both cases. (To take the veil, always a black one, is for a woman to become a nun in the Catholic Church.) But the bits of flesh that appear at the edges of these costumes are anything but drab, whether this be the pudgy red neck of the cleric or the dark lower temple of the Morrocan woman. Veils exist between two extremes: complete transparency and complete coverage. Complete
183
Closing Remarks
transparency reveals the entire body in its nakedness: as provocative, sexually enticing, but also as exposed and vulnerable. To be fully covered, with nothing showing, is to retreat from the realm of appearance: it is to become a mere object (whose extremity is the corpse, fully shrouded). In relation to these extremes, a veiled body is something intermediate: translucent, semi-exposed. It is the equivalent of a Winnicottian transitional object (even if it it is itself no object at all), a third thing between fantasy and reality, something potentially playful and the source of creative acts. Fanon remarks in Algeria Unveiled that Algerian womens veils are not merely hindrances imposed upon them: they can empower by allowing a woman to be actively looking while being only the partial object of others looks. Beneath the veil, he says, freedom of movement reigns, unbenownst to the onlooker. The veil is a force of resistance, especially in colonialist regimes: the woman who sees without being seen, remarks Fanon, frustrates the colonizer... She does not yield herself, does not give herself, does not offer herself.1But such free movement and inherent resistance has to occur at the edges, especially in a hegemonic regime that keeps its eye front and center.2 The veil, then, is not just closure; it is opening. It opens through its own edges at these edges and perhaps even as these edges. This is truly spectacular, if we only have eyes to see it and hands to feel it. The object seen under, or through, a veil is a part object not just part of an object and not a partial object either. A part object, as this term is understood by Melanie Klein, is part of the body that bears special psychosexual
1
Franz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, tr. H. Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 44. 2 Stephanie Damoff writes: I found myself thinking of some Naguib Mahfouz novels I read many years ago. I seem to recall in the Palace Walk trilogy that there was some kind of grille over the windows, over perhaps a balcony, through which the women of the house could look out at the world, but through which they could not be seen from the street. This grille is called the mashrabiyya. Another kind of veil, another type of edge between inner and outer, public and private. (email communication of 4/7/08)
184
Dr. Edward S. Casey
significance, far more than the piece of flesh it embodies would seem capable of bearing. It also has overdetermined symbolic status. In Muslim countries, part objects with explicit sexual meaning the lips, the breast, not to mention the vagina are so thoroughly covered that no edge is shown, or even hinted at. (The same is true of the penis in virtually all cultures except the most aboriginal, where a loin cloth or penis-shield allows the dim outline of the organ to be manifest: that is to say, a contour that mimics the organs actual shape an edge once removed, so to speak.) Given such extensive veiling in most of the worlds cultures of the bodys part objects, it is not surprising that the surplus significance imputed to these objects derives as much from fantasy as from real experience, as in the Good or Bad Breast. Short of part objects, the actual edges of veils rejoin the actual edges of flesh (or underclothing) or (in the case of inanimate objects) physical things over which they are draped. Take the drawing on the cover of Derridas and Cixouss Veils: SHOW COVER [I have xerox in Veils folder]. Notice how the outer edges of the hand, its knuckles, fingers, and palm here come up against the lower edges of the cloth lying over them. The two sets of edges are juxtaposed those of the veil and those of the hand. Around these sets respectively are the flesh (and fingernails) of the hand and the upper folds and texture of the overlying cloth. The edges of each act to contain the cloth and the hand respectively two very different substances here conjoined through their proximity to each other: flesh to thing, thing to flesh in a curious binary couple whose visual symbiosis brooks no compromise. Their fate is conjoint, intertwined not just in this image, frozen as it is in a visual eternity, but in any situation in which veiling obtains. Everything will flower at the edge, says Derrida in the above essay, and not accidentally, for a parergon signifies a by-work that is around or alongside something else, the work proper (i.e., the work we identity and name as such). But these two locative adverbs in turn imply the presence of edge, not only physical or drawn but also imaginary or cartographic. A veil, especially one that is drawn over a lived body, is a parergon of a special sort: it does not serve to frame nor is it comparable to a column on a building (in Kants choice examples) but it valorizes the very thing it veils. It brings it forward in its very
185
Closing Remarks
unavailability to perception, as if to say: here, under this veil, is something of great intrinsic value value to be parsed variously as personal, fleshly, male or female. And this value is underscored by its being withdrawn from view (and thus, by implication, from touch as well). But and this pause is critical a hint or peek, a slender slice, of this verboten or verhllt thing is allowed to extrude at the edge of the veil: a teaser, so to speak, a lure, a way into the flesh or person, sexuality or woman or (much more rarely) man. The edge is the way into these latter, just as it is the way out of the veil itself. Once more, then, a doubling of the edge, now in its implicit bi-directionality. Everything flowers at the edge because the edge is a double-edged affordance that moves between cloth and flesh without mediating them in any easy compromise or synthesis. It is, in Derridas words, a pure cut: the edging (la bordure) is the sans of the pure cut, the sans of the finality-sans-end.3 The latter phrase renders Kant's Zweckmssigkeit ohne Zweck purposiveness without purpose and as Derrida is suggesting that the ohne, the sans, the without, is a sheer cut (coupure), so I am asserting that the edge of the veil is such a cut across human flesh: cutting off its full presence, cutting