by Aryan Kaganof

Veracruz, painted by Jesus Sepulveda

Art operates like a symbolic appropriation of reality. The act of representing reality or mediating our relation with the world—through an object or product of symbolic art—reinforces the process of reification. Art is a representation that replaces reality. in this same way it is a form of mediation of social and inter-subjective relations. said mediation is produced through cognitive reason, which filters the modes of appreciation of reality. becoming familiar with reality, the subject internalizes it. this is an appropriation that occurs, straining reality through a utilitarian and functional sieve. the codes of the filter are the codes of instrumental rationality, which projects the expansion of the subject’s interiority over the world’s exteriority. this develops the cognitive mechanisms of appropriation, categorization, and control of the other—that which is always unknown and unfamiliar. these mechanisms are the product of fear of the outside. because of this, the projection of interiority upon the exterior world produces an expansive and colonizing zeal. this zeal in turn projects the ego over the other: the external world (nature), and the creatures that inhabit it (human beings, animals, plants, and the soil). the expansive projection of the “i” over nature accelerates the process of reification.

kant was enraptured by the majestic spectacle of nature. this emotion produced in him a kind of “mental agitation,” which he called “sublime.” but this emotion is also the living experience of the dread that is sublimated through art, the petrification of the natural spectacle of the world. when art is an institution or a mere object— symbolic and separated from life—it is converted into a symbol of the process of reification. sophisticated meta-art is nothing more than a symbol of the symbol, a reification of reification. this process sharpens the ideological mechanism of the reification of the subject itself, which, when commodified, alienates itself from reality and loses perspective.

to replace instrumental reason with aesthetic reason does not mean simply replacing the mechanisms of reification. reification in art exists because art symbolizes that which has been taken from life—the experience of beauty. art and life have been divided into two separate planes, without any real interconnection. this makes art an institution of the sublime, while life is the praxis of enslavement. art has been the pressure release valve of alienation. traditionally it has sheltered those values and energies distanced from life, permitting the maintenance throughout “history” of the illusion of humanity. the separation between art and reality has created a situation in which both planes of experience are lived as isolated spheres, without spirit or emotion. art becomes petrified in museums, in galleries, in salons and libraries, while existence continues to the rhythm of the minute hand that subjugates salaried work. there, beauty is suppressed, joy domesticated, pleasure enslaved, and peculiarity made uniform. art is the negative mirror of reality that compensates for the miseries of life with the illusion of liberty. to remove art from the sphere of the institution means living art in life and vice versa. it means destroying the alienation that implies the distinction between the artistic and intellectual, and the vulgar and manual. it means beautifying life and enlivening art, both as a unified and organic whole. it also means creating a humanity of artists, and humanizing the artists who already exist.

taken from:

​The article is taken from:

by ​Andy McGlashen

Wim Wenders is known primarily for his work as a film director, most notably Paris, Texas (1984) and Buena Vista Social Club (1999).  He is also known for his photography and his images have been exhibited worldwide, more specifically his collection of Polaroids.  Around 3,500 of his Polaroids survive (many had been given away immediately to the subjects in the photos), and the Photographers’ Gallery in London is currently exhibiting  200 of them in a collection titled “Instant Stories”.
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As well as the Polaroids (which are grouped into themes) there is an 8-minute documentary that Wenders made in 1978, which he has updated for the exhibition by adding narration. In the film he is an “actor” on a road trip with a prototype Polaroid SX-70 Land camera which was given to him by Polaroid to test.  It is an interesting little film in its own right, and Wenders explains the attraction of Polaroid being the “missing link” (although I’m not sure to what extent it is missing) between film photography and the instant gratification of digital.

He explains in his narration that Polaroids felt like a different act to photography and likened it to playing with a toy. This meant, he says, that taking pictures was playful and casual, and simply fun.

Looking at the images in the gallery isn’t the easiest thing to do.  They are of course standard Polaroids – around 3″ x 2.5″ – and mounted in frames, and my short-sightedness meant I was often squinting at the pictures from a distance of about two inches!

The quality of the photos by today’s digitally airbrushed efforts (or even an amateur’s darkroom, I’m guessing) appears poor. They are often out of focus, or over- and under-exposed, or their colours are bleached, although a partial reason for this may be the passage of time and the quality of the original paper. I’m not sure anyone really expected the things to last 50 years or so.
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However, they often had a magnetic quality.  Even though I was not drawn into all of the compositions, there was a palpable sense that you were viewing something through Wim Wenders’ eyes at the time. These images are not altered, distorted or enhanced from the little film that popped out from the front of the Polaroid camera all those years ago, and it felt like stepping into a time machine.

​Another aspect of the Polaroid is that it is undoubtedly the great-grandfather of the selfie. In today’s age of ubiquitous smartphones a selfie is something that is so instant we immediately see if something is a keeper (albeit we might not agree in future years if it’s committed to social media!) and throwaway others with a simple tap of the dustbin symbol. A Polaroid is also (almost) instant, but its cost meant that more often than not they were keepers and not consigned to a physical dustbin. I have never used a Polaroid and I can only guess at the sense of wonder and excitement as a picture crystallised before your very eyes.

This is a great little exhibition and, although in hindsight probably more of a celebration of the Polaroid SX-70 than the images of Wim Wenders per se, it was fascinating to learn about both subjects.  If I learnt anything about the creative aspects on show, it is to embrace a photo for what it is, play with randomness, and ensure that photography stays fun.

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Daguerre-1838 

​You’ve likely heard the reason people never smile in very old photographs. Early photography could be an excruciatingly slow process. With exposure times of up to 15 minutes, portrait subjects found it impossible to hold a grin, which could easily slip into a pained grimace and ruin the picture. A few minutes represented marked improvement on the time it took to make the very first photograph, Nicéphore Niépce’s 1826 “heliograph.” Capturing the shapes of light and shadow outside his window, Niépce’s image “required an eight-hour exposure,” notes the Christian Science Monitor, “long enough that the sunlight reflects off both sides of the buildings.”

Niépce’s business and inventing partner is much more well-known: Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, who went on after Niépce’s death in 1833 to develop the Daguerreotype process, patenting it in 1839. That same year, the first selfie was born. And the year prior Daguerre himself took what most believe to be the very first photograph of a human, in a street scene of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris. The image shows us one of Daguerre’s early successful attempts at image-making, in which, writes NPR’s Robert Krulwich, “he exposed a chemically treated metal plate for ten minutes. Others were walking or riding in carriages down that busy street that day, but because they moved, they didn’t show up.”

Visible, however, in the lower left quadrant is a man standing with his hands behind his back, one leg perched on a platform. A closer look reveals the fuzzy outline of the person shining his boots. A much finer-grained analysis of the photograph shows what may be other, less distinct figures, including what looks like two women with a cart or pram, a child’s face in a window, and various other passersby. The photograph marks a historically important period in the development of the medium, one in which photography passed from curiosity to revolutionary technology for both artists and scientists.

first human photo

Although Daguerre had been working on a reliable method since the 1820s, it wasn’t until 1838, the Metropolitan Museum of Art explains, that his “continued experiments progressed to the point where he felt comfortable showing examples of the new medium to selected artists and scientists in the hope of lining up investors.” Photography’s most popular 19th century use—perhaps then as now—was as a means of capturing faces. But Daguerre’s earliest plates “were still life compositions of plaster casts after antique sculpture,” lending “the ‘aura’ of art to pictures made by mechanical means.” He also took photographs of shells and fossils, demonstrating the medium’s utility for scientific purposes.

If portraits were perhaps less interesting to Daguerre’s investors, they were essential to his successors and admirers. Candid shots of people moving about their daily lives as in this Paris street scene, however, proved next to impossible for several more decades. What was formerly believed to be the oldest such photograph, an 1848 image from Cincinnati, shows what appears to be two men standing at the edge of the Ohio River. It seems as though they’ve come to fetch water, but they must have been standing very still to have appeared so clearly. Photography seemed to stop time, freezing a static moment forever in physical form. Blurred images of people moving through the frame expose the illusion. Even in the stillest, stiffest of images, there is movement, an insight Eadweard Muybridge would make central to his experiments in motion photography just a few decades after Daguerre debuted his world-famous method.

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by Steven Craig Hickman

– Timothy Morton, Realist Magic

Peter Schwenger in his book The Tears of Things comes very close to the same central insight upon which Graham Harman has built his entire metaphysical edifice. We discover that for the most part the everyday tools that we use: hammers, rakes, pens, computers, etc., remain inconspicuous; overlooked by those of us who use such tools; noticing them, if at all, as necessities that help us get on with our own work. Yet, the paradox of this situation is that there are moments when the tool threatens us, becomes an obstacle to our enterprising projects, and it is at such moments that we suddenly awaken from our metaphysical sleep and notice these objects in a strange new light: when the hammer iron head flies free of the wooden handle, or the computer suddenly freezes, the screen goes black, then sparking and sending out small frissions of stench and smoke from the flat box that encases it; at such moments we become defensive, threatened by the power of these material objects that we no longer control, that in fact are broken and exposed, beyond our ability to know just what they are.

We also become aware that the tool is part of a larger sphere: it does not exist in and of itself, but is applied to materials in concert with other tools to make something that may then be seen in its turn as “equipment for residency” in parallel to Le Corbusier’s famous pronouncement that “a house is a machine for living in.” The full network of equipment’s interrelated assignments and intentions makes up what the subject perceives as “world.” The dynamic of this world, at whatever level, is one of care – care of the subject’s being. The business of equipment, then, is not just to build an actual house but as much as possible, and in the broadest sense, to make the subject feel at home in the state of existing.1

Against this Heiddegerian world of comfort and care much of what we call modernist art incorporated the tools into their artistic charade in order to break our at homeness, to make us feel a more difficult strangeness and estrangement, to become Aliens in an Alien Land ( I play off Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land). Against the order of meaning and description OOO prides itself in making things strange again, allowing the Master Signifiers that once ruled the world to fall away into darkness, withdrawn and empty of significance, uncanny and paradoxical guests to a banquet of the Real that can no longer be controlled by humans or scientific discourse. Listen to a master of philosophical mythography, Graham Harman, as he turns a Ferris Wheel into a lesson on Objects and the levels of being, occasional causality, and the inhuman withdrawnness of substance:

The reader should pause and fix this image firmly in mind: a giant rotating wheel, carrying thousands of beings in a long arc ascending to the clouds and vanishing into the darkness of the earth. Let it spin dozens of times in your mind before we move on from this beautiful spectacle. Imagine the faint machinic whirr of its concealed engine, the creaking of its bolts, and the varied sounds emitted by the objects riding in its cars: from neighing horses to mournful woodwind ensembles. Imagine too the ominous mood in the vicinity as its cars plunge deep into the earth. Picture the wheel loaded with animals, bombs, and religious icons. Picture it creaking under the weight of its cargo and emitting a ghostly light as it spins along its colossal circuit. Imagine the artists and engineers of genius who designed such a thing. And consider the human culture that would arise nearby, with the wheel as its sacred point of reference.2

​Timothy Morton in his new work reminds us that “the phenomenological approach requires a cycling, iterative style that examines things again and again, now with a little more detail here, then with a little more force there”.2 Harman does just that in his myth of the Wheel turning from light to dark to light again, a fabricated circle of machinic life that harbors the strangeness of existence itself, entities that cannot be charmed into eloquence accept as paradoxical creatures that inhabit the interstices of thought like fragments of a cyclic world. The great wheel rising and falling from the sky into the underbelly below the ground, the dramatic interplay of object and network, the countless entities circling into and out of our lives, some of them threatening and others ludicrous. The objects in the cars and those on the ground or in the chambers affect one another, coupling and uncoupling from countless relations— seducing, ignoring, ruining, or liberating each other. (Harman KL 69-72)

As Morton remarks “thinking objects is one of the most difficult yet necessary things thinking can do—trying to come close to them is the point, rather than retreating to the grounds of the grounds of the possibility of the possibility of asserting anything at all”. Are as Harman would have it objects affect us and in fact these objects turning on the Wheel of Relations – as he terms it, “generate new realities” (Harman, KL 76). At the end of this little myth of wheels within wheels, the churning ocean of being and becoming, Harman remarks that “no point in reality is merely a solid thing, and none is an ultimate concrete event unable to act as a component in further events. In this respect, the cosmos might be described as a vast series of interlocking ferris wheels” (Harman, KL 175-177).

This opening move leads me back to Timothy Morton and his new work where he tells us that to think this way about Objects all the way and all the way down as a series of interlocking machines is to begin to work out an object-oriented view of causality. “If things are intrinsically withdrawn, irreducible to their perception or relations or uses, they can only affect each other in a strange region out in front of them, a region of traces and footprints: the aesthetic dimension“. As he states it so eloquently in his introduction “Every aesthetic trace, every footprint of an object, sparkles with absence. Sensual things are elegies to the disappearance of objects.”

I am reminded of his work within literary criticism of which he is a master. In his excellent essay The Dark Ecology of Elegy in the Oxford Handook to Elegy he remarks:

Perhaps the future of ecological poetry is that it will cease to play with the idea of nature. Since ecology is, philosophically thinking how all beings are interconnected, in as deep a way as possible, the idea of nature, something ‘over there,’ the ultimate lost object … will not cut it. We will lose nature, but gain ecology. Ecological poetry must thus transcend the elegiac mode” (255). 4

And, yet, under the sign of the inhuman he brings us closer to the Sadean truth of the world. “What if ‘man’ was already a kind of ‘living sepulcher,’ an empty tomb, a ‘mere husk’ like the seeds of the rustling reeds? If is finally our intimacy with that which is the deepest and the darkest. Under these circumstances, elegy would perform the melancholy knowingness that we are machines” (269). It is in the darkness that ecology withdrawn within the inhuman begins to harbor that ecological thought of which Morton is the eloquent elegist:

Dark ecology chooses not to digest the phobic-disgusting object. Instead it decides to remain with it in all its meaningless inconsistency (Zizek 1992:35-9). Dark ecology is the ultimate reverse of deep ecology. The most ethical act is to love the other precisely in their artificiality, rather than seeking their naturalness and authenticity. Dark ecology refuses to digest plants and animals and humans into ideal forms. Cheering your self up too fast will only make things more depressing. ‘Linger long’ (Alastor: 1. 98) in the darkness of a dying world. (269)

As he reminds us in his new book “Doesn’t this tell us something about the aesthetic dimension, why philosophers have often found it to be a realm of evil? The aesthetic dimension is a place of illusions, yet they are real illusions. If you knew for sure that they were just illusions, then there would be no problem.” This is the realm of vicarious causation the place where the “aesthetic dimension floats in front of objects, like a group of disturbing clowns in an Expressionist painting or a piece of performance art whose boundaries are nowhere to be seen”. This aesthetic dimension was revived with Harman’s return to Aristotelian substantialist form, which forced him to revive the older occasional causation theories he termed vicarious causation because, as he remarks, it “requires no theology to support it. Any philosophy that makes an absolute distinction between substances and relations will inevitably become a theory of vicarious causation, since there will be no way for the substances to interact directly with one another” (Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Kindle Locations 83-85). As Morton in his new work remarks on this:

Even though I come out of the traditions of Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bataille, Deleuze, Zizek and Land, and am definitely in the opposing insubstantialist stance within the philosophical spectrum, I still admire the power of this older formalism of substance.  I have yet to finish this work by Timothy but have enjoyed the stimulation of its alternative traditions descending as they do from those Great Originals, Plato and Aristotle. And, even if I fit within their competitors loquacious if insubstantial or immanent tradition – that tributary river of another materialism (Epicurus and his epigones, who down the ages has spawned varying proposals concerning matter and the void) I still affirm those who hold to the flame of materialism no matter which path they follow.

Read online: Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality

The article is taken from:

by Steven Craig Hickman

One often wonders what truly is going on in Badiou’s mind as he prepares for his lectures. Reading the lecture I quoted above in the link I sit back in wonderment at the childlike simplicity of his statements, as if the audience before him were all ten year old kids and he the master was trying his best to lead them through the intricate yet simple realms of Alice’s Wonderland. His voice is charming and eloquent, decisive and pure, yet one is tempted to smile and realize that the Master has gone over this track too many times, that it is all too confident, too precise and mathematical for our taste. It’s as if he is trying to convince not the audience but himself of the simplicity of his system, to make sure that each and every aspect of its labored precision still fits the measure of his tempered mind. And, does it? Is this trifold world of being qua being, being-in-the-word, and the event truly locked down in such a methodical fashion as to allow for no critical injunctions?

Badiou like Zizek always begins and ends with the Subject as that point in the world where something new happens:

The point is that the relation, the subjective relation between an event and the world cannot be a direct relation. Why? Because an event disappears on one side, and on the other side we never have a relation with the totality of the world. So when I say that the subject is a relation between an event and the world we have to understand that as an indirect relation between something of the event and something of the world. The relation, finally, is between a trace and the body. I call trace ‘what subsists in the world when the event disappears.’ It’s something of the event, but not the event as such; it is the trace, a mark, a symptom. And on the other side, the support of the subject—the reality of the subject in the world—I call ‘a new body.’ So we can say that the subject is always a new relation between a trace and a body. It is the construction in a world, of a new body, and jurisdiction—the commitment of a trace; and the process of the relationship between the trace and the body is, properly, the new subject. (here)

When I saw that word ‘trace’ rise up in the above sentences I was reminded of another French philosopher, Jaques Derrida, for whom trace became a catch word. In the 1960s, Derrida used this word in two of his early books, namely “Writing and Difference” and “Of Grammatology”. Because the meaning of a sign is generated from the difference it has from other signs, especially the other half of its binary pairs, the sign itself contains a trace of what it does not mean. One cannot bring up the concepts of woman, normality, or speech without simultaneously evoking the concepts of man, abnormality, or writing. The trace is the nonmeaning that is inevitably brought to mind along with the meaning.” Is there a connection? I doubt it, only the connection in my own mind between two distinctly independent and intelligent philosophers that obviously with careful reading probably questioned each other to no end, yet read each other deeply and contentiously. Their thought converges and diverges on the concept of the event. I’d have to spend too much time to tease out the complexity of both philosophers conceptions to do that in a blog post so will end here. Read the above essay if you will for it lays down in a few words the basic architectural units of Badiou’s whole system of philosophy. One could do no better than read it and either follow it up with a deep reading of his major works Being and Event and The Logic of Worlds, or toss it into the trash and follow one’s own inclinations toward other climes. I leave that to the reader to choose. For me it is enough to realize that Badiou is someone you cannot pass over, but must confront with all the rigor that he brings to his own project. That there can be no direct relation between the event and the world to me seems to fit nicely into many of the strands of current philosophical speculation. This is a philosophy of movement, of happening, not of closure and stasis. The idea of indirect relation is processual in its dynamics, yet is also gathered into the net of mathematical precision as the intersection of relations defined as the movement between world and body, subject and its field of newness. Where does this take us? I’ll only leave you with one last tidbit from the lecture:

Taken from:

by Steven Craig Hickman

– Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation

The ripple of flesh, the slippery lushness just below the surface plane, the immanent materials and forces, the “violence of a sensation (and not of a representation), a static or potential violence, a violence of reaction and expression” (x), these are demarcations of a philosophy of life rather than death. Against the old religions, the monotheistic tribalism of the sky: the dark powers of hierarchy, of the One who beholds, who sees all, whose gaze orders everything into a system of justice and retribution: under the law that keeps everything bound to its harsh justice and stringent banishments; instead of this dead and deadening judgment that hands down decrees and punishments, enforces the legal inducements of final Heavens of the Immortals or Eternal Judgments in Lakes of Fire (for all who do not follow the dictates of this fierce power).

Against this harsh world Deleuze offers us the immanent law of rebellion, of force, of flows that churn within like so many coagulating sperm infested snakes that want to escape: the spasmodic, the serpentine liquidity, the “revelation of the body beneath the organism, which makes organisms and their elements crack or swell, imposes a spasm on them, and puts them into relation with forces sometimes with an inner force that arouses them, sometimes with external forces that traverse them, sometimes with the eternal force of an unchanging time. sometimes with the variable forces of a flowing time” (160).

