In 2002 Jean Baudrillard first published a transcript of his lectures on ‘The Spirit of Terrorism.’ It is an ontological deconstruction of a sensitive and contentious subject; not least the chapter which deals explicitally with the collapse of the World Trade Centre on 9/11. The idealism inherant in the vision was what was attacked, the destruction of concrete and lose of life was a by product. Read the rest of this entry »
A window points to depth
A wall reflects and absorbs flatness
All thats in the frame passes before being reached
All ascribed to the crumbling surface is soaked up in a dry mouth
Idealism has depth
Realism has flatness
The place is flat
The Journey has depth
Love is depth and desire it flatness Read the rest of this entry »
I have been browsing through a series of old family photographs recently. Each has a different impact. Here I am with my two elder sisters in America, on a trip to Dsiney Land. i believe I am about five.
This is one of a few photographs which fills me with a certain melancholy. My instinct is to link this to some simplisitc phycological cause; perhaps the imminant divorce of my parents, the last ties to the nucelar family of my early childhood. In reality this does not feel honest, the sadness is both more poigniant and more ambiguous than that. Read the rest of this entry »
Tragedy is not singular. Each artform has its own form of tragedy, as does life itself. Lifes tragedy is obvious, the inevitability of death as a consequence of birth.
Narrative, literary, tragedy is the closest to this. Moving through time and space it necessitates plot. The tragedy in narrative is always tied up in cause and effect. What will happen is an inevitable consequence of what is happening, the end is defined by the start.
Photographic tragedy is different. The photograph is about a moment in reality which had been. Its static nature only focus our attention on the inevitable death of the moment recorded. It is not held in eternity but killed and embalmed. Photography is never about idealism but the depressing realism, the shadow of reality. Its oppositions are tragic reminders of lifes tragic transcience. Read the rest of this entry »
Everything divides into opposites
It all decomposes into mapable coordinates
Composed artificially for need of idealism
These constructs are ascribed to our particular psyche
The imprint of a repetitive history
Never intrinsic but forcing its way beneath the skin
The vertical is male Read the rest of this entry »
Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ is the most famous painting in the Western world. Judging it on its appearance alone people often wonder why. Such universal iconic status, however, is never the product of aesthetics alone. It is various wider contexts which have promoted the picture to such fame. Initial context: Da Vinci and ‘intention’. In 1503 Da Vinci began painting the Mona Lisa. Vasari states that he carries on working on it for four further years, and implies it was left unfinished. Its unfinished state is disputable, but the possibility adds weight to its general position within the framework of Da Vinci’s aims.
For Da Vinci it was one piece of his broader fascination with the phenomenon of life. Da Vinci is the embodiment of the stereotypical view of the Renaissance genius. A man obsessed with the advancement of the human mind through an expansion of our knowledge and awareness of every facet of life. Painting was merely one aspect of this study, amongst literature, music science, astronomy and engineering. In the limited number of paintings made by Da Vinci a chief fascination seems to be the deconstructing of vision. Da Vinci seems interested in recording objects in paint as the eye records them on the retina. For him an object was the collection of light gathered together. The soft edges of the Mona Lisa attest to this notion of images as merely shadows of objects, the result of light hitting the object in space and then transferring into image be the light being re-gather onto a flat surface. The warm glow of the Mona Lisa also supports the notion of painting as a devise through which Da Vinci could challenge the nature of light and image making. If we believe these to be Da Vinci’s intentions then we can project such notions onto the original incarnation of the image. Save damage, vandalism and the ageing of time the painting itself has remained physical similar. Yet our reading of it has shifted, numerous times. The first significant shift happened within 100 years. From this point on it is no longer Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
Giorgio Vasari: idealism and bastardisation
Vasari is the first, and a great, Art Historian. Unfortunately such a status has allowed him to have to autocratic a role in the History of painting. His seminal text, ‘Lives of the Artist’s’, chronicles the Italian Renaissance in three stages. It is an incredible record of the times, yet it is not a text which we should take as gospel truth. Its construction, like any, is biased, and the History it creates therefore artificial. It splits the Renaissance into three clearly definable stages, suggests a chronological rise towards absolute end goals. The arrival at the final fulfilment of these goals is reached in Central Italy in the 16th Century. This is conveniently at the same time (and location) as Vasari was painting, running an art school and during the career of Michelangelo; for whom he was the chief apologist. This was a brilliant marketing strategy. If we judge the art by Vasari’s rules then his account rings true. These rules were; truth to nature, selection of the finest parts, the collection of figures in space to depict moral narratives and painting as a window onto another world. For Vasari design, as a masculine and intellectual qualitiy, was the key ingredient of such a repertoire. Yet this is presuming that all artists discussed desired the total fulfilment of these goals. The Venetian’s (Titian et al) gave paint itself a greater primacy. The early and mid renaissance artists were not so much incapable of creating deep perspectival stages but delighted in the ordering of form across the surface as much as through it. I digress. What is key to realise is where Da Vinci sits in Vasari’s account.
