Jean Baudrillard and a Counter-Mannerist Art of Latent Excess
by Joseph Nechvatal
Something lies hidden behind the orgy
of images.
-Baudrillard, Aesthetic Illusion and
Disillusion
Reversibility, challenge, and
seduction are indestructible.
-Baudrillard, The Matrix Revisited
Criticism is only possible with distance,
but Jean Baudrillard proclaims that there is no possibility of distance anymore
in techno-mediacratic society. (Baudrillard, Simulations) In this paper I explore this by now
popular proclamation in terms of art and propose its refutation through what I
will call an art of latent excess. This art of latent excess will be demonstrated primarily with
the art found in the Abside (Apse) of the Grotte de Lascaux. I shall therefore
theorise issues of ancient art and its relationship to covert excess in the
Baudrillardian context of a world culture where information now controls the
flow and speed of consciousness.
To summarise, the
Baudrillardian position is that we live inside an increasingly global
simulation where the dominance of media-forms engender, homogenise, hallucinate
and drive communications via a rigidly methodical interactive network: what
Baudrillard calls the hyper-reality of simulation. Observations concerning the
sense of dissolving borders that once helped to separate the "true"
from the "false" and the "real" from the
"imaginary" were distinctly established in Jean Baudrillard's book
The Ecstasy of Communication. In it (and in other books) Baudrillard theorised the
media's effect on society in our environment and argued that we had entered a
post-modern era because, as he saw it, it is the production of images and
information, and not the production of material goods, that determined who held
power. In the post-modern mediascape, according to Baudrillard, the private
sphere of human intimacy is exteriorised and made categorical and thus
diaphanous. In The Ecstasy of Communication Baudrillard described this
diaphanous media effect as an instrument of obscenity, transparency and ecstasy.
Artists and art critics
influenced by Baudrillard, and I include myself here somewhat, tended to
elucidate a concern with images in the circulation system and were occupied
with their recoding and perverse reuse, now recycled into a commentarial
neo-conceptual art. Thus the Baudrillardian post-modern/neo-conceptual artist
worked with cultural givens, trying to manipulate them in various ways, such as
through pastiche, collage, and/or jarring juxtapositions. One ideal aim of the
Baudrillardian artist was to appropriate (select and manipulate) circulating
media signs in such a way as to elude being utterly dominated by them - even
while Baudrillard was claiming that in art there were no more criteria of
judgment. (Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, p. 14)
Concerning contemporary art, in his
infamous essay from 1996 The Conspiracy of Art Baudrillard maintains, that there is no
longer any possible critical judgment pertaining to art, only a genial
sharing of nullity (Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, p. 28), even while admitting that art
is not central to his concerns. That indeed he doesnt really identify with
it (while mourning its loss of transcendence (Baudrillard, The Conspiracy
of Art, p. 65)). But
even though he has stated that art is not his problem, he has gone ahead and
invented a concept to address this supposed state of non-judgmental affairs in
art: tranaesthetics.
(Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, p. 103)
Baudrillard's ecstasy of
communication theory anticipated this position towards art as it described post-modern
society of the 1970s and 1980s in terms of the presupposition that social
immersion in media simulation (what he called cyberblitz) adds up to a new zone of
experience. Baudrillard started rethinking media consumer theory in the light
of what he saw as the excesses of the technological information society. Baudrillard's previous works had
emphasised the shaping of the consumer society and how it provided a new world
of significance and value. In so doing he addressed issues of Marxism and the
general political economy. However, with his book The Mirror of Production Baudrillard broke with Marxism
and moved away from his previous critique of the political economy towards a
more systematic development of a theory of simulation; a radical semiurgy based on
what he saw as the persistent uninterrupted proliferation and dissemination of
signs. Thereafter he addressed media simulacra and the new information
technologies which produced what Baudrillard called both implosion and the previously recapped hyper-reality. These hyper-real implosive
circumstances developed for Baudrillard into what constitutes a new post-modern
world which, in Baudrillard's theorising, obliterated the boundaries,
categories and values of the previous non-hyper-real forms of industrial
society while establishing new forms of social organisation and new forms of
experiences. He viewed virtual reality as a simple extenuation and perfection
of this implosive hyper-reality while claiming that the image can no longer
imagine the real because it is the real and that images are virtual reality.
(Baurdillard, The Conspiracy of Art, p. 120) Which is not at all the case, if one
knows what virtual reality actually is (i.e., immersion in the image-sound).
We are, Baudrillard claimed, in a new
hyper-real era in which the new technologies of media, cybernetic models,
virtual systems, computer networks, and information processing supplant
industrial production and the political economy as the organising synthesis/principle
of society. Such a self-producing, self-regulating and self-referencing
principle of total-hyper-reality (and its feeling of closure) was the essence
of Baudrillard's philosophical propositions; propositions which I see in over
totalising terms and thus remain somewhat indifferent to them. Indeed, for
me, Baudrillard's philosophy seems to proclaim an almost romantic gesamt
resolution which is all-embracing in its use of the philosophical notion of a
cyberblitz zeitgeist
which envelopes (supposedly) all aspects of our lives. I will demonstrate below
how this can be refuted through a counter-mannerist art of latent excess.