Egyptian painted figures float in an abstract space that is neither here nor there. The background is coolly blank. Everything is flattened into the foreground, an eternal present where serenely smiling pharaohs offer incense and spools of flax to the gods or drive their chariot wheels over fallen foes. Women strike tambourines, dance as the forces of the earth rise in their young lithe bodies. Hieroglyphics hang in midair, clusters of sharp pictograms of a rope, reed, bun, viper, owl, human leg, or mystic eye. “Can the Egyptian assemblage be taken as the point of departure for Western painting? It is an assemblage of bas-relief even more than of painting,” says Deleuze (122).  The Bas-relief is the flat plane of the ontic, the place where eye and hand meet on the surface, the terraform that cleaves the haptic, the layers of movement no longer above or below but moving along the surface unhindered by the chains of chance or necessity.

“It is thus a geometry of the plane, of the line, and of essence that inspires Egyptian bas-relief; but it will also incorporate volume by covering the funerary cube with a pyramid;that is, by erecting a Figure that only reveals to us the unitary surface of isosceles triangles on clearly limited sides.  It is not only man and the world that in this way receive their planar or linear essence; it is also the animal and the vegetal, the sphinx and the lotus, which arc raised to their perfect geometrical form, whose very mystery is the mystery of essence” (123).

In line with Lucretius, needing to make visible the forces below the threshold of things, Deleuze touches the heart of art in deformation, the elastic or plastic deformations that are productive of temporal fluctuations harboring the monstrous truth of being: “they are like the forces of the cosmos confronting an intergalactic traveler immobile in his capsule” (58). The transformation of form can be abstract or dynamic. But deformation is always bodily, and it is static, it happens at one place; it subordinates movement to force, but it also subordinates the abstract to the Figure (59). The deformation is obtained in the form at rest; and at the same time, the whole material environment, the structure, begins to stir: “walls twitch and slide, chairs bend or rear up a little, cloths curl like burning paper…. “(60). The aesthetics of forces inhabiting the geometry of flows and fluctuations that move discordantly up through the tongue in the moment of becoming visible, the “visibility of the scream (the open mouth as a shadowy abyss) and invisible forces, which are nothing other than the forces of the future” (61):

“When, like a wrestler, the visible body confronts the powers of the invisible, it gives them no other visibility than its own. It is within this visibility that the body actively struggles, affirming the possibility of triumphing, which was beyond its reach as long as these powers remained invisible, hidden in a spectacle that sapped our strength and diverted us. It is as if combat had now become possible. The struggle with the shadow is the only real struggle” (62).

This is the agon with duende – the force of the sublunar, the chills that spring forward out of the shadows in our moments between, makes one smile or cry as a bodily reaction to an artistic performance that is particularly expressive. Folk music in general, especially flamenco, tends to embody an authenticity that comes from a people whose culture is enriched by diaspora and hardship; vox populi, the human condition of joys and sorrows. Lorca writes: “The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, ‘The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.”

He suggests, “everything that has black sounds in it, has duende.  … This ‘mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains’ is, in sum, the spirit of the earth, the same duende that scorched the heart of Nietzsche, who searched in vain for its external forms on the Rialto Bridge and in the music of Bizet, without knowing that the duende he was pursuing had leaped straight from the Greek mysteries to the dancers of Cadiz or the beheaded, Dionysian scream of Silverio’s siguiriya.” … “The duende’s arrival always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm.” …”All arts are capable of duende, but where it finds greatest range, naturally, is in music, dance, and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die, and open their contours against an exact present” (Theory and Play of the Duende).

Or as Deleuze eloquently states it “Life screams at death, but death is no longer this all-too visible thing that makes us faint; it is this invisible force that life detects, flushes out, and makes visible through the scream. Death is judged from the point of view of life, and not the reverse, as we like to believe” (62). … There is the force of ‘banging time, through the allotropic variation of bodies, down to the tenth of a second,” which involves ”’formation; and then there is the force of eternal time, the eternity of time, through the uniting separating that reigns in the triptychs, a pure light. To render time sensible in itself is a task common to the painter, the musician, and sometimes the writer. It is a task beyond all measure or cadence” (64).

The famously filthy mess that was Bacon’s  studio at Reece Mews – the piles and sticky avalanches of photos, books, clipped newsprint, booze-stained scribbles on the verge of becoming drawings, squished  paint tubes and every imaginable ingredient of clutter that covered the  horizontal and vertical surfaces, tables and walls, like some illegible compost in which, like molds or somewhat alien life-forms, his future pictures were  brewing and his past ones decaying. This stuff was more than rubbish. It was an archive, admittedly a staggeringly disordered one. An archive of the deformations that arise out of the earth itself to grasp hold of our very thoughts, and scream… the painters visions of that moment of deformation that implodes and gives birth at the same time. Out of disorder order shapes us, moves through us, spasmodically, and with desperate disjunctive sounds of the duende…

“It is not I who attempts to escape from my body, it is the body that attempts to escape from itself by means of…. in short, a spasm: the body as plexus, and its effort or waiting for a spasm” (15).

“Time is no longer the chromatism of bodies; it has become a monochromatic eternity. An immense space-time unites all things, but only by introducing between them the distance of a Sahara, the centuries of an aeon: the triptych and its separated panels… There are nothing but triptychs in bacon: even the isolated paintings are, more or less visibly, composed like triptychs” (85).

An inversion of the ancient Christian formalism, Bacon’s triptychs remind us not so much of icons of some transcendent deity, but rather as the immanent movement of those strange forces that surface and withdraw, channel their rapprochement or negotiate between the triple aspects of being that is always and forever the faces of Time past, present, and future: the motion of a pendulum that carves and deforms us even as death awakens within us the flowers of life itself. “Like Lucretius’s simulacrum, …seem to him to cut across ages and temperaments, to come from afar, in order to fill every room or every brain” (91). These triple non-forms are the strokes of a cosmic catastrophe: “It is like the emergence of another world. For these marks, these traits, are irrational, involuntary, accidental, free, random. They are nonrepresentative, nonillustrative, nonnarrative. They are no longer either significant or signifiers: they are asignifying traits” (101).

The monstrous void opens inward revealing nothing less than the face of an abyss that cannot be described nor represented for it is the face of the inhuman other that for so long has been banished, exiled among its own dark thoughts, riven of its place within the fold, the flows of time’s dark prison. But the path to salvation is not easy. No. But are atheists allowed salvation? Is art a form of salvation? Are the paths of artistic expression forms of freedom? And, what of these paths? “Abstraction would be one of these paths, but it is a path that reduces the abyss or chaos (as well as the manual) to a minimum: it offers us an asceticism, a spiritual salvation. Through an intense spiritual effort, it raises itself above the figurative givens, but it also turns chaos into a simple stream we must cross in order to discover the abstract and signifying Forms” (103). The Second Path leads another way:

“A second path, often named abstract expressionism or art informed oilers an entirely different response, at the opposite extreme of abstraction. This time the abyss or chaos is deployed to the maximum. Somewhat like a map that is as large as the country, the diagram merges with the totality of the painting; the entire painting is diagrammatic” … In the unity of the catastrophe and the diagram, man discovers rhythm as matter and material. (104 – 107).

These diagrams offer recompense, only if we can differentiate between the triptych diagrams. But we can also date the diagram of a painter, because there is always a moment when the painter confronts it most directly. “The diagram is indeed a chaos, a catastrophe, but it is also a germ of order or rhythm. It is a violent chaos in relation to the figurative givens, but it is a germ of rhythm in relation to the new order of the painting” (102). As Bacon says, it “unlocks areas of sensation.” The diagram ends the preparatory work and begins the act of painting. There is no painter who has not had this experience of the chaos-germ, where he or she no longer sees anything and risks foundering: the collapse of visual coordinates. Ultimately this is a tale of facts, of the power of non-representational painting, the ardour of emergence and flow, the moment of facticity:

“…the forms may be figurative, and there may still be narrative relations between the characters – but all these connections disappear in favor of a ‘matter of fact’ or a properly pictorial (or sculptural) ligature, which no longer tells a story and no longer represents anything but its own movement, and which makes these apparently arbitrary elements coagulate in a single continuous flow” (160).

Gilles Deleuze. Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation. Continuum 2003

The article is taken from: 

by Aryan Kaganof

​The moment of the Genre Splice is superluminal.

​It arrives before it was sent.

​The closest Microlinear Storytelling gets to Once Upon A Time is Always Now.
The Hyper-Literary Fiction of value always invokes deja-vu.
Genre-Splicing is addictive.
In a way having one’s writings Genre-Spliced is like eating from the tree of knowledge. The knowledge acquired sets us new (ethical) problems; but contributes nothing to their solution.
Sometimes a Genre-Splice can be understood only if it is experienced at the right tempo. August Highland’s Hyper-Literary Fiction is all supposed to be read very fast.
Hyper-Literary Fiction gazes into abysses, which it should not veil from sight nor can conjure away.

The Metapoetics Theatre movement probably reached its most distilled meaning in August Highland’s own career, where the notion of “the hard textimage” did acquire an authoritative centrality, but nonetheless it most certainly offered many essential constituents fundamental to modern Genre-Splicing lore – the free line, “superpositioning”, crack, etc. One thing that can be said in his favour is that August Highland always went in pursuit of a redemptive kinesis.

The article is taken from:

by Marcel Wesdorp

Prints of these digitally developed areas seem to be real photographs, uniquely named by their specific xyz co-ordinates. But at a second glance you are struck by an unknown reality that lies beyond. Some steps in this process lead to unsuspected and surprisingly catching images, each of them with a most sensitive and enigmatic touch, as may be seen in his PW series.

Apart from the purely software based techniques, the collection and modelling of existing satellite data and maps is a second intricate field of work of the artist. Here another elaborate few years were needed to complete the paper-printed black and white ‘Untitled World File’. Wesdorp’s fine imagination of scale and proportion makes you dazzle for this vacuum of time and space. The work originates from a real love history, only to be revealed to the viewer when taking time to see its dimensions.

x4207.44/y2809.41/z258.51 - 2011

x1288.20/y6028.21/z285.40 - 2010

x3435.26./y5201.54/z-9.14 - 2011

x7457.29/y9325.47/z226.42 - 2012

2007/2010 - 02:05 hour [fragment]

x86946.1/y55460.1-3838.8 - 2015/16

x52059.4/y2598.8-2161 - 2015

Untitled World - 2015

Untitled World-File - 2014/2015

MINE  'compiled world file'   2017

Marcel Wesdorp

Born in Netherlands (1965) and graduated at Willem de Kooning Academy -Rotterdam and the advanced programme in photography at St. Joost Academy in Breda, Wesdorp creates computerized animations of landscapes.

​Wesdorp’s work has been shown several times at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam (2007-2011), at Museum Belvedere, Heerenveen (2012), in Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012), Erasmus University, Rotterdam (2013) and with gallery Helder in the solo presentation at KunstRAI, Amsterdam (2015). Wesdorp continues to investigate new ways to show what lies beyond the surface.

by Armen Avanessian

​I want to pursue the question of the new interest in materialism by way of an(apparent) detour, namely: with a view to determining from what direction, for what reasons, and via what signs this new interest is expressed. Because of the increasing lack of interest on the part of official academic institutions and their pitiful failure at hosting or producing new philosophy, it is now an expanded art field that gives impetus to various movements and transformations in theory. This expanded field includes not only artists and curators but also galleries, art institu-tions, art academies, art journals, and the theoreticians and critics whom they pub-lish. At times, it is this expanded field that enables individual theoreticians to con-tinue working at all. On the other hand, in view of the fundamental crisis of a con-temporary art scene that appears increasingly directionless, and that can betermed materialistic primarily in an economic sense, the new speculative realism(or in Quentin Meillassoux’s case, speculative materialism) has been stripped forbuzzwords. This process is well known, and has been undertaken in order to dis-guise extreme emptiness and disorientation in the art field (zombie-conceptual?pre-internet? post-digital?) with new concepts—this time from the subject areas of materialism, speculation, and ontology. In particular, one variant of speculativerealism has achieved rapid success in the art world, namely Graham Harman’sobject-oriented ontology. There are a couple of obvious reasons why artists andcurators have embraced this ontology so joyfully: Harman developed a pan-psychictheory largely by re-reading positions that were already established—and hencecomprehensible for the art business—such as Husserl’s phenomenology, Latour’snetwork theory, etc. And he endorses aesthetics (as prima philosophia, first philoso-phy), which is fundamentally and inherently “correlationist,” depending as it doesupon a perceptual dialectic of subject or object. Finally, there is the ontologicalenhancement or upgrading of the status of objects, an aspect of his thought that has certainly not slowed the economic materialism of the art world.

The fog is slowly lifting after several years of hype, and we now see positionsand demarcations more clearly. This relates first of all to the several kinds of new speculative materialism or realism. This occurs not least through the recent prominence of accelerationism, a political theory in which the influence of Deleuze and Guattari meets that of a new Promethean rationalism. With the lat-ter, the significance of analytical-philosophical and linguistic-philosophicalthought clearly enters the foreground. A positive side effect of this is the over-coming of a rather naive initial emphasis—it could also be termed somewhat sim-plistic public relations—namely, the assumption that a speculative turn  would sim-ply overcome the linguistic turn; or that an uncritical, purely speculative and base-less ontology would or could now operate in place of critical epistemology or lan-guage philosophy. Such simple models maintain a common dichotomy of either language or matter (a misunderstanding that is no less widespread in poststruc-turalism itself). The second of these terms—matter—is at times excluded in thesemodels as impossible and at times is longingly invoked through aesthetics. In place of such unhelpful juxtapositions, there will hopefully be a greater material-istic reliance upon thought or language, not as opposite terms of a simple dichotomy but as recursive aspects of world and matter together: of language best understood from its material dynamics. This is also a linguistic-ontological pre-supposition for every (future) attempt at an understanding of art that is no longer aesthetic but rather poetic or perhaps poietic (meaning productive, in the sense of creating something genuinely new).

​The other shift in the understanding of speculative materialism can be observed in the field of art (theory). Following the Speculative Realism Conference, organized by Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier and held in London in 2007, the initial reception in the art world was at times enthusiastic. This is attest-ed to by numerous anecdotes regarding object-oriented art students who are either arguing about or supposedly producing archifossiles  (materials indicating tra-ces of phenomena anterior to the emergence of life), or trendy gallery owners try-ing to associate their artists with the appropriate theoreticians, the latter them-selves all too often readily acting as catalogue text writers for the art business at the same time that they banally lambast it as corrupt (instead of systematically pon-dering the material software and hardware of the art business); or the prominence of various positions of the new materialism  at the last Documenta. In short, there have been a great many efforts that have led at the very least to successfully estab-lishing a new, young, fresh generation of artists in a global market between Basel and Miami who benefit from their association with speculative philosophies.

Old wine in a new bottle? Same old sculptures—this time 3-D printed? Yet more decorative paintings with some new industrial colors or maybe on synthetic materials? This is pretty much the impression one gathers when following somequite fruitless debates about post-internet art. Regardless of these discussions thehorizon or the potential of the digital revolution has until now hardly had a posi-tive impact upon ultimately decisive questions such as the economic terms of thedistribution forms of contemporary art (as long as one doesn’t count the flippingphenomenon or the importance of Instagram to gallery sales as a progressivedevelopment). By and large, everything appears to have remained pretty much asit was. Critics still invoke the critical potential of art objects and the impressionthey make upon bourgeois subjects when those works hang upon their walls, andart historians still mystify white cubes as aesthetic experience in a profitable way (to say nothing of the ever-increasing volume of money that is laundered by meansof contemporary art). That these practices continue to take place in relation tospeculative and materialistic ideas, to concepts that are opposed to every form of correlationalism, is a pity, and certainly helpful neither for art nor for philosophy.

In the longer term, I would hope that the real philosophical and art theoreti-cal potential of speculative realism or materialism might emerge more clearly, even if this were to have a threatening impact upon the business as usual  aspect of contemporary art.1 Meanwhile, so-called critical art and its aesthetics does not combat the new spirit of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello), but by its nature con-tinues to propagate that spirit. An art truly informed by speculative materialism would on the contrary strive not only for a transformation on the discursive levelbut also for an acceleration of the existing platforms of the art system: the materi-al-economic forms of production of art and the paths for its distribution. This alsoapplies to the material power of images to transform our reality, a power that hasfortunately been dealt with recently in a more concise way by artists and theoreti-cians. Such images can also shape reality and can be integrated recursively in actu-ality, instead of merely reflecting it over and over again. Rather than an aesthetic-critical art that bears such an affinity with our modern capitalism, a materialisticart, in a sense that is poietic and speculative, would aim at a new art, no longer our contemporary art.

The ​essay is taken from:

by Armen Avanessian

Today, science fiction might be the best kind of realism – if, that is, it is not the only possible realism. This insight by J. G. Ballard provides the impetus to look at our political, economic and artistic present from the perspective of an already present future. For example, though the current financial crisis has led to severe criticism of financial speculation, those market operations also force us to realise what may have been repressed for decades: Capitalism as we conventionally understand it might not exist anymore, and we are only just becoming aware of this.

The latency period of this transformation of the past decades coincides with the history of contemporary art as a genre or concept devoid of the time orientation that was characteristic of the historical avant-gardes and modern art movements, each of which affirmed the possibility of future (social) progress as a constant in the present. If the coincidence of contemporary art and the latent transformation of capitalism is not entirely arbitrary – and it cannot be if the basic claim of contemporary art is that it is an art appropriate to its time – then contemporary art could be taken as the sign of the derivative or speculative financial system that has left us bereft of both future and present since it reduces every future present to a present future pre-calculable on the basis of probability theory. Here, what has yet to happen is but a continuation of the long-known, the execution of what has already been priced in.

Tomorrow Today opposes this futureless condition, instead presenting experiments in new art-economics projects and taking up the interface between art and capital as a political contestation. Accepting that we are currently in a period of transition and new formation, the question of Tomorrow Today is whether and to what extent artistic imagination and poetic practices can help us accelerate the entry into a post-capitalist society rather than passively accompanying the gradual and increasingly ubiquitous approximation of post-democratic conditions (the aestheticisation of everyday life, gentrification, the art-market bubble, biennale tourism). After postmodernism we realise: the end of (art) history has not yet been reached. Neither liberal Western capitalism nor the genre of a globally expanded contemporary art will have been (art) history’s last word.

For a while now, we have been up against a speculative regime in the world of art. In the pricing system of art, the expertise, skill and, ultimately, the degree of influence of the respective market players play a decisive role. The artistic significance of artworks, their critical content and their art-historical relevance serve a mostly ideological function. If that is the case, we should do nothing less than reverse the popular conviction that the relationship between art and the market is characterised by constitutive ‘tension’. It is rather the priceless nature of art, whose value cannot be calculated through and is irreducible to price, which has rendered it a perfect object of speculation. In this sense, isn’t contemporary art indeed the model and transmission mechanism of a universal financialisation permeating all aspects of society, as has recently been proposed? 

Perhaps for this reason, amidst the increasingly disoriented movements of critical contemporary art we are confronted with accelerationist positions that, instead of simulating a ‘critical’ distance to the market, move in a diametrically opposed direction. These positions replace distanced aesthetic reflexions with creative interventions and practical confrontations, for example, at the interface with fashion or celebrity culture (lifestyle branding, image campaigns, marketing strategies) or that of art and science (big data, climate change). They are remarkable for their recursive appropriation and reprogramming of the respective technological, economic and media platforms (virtual money, bitcoin).

How then to speak to the intrinsic relation between art and finance capital? And what is capital, if it isn’t the market, economy, consumption or simply money? Strictly speaking, ‘capital’ is a social entity that facilitates translations of cultural, social, economic and other forms of capital (a good example of this is the shamelessness with which ‘critical’ intellectuals are continuously producing value-adding catalogue texts). Noisy debates on the pricing structures of the art market (most recently on the allegedly illegitimate flippers, etc.) have to be understood against the background that all cultural and social processes are indissolubly connected to the capital. Capital is a social relation, a permanently shifting balance of power.