Vasari heralds Da Vinci as one of the key figures in the third, and greatest, stage of the Renaissance, perhaps only just behind Michelangelo. I am not suggesting history is totally false, there is plenty in Da Vinci’s work to justify such celebration by Vasari. What I am suggesting is that Da Vinci’s work, and thus the Mona Lisa, is shifted in its meaning by the role played by Vasari. Vasari’s celebration of Da Vinci means we begin to judge his work by the rules laid down by Vasari. These are rules which have survived as measuring tools in much, perhaps most, literature which follows. Yet when we analyse such a correlation in any detail it seems an uncomfortable fit. Vasari celebrated solid line as the foundation of great art. Da Vinci seemed keen to focus on soft lines, seeing objects as culminations of light, not forms idealised into solid shape by the god like mind of a genius. It is a different belief system in the progression of representation.
Da Vinci’s Millanese ways of seeing perhaps link more closely to the ideals of Venice than those of Vasari and Michelangelo. The impact of Vasari’s account is vast. The painters of the Renaissance were great enough to survive through history with or without him. Yet with him the structure of our memories is more firmly defined the shape of history more rigid. Da Vinci’s work is no longer read entirely on what is seen but through the eye of history tinted by Vasari. It does not matter if we have never heard of him. His ideas have helped clearly define canonical ideals which have filtered into our general understanding and analysis of such work. The Mona Lisa thus becomes misread as fitting too clearly into this picture.
Napoleon and repatriation
There is certainly an active history for the Mona Lisa between its creation and the opening of the Louvre; yet it is that moment which I see as the next significant shift in its reading. Louis XIV had already brought the Mona Lisa to France and had it housed in the Palace of Versailles. Yet the significance of its geographic location came with the rise of Napoloeon I. After the revolution Napoleon has the Mona Lisa moved to the Louvre. The regal building had been transformed into the first major art Museum opened to the public. It was a symbol of the French empire. Its collection was the cultural identity of French imperial civilisation. Housed in the Louvre were objects purchased, gathered and stolen from around the world, often as a by product of their imperial expansion. The Mona Lisa would prove to be the jewel in the crown; a symbol of the high point from the Italian Renaissance. By repatriating the work in Frnace it shifted from being a signifier of Italian creative heritage to a reference of French cultural dominance. It was positioned to be the high point in a museum hung to mirror a particular Vasarian narrative. Sat at the peak it represents the rise to powers of representation. It was exhibited in such a way to imply the French academicians which followed were an inevitable continuation of such perfection. It is a story told through the gaze of French imperial power.
Myth and fame: Symbolism to The Da Vinci Code.
By being housed in the Louvre, as the star attraction, the Mona Lisa attracted the sheer weight of numbers to create an iconic status. Responses to objects are as important as the object itself in form its status and meaning. By its sheer location the work ensured it had a weight of responses to out bid its rivals for lasting fame. It was during the mid 19th Century that creatives started to be drawn to the Mona Lisa as an image to respond too. The symbolist movement saw the Mona Lisa as a figure full of mystique, a notion supported by the enigmatic smile as well as the paintings own history. It started to take on magical and legendary status.
The theft of the work in 1911 was at first seen as an attack on tradition. Picasso and Apollinaire were suspected. Not surprising considering the later had publicly expressed his desire for the painting to be burnt. Eventually it was revealed that it was an Italian employee of the Louvre, Vincenzo Peruggia. He had wanted to have the worked rehoused in Italy. Despite his failed attempt the act added a new anecdote to the picture and thus another level of history to further aggrandise its status.
For Duchamp the image was a perfect vehicle for his Dada protests against tradition. Keen to attack tradition and convention Duchamp wanted to celebrate the irrational and illogical. Adding a fake moustache to a copy of the painting was a simple but effective subversion and parody of the image. Less political and intellectual puns have continued to be made. If you google the image you come across numerous humorous versions; from Lisa Simpson as the Mona Lisa to Banksy’s version of the Mona Lisa holding a rocket launcher. The iconic status of the image as a part of Western heritage is confirmed by its role in blockbuster books and films such as Dan Brown’s, ‘the Da Vinci Code’. The mass selling book and multi million pound grossing film take the image as the central selling point of their franchise. Regardless of any meaning it brings a certain weight of prestige and fame to the brand. This process of quotation and commentary alters our vision. It makes the Mona Lisa part of our very cultural fabric. It becomes a more detached, generalised, vague symbol of certain values we consider history and the masters attain too. It is Vasari’s doctrine filtered and modernised through the gaze of repetition. She has become a highly diverse actress in our cultural theatre. An empty vessel in the Louvre.