Baudrillard submits, among other things,
that the intrinsic objective of simulacra is to bring forward a malleable (but
controllable) universal modus operandi bent on world domination through electronic media
totalisation (the feedback-looped totality of computer terminals and television
screens). For Baudrillard the computer and television screen are both depthless
and infinite, a superficial abyss and a hypnotic transparency which simulates
and denies space at the same time. As he wrote in Simulations, the screen offers "an aesthetics
of the hyper-real, a thrill of vertiginous and phoney exactitude, a thrill of
alienation and magnification, of distortion in scale, of excessive
transparency...". (Baudrillard, Simulations, p. 50)
Of course, for Baudrillard the
simulacra-screen-world (which he calls the perfect crime) is never perfect and
the artist is the one who leaves traces of imperfection. (Baudrillard, The
Perfect Crime, p. 1) So
when Baudrillard described the hyper-real condition as a transformation in
which the code of production becomes the primary social determinant, he makes
an important provocative point for art as he focused artists concentration on
media, simulation, new technologies, and cybernetics. Among Baudrillard's most
provocative assertions for art are his reflections on the role of the media in
forming the post-modern world and our place within it. Baudrillard therefore
puts forth a paradigmatic model of the media as an all-over, engulfing,
omni-present, totalising agent. He theorises that such a process leads to both a collapse of
meaning and the destruction of distinctions between media and reality. In a
society presumably saturated with media messages; information and meaning implode into pure effect without content or
meaning.
This, if solely true, would set the
conditions for the production of exclusively, in his terms, null (worthless) art. Happily it is only
slightly true, as sweeping generalizations of what contemporary artist do and
mean dont hold - they vary greatly. There is a gradational scale here of which
Baudrillard either is unaware or ignores. At the root of Baudrillards
generalizations lay his overly respectful estimation of the work of Andy Warhol
(1928-1987), who he claims freed us from aesthetics and art. (Baudrillard, The
Conspiracy of Art, p.
44)
Obviously in some cases he is correct,
that contemporary art has become null through derivative repetition - most
notably with the reception of kitsch into the serious art world best
exemplified by the work of Jeff Koons, of whom Baudrillard writes that it is
impossible to know whether he is stupid or not, whether he can distinguish the
kitsch from the original, the true from the false (implying that there is such
a thing as a true original if he was not being merely ironic here). It is
impossible to tell. (Baudrillard, Cool Memories IV, p. 92)
But such hyperbole serves him poorly when
he generalizes nullity as a general state of affairs in contemporary art. There
is a worthwhile - even critical - possibility to art (both ancient and
contemporary) which I will demonstrate in this paper. Such a hyperbolical error
is understandable however because Baudrillard himself tends to use a model of
the media as a black-hole that absorbs all information contents into a
situation which no longer communicates purposeful messages. As content implodes
into appearance, presumably the medium and the real are now seen in an
indistinct totalised pattern, from which there is no critical distance from which to oppose (or even surmise
one would think) it. Dada-Surrealist techniques of uncertainty, irony, mockery
and humour, all of which downplay grandiloquent reason - and particularly Max
Ernst's (1891-1976) Dada concept of "systematic displacement"; a
technique which is concerned with the liberation of individual signs from their
utilitarian purpose - are discounted as prototypes here; which is not as one
might have hoped and expected after reading Baudrillard in The Transparency
of Evil say that
"...so long as there is a dysfunction in a system, a departure from known
laws governing its operation, there is always the prospect of transcending the
problem." (Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, p. 32)
Max Ernst, Hydrometric
Demonstration of Killing by Temperature, 1920
Max Ernst, Sambesiland, 1921, photographic enlargement
of photomontage with ink mounted on paperboard, 6 13/16 x 9 1/8".
Indeed in asserting the ascendancy of
Andy Warhols work over that of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and the Dadaists
(Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, pp. 76-77) Baudrillard misses the authentic, original
(first-generation) Dada-Surrealist impulse of opposition to unmitigated
representation. For example, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), in his essay on the
Surrealists, notes how their emphasis on excess and ecstatic encounters creates
an opposition to the domain of purpose through an ecstatic excess which
dissolves away the idea of the self as determined by controlling utilitarian
purpose. (Benjamin, Reflections, p. 161) This is all-important to Benjamin for, writing in 1929,
the aspect of the Surrealist movement which he saw as embodying its principal
worth, was Surrealism's place in the political awareness and the struggle of
socialist resistance against the rising threat of the irrational ideology of
fascism. The dialectical step beyond intoxication (which is reached first by
entering into it) (Benjamin, Reflections, p.138) is the beginning of a new realm of purposes, now
directed toward the revolutionary transformation of an irrational social
reality which insists on calling itself rational.