it off from view, without cutting (into) the flesh itself, just grazing it. And the case of the full veil, the burkha that attempts to cover the whole body, head to toe? It is doomed to fail; a cut will always remain, albeit in the form of a slit for the eyes alone across which a mesh is drawn. This is to say that it will have an edge: not just its own edge (that is, the outer edge of the entire veil considered as a piece of cloth) but the edge it makes with the region of the eyes that are still allowed to be seen, however dimly (the mesh over the eyes is yet another kind of veil, a veil-within-a-veil, one composed of internal micro-edges). The edge will out: it will cut out a part of the body that would otherwise be fully concealed a part that is more than an indifferent piece and different from a part object. It is that privileged part which the eyes uniquely constitute that part from which the shuttered subject can look out and look back in that free movement of the glance which the body veiling, however extensive,
3
Derrida, ibid., p. 89.
186
Dr. Edward S. Casey
cannot completely inhibit. This is the submerged freedom of looking to which Fanon had pointed and which Sartre had described as the freedom of the tortured subject who casts a last accusing look at his torturers, as was the case with Joe Christmas in Faulkners Light in August: a look that as Faulkner avers will abide in their memories forever. Rather than saying with Derrida that the parergonal edge, as an outside, constitutes the inside as inside, thereby evacuating the inside of its own content and identity and rather than having recourse to material and technical media as the source of a Same that results from repetition (as Derrida also proposes) I assert that the edge of a veil (especially, but not only, a veil that surrounds a human body) valorizes what is inside the veil itself as at once unavailable ( or shall we say un-a-veilable?) to sight and touch and yet accessible to these two senses (perhaps more?). It is the edge that constitutes the accessibility to what has withdrawn as veiled. Edge to veil, veil to edge: the two together in the cut they share that may be without a final purpose but that is signifying (alluring, suggestive) as what is glimpsed at, and as, the edge of the veil itself. These cursory remarks themselves constitute a veil thrown around thought, cast over it like a mesh. I can only hope that at the edges of my words you have gained a glance at a rather different way to look at veils.
187
Contributing Artists
Contributing Artists: 'com()pass40n75w' and 'symchronaut' Constantina Zavitsanos Independent Artist, Philadelphia
symchronaut
188
Constantina Zavitsanos
symchronaut
189
com()pass40n75w
190
Constantina Zavitsanos
com()pass40n75w
191
The Brown Study1 eldritch Priest Carelton University Notes on the brown study: A Gloomy Contemplation on the Veils of Sense eldritch Priest I wrote a melody that I titled the brown study. There is nothing brown about the work, except that brown is a confusing colour and the character of this work is also confusing. But then again, a brown study really has little to do with colour and more to do with reverie. Importantly, the work is all melody, by which I mean, the brown study is only melody, and as such, is only an Idea. Let me explain. I consider this work more accurately a situation that invokes and semi-orchestrates what composer Michael Parsons termed hidden resources: putting potential difference to play, difference that characterizes the spontaneous heterogeneity that is immanent to and inheres to any group of individuals which in this case is a concert of musicians. As a single, non-repeating melodic line, the work proposes that each performer approach the melodic Idea as an instance of creative dissension to be worked out during the performance of the piece. That is, though the brown study is in some sense merely the same melody performed by a collection of individuals, the effect is of contemporaneous profiles or modes of a melodic Idea different expressions of a heterologous sense. the brown study is the same gloomy contemplation that expresses its musical sense through the veils of its notation and interpretive customs its sameness dreams the sound of multiple departures. So, the brown study is not about anything insofar as about means that it is meant to mean something.
1
The Brown Study, a piece composed by eldritch Priest, was performed the closing night of the conference by Eric Clark, James Moore, Aaron Meicht, Seth Meicht, Michael Ibrahim, Katie Porter, Devin Maxwell, Quentin Tolimieri, Harris Wulfson, and eldritch Priest Eds.
192
eldritch Priest The Brown Study
Instead, it may be that what the brown study is about is difference. It does not mean difference but rather it lingers about lingers around or in difference. The work then is on about what it does, and what it does, while it dallies in difference, is tune difference. Heidegger introduced the term Befindlechkeit to describe the experience in which one is said to find their self participating in the world; in other words, to have awareness of being situated and contextualized. We find our self when and where we are attuned to the cultural and historical, as well as material and ethical differences of a situation. The difference of this or that situation the mood (Stimmung) or mode is a condition immanent to the experience of being-in-the-world. It is to the specific configuration of difference that one is attuned, and to which one's being-t/here is expressed as being in a mood. But this formulation elides the processual and resounding nature of tuning. We are always about tuning into the difference(s) of our situatedness. That this tuning takes place before we think about it does not mean our eventual awareness of it is ever secure or fixed; rather, at best, finding ourselves is punctual and discrete. Thus, insofar as we ever find our self, we do so in the past, as an image of when we were and not as we are becoming. But to have a sense of what we are becoming rather than what we have been, requires that we be about tuning itself, which means that we cannot be about this or that thing but only about-the-between this and that, and that and that... I suppose that if the brown study is about anything, then it is about how we are about or among the echoes of a tuning. Tuning is concerned with an activity of sorts. Generally we speak about satisfaction of fit and getting on with our doings and meanings. When attuned we are engaged. However, tuning is a pragmatic and experimental affair and describes a straining or stretching impulse towards a theatre of sense. T he aboutness of a situation is thus not its meaning or interpretation but a resounding of the differences that comprise the situation. Nancy, in his book Listening, explains that the difference between cultures...the arts...the senses are the condition, and not just the limitations, of experience in general.2