The most pressing incarnation of the Mona Lisa exists in the viewing of the work in its current location in the Louvre. The above readings seem to have become quieter, a far more depressing and empty noise has deafened the silence of the painting. Consider the mechanics of its current display. It has been given its own free standing, high rise wall in the middle of a room. It sits behind a bullet proof sheet of glass. Beyond this is an altarpiece like barrier and the obligatory guards. They stand like the bodyguards of some vacuous, superficial celebrity. This is exactly what the Mona Lisa has become. Behind this barrier are ropes for us to queue within, lining up like sheep’s for a few seconds of admiration of a secularised goddess; her iconic power drawing us in like moths to light or flies to shit.
Beyond the room is the paraphernalia that surrounds the modernisation of the Louvre; where the museum has moved conspicuously towards entertainment over value. In the shop and all around there is a plethora of Mona Lisa related merchandise, pens, notepads, t-shirts, posters, fridge magnets etc. etc. Is this the purest form of Kitsch? The work has become nothing more than the celebratory figure head of a business, merely a part of commerce. The irony, and its almost funny, is that its celebration leads to a total emptying of original meaning. That which got it to the heights is that which is lost. It’s like equivalent of celebrating reaching the top of a mountain by being pushed over the edge. In this current geographic and cultural context it has become a vacuous symbol of a capitalist societies need to consume and devour empty and quick experiences. The very mechanics of its presentation control the semantics of this new dimension of meaning. It is very hard to get beyond or transcend this. Thus it is possible to account for the fame and iconic status of the image. It is celebrated for numerous reasons which have shifted through history; each added a layer of weight and permanence. The irony is that such multiple refilling of the vessel has led to its eventual emptying.
The hero is dead
The hero is the figure of idealism
The tragic hero is the romantics hero and ICarus its king
The fall was the tragic hero’s motif
Tragedy is about inevitability
The fall is the inevitable conclusion of the rise
The desire to fall comes from the unfulfilled desire to rise
Tragic heroism is measured in the total distance travelled
Tragic heroism always ends where it started
Tragic heroism befitsliterautre
it has a linear narrative
upwards and then downwards through space and time
All we have left is the desire for the hero
The desire for heroism has no narrative
The desire for heroism is static
It desire movement through space and time
It desires the rise that necessitates the fall
It remains attached to the base level
Twitching and squirming at best
The hero is dead
Tragedy is dead
only unfulfilled desire is left
Ideology
Selling a dream, a myth. The future is a perversion of the past.
The death of an idea leaves a void, yet nothingness does not exist, so we are compelled to fill it with something. The “something” is a corruption of the belief. Symbols to signify the belief become empty but are acted out to show our command over something which once commanded us. But all it ends up showing is our debt to the belief and our inability to escape from its influence.
Oedipus, look after you eyes!
Love is a belief- a faith. The willingness to devote yourself to something which can never be proved.
Nostalgia plays a large part in myth.
Postmodernism.
As Dick Hebdige pointed out (“A report from the Western Front: Postmodernism and the ‘politics’ of style” 1986-87) Postmodernism has become a catch all term capable of being appropriated to describe an almost limitless range of things. We apply the phrase to the styled approach of contemporary painting, the design of a building, sampling and scratching in music, 9/11, the nature and development of technologies such as television and the internet, the manner in which a text is deconstructed, the interdisciplinary approach of new University courses, the destabilising of subject matter, the lose of subject, the implosion of meaning, the apocalyptic paranoia of a generation of post war baby boomers, the collapse (semi collapse) of sociological hierarchies, the lose of structure, the flattening of the political landscape, the rise of religious fundamentalism, the lose of place, responses to Einstein’s theories of relativity, the quotative and pastiche, the non existence of history and seemingly anything to which in contemporary culture which is mildly ironic. At worst it is meaningless, at best utterly confusing in its complexity. Despite this it continues to be the word of choice for many commentators looking to tie down something intangible about the present.
By its nature Postmodenrism is obviously defined by modernism. This throws up certain complexities in itself. In art historical terms alone modernism is a dichotomy. On the one hand it refers to Greenbergian notions of art for arts sake, of the closed door on association and an entirely formal, Kantian mode of meaning. On the other it has a Bauddelairian history, referring to the notion that art should celebrate the heroism of modern life, a realism explicitly about the here and now in which the work is produced.