In view of the current system-wide crisis, revaluing the debt economies that are collapsing right before our eyes becomes inevitable. Financial speculation is becoming increasingly detached from any type of real economy through high-frequency and algorithmic derivative trading. Can finance nonetheless be controlled by better means of regulation, as suggested by the government parties of the European mainstream (who are all adherents of neo-liberal economic policy, whether or not they are social-democrats)? Or are we witnessing the final throes of a moribund political-economic classification system named ‘capitalism’, which in turn could entail serious consequences for the production and distribution conditions of art?

Given the technological (digital, algorithmic) conditions of the current economy, new and different ways of working from these premises come into play. curated by_vienna explores the alternative economic and artistic strategies that are now available.

What options should galleries take if they are not to continuously equip art fairs with the newest in zombie formalism, the youngest emerging artists and evermore exhibits of alleged criticality – often only to be overshadowed by a few global players and risking financial ruin in the process? On the side of artistic practices, economic interrelations are being explicitly readdressed to realign them into the future. Artists and curators who are digital natives and seismographers of a new economy of attention optimistically experiment with poetic and artistic practices instead of believing they can escape from overarching capitalisation by resorting to folkloristic niches. This anti-nostalgic accelerationist perspective raises the question to what extent artists can succeed at steering the changing forms of distribution (for example, by founding companies or through similarly offensive strategies) in an emancipatory manner in today’s Internet age practices that are already forcing gallery and museum exhibitions to take different approaches to the well-established conventions.

From a speculative and untimely perspective, the principle of spectatorship proves to be an expression of the expiring television age. Doesn’t the omnipresence of social media call for entirely different artistic strategies, not least in how social media providers view their users as passive spectators but as disposable concrete and active material for enhancing diverse algorithmic and data processing and, through that, revenue? What is important here is less the purpose and disadvantage of social media or new communication technologies than it is their means of navigation and control.

The determining media of this day and age are to be understood as interfaces between the human and the non-human (bio hypermedia), whereby creative activities are increasingly integrated into extended technological and economic processes in everyday life. What were once ‘final’ exhibits are now taken only as intermediary stages in an ongoing process of action-once again making apparent the necessity of testing new models or combinations of art and economy.

​Armen Avanessian is a philosopher and political theorist. 
He is co-founder of the bilingual research platform Spekulative Poetik www.spekulative-poetik.de and of Bureau of Cultural Strategies (https://www.bureauforculturalstrategies.com). 
His publications include Irony and the Logic of Modernity (De Gruyter, 2015), 
Present Tense: A Poetics, with Anke Hennig (Bloomsbury, 2015); 
Speculative Drawing, with Andreas Töpfer (Sternberg Press, 2014); 
and the forthcoming titles Metanoia: A Speculative Ontology of Language, Thinking, and the Brain, with Anke Hennig (Bloomsbury, 2017); 
Overwrite. Ethics of Knowledge – Poetics of Existence. Berlin: Sternberg Press 2017; 
and Miamification (Sternberg Press 2017).

The essay is taken from:

Joseph Nechvatal (Rail): Hello Jay. I have just devoured your incredibly rich, incredibly detailed and provocative new book Artaud's Metamorphosis: From Hieroglyphs to Bodies Without Organs (Pavement Books) in an uninterrupted two day reading orgy. I found that the serious intensity of your book demands as much. It is not a book easily skimmed - as there is so much to be learned here. Even in the copious footnotes!

I have known you on and off for many years now, but there is so much I don’t know about you and your fascination with the poète maudit extraordinaire Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) – the laudanum-addled but seminal, visionary, multi-faceted, mid-20th century artist who directly antedates art relevant to our current virtually-enhanced era. You were one of the first to write about my Computer Virus Project 1.0 (1992-93) for the Parisian Galleries Magazine where you demonstrated to me your grasp of the virtual in relationship to contemporary art. This was my early viral contamination computer painting series done at The Saline Royale that reflected on the AIDS epidemic (work that I will be showing in New York at Galerie Richard this November). So I have long been well aware of your expertise in these matters. But I think that your book Artaud’s Metamorphosis will amaze readers, even long standing Antonin Artaud admirers such as myself (a passion that began with reading Susan Sontag’s book of Artaud’s Selected Writings in 1976, the year I moved into downtown New York). Later I was stunned by the 1996 MoMA show of drawings Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper that was curated by someone I have met in Paris, Margit Rowell.

You and I met a long time ago in New York, but you now live in New Orleans and I in Paris. So let’s catch up on what you have been doing in your life and in your curatorial practice. What led you to such an exhaustive deep dive into the magickal chaos of Artaud and your emphasis on tracking his transition (or metamorphosis, as you call it) between his (mystical) white and black periods: a metamorphosis that hinges on the peyote rituals he experienced with the Tarahumaran people in Mexico in 1936 that led to his famous theory of a theater of cruelty based on a “body without organs” (so influential upon Deleuze and Guattari’s BwO ‘virtual’ body as described in their all-important A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia).

Jay Murphy: I’m a bit surprised myself that I took this on as a project. Many figures have been resurrected or renewed in thinking about our digital or now post-digital era – Joyce, Mallarmé, Proust – but I was especially struck by how Artaud had a whole new relevance. This was both in terms of the ‘virtual’ generally, and very specifically in works like the catastrophic video installations of Gary Hill in the ‘90s. Artaud is already writing so articulately about the ‘virtual’ in 1925-1927, as a kind of “life plane” or trajectory involving the body, and the insistence of the ‘later’ or ‘final’ Artaud that the ‘virtual’ remains an arena of intense struggle and combat regarding the projection of the body I find a really useful corrective to seamless notions of the ‘virtual’ that continue to be passed around.
​
I find Artaud inexhaustible. I first read him in high school, in the Hirschman anthology and The Theater and Its Double (1958), but was introduced to him at the beginning when he was quoted in Phil Brown’s Towards a Marxist Psychology (1974). Brown’s book was a birthday present I took at the time as a put-down, since I had the most leftward views of anyone in school at the time. It ended up being extremely productive since I found the quotes from Artaud so very remarkable. Trying to grasp what exactly is going on in a bewildering yet so very germinative essay like his “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society” is still a challenge, even after I’ve done an entire section on it in my book.

So I have been reading and thinking about Artaud for a long period of time. There’s also the issue that I returned to Artaud, giving a series of papers on him at conferences beginning in the ‘90’s, since I felt the matter of affect (an extremely weak and poor term given what it purports to refer to, but I’m using it here anyway) was not adequately conveyed or engaged by the vast majority of visual and media art I was seeing in New York, or elsewhere. I was motivated to look at Artaud again since he continues to transmit such extraordinary power. I know many take issue with that – Allen Weiss found To have done with the judgment of god (1947-1948) overly “poetic” and Gayatri C. Spivak has spoken of an Artaud taken up into the ‘culture industry.’ On the contrary, I find Artaud opened up some pathways that have still not been closed.

One of the distinctive features of Artaud’s Metamorphosis is that it is one of the most affirmative views of Artaud that has been published in decades.
​
There’s also the dimension, of what Isabelle Stengers might call “cosmopolitics.” We live in a period of collapse, of political, environmental, socio-economic, aesthetic systems and motivations that are grinding to a halt or coming to brutal denouements. (Jean-Luc Nancy has compared this to the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages, hence our usual political and economic models lose their coherence). If we were in a more stable era where various ecological systems were working very well, Artaud might be more of a curiosity. But we aren’t. And Artaud is one of the great world poets of collapse and dissolution. If he is about anything, he is about absolute re-invention and re-constitution. That he poses this at the level of the body in such utterly concrete terms is one of the many factors that make him so critically relevant again. Sterlarc dated the carbon body as obsolete as of the early 1970’s – Artaud is already positing this in 1945-1948. 

Rail: There is so much to cover here, but one thing that jumped out at me was how important André Masson’s painting L'homme (1924) was to Artaud: a painting Artaud wrote about that shares the same speeding, automatic, ritualistic and revelatory mode of iconographic mark-making seen in Masson’s sex-machinic Automatic Drawing from the same year (1924) where a conflict or antagonism is set up between the feminine litheness of curves and hard angles. Slow looking reveals that the image calls to mind Marcel Duchamp’s Nu descendant un escalier n° 2 (Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2) (1912). But beyond that there is at work an artistic method which plays in the area of chaotic control/non-control, aiming towards constructing a capricious alliance that associates discourses of machinic grinding with organic sexuality. An expanded field of decentered and distributed subjects pervade the visual lexicon of Surrealism, but Masson is generally considered to have pioneered the automatic drawing technique with an opulence that borders on the decadent by adapting the écriture automatique (automatic writing) method of André Breton and Philippe Soupault, who with it composed in 1919 Les Champs magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), the first surrealist text. Masson’s graphical automatism created a visual analogy to the écriture automatique writing method, based on speed, chance and intuition, but also revealed a certain amount of reflection and artistic strategy. This is all well known, but given Artaud’s stress on spells and magick (that you accent in no uncertain terms), I noted that in the summer of 1924 the English artist and chaos magician Austin Osman Spare, a late-decadent, perversely ornamental graphic dandy in the manner of Felicien Rops, produced a sketchbook of ‘automatic drawings’ of equal disembodied fabula consistent with Artaud’s body without organs. Entitled The Book of Ugly Ecstasy, it contained a series of outlandish pan-sexual creatures produced through automatic (trance induced) means that resembles in their totemic stacking and overlapping transparency the two late-drawings by Artaud you reproduced in your book: both called Untitled (1948) (both 64 × 49 cm).

Considering Spare’s elaborate magickal practice of sigiling (condensing letters of the alphabet into diagrammatic glyphs of desire) and given Artaud’s voracious appetite for occult material, might it have been possible he knew of Spare’s practice of making automatic magickal chaos drawings? Indirect ties between Spare and Masson can be found with Grillot de Givry’s 1929 seminal book Le Musée des sorciers, mages et alchimistes (Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy), an art historical account of where painting, illuminated manuscript, sculpture and architecture connect to the occult heritage that Michel Leiris reviewed in Georges Bataille’s Documents. Of course, Documents was a circuitous challenge to Breton’s ‘mainstream’ Surrealism, as spearheaded by Bataille’s scheme for a swank divinatory “war machine against received ideas.” Also from 1924 is Masson’s intense Dessin automatique (Automatic Drawing) (1924-1925) that strikes hard as an example of that divinatory practice of finding subconscious desires within vague cues. Like Spare’s and Artaud’s drawings (from years later), it is a neurotic network of lines that seem fluid but hectic. At times staccato-like. Gradually appearing among the lines is a standing, plugged-in burial casket (we find many caskets floating in Artaud’s drawings) surrounded by phantasmagorical figure motifs that may include boxy object parts merged with anatomical fragments. The sum total gives off a feeling of occultist ferment typical of Artaud’s thesis of a body without organs.
​
Of course, it, like many of Masson’s and Spare’s and I add Artaud’s drawings are really sites of suggestibility full of the duality of violence and whimsy, allowing the viewer to make use of her own liberated and heightened mental faculties to probe the opaqueness of the world and discern concealed forces. In that regard, I have always wondered why Artaud showed no interest in the drawings of Hans Bellmer: drawings that have similar transparent and metamorphic qualities as his own. Do you know?

Murphy: I think your questions bring out the extent to which Artaud, despite his hatred of France, and who at one point writes “it is French which is the cause of the carnage and of the universal madness,” remains in a French milieu and is very Paris-centric. He did a version in French of Matthew Gregory Lewis’ 1794 Gothic novel The Monk, but Anglo references in Artaud are very rare. There’s no mention of Spare, or W.B. Yeats, Aleister Crowley and the ‘Golden Dawn’ for that matter. I would agree that Spare is one of the most developed and credible of the homegrown magus of the time, but Artaud is more concerned with first sources. This is why he would travel to the Sierra Tarahumara to experience peyote rites, but it is also why Artaud, Breton, and other surrealists admired a figure like René Guénon. Guénon was withering in his criticism of mystical syncretisms.
​
To discuss Artaud’s relationship with visual art demonstrates again his singularity. The process of his own drawings at Rodez and at Ivry-sur-seine don’t have much to do with automatic drawing, and the surrealist practice of écriture automatique was anathema to him. Jean Dubuffet was one of the first collectors of Artaud’s drawings, and he considered them in a category of their own. That said, Artaud’s art criticism in the 1920’s and ‘30’s was frequently remarkable, delineating the “ideal space, absolute” gestating in Masson’s L’homme, what Évelyne Grossman has called a “transitory” or indeed ‘virtual’ space, which characteristically for Artaud, despite its location in static art, is in perpetual motion. That Spare’s drawings reach a space similar to Artaud’s would be a fascinating thesis to pursue; part of my current project on Artaud Media Theory (a sort of part two to Artaud’s Metamorphosis) is to compare the function of the ‘virtual’ in Artaud and Duchamp. So to bring up Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase as you do, and The Large Glass installation (1915-1923) as well, for me cut much closer to the bone.

Artaud’s art criticism was also written in a different period, when he was in the midst of his own “occultist ferment,” as you say. I have to stress that Artaud’s invention of the ‘body without organs’ is produced in a later one, created in the cauldron of his asylum confinement (1937-1946), and for Artaud it is explicitly a counter-occult, counter-sorcery weapon for aggression and survival. “The occult,” Artaud writes in 1947, “is born from laziness.” The occult and allied sets of representations, including the mystical paths Artaud seemed to advocate in the 1930’s he now holds in total contempt: “I hold it now in the real, and in my body, like a toilet broom.” This results in Artaud writing almost the opposite about aspects of Cubism, for example in 1947, then he does more than a decade earlier. In 1936, according to Artaud, Picasso executes a “living geometry,” as a kind of “seer,” what Artaud elsewhere calls an “occult geometry” that makes up the patternings of the world. Yet in a January 16, 1947 letter to Georges Braque, Artaud doesn’t salute cubism for depicting such a geometry, but champions it rather because it “is a putting into question of the linear occult world,” because it confounds and tears the mechanics of an already made cosmos.
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In Paris Artaud is part of an entire milieu that seeks a solution to civilizational ills in the occult or various forms of Eastern mysticism – this is definitely true of surrealists who were personally very close to Artaud such as René Daumal and Robert Desnos, of André Breton (whom various writers have described as a kind of ‘older’ brother to Artaud). Masson was a close friend as well. It is what Scottish poet and theorist Kenneth White characterized as the “shamanic scene” of the time. But the Artaud of Rodez and after rejects this en toto. This gives the drawings to my mind an originality corresponding to their motive force. It makes sense to speak of his drawings at the very beginning of this conversation, since they (and his notebooks they often grew out of), perform a remarkable rebuttal to the psychoanalytic modes of interpretation that have so frequently been offered up to describe them. The “totemism” or stacking up of figures you mention being a case in point. Artaud demolishes any symbolic correspondence they may have, or hierarchal familial-type affiliation (why, for Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘primitive’ totemism anticipated the State). They are rather “anatomies-in-action” as Artaud called them, or assemblages in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, and quite far from psychoanalytic mechanisms of identification. In the notebooks, they provide an almost documentary day-to-day record of the creation of Artaud’s “new body.”

I honestly don’t know what Artaud would think of Bellmer’s work, or why they weren’t engaged (though I compare their drawings in the book). There are others one would imagine Artaud having an extremely productive exchange with that didn’t occur, Georges Bataille being foremost among them. Bataille seemed to be frightened and repulsed by Artaud. A marked contrast to the somewhat pitiable, purple laudanum-lipped Artaud in Bataille’s memoirs and Anäis Nin’s diaries, is producer/director Roger Blin’s account in his autobiography Souvenirs et propos(1986) – there one sees Artaud as a very powerful, dramatic presence in the cafes and embodiment for many young artists of their hopes for a generalized breakthrough (whether in the theater or elsewhere). Sexuality is such a fraught area for Artaud – one of the least appealing aspects of Artaud’s version of ‘body without organs’ is that it is designed to squash any jouissance and replace at least dualistic sexuality. Though I don’t know what Artaud would have thought of Bellmer’s project, it does similarly open up to non-homeostatic cycles, going beyond thermodynamic models of desire.

Rail: This is speculation on my part, but there may have been non-aesthetic political issues that blocked any productive Bellmer-Artaud exchanges. I learned in your book that Artaud was, in 1939, an admirer of Adolph Hitler, going so far as dedicating one of his books to him. Whereas Bellmer was declared a degenerate artist by the Nazis and had to flee Germany for France in 1938 where he was welcomed by the surrealist circles around both André Breton and Georges Bataille.
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Perhaps I should not have been shocked by Artaud’s pro-Nazi demeanor, given his stress on cruelty in his theory of theater. This is something I need to ask you more about. I have never understood why Artaud asserted ideals for a theater of cruelty when what it appeared to me he was striving for was a theater of intensity (based on cosmic hieroglyphs and the extremely graceful dance of Bali - so full of classical restraint typical of high culture). I have long pondered about Artaud’s emphasis on cruel ideals for his art (even in his white period) and I think I now understand after reading your book. Am I correct to assume that Artaud’s participation in the peyote ritual with the Tarahumaras can be described (in our parlance) as a bad trip? As you describe, he experienced something like the “death of the sun” through an all-over “grinding” that persisted with the insistence of repeated drumbeats. He madly perceives a painted, snickering (cruel) face on this cosmological grinding as it eclipses away the sun. (p. 122) This experience (of what sounds like a bummer) initiates his black period and the “explosion” of his mystical adaptation of magick, tarot, numerological, astrological and alchemical systems: an explosion that led to his internment in Le Havre and elsewhere after “cracking up” the next year in 1937. You point out that Artaud was in fact looking for psychic healing in Mexico (he even withdrew from his drug addiction there) so does interpreting his peyote experience as a bummer help explain the opposite; his encountering of trauma, cruelty and torture? A trauma that he was already expressing in his first drawings at Rodez in 1944 of dense fields of weapons and broken bodies intertwined? Drawings that point towards his building impulse to rage against any and all representation.

Murphy: Artaud does dedicate a copy of his The New Revelations of Being (1937) to Hitler in 1943, but this is in the sixth year of a frequently brutal psychiatric confinement. It is unclear whether this is mockery, a backhanded false “tribute” to the man who dominated Europe while Artaud languished, was tortured (and perished, Artaud claimed he died at several points) in asylums. This is the way the poet Jack Hirschman, editor of the 1965 City Lights Artaud Anthology, interpreted it. Artaud addresses one of his spells in September, 1939, to Hitler and it demonstrates all the profound ambiguity and ambivalence with which Hitler appears in Artaud’s journals. At times he seems to be one of the Initiatés, a being with power who could fight for him, intervene for Artaud and free him from the asylum; at others he is yet another demonic force and threat. What is consistent is only that Artaud seems very unsure of how to place him. Artaud claimed to have met Hitler in the Romanisches Café in Berlin in May, 1932, a meeting, as Stephen Barber points out, that was entirely possible (Artaud’s actor jobs sometimes brought him to Berlin in the early ‘30’s). But Artaud also claimed to have been in the bunker with Hitler when he committed suicide on April 30, 1945 – this obviously wasn’t. That Hitler constitutes a nearly overwhelming, archetypal vector for Artaud isn’t so surprising, this is also true for millions of other people. To characterize the first asylums Artaud was confined in as concentration camps also is not a stretch. Under the Nazi occupation of France all funds to asylums were cut off, consequently inmates frequently were condemned to drinking urine and eating grass to survive. It was in these circumstances that Robert Desnos arranged Artaud’s transfer to Rodez, in the ‘Free Zone.’ But there he was subjected to 51 then-experimental electro-shock treatments in a single eighteen-month period. It is difficult, despite all the painful episodes in Artaud’s life, to find anything that compares with the trauma of his treatment in the asylums. Art historian Florence de Mèredieu in her biography of Artaud has pointed out the similarity of the profound suspension of space and time in peyote and electro-shock coma, arguing that Artaud often conflated the experiences.
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Artaud isn’t ‘political’ at all in the everyday, normal sense of the term, so to say his complex relation to events prior to and during World War II is “pro-Nazi” I don’t think is accurate. Yet you’re right in that Artaud was never beholden to leftist ideologies and views in the way Bataille and Breton were, however idiosyncratic their respective communisms. Both determinedly anti-fascist, Bataille and Breton rejoin forces in the short-lived Contre-Attaque group (1935-1936), which Artaud denounces in his Mexico City lectures. In contrast, Artaud, chronically broke, later appealed for aid to Pierre Laval, the minister of culture in the Vichy government, and to futurist Filippo Marinetti, then state poet of the Mussolini regime. Artaud’s point that the revolutionary socialisms or communism of the period did not adequately deal with “the question of desire” and so was a revolution of eunuchs, of course is shared in a different manner by Bataille; this is another way of saying that changing the ownership of the means of production is a far from sufficient revolutionary condition, which becomes a commonplace insight by the time of the 1960’s New Left.