By ignoring such basic Dadaist
dysfunctional strategies (by over-valuating Warhols own appropriation of them
via Duchamp), Baudrillard is able to claim rather that the masses can only
incorporate media content, thereby neutralising meaning by demanding and
obtaining more and more irrational self-contradictory spectacle/entertainment,
thus further eroding the boundary between the media and the real. All modes of representation collapse
into a realm neither real nor imaginary, but simulatory.
Perhaps for the masses this is an
accurate analysis (and a stopping point), but for an artist interested in
excess this is where things only start to become active. By ignoring the
potential impact of the Dada-Surrealist metaphoric procedures of juxtaposition
and overlapping which pertain to the liberation of the meaning of signs,
Baudrillard, in my view, misses the precision with which they remove from the
image-world the closed familiarity of his absolute and leave information suspended in a
plenum (vacuum state) of consciousness. The Les Transparence series of transparency paintings from the
late 1920s of Dada painter Francis
Picabia (1879-1953) - with their extensive use of simultaneity - are a good
example of this visual vacuum state; and an important precedent to a
contemporary dcadent art of latent excess. When
visual information is frustratingly suspended,
there is only the slightest difference between an intentional and an
involuntary transcendence of reality. Such a collapse of utilitarian
consciousness (combined with the pursuit of inexactitude) may create the effect
of a unique post-representational excess in our mental-perceptual circuitry.
Francis Picabia.
Hera. c.
1929. Oil on cardboard. 105 x 75 cm.
As we have seen, for Baudrillard, media,
information and communications neutralise signification by encompassing
spectators in a glossy media-immersion, which he defines in terms of an inert
absorption of images which resist meaning, rather than an active
processing/production of significance. This, I wish to point out again, is
quite a totalising generalisation. In making such a sweeping statement,
Baudrillard reversed the propositions found in Marshall McLuhan's books The
Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, and The Medium is the Massage; all of which perceived media as
extensions and exteriorisations of our human powers even while questioning the
relationship between medium and content. By contrast, Baudrillard argued that humanity
is immersed in the media, engulfed by it and consequently overpowered and
overwhelmed by its excessive omni-present constrains.
Baudrillard's claims follow, assuredly,
Walter Benjamin's examination of photography and film in his famous essay The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and particularly Benjamin's
expos of art's plight in relationship to mechanical reproduction. (Benjamin, Illuminations) As is well acknowledged, according to
Benjamin, art lost its original aura and thus became obliged to relinquish its claims to
exceptionality as a form of human endeavour capable of offering alternative
(and ostensibly superior) experiences and models for better being. Benjamin
brought into critical discourse an awareness that widespread integrated changes
in technological conditions can affect the accumulated consciousness and
trigger prevalent changes in cultural norms as he specifically analysed how
photo-mechanical technology intervenes in delineating existence. He understood
that through the mediation of machines, the inherent realm can be contorted and
prejudiced, thus changing our awareness of it.
However in post-modern society, with its
electronic and digital simulacra, there is no longer a spent nostalgia for
natural semblance and Warholian reproducibility becomes the fundamental logic
and code of the information society.
Although I agree with Baudrillard when he
reiterates that (in general) most visual information is accepted by society
rather passively, in my view, his way of conceiving of life as passive
homogeneity is itself a form of totalist idealisation, however supposedly
critical or negative its ubiquitous aggregates propound to be. This is evident
in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign when Baudrillard writes, "...the
whole environment becomes a signifier...". (Baudrillard, For a Critique
of the Political Economy of the Sign, p. 186) Following on, he evinces the conquest of
functionalisation and portrays post-modern society as one of "total
control" and "total organisation" in which functionalised
aesthetics are incorporated in the very cybernetic organisation of society.
(Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, p. 186) All dichotomies between appearance and reality, surface and
depth, life and art, collapse into a functionalised, integrated, and self-reproducing
gesamt universe of pass simulacra models and codes.
In contrast, I wish to hypothesize and
demonstrate here a counter-mannerist art of latent excess which re-establishes
a critical distance which Baudrillard pessimistically claims no longer exists
but an ambiguous private critical distance: a distance achieved through the
challenge of (and disparity between) pleasurable frustration. This is an art that demands of society an active
visualizing participation in private interpretations - and thus is a legitimate
metaphor for contemporary art as a form of simulation-shattering engagement.