2
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. Listening. Translated by
193
Here the mutual intricacy of these differences (ibid) constitutes the sense that obtains between the manifold registers of sensation, perception, culture, and meaning. Sense is configured disfigured and transfigured in resonance. The conditional sense of sense, characterized by the hollowing out of space and time in sound, is thus a matter of putting differences into play, of being-about an insurmountable and necessary even desirable distance between sound and sense.3 Difference then is what subsists between ones variously dogged or blessed capacity to actualize the Idea of the brown study. Similarly, difference obtains between ones varying capacity to not-read and not-know the music, or, if you will, to improvise and/or drift from the Idea's textual source to the sensuous contour of its becoming. It is thus by ones in-ability to accomplish the task of un-knowing the work that the brown study begins to differ. I'm not certain how to find myself. There is no firm ground. I am always wanting to prove to the sense of me what I am, that how I find myself, that how I affect a world is my self and not merely a flickering after-image. We make art to make a world and to evidence our being. Not only being, but a being that matters and belongs to this world. To affect a world in a determinate way is to satisfy a belonging by creating powerful effects. Yes, a will to power. The problem is that culture and history have already willed so many effects that we needn't exercise our own will in order to satisfy a sense of self, a sense of belonging. We can appropriate these historical and culturally willed effects as evidence of our affect in the world and be more or less content with them. But if the sense of me finds no satisfaction in these received effects, then I have no choice but invent new ways of affecting a world where I can distribute new effects and thereby reach new satisfactions of beingabout-a-world. the brown study is one of my affects. It distributes an affect among each of its performers and performances whose subsequent effects resound as events of selfCharlotte Mandell. (New York: Fordham University Press.), 11.
3
Nancy, 58.
194
eldritch Priest The Brown Study
expression. However, the brown study is a work that does not generate significant effects. Because its effects are distended and extremely slack (dispersed throughout the singular interpretations of the melody) they ultimately fail to satisfy any certain form of self-expression. (Or maybe they fail to satisfy a selfish form of self?) In this case, the way that I affect a world with a music whose effects cannot be specified, shows the affect of the brown study to be radically ambiguous. There are signs that I affect a world people engage with the brown study, they perform and listen to it, even love it and hate it but ultimately, there is little purchase for a self. The effects that express a selfs affect are too wide, too fast, and too loosely assembled to secure it. However, to the extent that there is a sense in the circulation of effects, yet a non-sense in their specificity or totality, the brown study does not affect a world so much as dream a world, a world of multiple ingress and divers selves who simultaneously profile myriad expressions of my affect. *** 1. To become any thing in the world is to affect a world that sustains its affects. Worlds are affected (influenced, brought forth, disposed); they are impingements and pretensions that belong to Anyone. To make a theatre for myself then is to affect what is not for me, but for Anyone. In a sense, to affect my own world is to infect Anyone's world with my being-t/here. As such, my beingin-the-world cannot not affect the situation in which I find myself. And so the world becomes my own as the effect of my affect. 2. But I often find my-self in the involvements determined by the roles of historical culture.4 However, the ways I interpret my self are always a product of the social world I have grown into,5 but I am never entirely convinced by them, for every articulation of my I with the They veils the singular affect of my being-t/here. Thus, in committing myself to these inherited roles, I may just as well not have been t/here: I may have been
4
Guignon, Charles. 1984. "Heidegger on Moods," in What is an Emotion? Edited by. R. C. Solomon and C. Calhoun. (New York: Oxford University Press.), 183.
5
Guignon, 183.
195
elsewhere, now/here, or otherwise; I may be Anyone. But here I am. My situation, neither fated nor determinate, is what crosses thresholds of self-expression to invent a self that I glean as an apparition, as the effect of being affected. 3. But I am not without my own influences. Being without affects could not be t/here: no One would be t/here. In a sense to become who I am I need to infect a situation with affects whose effects can express an affected self. Concerning Existenz, I am a virus: There is no self apart from a fundamental (de)coupling that affords me existence in virtue of a radical transcendence. My being-t/here is adumbrated by a viral becoming, a being-t/here expressive of a power to appropriate, even if that appropriation figures appears as a negation. Being is parasitic, is communicable, even when it vaccinates itself from nothingness. 4. I say that being appropriates, but really I mean we affect. I mean we because appropriation is a matter of making sense, and only we makes sense when we appropriates. Apart from the appropriating sense of we there is non-sense. But non-sense nevertheless continues to affect, only it doesn't matter. Affects only matter to a we who are unbalanced. Death is balanced. Life is crooked. To gain a footing we circulate our affects. We pollute each other with a desire for a world that would have us. We affect one another to makes sense of our being-t/here. In one and the same moment I affect you and you affect me. You find your self in the effect of being affected; I find my self in the effect of your being affect. And you pass this along...
Works cited Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper;
196