Despite these contradictions it is possible to notice common trends across all disciplines in terms of the modern condition and the values it celebrates. It is a condition for absolute values, for the singular belief which needs to be empirically measurable and preferably tangible. It craves certainty as a notion of understanding. It allows for shifts in beliefs systems, such as the destruction of religions overbearing power, but insists on new systems to replace the old. Thus we end up with capitalism, in the West at least, which put economic structures as a mode to judge relative value. It fights for reason, certainty, progress and the new. It is a way of thinking which is capable of justifying the barbaric, reasonless, mass murder; and its manner, of the First World War battle fields. (As such Dada reaction to WW1 with its focus on irrationality can be seen as the early seeds of post-modern thought)
Modernism articulates linear progression, vertical hierarchies; singular centres and sees time as a horizontal line moving forwards and upwards. It is seen in the clear ordering of history in museums, denying the reality of the past as a mass of atoms lost in chaotic confusion. It looks to give this, and everything, the same definable and measurable coordinates that it presumes physical space has. It gives things values which can be ordered, such as ascribing notions of greatness to artists who we place into a Canon.
Postmodernism is thus the shift from this safe ground, which for ease of analysis we should falsely see as homogenous. We can loosely, although inaccurately, locate this shift as a result of tensions and rumblings in the 1950’s and 60’s. Think
The foundation of the above occurrences provides a platform from which to undermine the singularity and uncertainty of much modernist thought. New approaches demanded an inquisition. ‘Feminism’ challenged the gender biases of the west. Non western approaches showed up the ludicrous imperialistic values which form simplistic and western cantered binary oppositions such as the civilised vs the primitive. Our place as the forward thinking, monarchal power above the backward and basic ‘other’ was attacked. Marxist approaches called into question the bourgeoisie’s position of power which created repetitive social structures of separation and status. New historians highlighted the artificial nature of linear and logical historical systems. The falsity and constructed nature of our reality was revealed.
Previously many disciplines had attempted to exist in isolation, celebrating their own uniqueness. The associations between each discipline and of each to wider values was denied, suddenly we were demanded to open the door for cross disciplinary discussion. The hierarchy, isolation and value systems of every facet of existence had been fractured to the point of bankruptcy. A paradigm shift was demanded. A multicentred reality was created. The post-modern era had arrived.
The implosion of our values has led to a position where anything goes, where new means of production and consumption are demanded. It embraces the constant evolution of new media. It promotes a knowing pastiche, a subversion of types, a quotation of what has gone before, a denial of originality, the death of the author, the denial of meaning. Irony, humour are too the fore.
Movements, schools and styles are a thing of the past, to an extent. A painter might perhaps have a closer link to a scientist or musician than another painter. Our field of reference and influence is democratised, all barriers have been dissolved. All logical structures are eroded.
Freedom is a strange thing. Without the past frameworks we can feel lost. When we can do anything, in any way, about anything than a ironic creative paralysis runs through our veins. Instead of having found a utopian liberty we are actually lost, maples; floating in unknowingness. Fundamentally this is where we are today. Lost and grappling for something to trust and believe in, aware how flawed a desire that is. We know we need rules and structure else we dissolve into nothingness. Equally, how can one be set free when there is no longer a controlling devise to be set free from. Totally freedom suffocates.
It is also worth mentioning Gerhard Richter here, a most eloquent and intellectual of minds. The postmodern human arrogantly dismisses ideologies. He speaks of some idealistic ultra democratic process. Yet having or wanting no ideology is an ideology in itself. This is suitable paradoxical.
The disengeuous urchin, by his nature, is undone by the Pink Lady… again and again…
…Its the same everytime. We believe in it because it satisfies an urge. The empty void society and self has made needs filling. Its a self fullfilling fuck up. So we continue, blindly.
It grows. The boy in the head sniggers, thinking of the phallis as always…but with other names. It gorws in the head, to what it should be. It never is that though. Its a lust for flesh which we call that other name. Intangible makes it sound mysterious and hides its nonexistence. Its our secular god, the unreal reason in a reasonless existence.
This ends, this falseness. Then we are left spinning again. Srambling within ourselves on the floor. Screaming as if fallen. But we never even left the ground to start with. But the silence of the plataeu lacks the poetry of the rise and fall, however artificial that is.
Our mediocirty is denied, cast into the cynics pillow. We romanticise and aggrandise our emotional impotence. The grand monologue of loves great tragedy sounds so much better in our imaginary daily epitaph.
The truth brings far more despair than the hollywood melodrama we create. This pathetic, narcissistic emptiness.
So the cycle continues. So the cycle continues. We spiral within ourselves searching for something real. We soffocate and drown in the empty journey for breath.