But this is not an anti-Baudrillard art (well it is only if you take seriously
his end-of-art implications, which I do not) but rather a post-Baudrillardian
one, in that I accept his point that numerous people today dwell (but not
totally) in the expanse of infotainment, with its potential instantaneous
non-separability and ubiquity. But I want then to ask just what can art's
contribution be to the enlargement of understanding of our conspicuously
excessive Western society? I am certain that it need not be confined to what
Baudrillard says its role is now; asserting the insignificance and
meaninglessness of a society already null and void. (Baudrillard, The
Conspiracy of Art, p. 27) Yes, Baudrillard
claims that art has no role to play (that art is irreverent) when he writes
that the artistic object in this system loses its status as an artistic sign,
since this is now the role of all objects. The cynical smile of American Pop
Art (Warhol) is one of the obligatory signs of consumption: it no longer indicates a humor, a critical
distance .," (Baudrillard, Pop--An
Art of Consumption, p. 44).
So I will argue the contrary: that a post-pop art is
indispensable to us by demonstrating below how an art of counter-mannerist
latent excess (produced in the Baudrillardian milieu of image superabundance
and information proliferation) is an art that can problematise the pop
simulacra and hence enliven us to the privateness - and unique separateness -
of the human condition in lieu of the fabulously constructed social spectacle
which engulfs and (supposedly) controls us. This private separateness offers us
a personal critical distance (gap), and thus another perspective on (and from)
the given social simulacra.
Such an art of latent excess then may
provide us with two essential aspects relevant to our lives. First, it can
provide a private context in which to suitably understand our simulacra
situation. Secondly (but more importantly) it may then undermine this
understanding of the simulacra by overwhelming our immersion in the customary
simulacra along with our own prudent pose as observer and judge. Through the
destructive-creative bacchanalia at the root of an art of latent excess we are
prodded to lose our position of detached observer as such an art demands our
engaged intellectual and perceptual production.
For me at least then, post-pop art, when
latently excessive in its own right, is capable of functioning, paradoxically,
by nurturing in us a sense of polysemic uniqueness and of individuality brought
about through a counter-mannerist style of reproducibility (ever more circuitous, excessive and dcadent); a style which
takes us from the state of the social to the state of the secret
distinguishable I, by overloading ideological representation to a point where
it becomes non-representational. It is this non-representational
counter-mannerist representation which
breaks us out of the fascination and complicity with pop art and the mass media
mode of communication. Thus the repartie
to Baudrillard's view of media-bathed society is an aesthetic lan constituted through private superabundance.
Perhaps it is relevant here to
remember that Mannerism (generally the art of the period of Late-Renaissance
circa 1530-1600) was an aesthetic movement that valued highly refined
gracefulness and elegance; a beautiful maniera (style) from which Mannerism
takes its name. The term usually means an art in which lavish attention is paid
to stylisation and to the superficialities of semblance. This is obviously a
very Baudrillardian state.
An example of the
counter-mannerist style from the period is the Grotesque, which is deliberately
anti-actual, often including elaborate depictions of multiple figures bound in
tendrils. The Grotesque (in Italian Grottosesco) became an arabesque style of all-over decoration based
on a linked mle of fantastic, diminutive figures deriving from Roman mural
and vault decoration which had been unearthed during the Renaissance (such as
at the Golden House of Nero); mural decorations which themselves suggested
ancient expressions of religio-sexual inter-penetrability. This fanciful
imagery involved mixing animal, human, and plant forms together. First revived
in the Renaissance by the school of Raphal Sanzio (1483-1520) in Rome, the
Grotesque quickly came into fashion in 16th-century Italy and subsequently
became popular throughout Europe.
typical
anonymous 16th century Grotesque design
Interior decorators at the time
esteemed the style inasmuch as it was suitably hoary in derivation, whimsical
and playfully erotic, and, most importantly capable, due to its all-over field
approach, of fitting any required expanse because it had no solitary subject-matter
and hence no central focus.
Counter-mannerist style
represented the reversal of mannerist rationality by introducing into the order
of the simulation an art dedicated to the irrational realm of the de-simulated
orb in which rationalist rules need not apply. It uses the excessive all-over
field typical of the classic work of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956).
Jackson Pollock painting
An Art of Latent Excess
So what is an art of latent excess? It is
an art that puts forth an aesthetic lan of superabundance which
reconceptualises art in terms of simulation so as to grant art an unbridled
zone free of the good manners of simple simulations. However, this character
of de-simulated openness, which an inception of the art of latent excess
assumes, demands that we seek a liberation from custom, doctrine and influence,
and that we grasp again the autonomy and priority of art as a special type of
excessive ideological activity.