Art&amp;Phil 2008 Conference Proceedings

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Art&amp;Phil 2008 Conference Proceedings

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Veils

Dr. Megan Craig Opening Remarks

Dr. Megan Craig Opening Remarks

Dr. Megan Craig Opening Remarks

Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

Panel I: Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

Clay Matlin Barnett Newman and The Aesthetics of Totality

Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

Clay Matlin Barnett Newman and The Aesthetics of Totality

Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

Clay Matlin Barnett Newman and The Aesthetics of Totality

Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

Clay Matlin Barnett Newman and The Aesthetics of Totality

Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

Clay Matlin Barnett Newman and The Aesthetics of Totality

As was Rothkos intent with his three part paintings: the

Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

Clay Matlin Barnett Newman and The Aesthetics of Totality

Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

Clay Matlin Barnett Newman and The Aesthetics of Totality

Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

Clay Matlin Barnett Newman and The Aesthetics of Totality

Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

Clay Matlin Barnett Newman and The Aesthetics of Totality

Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

David Smucker The Question Concerning

Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

QCT 317 QCT 320 QCT 322

David Smucker The Question Concerning

QCT 311 QCT 333 9 QCT 333 10 QCT 335

Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

QCT 340 QCT 340 13 Stimson 2

David Smucker The Question Concerning

Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

David Smucker The Question Concerning

Stimson 14 Stimson 16 19 Stimson 10

Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

David Smucker The Question Concerning

Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

David Smucker The Question Concerning

Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

AL-ADHAN Michael Knierim Northern Illinois University

Michael Knierim Al-Adhan

Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

Michael Knierim Al-Adhan

I decided this would be the imagery I would appropriate for my work.

Antique Persian Carpet / Herati Pattern / Tehran

Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

Antique Wall Tile / Herati Pattern / Al Basra

Digital Montage / Herati Pattern

Michael Knierim Al-Adhan

Al-Adhan / Video Projected Image of Digital Montage Above

Decollate / Floor Installation UV Curable Inkjet Print on Tumbled Marble

Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

Michael Knierim Al-Adhan

Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

Michael Knierim Al-Adhan

Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

Isaac Fer Panel Response

Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

Isaac Fer Panel Response

Identity and Seeing Others

Max Razdow A New Narcissism

Art&Phil 2008 Conference Proceedings

Art&Phil 2008 Conference Proceedings