That this area is so problematic in Artaud is paradoxically why he makes such a fruitful paradigm for Deleuze and Guattari. Artaud can slide with alacrity from the paranoid/fascist pole to the schizo/revolutionary one, to use the shorthand of their Anti-Oedipus (1977). The ‘body without organs’ is the “figureless and foundationless” foundation (in Guattari’s terms) of any drive or desire, and so doesn’t exclude fascist and capitalist drives, rather it acts as attractor and platform for those as well. Artaud has often been confusing on a political level, and many of the political appropriations of Artaud in the 1960’s were oblique to their source, to say the least. When the students occupied the L’Odéon Théâtre in May, 1968, one of their slogans was “They have even stolen Artaud!” L’Odéon’s director at the time, Jean-Louis Barrault, was a close associate of Artaud’s and could have told them how misdirected this was. One of the most viable theatrical pursuits stemming from Artaud would have to be Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theater, though their anarchist-pacifist agenda wouldn’t have found much support from Artaud. Similarly, Carolee Schneemann’s ‘kinetic painting’ with its joyous assertion of female sexuality would likely horrify one of its primary inspirations.
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Yet Artaud’s critique of representation was so adamant and so far-reaching it strikes one as far more appropriate to today’s era of Google Earth and omnipresent digital infrastructures and links (Benjamin Bratton’s ‘The Stack’) than it was in the 1940’s. There have been a series of recent exhibitions and studies exploring this new ‘animism’ of our media environment where images and disembodied powers act. According to pharmaceutical activist and publisher Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, this connects to the prevalence of “capitalist sorcery” that require counter-sorcery in response. So there is a political dimension that emerges from Artaud that was not present before, just one aspect of how some of his most previously outrageous aspects find a new home in the early years of the 21stcentury.

In regard to ‘cruelty,’ this is a thread of consistency between the ‘early’ Artaud before his journey to the Tarahumaras, and ‘final’ Artaud 1945-1948. At the end of his life Artaud is still scheming and obsessed with what a proper Theater of cruelty would consist of. Artaud wrote the manifestoes of The Theater and Its Doublebefore his trip to Mexico, but when it appeared in France in 1938 Artaud was already in the asylums. In the ‘Third Letter’ of the chapter “Letters on Language” in The Theater and Its Double he responds to the many critics of the term ‘cruelty’ – it wasn’t a matter of “sadism” or “bloody gestures,” Artaud wrote, “but on the contrary, a pure and detached feeling, a veritable movement of the mind based on the gestures of life itself…” Artaud argued, “Life cannot help exercising some blind rigor that carries with it all its conditions, otherwise it wouldn’t be life…I have therefore said ‘cruelty’ as I might have said ‘life’ or ‘necessity’.” He writes elsewhere of ‘cruelty’ as any determinable or rigorous action. So any birth is a moment of cruelty, as is death. Yet the roots of any ‘culture’ are quite dark, macabre and ‘cruel’ in the usual, bloody sense for Artaud; he admired Seneca as a theater of cruelty in the ancient world, and ardently identified with the 3rd century mad Roman boy-king Heliogabalus (in a 1934 book very important to Deleuze and Guattari).
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Such was the force of theater, according to Artaud in the 1930’s, that a symbolic death or crime could have a much greater impact “than the same crime, realized,” that is, than if a person was actually murdered on the stage. This sounds unbelievably ambitious, and it is, but I see a contemporary corollary in Philippe Grandrieux films, where the suggested or anticipated violence packs more menace and fear than any violence you may see on the screen. 

Artaud was searching for a still extant, viable Theater of cruelty, and with the Tarahumaras believed he had found one. It certainly has a number of ‘bad trip’ aspects, but to conclude these are the only ones would be to deny any validity of what Artaud discovered there. The filmmaker Raymonde Carasco followed Artaud’s footsteps and like him became initiated into the Tarahumara rites; she made eleven films with the Tarahumaras, 1978-2003, beautiful studies of rhythm and gesture, part experimental cinema, part ethnography. (Her Tarahumara journals, Dans le bleu du ciel, were published in France in 2014). She found Artaud’s notion of the ‘body without organs’ a very faithful transcription of Tarahumara religion and thought. Others, such as Sylvère Lotringer, were surprised by the accuracy of Artaud’s descriptions of their ceremonies. The percussive beats, the screams and chants of To have done with the judgment of god were very much inspired from the Tarahumaras, although he’s not trying to replicate the form of their rites so much as the transfiguring power they produce. Artaud called that last radio broadcast a “mini-model” of a Theater of cruelty. This is remarkable since nowhere does Artaud point to something he’s done as having attained his goals, quite the contrary. These ‘final’ works are the fruit of Artaud’s transformation that began with the Tarahumaras. They are produced despite the horror of the asylums, where Artaud’s life became its own Theater of cruelty. The drawings become a kind of laboratory for the re-formation, re-constitution of Antonin Artaud, though not one, as he writes, of “the reintegration of a sensitivity misled.” It is a new creation of a “true body.”

​Rail: One more word on his drawings before turning to his sensational audio art radio project, Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu (To have done with the judgment of god) that Sub Rosa published on CD and the merits of his general attack on representation. By the way, stimulated by your book, I have also returned to the recording of Artaud reading his 1947 text Alienation et magie noire(Alienation and Black Magic) that was published by Lunapark.
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Artaud draws as a counter-spell his own head and face a good deal and other human heads. In doing so, he usually adheres to the tropes indispensable to the comprehension striven for in typical drawn representation. The viewer of his drawings (that were framed and exhibited in 1947 at Galerie Pierre - where Artaud made his last public appearance) is thus mostly excluded from his goal of ruining representation. Held at bay as it were, and invulnerable to a true ruin of representation through the conventions of framing, centering and perspective. My take-away from your book is that a truer ruin of representation entails more ambient and simultaneous impulses than Artaud himself provides - after all, the casting of spells is representational thinking par excellence. Needed is something all-over which returns framed and centered perspective to its rightful place as contingent instrumental convention. This is really a question of anti-phallocentric form that asks for a more active and continuously searching situation rather than content at the level of practice and reception. Hence Jay, do you think any current anti-conventional representational aesthetics of the virtual would mean working beyond Artaud’s theatrically cruel boundaries? And if so, how?

Murphy: Yes, one would think Artaud’s approach would lead to complete non-representationalism. He has his reasons, however, for retaining the figure in his drawings while he scarifies, re-arranges, obliterates and replaces it. In his little essay “The Human Face” (1947) he refers to how one of Van Gogh’s self-portraits “renders null and void all the attempts of abstract paintings which can be made after him,” as well of “the most specious secrets in which abstract or nonfigurative painting can delight.” As usual, what he says about Van Gogh applies as much or more to his own work. “There will be hell to pay,” Artaud wrote of his own drawings, “for whoever considers them works of art, works of aesthetic simulation of reality.” It may well seem a contradiction to allow such work to be shown in an art gallery as Artaud’s comments on the postwar Parisian art world were coruscating. Furthermore, some of Artaud’s last work will seem to make moot the entire notion of audience.
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What I feel evokes Artaud are works that highlight the virtual operations or components of any ‘experience.’ This would include not only works that do evoke catastrophe or conventional loss of perspective or ‘self’ - like Gary Hill’s Dervish(1993-1995), Reflex Chamber (1996), or Impressions d’Afrique (2003), among others - but also works that do not feature the cataclysm one associates with Artaud. I can’t imagine Toni Dove is attempting to uproot and transform audience/participants the way Artaud hopes, yet her Lucid Possession (2013) features a “schizoid chorus from the real and virtual worlds,” so her narrative in this advanced, interactive performance/cinema has Artaudian themes. Lucid Possession is a ghost story where the principal character is invaded by presences; similarly, in her Spectropia (2007-2008) the noir/sci-fi themes include time-travel and telepathy. Lucid Possession utilizes robotic screens, motion sensing, laser technologies and live VJing, among other elements, that one could embrace as a technologically-enhanced theater of cruelty. And in her artist’s statement for Lucid Possession Dove asks the preeminently Artaudian question of “where does the body end?” Such works are multi-directional and depend on the gesture and bodily movement of their audience-participator, and so are decentered in a manner perhaps that Artaud’s drawings cannot be; despite what Artaud called the “unsticking of the retina,” a sliding before the work that could engulf the entire body.

I find some of the most successful Artaudian approaches in the films and installations of Philippe Grandrieux, whether in La Vie nouvelle (2002) or Malgré la nuit (2015) and the Unrest trilogy (2012-2017). It is not simply a matter of shock-value, or utilization of the scream, contortions of the face, real and symbolic violence, the dance, location of the psychosis of our time in sexuality and the body, which are all present. It is that Grandrieux is so effective in dissolving subject/object relations that one must navigate his films through the images alone or viscerally through the body, which implies another, double body. This speech of the body through motion and gesture, all other avenues being closed (sound is a profoundly significant element, and there are songs even if speech is often futile or foreclosed), is a consequence of an annihilation of metaphor – this is a tremendous Artaudian achievement. One must participate in the film through joining a labyrinth of bodies, yet the body remains inaccessible for all that. Grandrieux’ “new life” seems to suggest inventing another body in Hell – as Artaud did in the asylums. The character of Mélania in La Vie nouvelle is nothing so much as new Eurydice.
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Artaud’s influence has been so vast – from lettrism in France, Butoh in Japan, concrete poetry movements in Brazil, aside from paintings by artists as disparate as Nancy Spero, Georg Baselitz and Julian Schnabel, and in alternative theater/performance – but these I’ve mentioned appear as really promising extensions, and they are often only possible due to new or digital technologies. In another medium, Diamanda Galás has spoken of her “surgical approach” to each word, dismembered and rended, and then reconstituted as part of the sentence, phrase or entire poem, as a device she took from Artaud. So a Theater of cruelty continues, more or less cruel!

Rail: Artaud’s influence is not in doubt and his cruel attitude towards abstract or nonfigurative art is intriguing. Your explanation made me think of what Gilles Deleuze said in Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (1981) about abstract painting: that “it has pure hands, but it doesn’t have hands.” But perhaps more important for the future of art is how Artaud insists on linking the imagination to notions of impossible spells. I think that even though in his essay “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation” Jacques Derrida describes how Artaud’s theory may be seen as impossible in terms of the established structure of Western thought, this is precisely why current art theory, with its vital connections to spells, the speculative, the imaginary, the virtual, and the impossible should be re-placed in parallel position to Artaud’s body without organs hypothesis. This is particularly so when artists put themselves inside the virtual way of art making, where one experiences constant preludes to the work’s fulfillment. As with Artaud, the artist’s will and desire play with and against an impossible vastness that can always divert immediacy, thus stimulating desires which affect the state of nerves and minds.
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But in his statement on Van Gogh, Artaud seems to be suggesting that such nervy desires involve a prying-loose from former familiarities, and hence is a state where art itself is attacked and opposed. Is that right? I sort of hope not, as the way I see it is that art and the artist are required more than ever as a way of overcome the alienation felt with the expanded boundaries of virtual presentation and re-presentation. Perhaps only the artificiality of art extols the operational possibility of realizing in the physical world imaginative challenges needed for gaining familiarity with those vast virtual concepts. Also, isn’t it true that Artaud proposed that art must become a means of influencing the human organism and directly altering consciousness by engaging the audience in ritualistic-like activities involving excess?

Murphy: The body without organs does involve a kind of infinite suspension. With Artaud, it is part of an ecstatic wager where one gets the sense that this body cannot ever be completed. This is similar to the earliest treatment of BwO in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, where the only complete body without organs would be a dead body, its orifices totally closed. It is also typical of Artaud’s spells that he is waiting for their result, and constantly testing which ones work and which ones don’t, so your comment concerning “constant preludes to the work’s fulfillment” is very much to the point. But I don’t think Artaud sees his spells as impossible. Rather, for him it is how and why anything happens. Artaud shared the belief, extremely common in the millennia of ‘traditional’ societies, that one only dies due to malevolent magick. Otherwise, one would live forever. Artaud’s notion of art is tied to transformative action, much as it was for most of human history. A parallel in modern and postmodern art would be William Burroughs’ definition of writing as “making things happen.” Like Artaud, Burroughs means this quite literally, in that it changes reality or creates an effective alternate reality. (Burroughs, a member of the Order of the Thanateros, was buried with its chaos star ring on his finger). 
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Artaud stays faithful to Dada and early surrealism in that art-as-institution is to be absolutely opposed. Artaud, at the end of his life, said that he doesn’t mind being called a surrealist and that he was always a surrealist, except for the short period of time when he was in a group that called itself that! He writes about Van Gogh as a “marvelous musician,” as well as practitioner of “pure painting,” yet Van Gogh partakes of “direct creation” that dwarfs even the power of nature for Artaud. The artist-as-shaman comparison that comes in and out of vogue, given its domestication among other reasons, is another kind of “pitiful terminology” for what Artaud presents. There are many ‘art worlds,’ but the consumer cycles of the high-luxury business are simply irrelevant to this. Bataille’s path was different, but his advocacy of le grand surréalisme in the 1940’s is analogous in that it suggests a surrealism without or beyond ‘works,’ which cannot be appropriated as such. 

Rail: As virtual space places us in the position of indeterminate unknowing, I see how Artaud helps disable previous emphasis on the false objectivism of representation accorded to cultural production. In the virtual condition of arduous inter-relational questioning, what is clarified in terms of the ruin of representation is the human idiosyncratic ability to imaginatively convert absence into presence. 
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In the book you suggest that Artaud foresaw and anticipated the cultural rupture (or bifurcation if you prefer) that occurred between the capture technologies of the 20th century (representational art, film, photography and video) and the far more virtual and elastic technology of the computer and its language codes. For you, does Artaud’s virtual body aid current culture by pushing the underlying assumptions of excess inherent in the virtual into the flesh, thus challenging artists to face up to the radical implications of that assumption in their body of work? I assume so, but don’t you think that what is important to Artaud’s ruin of representation was already instigated by Arthur Rimbaud’s poetic formula based on the derangement of the senses? In Rimbaud’s poems, we are already essentially challenged to find the virtual within vast and shifting non-representational sensations of the body’s sense organs. Right? 

Murphy: Rimbaud is a very significant and relevant precursor and also, for different reasons, is Comte de Lautréamont. Artaud has a ‘peer group’ he often refers to, including Rimbaud and Lautréamont, Baudelaire, François Villon, Edgar Allen Poe, Friedrich Hölderlin, Gérard de Nerval, and sometimes others. There is a Baudelairean “voyage” aspect to cyberspace, though as Rimbaud pointed out, Baudelaire remained a conservative writer in some aspects given his respect for traditional French prosody. Baudelaire never broke the “eggshells of being” in Jean-Paul Sartre’s awkward phrase. Baudelaire and Poe had already filled out to a great extent Artaud’s theme that greater insight was possibly gained from degradation and sickness, insomnia and lucid dreams, than in health. Nerval’s psychotic episodes were profoundly mythic ones, as certain periods of Artaud’s ‘schizophrenia’ were likewise ‘classic,’ in that they were travels through history that contained assumptions of historic personas. Lautréamont’s howls, especially directed toward the nuclear family and family-like institutions throughout society, were also unrepeatable gestures, as Gaston Bachelard stressed in his book on him. Artaud includes Nietzsche in this group now and then, and their stances strike me often as very close. But for Nietzsche the “aesthetic simulation of reality” was necessary for human beings to bear existence at all, not a condition to be abolished.
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Artaud’s Theater of cruelty does bank on excess, but I stress the constructivist nature of the body without organs that is missed by looking at Artaud and his convolutions strictly through a lens of excess. Artaud claims some success: in December, 1947 he writes, “I have made/a body.” Artaud in the ‘late’ work has generated a new substrate of being, which is arguably more significant than his achievements during the short-lived participation with the surrealists or even the theater manifestoes. It is this body without organs that Félix Guattari later generalizes as “the continual point of emergence of all forms of creativity” in an era of “planetary computerization.”

Rail: In my view, Artaud’s logocentric defect or deficiency (that I cited earlier) exactly illustrates what is wrong with his method of supposedly ruining representation in sound art and in drawing. As Artaud suggested, systems of representations operate by establishing a fixed standard as the norm or model. I think he stayed too close to these models. In that sense, Artaud’s audio art piece To have done with the judgment of god, regardless of its ground-breaking treatment of the scream and glossolalia and some pretty far out sound effects for the time, fails to effect a ruin of representation. He should have used higher degrees of excessive superimposition to produce a lavishness that bids us to open our ears and eyes to the nomadic nomos of wandering assemblages and their molten distribution. Do you agree with me Jay, or am I being too hard on Artaud? 

Murphy: To have done with the judgment of god has evoked all sorts of responses. Artaud’s ambitions for it were vast. He predicted the broadcast “would connect with certain organic points of life, a work which causes the entire nervous system to feel illuminated as if by a miner’s cap, with vibrations and consonances that invite one to corporeally emerge.” Artaud thought that the working class people that tuned in were among the few who could understand what he suffered in the asylums because they too had been exploited. Artaud wanted to engulf the listener. Though his disappointment in it being banned cannot be overestimated, by all accounts it was devastating, there is a sense in Artaud’s use of the scream that its impacted power no longer needs an audience. Exercises with screams were a major part of Artaud’s work with actors in the 1930’s, and it is a remarkably honed weapon by the end of his life. The scream becomes the ultimate in what Artaud called his “search for fecality” – an expression or value of expulsion that is not excremental, which cannot be located in any ‘interior’ or ‘exterior.’ This self-propulsion, beyond what Artaud termed the oral-anal canal, also resides on a border of all dualities: including eros/thanatos, life/death. This form of non-duality had its existence, in Guy Rossolato’s terms, as that which “by means of the single thought incarnate in the infinite instant of passage within the circumscribed immensity of the theatre: a scream.” Artaud’s aim was for a re-materialization of his body, and a taking back of his voice that was silenced for nine years in the asylums. In that sense, it is a success. There are shades of it in early Butoh’s insistence on gestures that hang in the air in a grasp of immortality (its refusal, especially in Tatsumi Hijikata’s performance, of repertory), and in the later work of Jerzy Grotowski that consists of excruciating ‘spiritual’ exercises for the performer with no audience. But it is with various new technologies that Artaud’s ambitions for a veritable disorder and engulfment can be most realized. 

Rail: Thank you Jay for this marvelously rich book and for the stimulating conversation. I end our exchange with a quote of Antonin Artaud’s from his “Manifesto in Clear Language” that I always find relevant and nourishing: “In the realm of the affective imponderable, the image provided by my nerves takes the form of the highest intellectuality, which I refuse to strip of its quality of intellectuality.”

The article is taken from:

by Himanshu Damle

Would it be unsafe to say that every epoch (Zeitgeist) is defined by the kind of technology that determines the consciousness on the social and the individual level? I don’t think so.

Post 1980, roughly speaking, we have been living in a world that is accompanied by a fellow traveler as a parallel world, a world that could be called the virtual world and the world we inhabit could be termed the actual world or the real world. Rather than getting into the realm of psychoanalytic vocabulary, let me be clear enough to denote the virtual and the actual/real as the one based on computations and the other as based on non-computational respectively. What we get on the merger of these two worlds is the carving out of new topography. The merger needs to presently map out only the cognitive vision in a space that gets defined when the two interact heavily, the case today. This merger has been called by Nechvatal “Viractual”. Joseph Nechvatal has been the pioneer in this study that he undertook as a research topic in virtual reality at the Center for Advanced Inquiry at the Interactive Arts, UK.