The acknowledged probing at the outer
limits of recognisable representation, the excited all-over fullness and
fervour of this syncretistic probe, isn't a failing of communications within
excessive terms then; it is its subject. Such a copious realisation is insinuated through
overloaded/excessive stimulus inasmuch as latent excess can represent every
integrated meaning conceivable, for in the art of excess the focal point is
never circumscripted. The fusion of elements within latent excess are not, by
definition, passively received and accepted. By nature of its conflicting
excessive presentation, information is to some degree psychologically embedded
and thus withheld even as it is inexorably displayed all at once to the limited
nature of our human perceptive competence. Thus an art of latent excess takes
us away from the habitual focus of the picturesque and potentially liberates us
inwardly from the infringements stemming from the deluge of mass-media images -
and so stimulates us to assess anew the calibre of any such infringement. Now
we must interrogate the validity of our sense of simple simulations with there
frequent binary image oppositions. Hence it is in the amity felt with the
excessive ground that we may feel a sensuous liberation from ideological
monotony and cultural prudery.
A perfect example
of the art of latent excess was created by the anonymous collective of skilled
artists in the Abside (Apse) of the Grotte de Lascaux. The Apse is a
roundish, semi-spherical, penumbra-like chamber (like those adjacent to
romanesque basiliques) approximately 4.5 metres in diameter (about 5 yards)
covered on every wall surface (including the ceiling) with thousands of
entangled, overlapping, engraved drawings (Leroi-Gourhan, The Art of
Prehistoric Man in Western Europe, p. 315) for which, on request, I received a
very unique privilege of seeing, though far too briefly.
diagram
of Lascaux
detail
from the Abside
The ceiling of the Apse of Lascaux (which ranges
from 1.6 up to 2.7 metres high (about 5.2 to 8.9 feet) as measured from the
original floor height) is so completely and richly bedecked with such
engravings that it indicates that the prehistoric people who executed them
first constructed a scaffold to do so. (Ruspoli, The Cave of Lascaux: The
Final Photographic Record, pp. 146-147) This indicates to me that the Apse was an important
and sacred part of the cave and indeed Ruspoli calls it the "strongest,
most richly symbolic, most mysterious and most sacred" of all the inner
spaces which make up Lascaux. (Ruspoli, The Cave of Lascaux: The Final
Photographic Record, p. 146)
Generally the Apse
however has been ignored by art theoreticians (and there is only one widely
published scholarly investigation of it per se, by Denis Vialou in Arlette
Leroi-Gourhan's Lascaux Inconnu even though Abb Glory spent several years
trying to decipher this inextricable chamber) as nowhere is the eye permitted
to linger over any detail (even though it holds an immense 2.5 metre engraving
(8.2 foot) in its midst). Rather, the gaze is urged on by an all-inclusive
flood of taunting sublimated optic information in need of visual stamina.
Nevertheless, the Apse holds a semi-legible "comprehensive index" of
all of the forms of representation found scattered throughout the entire cave,
thus making up what Mario Ruspoli calls Lascaux's seductive "vritable corpus"
(real body). (Ruspoli, The Cave of Lascaux: The Final Photographic Record, p. 147)
Of it the libertine writer, paleologist,
archivist, and radical thinker Georges Bataille
(1897-1962) said that it was one of the most remarkable chambers in the cave
but that one is ultimately disappointed by it. (Bataille, Oeuvres
Completes: Lascaux: La Naissance de l'Art, p. 58-59)) I was not
disappointed however. Indeed, what pleased and fascinated me about the Apse was
exactly its cryptic and foreboding over-all hyper-totalising iconographic
character granted by its boundless, palimpsestesque, wall-paper-like image
explosion (what Bataille called its fouillis) of overlapping near non-photo-reproducible stockpiled
drawings from which, when sustained visual attention is maintained, unexpected
configurations visually emerge. Here animals are superimposed in chaotic
discourse, some fully and carefully rendered, others unfulfilled and left open
to penetration by the environment, all commingled with an "extraordinary
confused jumble" (Leroi-Gourhan, The Art of Prehistoric Man in Western
Europe, p. 315) of lines including,
remarkably, the sole claviform sign in the Prigord and, even more remarkably,
Lascaux's only reindeer, an animal which existed in plenitude during the period
of the adornment of Lascaux. Its extensive use of superimposed
multiple-operative optic perception (optic perception unifies objects in a spatial continuum) presents the
viewer with no single point of reference, no orientation, no top, no bottom, no
left, no right, and no separate parts to its whole. Rather it offers a
general, unified visual effect typical of what is called sfumato composition; a smoky technique
used for decreasing the separating dramatic force and physical presence of
isolated figures in a work of art by immersing them in a fumey,
semi-imperturbable pose. Sfumato is the seductive,
subtle, smoothly imperceptible, gradation of dark colors which approaches a
smoggy unity useful in the creation of psychological atmospheric effects. Through
sfumato, complimentary contrasts (contrapposto) find a unity previously
absent and it is this unity that lends latent excess visualization its most
significant self-alternative to hegemonic simulation. This is so as sfumato
invites and promotes an expanded, diaphanous, dilated focus achieved as a
matter of personal intuition and hence is removed from direct rational
knowledge and technical manoeuvres. With sfumato we see the seeds of a visual
counter-tradition in opposition to the crisp, detached, geometricised optics of
clean simulation. This oppositional optic practice of sfumato visualisation,
which brings receptive vision to a state of sympathetic languor, was taught by
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) to his students in his Treatise on Painting - where he encouraged languid
attention to the ambiguous grubbiness of cracks and smudges on decrepit walls
which may suggest faces and forms to the viewer in order to aid artistic
imaginative and visionary ability. Thus sfumato (latent) effects offer another
type of management of vision and is an important element in the definition of
latent excess.