The major issue of contention here is the trapping and unleashing of the power of digitization over its counterpart ‘the analog’. To quote Roy Ascott in his essay titled “The Architecture of Cyberception”,

A new sense to self could be what Michel Henry called the “ipseity” or a presence in what was hitherto never imagined, what had always disturbed the notions of imagination. A new sense to self could be what Michel Henry called the “ipseity” or a presence in what was hitherto never imagined, what had always disturbed the notions of imagination, a sense of aporia never thought of in overcoming. But, this is what is precisely what the inhabited world is facing upto. One can easily sense the parallel in the way Deleuze read Spinoza in his practical philosophy, wherein, Desires always propelled us to move to states of higher or lesser exaltations depending on whether the object encountered is in harmony with us or sets out to decompose. Viractual is this sense of existence in a double bind and a sense through which the notion of the exalted-ness gets defined as a flux of moving back and forth, a dynamism that abhors ossification. A sense of novelty in looking at life and art in compartmentalizing the two is the order of the Viractual. Viractual is often called cybism. Nechvatal states that cybism can be used to characterize a certain group of researchers and their understanding of where cultural space is developing today. Cybists reflect on system dynamics with a hybrid blending (cybridization) of the computational supplied virtual with the analog. This blending of the computational virtual with the analog indicates the subsequent emergence of a new cybrid topological cognitive-vision that Nechvatal has called viractuality: the space of connection betwixt the computed virtual and the uncomputed corporeal (actual) world which merge in cybism. He further states that co-extensive notions found in cybism have sharp ramifications for art as product in that the cybists are actively exploring the frontiers of science/technology research so as to become culturally aware of the biases of consciousness in order to amend those biases through the monumentality and permanency which can be found in powerful art. He begins with the realization that every new technology disrupts the previous rhythms of consciousness. In this sense cybist art research begins where hard science/technology ends. Cybists reflect on system dynamics with a hybrid blending (cybridization) of the computational supplied virtual with the analog. Digitization is a key metaphor for the cybists only in the sense that it is the fundamental translating system today.

This blending of the computational virtual with the analog indicates the subsequent emergence of a new cybrid topological cognitive-vision: the space of connection betwixt the computed virtual and the uncomputed corporeal (actual) world which merge in cybism. This cybrid space of cybism can be further inscribed as a span of liminality, which according to the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (based on his anthropological studies of social rites of passage) is the condition of being on a threshold between spaces.

Concerning this cybrid topological cognitive-vision, I am reminded here of two very different, yet complimentary, concepts: entrainment and égréore. Entrainment, in electro-physics, is the coupling of two or more oscillators as they lock into a commonly sensed interacting frequency. In alchemical terms an égréore (an old form of the word agréger) is a third concept or phenomenon that is established from conjoining two different elements together. I suggest that the term (concept) cybrid (and cybism) may be a concordant entrainment/égréore conception helpful in defining this third fused inter-spatiality that is forged from the meeting of the virtual and the actual.

Co-extensive notions found in cybism have piquant ramifications for art as product in that the cybists are actively exploring the frontiers of science/technology research so as to become culturally aware of the biases of consciousness in order to amend those biases through the monumentality and permanency which can be found in powerful art. They begin with the realization that every [new] technology disrupts the previous rhythms of consciousness. Then, generally speaking, they pursue their work in an effort to contradict the dominant clichés of our time, as they tend to move in their regimented grooves of sensibility. In this sense their art research begins where the hard science/technology ends.

Most certainly cybists understand that in every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. Hence the role of the cybist is that of the explorer/researcher. The function of such an explorationaly inclined artist however is not to only find, but to participate in and foster a constant instability of consciousness, to mitigate against self-stabilizing formations so as to encourage internal ‘cybomatic’ connections to sprout and expand. This integration goes far towards exemplifying an aesthetic that has a problematic relationship to material science-based reality.

Today, with the emergence and continual growth of cyberspace, it seems that no sense of closure will ever be able to contain the deterritorialization articulated and monumentalized by cybism.

Consequently, cybism has begun articulating a new techno-digital sense of life. By looking at the complex social and technological changes already occurring within the 21st century, cybists seem to perceive the world now as a kaleidoscopic environment in which every tradition has some valid residual form as information and sensation. A world of perpetual transformation has emerged and established a seemingly unrestricted area of abundant options.

What is being targeted here is an effort to bridge the two cultures of electronic activity with the traditional painting. The electronic activity could be the tailored virus and the traditional painting could be the panoply of images, stacked ones for that instance. Dromologically, the image is a blessing and a problem, so is the traditional image and therefore, the fusion of the two is defined as the problematic. This problematic is essentially treated as a purgatory of the psyche, and according to Nechvatal, conceptualized as a bringing forth to the surface the repressed ideas or the memories. A kind of sublimation is at work here as the dialectics of the bringing forth and repression is exercising the purge, the cleansation of the psyche.

One way of looking at the Viractual is the way consciousness operates, that is, if it is ever thought in terms of as an emerging property. Rather, it would be safe to say, the way the Viractual operates would facilitate in mapping the emerging of consciousness. Nechvatal undertook the study of viractual images and initially toyed with the idea of complex images with increasing mixture of drawing, digital photography, written language and external computerized codes. Once done, he subjected the deliberations to computerized manipulations including the viral attacks. The tailor made virus is behavioristically modeled as an active loop that swings into action in the manner of artificially intelligent. The viral conditions are built in keeping in mind the way the environment impacts the existential status of the virus. The environment dictates the way the virus starts or stops to process. This way is nothing short of openness for the system, an interactive one, a one where the processual dialectic is continuously at work, where the structurality and the functionality are always dialectically negotiating. Or in the words of Maturana and Valera, an autopoietic machine:

Nechvatal actually identifies the Viractual with the autopoietic machine, but the difference is the way in which he relates the same in a more Deleuzean manner of a rhizomatic web, wherein all is connected all at once in a globular communicative network. But, why rhizomatic? As Nechvatal has himself pointed out in a talk, his perseverance to detect in art a fertile attraction towards the abstractions of advanced scientific discovery-discovery now stripped of its fundamentally reductive logical methodology. This attraction has the property of emerging out or exiting out, entering into or an intercourse into the fold at multitudinous points or rather topologically defined co-[planarity]. Cleansing the psyche is a new way of looking the consciousness, a presence of the carrier of the dialectics, sublimation is wrought out. Therefore, viractual art may not be satisfied with the regurgitation of standardized analog repertoires for art. Rather, a fertile attraction towards the abstractions of advanced scientific discovery – discovery now stripped of its fundamentally reductive logical methodology is detected in viractual art.

Into the unfamiliar (but evolving familiarity) chaosmos, the turbulence defined by the dromological technology in all its auto-superlative-prerogative over the ‘techne’ is indeed fracturing the very consciousness that once was taken to be the very cradle of comprehensibility. It dislocates the very hypostasis, dethrones it and opens up the space of mutation, a space of extreme plethora, of experimentation, empiricism constantly pregnant with abstraction called the ‘viractual’.

Note:

The article is taken from:

by Arran James

​Niki de Saint Phalle was a French sculptor, performance artist, painter, poster maker, writer, film-maker and feminist. A producer of voluptuous sculptures of female bodies that alternate between Goddess worship and the affirmation of vulnerability, her work is almost always oversized, brash and colourful. There is an innocence to her work that reflects her desire for her sculptures to be touched and literally inhabited. For instance, this skull was designed for human bodies to move around within it and to this day her intentions are being respected. She also wanted her art to communicate a sensuous call to children and after having taken our 5 year old to see an exhibition of her work at GoMA I can attest that it does. Even when her work is exploring the darkest of themes (and often her own lost innocence after being sexually assaulted as a child by her own father) her work’s instantiate a revealing in the production of an aesthetic sensibility of joyful abundance. Even threatening material remains an exotic flash of colour and warm with the softness of curves. Traditionally a leaden reminder of mortality and finitude, here the skull becomes playful, vivacious and obscene in size: death itself is captured as a thing of beauty and joy.

​The Great Devil, like her “Nanas”, might be soft, voluptuous and inviting but they are also disfigured. Heads and arms appear under-developed or don’t appear at all and faces are obliterated. There is the suggestion of incompleteness within abundance and of an ambiguous reversibility of malevolent and nurturing forces. This might best be illustrated in her small but important book on Aids. In the materials she produced in her early “shooting paintings” de Saint Phalle also revealed the necessity of violence that subtends the creative process and would talk about the experience of watching the painting “bleed” colour. By taking aim at cans or balloons of paint she was able to force the canvas and the objects attached to it to reveal its corporeal dimension thereby revealing both it, and her own, vulnerability in a performative gesture. Her career as an artist was a therapeutic response to a “nervous breakdown” that centred on her traumatic exposure to male sexuality and so violence had both a demonic and cathartic operation in her art. What gesture could be more ambiguous than seizing the phallic power of the rifle and turning it on one’s own creations? Yet in making them bleed she punctures the paintings making them more than they were, rather than diminishing or killing them.

​In another of her enormous sculptures a giant Nana lays with her legs open while the spectators shuffle between her part labia and walk into her vagina. Adult bodies are returned to their infantile size by the effect of the relative scales of their organic and inorganic corporeal dimensions. Grown adults return to the womb having been made small and put in the mimetic place treacherous body of infancy and childhood. At one and the same time this is a return with both comforting and horrific aspects but which ultimately reminds each of us that our fragile bodies began as growths held within the uterus of our mothers.

We return to the place we have left as a collectivity and a public rather than as isolated children. At least in theory; galleries tend to be among the most alienating environments, which goes some way towards explaining why she often displayed her work in extra-institutional spaces. But it is not just as mother that this giant body welcomes us but as lover: the public enters the cunt of an artist who once described herself as one of ‘the biggest whores in the world’. There is no shame in this though- her body is big and welcoming and never closes, is never finished with new lovers. This is both the celebration of motherhood and of a particularly female eros. Furthermore, it is an eros that is indifferent to the sex, sexuality or gender identifications of those that enter her. And in entering we also see another aspect of the vulnerable corporeality of bodies: they penetrate (us) and our penetrable (sculpture); they may be broken into (sexual assault and rape) or they may welcome us (consensuality). This particular female body opens itself up to a waiting public and so loses performs or prophesies the time when female bodies aren’t considered in the negative as deprivation and confined to the private sphere. The very title, She: a cathedral, at once suggests congregations flocking to a Sacred space and the publicity that such spaces can take on. This is the happy side of feminism but de Saint Phalle is engages its more militant face too.

​In this shooting painting (or tir) we find that the patriarch is neither a male or female body but a blank white and sexless form. The body of the patriarch is not just a body but a territory bounded by darkness and populated by aircraft, missiles and torn apart dolls: the weapons of war and the broken bodies of their victims. The red explosion so obviously suggestive of blood emerges from the place where the heart is located in the popular imagination suggesting that the patriarch’s heart has exploded. Of course this is the effect created by the artist shooting it herself. If this is the dead body of the patriarch then the cause of death was assassination. At the same time as performing the destruction of the patriarch (at once patriarchy itself and the very “name-of-the-father” that had abused her and countless others) the painting is also an explicit and somehow lurid and stark elaboration on the relationship between that patriarchy, war and the image of femininity that women were expected to consume throughout the 1960s. In the time since it was first exhibited this angry feminist image has lost none of its power.

​In coming to the end of this appreciation- rather than review or critique- of Nikki’s de Saint Phalle’s work I wanted to turn to her own words. The exhibition at GoMA is accompanied by many quotations and features copies of her books. So it is odd that I can’t find any of her writing available online, except for non-preview e-books. The insurgent vitality of her artwork, often dismissed as merely “playful” and thereby missing the way that the early aggression still haunts the later work, sings and screams loudly about corporeality, sexuality, trauma, women and feminism; but her words seem to be largely ignored by the institutions and publications that announce her as cutting edge. This depoliticisation and repackaging as “exciting” “dangerous” or “innovative” is often the fate of political art within the circuitry of the art-market’s consumerism. So instead of reading some of what she had to say about the world and her own artistic practice, let’s watch her shooting the fuck out of a painting:

The article is taken from:

by ​JOSEPH NECHVATAL

Considering the Problem of Aesthetic Immersion: "Dioramas" at the Palais de Tokyo

Exhibition view of Jean Paul Favand, Naguère Daguerre III (2015) 19th century painted canvas, luminous installation and scenography, Musée des Arts Forains (Paris), courtesy of the artist. Photo Aurélien Mole

​Dioramas
Palais de Tokyo
13 Avenue du Président Wilson, 16th arrondissement
June 14 – September 10, 2017

Dioramas may or may not be your cup of tea, but they do clarify and confirm our latent immersive desire for intimate sublime space, something that has marginally existed in art and human culture throughout time. Anyone who has played with dolls or army men has a feel for the psychic projection of the diorama: a model representing a scene with three-dimensional figures in miniature. Subsequently, Palais de Tokyo’s current show Dioramas is impossible not to enjoy on that juvenile level. But the cultural feelings inherent in adult aesthetic immersion - which entails a lack of psychic spatial distance - need to be considered as well in this kind of show. 

Armand Morin, Panorama 14 (2013-2017) Divers material, 260 x 260 x 300 cm Photo: Armand Morin. Courtesy of the artist

Charles Matton, L’Atelier de Giacometti (1987), photo by the author

Dioramas attempt to close the atmospheric gulf between the viewer and the aesthetic environment being viewed, something that is ideally dissolved in virtual reality’s 360-degree industrial standard of perfect functionality: total-immersion. Total-immersion, that state of virtual being which is considered the holy grail of the VR industry, can be characterized as a total lack of psychic distance between body-image and the immersive environment, accompanied by a feeling of plunging into another world. Dioramas are a cultural step towards total-immersion within the insinuated space of a virtual surrounding where everything within that sphere relates necessarily to the proposed "reality" of that world’s space and where the immersant is seemingly altogether disconnected from exterior physical space. As such, diorama’s immersion promotes a conflated but promiscuous ontological feeling of awareness where aesthetic cognition of the limits of the aesthetic environment attain the actual state of the generally subjective world of consciousness. Pushing back against that subjective seduction is the finest piece in the show: Richard Baquié’s 1991 remake facsimile of Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage (1966); it deconstructs the illusionism behind all dioramas. One can circle the Étant donnés sculpture and see it for the first time from many angles, thus undercutting Duchamp’s original artistic peek-a-boo intentions.

Richard Baquié, Sans titre. Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage (1991), photo by the author.

Dioramas involve the viewer in a combination of the history of scenography, illusion, art, cinema, theatre, circus, science, and perception technology. Indeed, they are an apparent ancestor of immersive virtual reality. Their formal invention in the 19th century brought about an optical revolution and represented a turning point in the history of spectacle akin to the emergence of magic lanterns in the 17th century. Like virtual reality, dioramas seem to offer us the promise of an over-all make-believe world, or trips to the lost past.  Two of the strongest works Diorama invoke the purpose of the diorama especially well: Charles Matton’s excellent L’Atelier de Giacometti (1987), and Armand Morin’s Panorama 14(2012). While Giacometti’s studio exudes meditative stillness, Panorama 14, a model of the amazing Canyon de Chelly animated by special effects and theatrical lighting, is rhythmed in time by a miniature sandstorm. This swooshing motion lends a feel of the sublime to the diorama, as shifting elements of ruddy scenery fade and emerge from the shifting landscape.

Armand Morin, Panorama 14 (2013-2017) Divers material, 260 x 260 x 300 cm Photo: Armand Morin. Courtesy of the artist

This sense of subtly shifting scenery evokes the diorama’s pre-history: the history of the panorama, a history that is given slight recognition here in this show. The name panorama is bestowed upon several forms of large-scale pictorial displays which enjoyed widespread popularity in the 18th and 19th centuries as applied to artificial installations that utilized a 360° view of a landscape or cityscape. These scenes were painted on the inside of a large cylinder and viewed from a platform at the cylinder’s center. This mode of optic display was officially invented and patented by Robert Barker, an Irish artist who lived and worked in Edinburgh. The original name for the panorama was the French term la nature à coup d'oeil, but in advertisements for its exhibition in London in 1791 Barker adapted the term panorama, which derives from the Greek words for all and view. This choice of words (all-view) indicates that what was strived for was an attempt at a total-view. ​

Mark Dion, Paris Streetcape (2017) Courtesy of the artist & Galerie In situ – Fabienne Leclerc (Paris). Photo: Aurélien Mole

​Barker first exhibited his invention in 1787 in Edinburgh and in London in 1788. These presentations were considerably well-received by the public (the audience undoubtedly enjoyed being immediately surrounded on all sides by a three-dimensional interior) and their success enabled Barker to open a permanent rotunda for the exhibition of his panorama in London in 1793: the Leicester Square Panorama, which operated continuously for seventy years. However, prior to Barker’s achievement, several antecedents were put forth in Britain. In 1777, Thomas Hearne produced a sketch of Derwentwater that was 6.1 metres long (approximately 20 feet) for George Barret, who intended to have the scene painted on the walls of a circular banquet room. In 1781, Barret had painted the walls of a room at Norbury Park in Surrey with a continuous vista of the Cumberland Hills.

Jean-Paul Favand, Naguère Daguerre II (2012) View of the canvas illuminated from the back. 19th century painted canvas, luminous installation and scenography, 270 x 410 cm. Photo: Jean Mulatier. Courtesy Jean Paul Favand, Paris

​Eschewing Barker et al, the show launches itself with the work of Louis-Jacques Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype, who, together with the architect/painter Charles-Marie Bouton, created the scenography diorama in 1822. This landmark work is here represented by Jean-Paul Favand’s 19th century painted canvases, luminously treated in a fluctuating fashion: Naguère Daguerre I and Naguère Daguerre II (both 2012). Like the panorama, the diorama was an attempt to recreate the appearance of 360-degree nature by means of painting and the mechanical regulation of light. Daguerre’s diorama consisted of a delicate cloth measuring about 14 by 22 metres (approximately 46 by 72 feet) painted with landscapes in a manner of the idyllic sublime. The audience sat in near-darkness as the picture was shown by means of daylight admitted through the windows, concealed both above the spectators and behind the painting by a system of shutters and colored filtering screens. These innovations were first shown at the Paris Diorama, which the two men constructed to seat 350 people at the Place de la République, which opened July 11th, 1822. On September 29th, 1823 the partners opened a second Diorama that seated 200, which could show two dioramas in succession by rotating the audience 73 degrees in London’s Regent’s Park. The Daguerre Diorama also made a tour of Britain and the east coast of America.

Jean-Paul Favand, Naguère Daguerre I (2012), View of the canvas illuminated from the front. 19th century painted canvas, luminous installation and scenography, 270 x 410 cm. Photo: Jean Mulatier. Courtesy Jean Paul Favand, Paris

Closely linked to the history of landscape painting and the emergence of the notion of the sublime, dioramas most often featured grandiose monuments and landscapes in the purest romantic tradition. These trompe-l’oeil compositions came to life thanks to ingenious lighting tricks, reflective mirrors, and colored glass - elements which together could create a range of atmospheric effects such as fog, sunlight, and dawn.

Following a dive into Daguerre’s original 1822 diorama, the Palais de Tokyo exhibition goes on to explore naturalist and ethnographic dioramas that consist of a glass case, a backdrop, and a selection of three-dimensional figures and objects. This exhibition trope is spoofed at the get-go: upon entering the Dioramas exhibit, one first is confronted by a short clip of the movie Night at the Museum, where Ben Stiller is trying to speak to Sacagawea in a glass box, but she can’t hear him. At once entertaining due to their spectacular character, pedagogical in their desire to tell a story, and highly plastic thanks to their painted backdrops and sculpted figures, ethnographic dioramas attest to the talent of the unknown artists, scientists, taxidermists, and architects who created them, therefore redefining the territory of art and its borders with technology.

Rowland Ward, Léopard et Guibs harnachés (1904) Diorama, 113 x 236 x 70 cm Photo: Alain Franchella / Région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. Courtesy of the Domaine royal de Randan (Randan)

Faced with the rise of Protestantism, the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent (1545-1563) found in the excesses of art a valuable ally with an undeniable power of attration. This clever development is illustrated with a collection of dioramas that show Biblical scenes or the lives of saints in three dimensions, such as Caterina De Julianis’s Santa Maria Maddalena in adorazione della croce (1717). Immersion into the image here proved to be a remarkably effective means of propagating the Catholic faith, and such models enjoyed a great deal of success from the 16th century onwards by stressing nativity scenes (that proliferated in churches come Christmas time) along with small-format, three-dimensional paintings that served as private devotional objects.

Caterina De Julianis, Santa Maria Maddalena in adorazione della croce (1717) Polychrome wax, painted paper, glass, tempera on paper and other materials, 53,7 x 59 cm. Photo: Artefotografica, Rome. Courtesy Galleria Carlo Virgilio & C, Rome

The show’s press release claims these Biblical scenes as the very first dioramas, with their three-dimensional elements set in a painted background. But this assertion is clearly wrong. Already in classical Greeco-Roman antiquity, there was a distinct contrast between the natural grotto (decorated with pumice stone, tufa, and shells and punctuated with sculpture and a diminutive pool of water) and the architectural grotto (where interior walls are coated in a mosaic of coloured pebbles, shells and coral in union with frescoes and sculpture). By the mid-16th century, almost every cognoscenti had a grotto of one of these types. The nymphaeum at Hadrian’s Villa (AD 134) at Tivoli is regarded as the most famous and influential grotto from Roman antiquity. In addition, the 1st-century BC Temple of the Sibylat Tivoli, which stands on a ledge of naturally caved rocks which were fitted-out as grottoes, served as a model for a good many of grottoes over time, including that at the Schloss Schwetzingen at Baden-Württemberg. The Blue Grotto at Capri served as a clear-cut model for the neo-rococo Venus Grotto (1877) at Linderhof. In the early half of the 18th century, when the impact of the Baroque could still be felt, an independent type of grotto architecture came into being in Germany whereby the grotto became associated with a garden green-room. The proliferation of seashells and glistening minerals, combined with painted frescos and stucco, is typical of this trend. Furthermore, already in the 16th century there evolved the autonomous pavilion grotto in France: a detached diminutive fabrication coated in tufa (e.g., Noisy-le-Roy (1599)); this form, less the tufa, became widely adapted in Germanic culture, including the Orpheus Grotto at Schloss Hellbrunn. In 1584, Bernardo Buontalenti installed a grotesque grotto at the Medici villa of Pratolina, which was famous for its water-driven mechanical automata.  ​

Exhibition view of Walter Potter, Happy Family (ca 1870) Wood, glass, paint, paper, preserved animals. Private collection, courtesy of the artist. Photo: Aurélien Mole

​Remarkably like the diorama, the mannerist Grotesque grotto is deliberately anti-realistic, often including elaborate depictions of multiple figures bound in tendrils. Mannerist Renaissance grottoes were placed in various locations: in the ground floor of buildings, as separate stand-alone structures, or tucked under terraces. Mannerist interior decorators esteemed the style inasmuch as it was suitably hoary in derivation, whimsical and playfully erotic, and capable, due to its all-over field approach, of fitting any required expanse. Many late-Renaissance grottoes were decorated in just such a grotesque and syncretistic fashion. Grotesque grottoes were created in a variety of extravagant shapes, but all were dedicated to the impulses of sex and love. Often the inside simulated an underwater cavern, replete with a mosaic coating of opened seashells suggestive of female genitalia. In that sense, grottoes represented the reverse side of Renaissance rationality by introducing into the ordered garden space of the formal garden a niche dedicated to the irrational realm of the mystic world in which rationalist rules need not apply. It is this aspect of the grotto which is the most relevant characteristic in formulating comparisons to the diorama's urge towards immersive space.

The interior grotto was greeted with a warm reception in France, starting as early as the regime of King François I (1494-1547). Its importance resides in the fact that the interior grotto inspired the immersive attributes of the Rococo Rocaille style, attributes that set the conditions for the diorama mania to follow. To sum-up: all interior grottoes shared with the diorama these following characteristics: the expansion of a precise formal visual idea, a taste for astonishment and special effects, the inflation of form, and an excessively self-confident premeditation.

Exhibition view of Erich Böttcher, Mouflon de Dall, Denali National Park (1997) Mixed media, 400 x 190 x 238 cm. Bremen, Ubersee-Museum Bremen Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Aurélien Mole

To return to what is in the show, besides disliking the taxidermy in Rowland Ward’s Léopard et Guibs harnachés (1904) and Erich Böttcher’s Mouflon de Dall, Denali National Park(1997), what I definitely don’t like about dioramas - as opposed to grottoes - is how visually over-determined they are. How helplessly childish and passive they make us feel! It's similar to a point that Donna Haraway made in terms of bias in her essay Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936. Their etymology would suggest that dioramas are about imaginarily "seeing through" a scene. But there is little transparency and/or simultaneity to be found in the diorama, which seems to be more about "seeing across" a space of objects into a deeper space, as with staged theatre. In understanding the frustration of the too-partial immersion of the diorama, we realize that the edification produced by their suggestions of artistic immersion is not merely the effect of social approval and disapproval, but of the taciturn, refining contact with our own private immersive desires. The private ideal of immersion that we harbor (that dioramas can only hint at) is an entry into the interrelational aorist space of binding that admits us into the realm of unknowingness and the non-self. As such, the reality of immersion is qualitatively and quantitatively distinct from what the diorama can offer. The esprit de corps of immersion is diaphanous hyper-being within a kind of experiential and excessive span where ocular extravagance is felt to be a function of the space. Its raison d'être is to supplant the framed deep gaze of the diorama by enticing vision into a more fully a posteriori understanding of vision’s potential in terms of peripheral attention. WM

JOSEPH NECHVATAL
Joseph Nechvatal is an artist whose computer-robotic assisted paintings and computer software animations are shown regularly in galleries and museums throughout the world. In 2011 his book Immersion Into Noise was published by the University of Michigan Library's Scholarly Publishing Office in conjunction with the Open Humanities Press. He exhibited in Noise, a show based on his book, as part of the Venice Biennale 55, and is artistic director of the Minóy Punctum Book/CD project.                                     

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The article is taken from:

​in cooperation with  ​JOSEPH NECHVATAL

by  Alexander Galloway

Aesthetics is a recurring theme in Laruelle’s work. He has written two short books on photography and has several essays on art and related topics, including texts on color, light, seeing, drawing, dance, music, and technology. But what is technology, and what is technology’s relation to art?

Laruelle’s position on art and technology is not entirely intuitive. For example, he does not follow someone like Heidegger and reestablish a lineage from technology back to art, via the Greek concept of technê. Nor is he phobic of science following those skeptical of industrial modernity. Instead Laruelle is something of a purist about technology and science. He denigrates technology and elevates science, elevating it to such a degree that it becomes synonymous with non-standard philosophy overall.

The technology that surrounds us, from cars to computers to rocket ships, is all rather repulsive for Laruelle. Such technology provides little more than an avenue for transit or mediation in and out of things. From this perspective philosophy is the ultimate technology, because philosophy is the ultimate vehicle of transit, and philosophers the ultimate mailmen. Philosophy is all technology wrapped into one, for it is at once mirror, conveyance, energizer, and processor. By contrast, science is the realm of immanence and unilateral relation. Science is the realm of discovery, axiomatics, and theory. If philosophy were a science it would remain immanent to itself, never transiting anywhere, never synthesizing or reflecting on anything.

Philosophy would remain where it is, in the dark. But philosophy, always quick to demonstrate its illuminating potential, is never in the dark. “Our philosophers are children,” Laruelle reminds us. They are children “who are afraid of the Dark.”

Alternations of light and dark are the fuel of philosophy. From Plato’s cave to Paul de Man’s “blindness and insight,” philosophers are forever transiting between shadow and illumination. Yet darkness itself is not the problem. The problem is alternation. The problem is not that philosophy is dark. The problem is that philosophy is not dark enough.

According to Laruelle we must jump further, not from light to dark but from dark to black, from the darkness of philosophy to the blackness of science. So forget your rocket ships and rocket cars. Leave behind the scaffolding of reflection and alternation. “Do not think technology first,” Laruelle commands. “Think science first.”

Science is, in this way, the least illuminating profession, because it surpasses mere darkness by way of a profound blackness. Never afraid of the dark, Laruelle’s science begins from the posture of the black, communing with the agnostic darkness of the real.

But what is this darkness? What is this black universe of which Laruelle sings? Is black a color, and if so can we see it?

(Excerpted from Laruelle: Against the Digital [University of Minnesota Press: 2014], pp. 133-134.)

taken from here

This  article  is  taken from: 

by ​ Yvette Granata​

‘The lamprey’ is the name given to any fish of the order Petromyzontiformes. It is most commonly known as a parasitic, jawless fish that latches its fanged mouth onto other fish in order to suck the blood of its host. A google search of ‘lamprey’ brings up a series of digital photographs that show its ‘toothed, funnel-like sucking mouth’ prominently featured in the results. When asked, via the search field, what a lamprey is, then, google also answers the question, ‘what does a lamprey look like?’. It responds to us, ‘Here is a photo of a lamprey’ and ‘here is a photo of many lampreys’ and ‘this is what a lamprey looks like’. The toothed, sucking mouth is both the image of and the encounter with the lamprey.

Yvette Granata, Google Image Search Results, ‘Lamprey’ (2016). Screenshot.

Google’s search results in this way present to us a theoretical position on both the lamprey and on photography. Like Walter Benjamin’s optical unconscious, google image search returns photographs of the lamprey as if to reveal lamprey mouths and teeth that we perhaps have never seen, the real lamprey in photographic stillness. For Benjamin, the camera revealed the unseen, whereby the photographic offered an indexical print of reality through the capture of the surfaces of objects. This ‘unseen’ was embedded in the experience of daily life, and the technology of the camera showed us what we did not see in our daily experience, ‘with all its resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object. It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious’ (Benjamin, ‘Little History’, 512). Through the photograph, and through the image search engine, the objects that we have never seen are shown to us.

Yvette Granata, WhatIsALamprey? (2016). Video.

The photograph of the lamprey that google presents is an image of an animal body and of its fangs. It is a snapshot of an animal-object as parasite that threatens to latch upon the viewer. The image of the lamprey as an image of ‘the parasite’ reveals that the parasitic is classed by the human as a negative, rather than an essential characteristic for survival. The search results do not show, for example, an array of perspectives of the lamprey in its context, but images of fangs, jaw-less toothed mouths, bites, blood. It is a critique of the parasite, or a definition of the parasite as what it might do to us, a threat-mouth object, a thing that will suck on you.

A corollary to Roland Barthes’ myth, in which something is always ‘added to’ the sign, the ‘photo of’ the lamprey is an amplification of lamprey teeth. It produces a mythic threat by centering the lamprey teeth. Through this ‘photograph of’ the lamprey, a reduction of a species also occurs: lamprey = parasite = teeth. While the objectifying gaze of the camera and the politics of its images have been thoroughly critiqued since the invention of photography, and while the invention of digital photography and software editing practices have pushed contemporary critique beyond an analysis of the material of the index, there nonetheless remains a particular phrase that lingers in the everyday use of media—the ‘photograph of’, the ‘image search for the photograph of’.

In his work on non-photography and photo-fiction, François Laruelle gives a method for moving away from this phrase. Instead of the photograph of an object, photo-fiction ‘is about rendering the photographic act immanent, of interiorizing it, and rendering it real without an external realism, of destroying philosophical and perceptual sufficiency without denying the necessity for perception’ (Laurelle, Photo-Fiction, 7). One of the main tenets of Laruelle’s thought is a critique of philosophy’s separation of thought and immanence. He claims that by thinking about immanence, philosophy has always separated itself from it, calling out philosophy’s auto-position to make claims about immanence or the Real.

The auto-position of philosophy, or the self-assignment of its authoritative position, is what allows philosophy to legitimate itself (decisionism). What Laruelle attempts to construct instead is thus a method for thinking with immanence and not about it. Similar to his critique of philosophical decisionism overall, whereby he exposes philosophy’s proclivity to pathologically conflate thought with representational access to the Real, with photo-fiction Laruelle gives the method for looking at the photographic process as its own proclivity to expose and render itself, as opposed to its captured object.

Following Laruelle’s line of thought, then, the photographic image is merely the mimesis of its technological prerogative—the process of capturing light bouncing off of objects—not the revelation of objects. The camera captures light particles, and gives us in turn, an artifact of its internal image—the photographed. The photographer who ‘captures’ the world—Laruelle posits—is working within a ‘photographic finitude’ in which ‘finitude does not mean the reception of an external given, but an impotency in regard to oneself, a powerlessness to leave oneself so as to go amongst things or—a vision condemned to see according to itself’ (Concept, 15). He goes on to suggest that ‘this stance consists less in situating oneself in relation to the World…than in definitely abstracting oneself from it, in recognizing oneself from the start as distant, as the precessor’ (Concept, 15). The photographer is not unaware of this, but works within naiveté and accepts the a priori position of a separation between subject/object—the precess of the subject—thus agreeing to stand apart from the world.

Like photography, we may also view Google’s image search as bolstering this notion, replicating a similar photographic precessing of images through the internal prerogative of its search algorithm. It makes a claim on the ‘real lamprey’ by accepting the position of its function, assuming its ability to find and retrieve an image object as the same as presenting the realness of an animal. It likewise conflates the animal in the world with its act of returning to us the range of lamprey teeth out there on the internet. The result is produced merely from an acceptance of the naiveté of its own technological operation.

Neither photography nor Google give us a mimicry of a lamprey. They do not reveal an internal operation similar to the lamprey. They do not mimic that which they show nor do what the parasite does, thereby making us understand a parasitic process. By comparing the notion of being shown a parasite versus doing what a parasite does, we can better understand photography as its position, its precess. Moving away from the prerogative of photography then, we might ask—what is a photo-fictional lamprey?

The animation project Processing/Lampreys is a series of animated lamprey surfaces, structures, movements, and terrains crafted from digital images of lampreys made with the Processing coding language, Javascript, and After Effects. It looks to Laruelle’s notion of photo-fiction as a different realism of photography—realism not as an overdetermined representation, but as an ‘under-determined chaos’ in which the camera is one variable within a fusion of variables. It aims to create a method of photo-fictional chaos through image processing that crafts new worlds from the digital data of lamprey images in order to produce an under-determined chaos.

Yvette Granata, Processing sketch (running) (2016). Screenshot.

While the Processing/Lampreys project induces the digital process of coding as a photographic medium, it begins with an appropriation of lamprey photographs from the google search results. The scripts create 3-D extractions, surface textures, abstract stretchings and motions of the lamprey image, turning the photograph of the lamprey into a digital array. The processing code itself cannot capture light on the surface of a lamprey, the way a camera does.  It must be fed digital data from an image’s pixel information; it needs another photograph to latch onto. In this way, image processing code as a photographic medium is necessarily a parasite. For example, with a camera, one need only to push a button and it will work, it will create a photo of anything in front of the camera. With the processing code, on the other hand, if one hits ‘run’ on the program without  having the photograph contained within the program data file, the program will fail. It returns the words ‘NullerPointerException’ and tells you ‘the file is missing’.

Yvette Granata, Processing sketch failure (2016). Screenshot.

The program code and the effect scripts are selective of their hosts. Just as a lamprey cannot suck on a twig or a cardboard box for nourishment but requires animal flesh, the program cannot produce effects with any-object-it-selects-whatsoever.  The data is taken from a specific image-object, from a .jpg or .png, and is broken down into more specific data, such as the color data or the position of the pixels, and arranges the data differently. All of the data from the original .jpg or .png is there, but rearranged and redirected according to the operation of the code, its interior process. In this way, the internal technological prerogative of this conceptual camera is similar to a camera; however, it is exactly this internal operation that one works with—its operation constitutes the object.

Yvette Granata, Processing/Lampreys (2016). Animation still (Processing/After Effects layered).

Just as the parasite becomes entangled with its host and becomes a part of the host-thing-itself, the ‘image of lamprey’ becomes a part of the process of the technological apparatus. With the lamprey photo as a part of the internal process of the apparatus, this conceptual camera precludes the notion that there is a photographer-subject able to be detached from the world, precessing and rendering the objects in the world for us. Instead there is a host material and a transformation of the material of the host into different types of images and energies, like a parasite-machine. Similar to what Laruelle calls a non-photographic vision, it is an image ‘parallel to the World; a photographic process which has the same contents of representation as those that are in the World, but which enjoys an absolutely different transcendental status’ (Concept, 19). Through the execution of the code and the rendering of effects, the image is no longer recognizable as a lamprey nor as a photo of a lamprey. Instead an alien scenario or scenography emerges, a photo-fiction, as the image process crafts a strange world devoid of a grasped-object, or without a stable representation. It uses the data of the photograph of the lamprey as the source for crafting a realism of an underdetermined world.

Yvette Granata, Processing/Lampreys (2016). Animation still (Processing/After Effects layered).

In other words, to move from precessing to processing, the lamprey photograph as a photo-fictional scenario moves us away from the ‘showing of’ an object or animal, and instead creates an image of an entangled technological apparatus. This entanglement is a parasite aesthetics.

Through engaging with coding image processing as a parasitic entanglement, can a post-anthropomorphic image, not of, but with the world emerge?

Yvette Granata, Processing/Lampreys (2016). Animation still (Processing/After Effects layered).

With digital image processing, we are more like the lamprey. This is not a negative understanding of, nor a critique of the parasitic, but is a reposition the frame of practices of ‘the parasite’.  It is not to say that a parasitic practice is a negative one, but that it is a practice that can apply to the lamprey, the human, and the digital. Parasite aesthetics is therefore not about the formal qualities of images of parasites, nor the representation of the parasitic. It moves away from aesthetic experience ‘of an object’ and moves towards reframing aesthetics as an entangled process.

Parasite aesthetics produces an image of its conceptual-photographic act. It is defined by its modus operandi, like the parasite. The aesthetics are in the practice, in the entanglement of technological operation and the object, not the results. This is another realism of photography, whereby photo-fiction is a replacement for ‘real lampreys’. Photo-fictional lampreys instead grow out of the relation of human worlds, animal worlds, and digital worlds, framing them under the non-negative understanding of the parasitic.

Yvette Granata, Processing/Lampreys (2016). Animation still.

To immanentize photography, one can no longer take a ‘photograph of’, but can only photographize. With a photographized image, we are no longer the human center subject with lamprey animal as a threatening parasite object.

Yvette Granata, Processing/Lampreys (2016). Animation still.

The subject-taking-photo-of-the-object recedes into a de-centered position as one of many variables, a non-positional alterity.

Yvette Granata, Lamprey1.1.1.1.2 (2016). Video.

The anthropocentric position is spread out or moved, de-positioned through the digital practice of parasite aesthetics and becomes positioned on the same plane as the lamprey. Such a non-positional alterity is a photography without the finitude vision that Laruelle says is condemned to see only according to itself.  It is an attempt to move from the distance of precessor to the embeddedness of a parasitic processor.

​References:
​
Benjamin, Walter. ‘Little History of Photography’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 2. 1927-1934, trans. Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings et al. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999.
Granata, Yvette. Processing/Lampreys Archive.
Laruelle, François. Photo-Fiction, A Non-Standard Aesthetics, trans. Drew S. Burk.Minneapolis: Univocal, 2012.
Laruelle, François. The Concept of Non-Photography, trans. Robin Mackay. New York: Sequence Press, 2011.

The article is taken from:

by ​Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen

‘A being is special if it coincides with its own becoming visible, with its own revelation.’
(Giorgio Agamben)

What does it mean to be a contemporary artist today and can we describe this mode of existence? First of all, we must situate the contemporary artist within the space of the generalised human existence. Artists are just like all other humans: they have a body, are social and temporal and in search of ecstasies in whatever form. At some point in their lives they enter into the art world with a mature body, committing themselves to some kind of artistic output generated by the act of social positioning. This entering is a fundamental gesture towards life; it is a choice that becomes absolute, because it transforms a human body into something specific: that of an artist in a social world. From this first decision comes a specific existential power: the power to place a whatever within the art context. This power is not automatically given once and for all, and it does not happen with the same intensity for all artists at the same time. For example, the budget to produce art for a Tate Modern Unilever project is only given to artists who have already established themselves, and never given to an artist who is still a student. Both are contemporary artists, but with a different power to exist, and situated differently. To exist in the art world as a contemporary artist is not the same experience for all its agents. 