I believe this vision
corresponds to what Baudrillard speaks of as a recovering of radical illusion
where we liberate ourselves from the attachment to images by paying attention
to the secret way images are linked and bound together. (Baudrillard, The
Conspiracy of Art,
p. 127). Of this connectivity Baudrillard says, art has to enter into the
intimacy of this process. (Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, p. 127).
As a result of the
seductive sfumato
excess encountered in the Apse, I had the peculiar
feeling of being flooded over by a cloud-like image cesspool of deep meanings
which I could not uncode. It was as if I was in the midst of a model of the
Bohm/Pribram universe as implicate pattern zapping dada. As such it seemed an
imposition onto Paleolithic culture of the very thing that should unstabilise
it: nihilism. Nihilism in that it is no longer a matter of heterogeneous
figuration, but of scanning a homospatial criss-crossing and oscillating battle
scene between interwoven figures, immersed in their ideational ground with
which they have merged in a deliberate process of constitutional
defigurisation. There is no longer any space outside of the figures to define
them, and hence, in a mental reversal, space is immersed in the overlapping
figures. The nihilistic cancellation at work here then seemed to be an attempt
to deny the validity of subject/object understanding and to deny that any
visual erudition of anything whatsoever is possible, in the interests of
omnijective introspection. Here flesh itself is sensed as viractual (*): dancing on a clock.
Bataille said that
what was curious about the Apse was that the artists abandoned their oeuvre to
the next to come after them in an ant-like activity, yet they did not engrave
their figures with less conviction or care. (Bataille, Oeuvres Completes: Lascaux:
La Naissance de l'Art, p. 59) Obviously the artists here did not
work from a life model but from the overlapping introspective depths of their
visual memories. Indeed likewise, the Apse seems to call upon the viewer to
construct a mnemonic psychological interpretation of it based on its tightly
woven, intricate abundance, i.e., its latent excess. But even after introspectively
synthesising the overlapping imploded individual parts into a mnemonic coherent
whole, the Apse retained for me a provocative discord and irritation which
tantalised my mind farther towards a withheld (perhaps forgotten) seemingly
encoded signification. But as our subconscious is energised by sustained desire
that which I sensed to be both obscure and overabundant about the Apse merged
into a hybrid interpretation which combined conflicting ideas about abundance
and nihilism into an grore complex chunk of de-simulated information which I
then viewed as a single meta-nihilistic mega-symbol. This experience, I
propose, reflects and confirms what Baudrillard, I suspect, really feels about
the potentiality of art when he says: In art and this applies to
contemporary art as well as classical art there is a dual postulate, and
therefore a dual strategy. An impulse to annihilate, to erase all traces of the
world and reality, and the contrary resistance to that impulse. (Baudrillard, The
Conspiracy of Art, p. 118)
With this
meta-nihilistic mega-symbol's boundlessness, the Apse appeared to me as the
most sacred of the cave's sacred places. Certainly easy conceptions of one
beautiful being as distinguished from another (in specificity) are denied and
an aberrant invalidation takes place where previous concepts of the finite and
the infinite implode (as do concepts of the voluminous and the vacuous) into a
unified field of multiple-reproductive disembodied existences. Here, laid out
before my eyes, was what Baudrillard calls the problem of materializing a
nothingness at the limits of nothingness - a place to trace the edge of
emptiness at the limits of emptiness, to trace the filigree of emptiness.
(Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, p. 115)
This then is a
sacred/sexual place of singular iconoclastic intrascoping and distant
transformation (by reason of its creative virtuality and anticipated
self-cancellation) as its beautiful representational anti-depictions are
neither here nor there but overlap. Clearly what I am saying about the Apse
runs counter to the heart of positivism, a paradigm under which we continue to
toil unconsciously, as the positivist ideal is a search for rational,
systematic thought where images can be broken down, explored, understood, and
explained. Here in the Apse we seem to have encountered an irrational
systematicism that seems to critique reason, a systematic critique that
predates (and in some places overlaps) the modern positivist attitude towards
sensation. Here we are inside of a homospatial site of overrunning flux and of
hybridisation; a place for the rejection of realism and it's values (or at
least a place to save oneself from the futile and finally unreasonable claims
of dogmatic simulation and rationalism). The Apse then represents a thrusting
off of optic and mental boundaries and thus is a complex mirroring of our own
fleeting impressions which constitute the movement of our consciousness; the
perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves. Here we are not static, and we
have no use for reductive concepts of simulation, but we are inside a
de-simulating space that carries it's own nihilistic opposite within itself.