In order to understand the subtleties of being an artistic agent, a person who does something within a social field, in this case the art world, we must develop a hyper-reflection regarding the artistic existence. We must on the one hand grasp the condition of being situated within the metaphysical knot – own, given and final being – yet on the other hand understand the institutional transformation of the artist into someone specific: a generic singularity. Generic singularity as a concept points towards the double-sided aspect of being a human agent incarnating generic categories and yet being an absolute singularity. It is a being who becomes special by coinciding with his own becoming visible in a social world (Agamben). For example, my generic properties are those that I share with a number of other people depending on which context I inhabit, such as being male, white, Western, educated, middle-aged, father, brother, son, neighbour, consumer, artist, but my singularity in the art world derives from my specific power to exist as a human: a contemporary artist who has become known for a specific output. Only one person is incarnated into my flesh with my name right now. I am the one who in specific contexts (the art world) stands out from the crowd as that person known for this or that and who has the right to choose whatever to become works of art. The power I have to exist is partly derived from the generic institutional qualifications I have acquired and the exhibitions and works I have done as the total sum of competences I have accumulated over the years, for example, the papers and documents from certified institutions stating I have an MFA degree in Art or an MA degree in literature. These titles are generic in nature – thousands of other people also have these degrees – but I am the one with this specific outlook because of the artworks and projects I have made. I am at once generic, qualified through institutions, and a singularity. Thus the singularity I have achieved as a living artist today takes place against a background of generic categories: I am categorised as a contemporary painter educated at the Royal Danish Art Academy who has exhibited in art institutions of various formats. The category ‘a contemporary painter’ is generic, meaning it represents an abstract field of possibility where nothing about the actual content or formal output is said. It means that I mainly work as a painter and my work has a contemporary outlook – a description that I share with thousands of other contemporary painters. But, following the argument of this book, I would also say that being a contemporary painter means I am aware of possibilities other than painting. I have experimented with video, installation, photography, sculpture, performance and interventions. I am aware of all these possibilities within each medium or way of engaging with space, and if the right idea or appropriate context is there, I do these non-painterly activities.134 I don’t have to paint, but I paint because I want to. For me, there are still many ideas in painting and ways of creating spaces of reflection to be explored.

So, to the art world I am first and foremost a contemporary painter, but to my three children I am their father, and to my neighbours I am the man next door. To the local café I am the good customer, to the guy in the video rental shop I am the one who watches TV series, but to the clerk at the embassy I am a Dane, to the woman in the local municipality office I am a citizen with social rights and obligations, to the vendor on the main square in Marrakesh trying to sell me a wooden snake I am just another Western tourist whom he will overcharge, to a dog barking at me I am simply an unknown human. Depending on my context, I slip into different generic categories that construct operative spaces within and around me. There is no escape from the maze of categories, but I can act and behave differently according to each situation. Throughout all these encounters three transversals remain the same: that I exist in my body, and that I am present to a social situation in time. The transcendental foundation of my human existence is the intertwining of three essential dimensions of being: own, given and final being. The body, the social and time are all co-present in my life right now and in all situations I have ever experienced. Yet the number of categories, their inherent intensity and power over my existence is not the same, because the components feeding into the three dimensions change throughout life. As my listing of different generic categories reveals, the way I engage with the situations is not a given. I am granted the possibility of reflecting upon my relation to these three dimensions, which gives contemporary life an element of chance, indeterminacy and vitality. 

I have become something specific in an art world, because I have pushed myself in a certain direction. I have decided to become an artist and insisted on this existential form for more than fifteen years. My power to receive but also produce the world is derived from this initial gesture towards my life. I am a contemporary artist as a specific instantiation of a generic singularity existing alongside a huge number of other generic singularities. My artistic output is being tracked, recounted and is public in a new way due to the internet and my personal website. A totality of works and projects and writings is accumulating, generating a direction, a sense of where I am heading and which interests I have been pursuing. Yet, at any moment I might make a radical ‘jump’ almost as in quantum physics, where electrons leap between energy levels in an atom. From one day to the next I can make a fresh start, place myself differently in the way I make art if I really want to. I can re-invent myself and this is often the case for artists who stay in the game a whole life: they keep on moving. I have so many possibilities of becoming inspired by either historical or living artists and through my positioning and the absorption of concepts into my own existence. I can always become a displacement to myself and to the history of contemporary art. This is the radical freedom of art that derives from the radical contingency of art: that everything and anything is (still) possible.

As a conceptual person the generic singularity has certain traits or components feeding into the specific empirical situation. Each generic singularity within the field of contemporary art represents a development of an artist-being, of a way of living a life as an artist: being visually talented, with an ability to execute projects and meet deadlines; being conscious of one’s public appearance; having the will to keep going and overcome defeat and rejection; being conscious of the art world as a social system with internal differentiations; living a bohemian lifestyle; being part of an educational environment, either as student or teacher; developing an artistic project while pursuing a specific interest. There is a fundamental self-care in the way artists manage and develop specific relations to all these aspects of life, because a generic singularity develops an ethos for life that contains an element of honour but also risk. The honour manifests itself whenever I am invited to do something, when I am praised for my artwork, when I am included in a prestigious collection, when I am associated with other established artists or when I am critically assessed in a written text or speech. The risk I am running is the possibility of poverty and precariousness. I have no fixed income, my work is not paid for by the hour, I might not receive recognition for it in my own lifetime (or never at all) and be considered a failure in the eyes of others or more successful artists. 

These aspects constituting the space of the generic singularity as a mode of existence have developed over a long period of time and might have a historical origin. For example, there are many contemporary artists who live a bohemian lifestyle, yet this way of living was not invented by the contemporary artist. I might be inspired by art movements from the 1960s or an artist from the 1980s: within me there are many sources of inspiration. I, just being the bricolage of these sources, never a pure repetition. This is the verticality of my existence: that I can go back in history, find sources of inspiration, which I translate, superimpose into and upon the present. This constant refolding of the past into the present is what aligns the latter with a sense of raw energy: we never know when the past will suddenly reappear in the present in a different disguise, coming back like a ghost with a forgotten message. 

My being as a generic singularity is an acquired existence in the sense that I have struggled and fought for it to be. I chose to become an artist, and I applied out of my own free will to an art academy, which accepted me as a student. Thus, behind the appearance of any kind of generic singularity an act of will reigns. It is a fundamental gesture towards a life to be lived. As a will it manifests itself in the public, declaring: I want to be an artist; I am an artist. And it is a will continuing through time, making me endure the initial choice to be an artist that I made a long time ago. With the being of an artist comes a being-ability of an artist, although, in the space of contemporary art and its radical contingency, there are no precise definitions of what such a being-ability should consist of. Unlike medical students, for example, who must appear before a examination board of authorities and show their abilities – knowledge of how the body functions on an anatomical, bio-chemical and physiological level – there is no judge that can fail an art student of today. The being-ability of an artist could be anything – from working a material, to sitting at a laptop, drawing on a computer, developing ideas via Skype – nobody can limit the space of contemporary art. Whatever is decided upon, which project or interests or possibilities to pursue, contemporary artists will ultimately develop the needed being-ability to make the artworks real. And if the projects exceed their knowledge, they
​will contract experts, hire assistants, get friends and family to help them. Then they become a manager, someone who must organise the time and output of others. This is one of the effects of Minimal art on contemporary art: the moving away from the traditional idea of the artist as a craftsman in a classical sense. It doesn’t mean that the craftsmanship of art disappears, it means a new kind of craftsmanship arises: that of developing ideas, convincing curators, contracting workers, considering the installation, organising employees etc. 

In Generic Singularity (2014) I developed this concept in order to explain how humans become something specific in their lives. My investigation was only limited to the cultural field of the contemporary artist and only included components that I saw as significant at that point. In five years time, I will probably include new aspects. For any other cultural field, the components are different and have another depth, the process of developing a specificity not being the same in each field. For example, there is a difference between the work process of a film director and a poet, architect and actor, novelist and set designer etc. 

For me, there is a reflective power within each generic singularity, because they have thought about what kind of life they want to live and they have taken inspiration from the past, aligning themselves with art movements, re-introducing actions and events to the present, not only thinking, but also actively pursuing a specific position in life. Each generic singularity has taken powerful decisions with repercussions far into the future. Every generic singularity thinks for himself, from his point of being in a body in a social context right now in time (situated). Every thinking derives its force from the epistemic rupture it has been through and surpassed. 

excerpt from the book: NON-PHILOSOPHY AND CONTEMPORARY ART by Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen

​by ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAY

​In the early 1990s Laruelle wrote an essay on the artist James Turrell titled "A Light Odyssey: The Discovery of Light as a Theoretical and Aesthetic Problem". Although it briefly mentions Turrell's Roden Crater and is cognizant of his other work, the essay focuses on a series of twenty aquatint etchings made by Turrell called First Light (1989-90). Designed to stand alone as fine art prints, First Light nevertheless acts as a kind of backward glance revisiting and meditating on earlier corner light projections made by Turrell in the late 1960s, in particular works like AfrumPronto (1967)

For the exhibition of First Light at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1990, "the aquatints [were] arranged in groups based on the white shape that hovers in the dense black field of each print. In the installation, with light projected onto the images, the shapes appear to glow and float; viewed in sequence, they seem to move. The effect, from print to print, is tracelike and mesmerizing."

"I am dealing with no object;' Turrell said in a lecture a few years after producing First Light. "I am dealing with no image, because I want to avoid associative, symbolic thought ... I am dealing with no focus or particular place to look. With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at?" Indeed the object of First Light is perception itself, as Turrell was the first to admit. 

No object, no image, no focus-no wonder Laruelle was drawn to First Light. It represents the very core principles of the non-standard method. For Laruelle, Turrell's art poses a basic problem. "Light makes manifest;' he acknowledges. "But what will manifest the light?"4 Systems of representation reveal aspects of the world to perceiving subjects; this is how light makes manifest. But is it possible to see light in itself, not in relation to a perceived object? Is it possible to manifest the rigorously immanent genericness of light itself?

Laruelle's essay on Turrell makes two essential claims, one about perception and the other about light. Regarding the former, Laruelle asserts that we must think perception, not think about perception. Regarding the latter, Laruelle wishes to discover the non-orientable nature of light. 

​There is a light of orientation, a philosophical light. But there is also a light that does not seek to orient perception along a particular set of lines. It is this second kind of orientation that intrigues Laruelle and that appears in the work of Turrell. (Taking advantage of a play on words, Laruelle sometimes labels this kind of non-standard orientation "occidental" to differentiate it from what he sees as the endless orientalism of philosophy.) 

Laruelle explores these two essential claims by way of three different themes stemming from Turrell's work: discovery, experimentation, and identity. Just as Deleuze did in his book on the painter Francis Bacon, Laruelle assumes from the outset that Turrell and his art are theoretical in themselves, that they are performing theoretical work as such. Laruelle's is not a theoretical interpretation of a nontheoretical artwork; the work itself enacts the non-standard method. In Laruelle's view, Turrell himself discovered a non-phenomenological solution to the problem of light. Turrell "has discovered a new aesthetic (and theoretical) object: light as such, the being-light of light".

In an attempt to describe what he means by discovery, Laruelle draws attention to the subtle differences in meaning embedded in Turrell's title: "Turrell's title 'First Light' is ambiguous and can be interpreted in two ways. In the weakest sense it means just what it means, first light, the first among many, its own relative position in a continuous order in which it is included. In the strong sense it means light first, all the light given at once, without residual or supplement, without division or 'plays-of-light".

This second sense, the strong sense, is most appealing to Laruelle, because it indicates the identity of light as a kind of first givenness, light as raw discovery or invention without supplement. Part of Laruelle's aim is to move away from the conventional manner in which light appears in ​philosophical discourse, for example, in phenomenology, which tends to think of light through the digital process of withdrawing and revealing. As we saw in the previous chapter, Laruelle's light is thus not so much white but black, generically black. "The black immanence of this light . . . lets it escape from all phenomenology stemming from the greco-philosophical type".

In order to describe the radical nature of Turrell's non-standard art, Laruelle poses a hypothetical scenario: 

Turrell's light is a light that doesn't come from the stars. Laruelle gives it an unusual label; he calls it a "photic materiality".

Being both non-cosmic and non-ontological, Turrell's light does not orient the viewer. Instead, according to Laruelle, Turrell's light performs experiments on perception and retrains perception according to alternative logics. This mode of experimentation produces what he calls an "aesthetic generalization'' of perception in order to unilateralize the conventional prohibitions placed on perception by philosophy. Instead of philosophy or photography setting the agenda, "light acts instead ... like a drive that has its own 'subjedivity' or like an a priori force". Turrell's experimental mandate, therefore, is to allow both the artist and the viewer to test perception, not to probe the limits of perception, not to mimic the way in which perception is normalized by philosophy, not to think about perception, but to think according to perception. 

In this sense the artist and the viewer are strictly identical, allowing for an auto-testing of perception. It is not that one party-whether artist, viewer, or critic-is in a privileged position to arbitrate Turrell's aesthetic experiment. Instead, all parties are identical.

This brings us to the final theme in Laruelle's essay on Turrell, that of identity. Tµe key question for Laruelle is how. to see light itself, light's identity. For Laruelle the only way to answer the question is to break the vicious cycle of worldly self-manifestation. "There is a paradox at the heart of aesthetic sentiment;' Laruelle remarks. "The paradox is the following: on the one hand light remains to a certain degree in itself. It does not lose its identity in an object ... but on the other hand, light 'radiates:"10 There is no solution to the paradox, of course, because if belongs to the basic generative paradox fueling of all philosophy. Nevertheless the paradox provides Laruelle with raw material for non-standard intervention. Simply unilateralize the paradox and put both light and its radiation into immanent superposition. Such a move defangs the transcendental tendencies added to light by philosophy and reveals a purely immanent light.  

Given the unusual and somewhat counterintuitive nature of the nonstandard universe, Laruelle is forced to speak in circumlocutions: light is a radiation-without-rays, or light is a reflecting-without-reflection. This might sound like jargon, yet Laruelle's "without" coinages are necessary in order to designate the superimposition or unilateralization of the rivenness of the world. They aim to show "light discovered in its radical identity".

Photography, fiction, and utopia. We spent some time in the previous chapter looking at photography in the context of light and color. Now let's return to photography and amplify what was already said. Laruelle's two books on photography, The Concept of Non-photography and Photo-Fiction: A Non-standard Aesthetics, include material written over a span of two decades. Intended as companion pieces, the books pose a number of questions. What is seen in a photo? What is light? What is the photographic stance? And, perhaps most enigmatic of all, what does Laruelle mean by fiction?

''Aesthetics was always a case of tracing art within philosophy, and likewise of art understood as a lesser form of philosophy". For Laruelle aesthetics involves a convoluted and somewhat circular interaction between art aµd the contemplation of art. Art beckons contemplation. 

And contemplation seeks its art to behold. Following this reciprocal interaction, art and philosophy co-constitute each other in terms of lack, for each completes the absence contained in the other: "Without art, philosophy lacks sensitivity and without philosophy, art lacks thought:' 14 This kind of mutual digitality or mutual distinction is part and parcel of the philosophical process. Art and philosophy are separated and reunited, then policed as conjoined but distinct. A strange logic indeed, yet for Laruelle the logic is evident in everything from Plato's Republic to Deleuze and Guattari's What Is Philosophy? It is, in fact, the central logic of the standard model. 

Photography is "a knowledge that doubles the World;' he writes in the first of the two photography books. As an aesthetic process, photography is philosophical in that it instantiates a decision to correlate a world with an image taken of the world. When photography doubles the world, it acts philosophically on and through the world.  

Admittedly Laruelle does not discuss light much in The Concept of Non-photography. But light appears in the second book, Photo-Fiction, particularly in the context of philosophical enlightenment and the flash of the photographic apparatus. Laruelle uses two terms, eclair and flash, to mark the subtle variations in different kinds of light. Laruelle associates eclair with Greek philosophy. "The flash {eclair} of Logos;' he remarks, "is the Greek model of thought". He uses flash more commonly when discussing the physical apparatus of the photographic camera. Yet it would be hasty to assume that Laruelle poses the two terms in normative opposition-eclair bad and flash good-because by the end he specifies that both kinds of light are philosophical and that both need to be unilateralized. 

​As in his other writings, Laruelle accomplishes this by subjecting photography to the non-standard method. He proposes a principle of aesthetic sufficiency and shows how art and aesthetics have traditionally been allied with philosophy. Likewise he describes a principle of photographic sufficiency, indicating how photography is sufficient to accommodate all possible images, at least in principle. And, in an echo of how deconstructivists spoke of philosophy in terms of logocentrism, Laruelle labels photography's sufficiency a photo-centrism, and discusses how philosophy conceives of thought itself as a kind of photographic transcendental. 

The process of non-standardization goes by several names and is defined in different ways. In recent writings Laruelle has begun to speak of the non-standard method in terms of fiction. Fiction means performance, invention, creativity, artifice, construction; for example, thought is fictive because it fabricates (although only in an immanent and real sense). 

Fiction might seem like a strange word choice for someone wishing to depart from the endless alternations of representation, yet Laruelle devises a type of fiction that is nonexpressive and nonrepresentational. Laruelle's fiction is purely immanent to itself. It is neither a fictionalized version of something else, nor does it try to fabricate a fictitious world or narrative based on real or faptastical events: 

To subject philosophy to the non-standard method is to create a fiction philosophy. Likewise to subject photography to the same method produces a similar result. "The fiction-photo [photo-fiction] is a sort of generic extension or generalization of the 'simple' photo, the material photo".

As he said previously in The Concept of Non-photography, "The task of a rigorous thought is rather to found-at least in principle-an abstract theory of photography-but radically abstract, absolutely non-worldly and non-perceptual".

This begins to reveal the way in which Laruelle's views on photography synchronize with his interest in utopia. Photography is not oriented toward a world, nor is it a question of perception. Rather, by remaining within itself, photography indicates a non-world of pure auto-impression. Bored by the peculiarities of particular photographic images, Laruelle fixates instead on the simple receptiveness to light generic to all photography. Yet receptiveness does not mean representability or indexicality, That would revert photography back to philosophy. Instead Laruelle ​radicalizes photic receptiveness as such, focusing on the non-standard or immanent nature of the photographic image. 

​Rather than a return to phenomenology's notion of being in the world, Laruelle proposes what he calls "being-in-photo". By this Laruelle means the aspect of the photograph that remains radically immanent to itself. Such an aspect produces a kind of objectivity without representation, a radical objectivity, " [an] objectivity so radical that it is perhaps no longer an alienation; so horizontal that it loses all intentionality; this thought so blind that it sees perfectly clearly in itself; this semblance so extended that it is no longer an imitation, a tracing, an emanation, a 'representation' of what is photographed".

But the photograph is not the only thing recast as non-standard immanence. So too the photographer, a philosopher who thinks photographically about the world. Laruelle elaborates this aspect through what he calls the photographer's stance {posture}: 

Here is an illustration of Laruelle's theory of utopia. Yet he inverts the conventional wisdom on utopia as a non-place apart from this world. Laruelle's utopia is a non-world, yet a non-world entirely rooted in the present. Laruelle's non-world is, in fact, entirely real. Revealing his gnostic tendencies, Laruelle's non-standard real is rooted in matter, even if the standard world already lays claim to that same space. The non-standard method simply asserts the real in parallel with the world. Using the terminology from chapter 3 on digitality, the utopian real is a parallelism.

In Laruelle the aesthetic stance is the same as the utopian stance. In the most prosaic sense, non-philosophy describes a kind of non-place where conventional rules seem not to apply. To the layman, the nonphilosopher appears to use complex hypotheses and counterintuitive principles in order to journey to the shores of another universe. Yet that doesn't quite capture it. As Laruelle says, insufficiency is absolutely crucial to utopia: "We are not saying one has to live according to a wellformed utopia .... Our solution lies within an insufficient or negative utopia". The point is not to construct bigger and better castles in the sky, transcendental and sufficient for all. Rather, utopia is always finite, generic; immanent, and real. 