Particularly dense
with overlapping imagery is the part of the Apse called the Absidiole, a small,
niche-like hollow (like the semi-spherical small niches which house holy relics
attached to the apse in romanesque basiliques) just in front of the drop into
the Pit. Here one can ostensibly participate in a play of self-tutorial
multiple-immersions into latent excess as one stands in the Absidiole inside of
the Apse which is located inside the groin of the cave itself and
introspectively view through sublimated excess an explication of the curved
inner-logic of de-simulation itself: encased and withheld excess. Assuredly vision
here is no longer the controlling power over animals in nature (or signs of
them), but on the contrary, vision itself is engulfed in what Baudrillard calls a return to
the womb of the appearance of things where they merely state their presence,
albeit in multiple forms, multiplied by the specter of metamorphoses.
(Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, p. 128)
The motivational
force which quickens the Apse then seems to be a desire to undermine perpetual
vision and replace it with another type of impregnable and latent vision, or at
least to suggest that there may be other types of vision possible. Its
nihilistic excess serves the positive function of questioning the validity of
the customary appearance of things and to make connective understanding
inextricably felt.
Indeed the basic
function of the visual turbulence of the Apse, from the connective perspective,
is to precisely shake our conviction that our visual thinking is sound and to
hold any such assured convictions, rather, in suspension. Hence it is only
routine that formal issues (where consciousness may be said to be
self-referential and self-sufficient) would arise over any humanist narrative
ethic, as the Apse is more concerned with a recycling of psychological energy than
with optically correct (in Virilio's terms) astuteness. Hence, freed from
representational obligations, dark chaotic powers of consciousness are
unleashed via the Apse's repressed excessive exuberance.
In the Apse the
level of evasive mono-complexity of the fouillis (given the uniform sfumato
tonality in which the one sombre value dominates the complex visual arena) also
challenges preconceptions of legibility based on our ability to identify and
locate figures in their ground, and this made me wonder if the visualisation
chamber I was in was not perhaps a training spot for the hunters to improve
their discerning vision, so as to aid them in visually discovering animals from
within their tangled natural camouflage. But also on scanning the systematic, intricate
and perplexing inert spread of the Apse, one cannot but sense that in some way
one is looking at a representation of the metaphysics of orgasm and death, and
that by absorbing its visual code one was looking sex/death in the face. To be,
or not to be: that is the paradigmatic choice when visualising form into and
out of existence when examining the elusive alternatives made manifest here.
Being, beings, or nothingness: all are tentative conditions of resolution (or
forestalled resolution) here; all spout their own ontological/neurological
preferences.
In this purging
atmosphere of imploded meta-nihilistic sacrilege, spontaneous reflexes only go
so far and reflection necessarily takes over in search of an expansive meaning.
Yes, nihilistic amanuensis and jubilant Baudrillard catastrophic implosion are
here, not only in how this staggering image-dump can be read, but also in terms
of how its creation entailed the task of disrespecting the care with which
marks achieve representational artistry in an apparent desire to achieve and
contemplate radical negation. This scouring of assertive vision must have been
deemed necessary only precisely here, as in the other galleries, very often,
superimposed images respected the marks previous laid down and sensitively
incorporated them into the ensuing hybrid super-impositional compositions. By
ransacking representational vision so, the Apse paradoxically partakes in the
category typical of major art (regardless of its marginal standing within the
cave and within Prehistory) as it seemingly rejects the figurative tradition in
order to reinvent it as entrancing meta-(or supra)-representation. Thus it is
major in the way that John Cage's musical composition/non-composition 4'33" is in forcing us
to astutely consider silence as sound. And as such it is a meditation on
fullness and emptiness: on the emptiness of fullness and the fullness of
emptiness. And this is its key latent/excessive exemplary value.
Archaeologists are
continuously undertaking to understand the marks left here from this
inaccessible epoch as they analyse its dishevelled iconography in hopes of
ascertaining why this tangled impulse was consummated. Most do not see however
that the Apse defies the common assumption that visual art is associative, that
it is based on the human mental capability to make one thing stand for and
symbolise another, in agreement with society. The usual assumption is that
art-marks on a surface denote content, not just to the mark-maker but to others
as well. All we know for sure
about the abstract constitution of the Apse is that its dynamic cluster of
representational/anti-representational operations (and the
meta-nihilistic/mega-symbol boundlessness which it contains in its kitty) were
reworked over the span of many centuries. However by no means do all of the
superimposed figures date from different times, thus their overlapping is not a
simplistic function of time nor is it for lack of space. Thus its abstract
intentionality assumes a certain degree of lucidity.
If the Apse
functioned as a mnemonic devise, or as a site of hegemonious non-being severed
from any practical purpose, we shall never know. But it is my hypothesis that
the Apse chamber functioned as a cognitive dissonance visualisation field and
defocal virtualising area which adjusted-up the expanding and dilating eye/mind
to the awareness of conflicting, non-rational and de-simulatory realities
involving sex and death through the use of deeply creative virtual
visualizations. This is a creation of critical detachment by starring collapsed
distance down - and the essence of what I have been calling an art of latent
excess.
This personal
explanation for the dark excess of the Apse cannot be proven, nor, I think,
disproven and thus it remains a moot point, however fascinating. Though
obviously imbued with meaning, we unfortunately are unlikely ever to know the
true meaning or function of the image-space of the Apse (or the other marks of
the Magdalenian people for that matter). What I know though, with certainty, is
how the latent amplitude of the Apse operated on me, and what it did was to
collapse the inherited meaning of human image making into a more inclusive and
available sense of excessive ebullition and into a dynamic feeling of wanton
sexual climax. The shrouded scatter stirred my desire to seemingly unfold and
deliver forth a sanctioned libidinous pathos where forms of salacious creative
ferment and levels of self-indulgence are concurrent. From this state of
floridity it might be possible to further define latent excessive states of art
consciousness as those which contain a condition in which reality is perceived
as consisting of more than that which everyday vision brings to light. Such
aesthetic states bypass discursive counterintuitive processes and confer a
greater scope to the Baudrillardian vision.
What additionally fascinates is that this fine jumble of delicate lines, some beautifully representational and others again not, corresponded to the prolonged series of greyish drawing with which I began my carrier as an artist some twenty years ago: drawings which had partially been conceived of as a shadow of our nervous system's meshed neural signals mingling with nuclear catastrophe.
Joseph Nechvatal Black Spring 1984 graphite on paper 11x14
Joseph
Nechvatal Gods of Politics 1984 graphite on paper 14x11
So we see that by staring a collapse of
signs and the destruction of distinctions in the eye (so to speak), banal
depictions of Baudrillardian ideological content are flawed. Flawed for they
close the spectator and the creator off into ascertainable parcels of restricted
implications which preclude the concept of freedom of imagination. To get this
feeling in an art of latent excess there must be a subliminal infinity about
the visual-conceptual field, an overloaded incompleteness which lures us to the
inspiration of individual sovereignty; the idea of our own unclear and denuded
realm.
An art of latent excess refutes then the
accustomed Baudrillardian platitudes of non-judgmentality along with its claims
for the impossibility of critical distance. It is my contention that it is in
this inventive condition of privately excessive formlessness that we can
ascertain the delimitation of Baudrillardian mass-pop media ideology and the
resultant implications of that cognizance. Here then, in singular but active
impulsive privacy, is the distance Baudrillard claims no longer exists for
critique.
Such a self-referential private
interpretive activity overwhelms illusionist trompe-l'oeil seduction with a
fresh formalism (formalism rigorously stresses attention to formational principles)
thereby exceeding and soiling simulations transparency - spoiling its
presentation of an illusionistic faux world as real. In this sense it confirms
what Baudrillard claims art is about, however: an inventing another scene;
inventing something other than reality. () The purpose of art is to invent a
whole other scene. (Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, p. 77)
Such an art of private latent excess
never offers us conventions then. Rather such an art is like an amorphous
fertile seedbed that undermines the hitherto clear distinctions falsely made
between simulacra and the imagination by way of simultaneously negating and
spontaneously recombining. Here semblance and space are always already
connected within a dark and obscure excessive orb of visual noise as the art of
latent excess negates representations (and all they imply) - thereby affirming
a consciously divergent and spontaneous way to see and judge. Here is what I
believe Baudrillard calls the blind spot of singularity the spot where form
appears and simultaneously falls apart. (Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, p. 71)
An art of latent excess stands then in defiance of the
limits of ordinary perception and representational simulacra. Thus it is (or
can be) about the opposition between the daily work-day and the
transgressive/ecstatic moment. In a sense it attempts to set up a stable form
of ecstatic transgression where one can go back and forth at will via
dissimulation.
I should say
that most all of my ideas on this subject stemmed from the reading of Georges
Bataille's book Visions of Excess (which appeared in English translation in 1985) after which I
began to experiment with (and analysis through my artwork) various artistic
approaches towards latent excess. In the terms Bataille proposes, any
restricted economy, any sealed arrangement (such as an image, an identity, a
concept, or a simulation) produces more than it can account for, hence it will
inevitably be fractured by its own unacknowledged excess, and in seeking to
maintain itself, will, against its own rationalised logic, crave rupture,
expenditure, and loss.
(*) The viractual is my
own term for the merging of the virtual with the corporeal (the actual).
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Forthcoming in the International
Journal of Baudrillard Studies,
Volume 3, Number 2
http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/