But non-philosophy is utopian in a more rigorous sense as well, because the structure of the human stance itself is the structure of utopia. Utopia forms a unilateral duality with hunian imagination; our thinking is not correlated with the world but is a direct clone of the real. This begins to resemble a kind of science fiction, a fiction philosophy in which the human stance is rethought in terms of rigorous scientific axioms. 

It makes sense, then, that Laruelle would call himself a science fiction philosopher.

Drawing music. Yet even with these discussions of light and photography as prologue, Laruelle's aesthetics remains elusive. So before moving on to some more general claims about realism and immanence I address Laruelle's two essays on the little-known Hungarian artist August von Briesen, an emigre to Paris who worked primarily in painting, illustration, and pencil drawing.24 Von Briesen is a particularly interesting case, because, despite being . relatively obscure, he attracted the pen of a number of other prominent thinkers in addition to Laruelle, including Michel Henry, who wrote a long essay on von Briesen prior to undertaking his important book on Kandinsky, and Marcelin Pleynet, the influential critic and author involved for many years with the journals Tel Quel and L'Infini. The analysis of von Briesen further illustrates how Laruelle is essentially a thinker of utopia, and that the best way to understand Laruelle's aesthetics, and indeed his larger non-standard method, is as a theory of utopia. 

The portion of von Briesen's corpus that interests us here is a series of pencil drawings devoted to music (see August von Briesen, Drawing of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 22, the frontispiece of this chapter). Von Briesen's pencil drawings give graphical form to musical sounds. He had been drawing music his whole life, in fact, the myth holding that, at the age of seven during a musical dictation session, the young von Briesen "refused to transcribe the sound into notes, and transposed them instead into abstract drawings".

As an adult in Paris, von Briesen had a habit of attending classical music recitals, and he was known to be a devotee of the Theatre des Champs Elysees. But shunning a comfortable seat in the audience, he would crouch deep in the orchestra pit, amidst the musicians, frantically drawing the music that engulfed him. By 1980 he was attending approximately two hundred concerts per year, drawing passionately. He made so many drawings of music that it would have been impossible to keep them all. "For example in 1980 he only saved about 2,000 drawings out of the 10,000 drawings that he made". He drew images of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 5, Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, Beethoven's Diabelli Variations, and many other works of music, both classical and modern. 

The drawings were typically made on small pieces of paper at approx - imately fifteen inches square.28 Using a pencil on plain white paper, von Bries en would inscribe the page with a series of lines, dashes, points, and other markings displaying a wide variation in length, line width, orientation, and curvature. Sometimes the repetition of hatch marks create a uniform texture, other times a swelling wisp of line overwhelms the page like a cloud. 

Von Briesen was a "crucified listener;' in the words of Henry; as a youngster during World War II he had been separated from his parents, and during the Soviet occupation had known "all the terrors of existence:'29 For Henry, von Briesen's drawings were not so much renderings of music, but portraits, self-portraits that bring to light "a certain kind of suffering". As von Briesen himself admitted, "I draw my own suffering" -in fact he considered all art to originate from suffering: "90% suffering and 10% joy. No, 10% is too much, 1%"!

Because the music possessed him so thoroughly, von Briesen never simply drew with one hand, but with both hands at once. As Laruelle describes it, "The left hand acts as a kind of device with two feet that glides over the paper, giving direction, and above all changes in direction, to the other hand". At the same time the right hand, the writing hand, acts like the "point at the end of a cone;' funneling and focusing the music from out of the air:

As Henry recounts, von Briesen would stare off into the distance or close his eyes entirely while drawing, "meaning that each graphical mark made on the paper is totally independent of the marks made around itwhether above or below, the marks are indifferent to their neighbors".

​In his analysis of the artist's drawings, Marcelin Pleynet compares von Briesen's method to the literary technique of automatic writing that itself had influenced surrealist and abstract expressionist painting. Yet at the same time Pleynet stresses that such an "automatic" method does not mean mere transcription. Von Briesen is not simply a conduit who hears music and then marks it down in notational form, like a secretary taking dictation in shorthand. Instead, von Briesen's drawings reveal "a common current of intelligence and sensibility" that Pleynet calls a "syncretism between drawing and music".

Laruelle too described von Briesen's technique in terms of automatic inscription: "To put it in more exact language, we can say that the automaton is not lacking conscious thought, and certainly at times it can be extremely lucid, but its consciousness concentrates and focuses itself out into the moving points of the fingers and pencils .... The automaton is an explorer who is both blind and deaf'36 The orchestra pit itself functions as a kind of black box, a music box for blackness, and von Briesen takes his seat inside the black box rather than poking and peering at the box from the outside.

Nevertheless Pleynet's description of von Briesen's project in terms of what he calls "correspondences" would likely be too devoutly philosophical for Laruelle's taste. "There is no syncretism in this art work:' Laruelle argues, contradicting Pleynet, "only a prodigious synthetic force:' So although Laruelle 1uses the term automatic, he does not mean a kind of neosurrealist technique in which the hand and stylus become a conduit for subhuman flows. Rather he evokes the notion of automatic drawing as a way to suspend or collapse the notion, borrowed from phenomenology, of the perceptual distance between artist and object. "Von Briesen wants to cancel the distance entailed in consciousness or reflection, that is, any kind of hesitation or imprecision that might insinuate itself between the music and its rearticulation in drawing". This is where the seer and the blind man fuse in common: neither see mere reality, but both have a direct sense of the real. 

The placement of the listener is thus of utmost importance for von Briesen. Both Laruelle and Henry comment on it. Von Briesen locates himself in the orchestra pit, but his placing, as a listener and as an artist, is more complicated than simply breaking the fourth wall or trying to merge with the musicians themselves. Collapsing the distance between artist and object, or between the eye and the hand, means that the normal focal orientation of art will also necessarily change. The frame of the page ceases to be a window or a door, but rather "an infinite depth, a galactic expanse" that obeys new laws of depth, relation, and spatiality. The key is found in the gesture of drawing itself, or what Laruelle calls the "registration" of a line":

​As an aesthetic practice, automatic registration is not passive or mechanical; the simile of the seismograph here is not meant to evoke a passive, merely technical transcription of a signal coming from somewhere else. Von Briesen is not a translator or chronicler of the world around him. Registration means that the sufficient potency of the world is suspended, not that of the artist (someone who never had any such potency to begin with). 

Laruelle doesn't much deploy the non-philosophical vocabulary in the essays on von Briesen because in 1985 he hadn't entirely invented it yet. But it would be keeping within the overall thrust of his analysis to describe a principle of sufficient art, in which the musical sources lay absolute claim to the inspiration of the listening artist. This is precisely what concerts halls are meant to do: evoke feeling, energy, fear, pity, and other aesthetic sensations in the listener. The art source is that thing that is sufficient in all instances to lay claim to the aesthetic relation. And of course the surrealists' automatic writing and its derivative techniques, from the repetitive and blank descriptions of the nouveau roman to the wanderings of psychogeography, are marching in lock step with the principle of sufficient art.

Hence, the references to automatic registration must be understood not as a desubjectification or depotentialization of the artist, much less any kind of nihilist or modernist profanation of the human, but as a diminution of the power of the aesthetic. Registration a la seismograph is merely a kind of surface symptom for a combined music-drawing, fused in unilateral duality and neutered of its own philosophical potency.

For Henry, the kind of abstraction evident in von Briesen has nothing to do with normal modes of abstract art, instead von Briesen displays a form of abstraction that, "issuing from the unrepresentable Ground of being without form, object, or world, is capable of reproducing a more universal structure of pathos". Such a "generality" or "perfect indifference" of music is the key to von Briesen's special form of abstraction.

But before continuing with von Briesen and fleshing out Laruelle's ambitions for the work, we pause for a moment to address the larger context of aesthetic theory. For there exists in Laruelle an original conception of art that withdraws from the standard model of aesthetics and posits a parallel logic of relation, perception, and sense. 

Thesis XI: Laruelle's aesthetics are an aesthetics without representation, that is, an aesthetics of the immanent rather than the transcendental. If we are to consider aesthetics strictly from a theoretical point of view, the twentieth century witnessed a single great death and transformation, the death of representation and its transformation into a new form. Such a transformation has appeared under a number of different names in recent years: the end of critique, the crisis of mimesis, the posthermeneutic turn, the new materialism, or the end of representation. But the seeds of this contemporary phenomenon were planted much earlier.

To be sure, the question of nonrepresentationalism in art (namely, abstraction) has been around for some time, yet the question of nonrepresentational aesthetics is something quite different. For even nonrepresentational art contains a sensual element that it reveals to a solicitous viewer, no matter whether that sensual element has a referent in the ​world. Abstraction can still be mimetic even if it isn't a picture of nature. Nonrepresentational aesthetics is something else altogether; it abandons the age-old question of reference (or indexicality, to use current parlance), but so too abandons the this-that structure of representation in its entirety, reducing aesthetics to a form of fused immanence. 

From Plato's hypomnemata to McLuhan's extensions of man, much of aesthetic theory is essentially metaphysical. Much aesthetic theory tends to posit a baseline relation between an entity and its disclosure to another entity. Even the most sophisticated post-structuralist positions will agree on the essential relation, that entities will form relations of difference with other entities (self with other, integral entities with heterogenous entities, and so on). In short, much of aesthetic theory conforms to the media principle-the communicational is real and the real is comm1:1nicationaland the descriptions of the standard model offered already in the open-ing chapters. 

But starting in the 1970s and '8os a shift in aesthetic theory becomes evident, first with Deleuze but then quickly afterward with Henry and Laruelle. Something changed in France very rapidly in 1980 and 1981; by 1985 it was already complete. To be sure, immanence is a perennial theme in art theory.47 And the relationship between realism and art is a complex topic in its own right, complicated by the many different meanings of the term realism. But in general the prevailing aesthetic theory in France at the time was resolutely irreal, and tended to favor non-immanent epistemological frameworks such as hermeneutics, representation, referentiality, authenticity, and so on. Art theory from Sollers or Barthes or Debord was a question of semiotics, or textuality, or perhaps even the dialectic. The coin of the realm was interpretation, demystification, ideology, or spectacle. Art theory at the time was not a question of thermodynamic energy transfer, as it would be in Deleuze's realist aesthetics, or the depiction of the immanence of an internal spirit as in Henry, or the art of an insufficient and generic ontology of the one as in Laruelle. 

Undoubtedly Deleuze accomplished it first in the early 1980s. References to art, literature, and aesthetics permeate nearly all of Deleuze's writings. Yet with his important 1975 collaboration with Guattari on the literature of Franz Kafka and then later with subsequent books published in the 1980s, Deleuze deals with aesthetic themes in a more systematic way, first with painting, then with cinema, and the Baroque. Henry and ​Laruelle followed soon after: their respective essays on von Briesen (1985), Henry's book on Kandinsky in 1988,49 and a trail of other pieces by Laruelle since the mid-198os. 

All of these writings have something in common: they all firmly reject what was then the reigning techniques of semiotic and post-structuralist interpretation of art in favor of an aesthetics rooted in immanence and strong nonrepresentationalism. Where many of their compatriots considered art an essentially epistemological pursuit, Deleuze, Laruelle, and Henry placed art firmly in the category of ontology. Where others haggled over the details of interpretation, meaning, and form, they took up the questions of expression, affect, and immanence.

​As we saw in the previous chapter, Heidegger poses a basic question for aesthetics. What is the relationship between hermeneutics and immanence? Many who have written on Heidegger have explicitly or implicitly taken a position on these two terms. There are those who claim adamantly that Heidegger is the consummate thinker of hermeneutics, for in his version of phenomenology we are continually grappling with a world that is only partially knowable at best, continually withdrawing from our being, remaining forever at a distance, a cryptographic world that is only tolerable through a kind of mystical submission to its sublimity. And, in many ways, this is the prevailing view. Yet there are others who champion the poetic Heidegger and hold him aloft as proof of an immediate relationship to truth. This is Heidegger as a philosopher of sincerity and authenticity, the romantic Heidegger who places humankind at the center of a world and asks it to stretch out its arms in order to remain within the world. Indeed part of the appeal of reading Heidegger, and a partial explanation for his enormous legacy, is due to the fact that he does not clearly adjudicate the question of hermeneutics and immanence. 

Yet the aesthetic question takes a different form in Deleuze. If Heidegger queries after the relationship between hermeneutics and immanence, Deleuze asks a different question: What is the relationship between immanence and multiplicity? In fact Deleuze considers both terms at the same time. There is the Deleuze of immanence as well as the Deleuze of multiplicity. For him the two components fit nicely together. Guided by the principle of univocity, Deleuze describes a world of pure multiplicity in which all multiplicities are equally immanent within nature. Thus there is no sender-receiver logic in Deleuze's theory of expression, only ​immanent transformations within a set of virtualities. Likewise there are no entities per se in Deleuze. But just as Whitehead spoke of "occasions;' Deleuze describes specific gatherings of heterogeneous multiplicities, dubbed "assemblages;' that occasion themselves as blips of singularity on an otherwise smooth plane.  

​So on the one hand Heidegger is forever locked in the heroic throes of hermeneutics, which, though ultimately shackled to the basic phenomenological contract, also cherish immanence as some sort of ideal (even if it be unattainable both practically and theoretically). But on the other hand Deleuze breaks definitively with the legacy of phenomenology, pursuing instead the great compromise between immanence and multiplicity, forging an alliance between univocity and difference.

​In either words, the twentieth century offers two basic options for any aesthetic theory: either Heidegger or Deleuze, either aesthetics as representational correspondence or aesthetics as nonrepresentational expression. Henry and Laruelle appear in the shadow of Deleuze, in the shadow of the nonrepresentational night to which he introduced them. 

​Yet to pose the choice as that between Heidegger or Deleuze is not merely to evoke their respective aesthetic theories, or at least not entirely. Any Deleuzian will tell you that the books on cinema or painting are merely the most convenient volumes, but certainly not the first and last, for gaining an understanding of his philosophy of time, movement, and image. And likewise Heidegger's many writings on art only feed into his account of Being in general, an account of Being so "poetic" that one hears Holderlin wafting between the lines of the most hard-nosed passages on pure ontology, perhaps even more so than the essays explicitly about art, such as "What Are Poets For?" or" ... Poetically Man Dwells ... ".

Deleuze was not the first to consider the topic of immanence, of course, not even the first to think aesthetics as immanence. And neither Henry nor Laruelle was merely mimicking the course taken by Deleuze. The three do not agree on what form immanence should take. But they do agree that representation is bankrupt, that the transcendental must give way to immanence, that aesthetics must cease to ape the logic of metaphysics, that the universe is not digital at its core. Instead they suggest that aesthetics follow a more mundane logic. For Henry it is the internal logic of spirit. For Deleuze it is the productive capacity of matter. And for Laruelle it is the immanent and generic logic of the real. Because of  ​this, Deleuze, Henry, and Laruelle are the three key theorists of aesthetic immanence today. 

Still, Deleuze does not fully embrace immanence, at least judged against Laruelle's strict requirements. And on this point Laruelle refuses to compromise. Any form of immanence worth the name would have to reject difference entirely. Any true form of immanence would, in fact, be forged from identity rather than alterity, commonality rather than difference. This is the secret to Laruelle's nonrepresentational aesthetics'. And to avoid confusing it with Deleuze, we call it by its proper name, a nonstandard aesthetics.

A realism for art: from weak immanence to strong immanence. Let's return now to von Briesen and generalize slightly from the particularities of gesture, tone, rhythm, or line and think more broadly about the principles necessary for a non-standard aesthetics. Although his language would change in later work, we cede now to Laruelle's own vocabulary from i985, and consider three concepts: difference, reversibility, and truth.

 Difference. Although those already cognizant of Laruelle will likely be jarred or confused by it, Laruelle indeed uses the term difference in his description of von Briesen. "The notion of "difference" Laruelle suggests, "allows us to evaluate in a precise way the originality, or rather the singularity, of von Briesen"; or, as he says later, "von Briesen is the inventor, in the philosophical and aesthetic domain, of what we will call Musico-graphical Difference."Given Laruelle's treatment of the concept of difference in Philosophies of Difference, which was published only a year after the von Briesen essays, it seems confusing that he would speak here of difference in positive terms. A few points might elucidate this potential confusion. Beyond the rather banal biographical fact that this is still relatively early in the evolution ofLaruelle's own non-philosophical vocabulary, we note the two very different lineages available in this period for the concept of difference: the Derridean difference and the Deleuzian difference. The two have almost nothing in common, and Laruelle is almost certainly exploring the latter, even if he is not entirely adopting it. Derrida's difference means supplement, deferral, or alterity. Deleuze's concept of difference-resolutely not Derridean; deconstructivist, or even post-structuralist-is "a pure difference ... a concept of difference without negation:'54 Laruelle is picking up the trail from Deleuze, only extending it. Laruelle's difference means unilateral superposition of two fused terms, that is, difference as an "indivisible relation between two terms in which one-here drawing-is the relation itself'. Admittedly Laruelle's language is not yet fully honed in this early text, yet the same logic is evident here that would eventually be described in terms of cloning and unilateral duality. Drawing is the unilateral clone of a "suspended" or nonmimetic relation between drawing and music. Laruelle is therefore attempting to unilateralize difference in his essays on von Briesen, and-again perhaps parroting Deleuze at some level-to abduct it from its philosophical origins, calling difference "a veritable synthesis that is real and non-imaginary".

Reversibility/Irreversibility. Von Briesen does not create an "equivalence'' or "exchange" between music and graphical art, but "what certain contemporary thinkers ·influenced by Nietzsche refer to as a 'reversibility' -in this case between the musical and graphical". Von Briesen's synthesis of music and drawing is not a synthesis in the Hegelian sense, a mutual encounter and cancelation of two antonyms elevated into a higher form. "This is not a making equivalent or a translation from one into the other"; rather, von Briesen shows that there is an "irreducibility of the graphical, and reciprocally too [an irreducibility of the musical] :'58 Thus, when allowed to be absolutely reversible to each other, music and drawing in fact become irreducible or irreversible. In other words, the secret to a non-standard conception of difference is found in the elimination of any kind of logic of exchange, correspondence, supplementarity, trace, or remainder. In his later writings, he ups the ante even further and, for what he quite permissively labels "reversibility" here, begins to speak more militantly in terms of irreversibility alone. But the two concepts, though ostensibly antonyms, should be understood in a similar sense: irreversibility is merely the more rigorous conception of what is here described as an endless reversibility. Within this kind of hyperreversibility, representation's circuit of exchange-music represented as drawing, or drawing represented as music-is invalidated. The "strict reversibility" of music and drawing means, albeit somewhat counterintuitively, that the two elements are superimposed on each other and irreducible one to the other. So though in his later work Laruelle calls such logic an "irreversible duality" here in 1985 his language is still evolving ​and he speaks instead of a kind of suspended or metastable "reversibility:' Whichever word, though, the point is ultimately the same.

Truth (as Fusion, Superposition, or Metastability). "What is he drawing?" Laruelle asks of von Briesen-and the answer is simple: "Truth itself'59 Von Briesen is looking for an aesthetic criteria of truth, not simply of technicity, resemblance, etc. "In the last instance, the object of art is truth:'60 But what does this mean? Although truth is not a particularly important category in Laruelle, as it is for, say, Heidegger or Badiou, the use of the term here signifies a finite or fused relation of pure immanence. In short, truth means the one. Using the logic of difference and reversibility, and extending and radicalizing them to an almost unidentifiable degree, an aesthetics of truth is one with a direct and immediate image of the real. Hence von Briesen's drawings are directly in the real of the music (because they are that musico-graphical relation itself, that in itself). "Von Briesen's secret goal is to show how every graphical phenomenon immediately represents a musical phenomenon, itself given over to another graphical phenomenon-and reciprocally as well:'61 This is a "suspension" or "short circuit" of the typical cycle of art in which composers create the music and listeners appreciate, experience, or interpret it. Von Briesen is not representing or signifying a truth that's in the music. Instead, von Briesen proves that there can be a "circularity of interpretation" in which drawing interprets music and music interprets drawing. Thus the essence of the work resides in what Laruelle previously termed "Musico-graphical Difference, that is, in the tension of forces that are always both musical and graphical". It's the reversibility of music and drawing that ensures that truth does not concentrate itself in one side or the other-because that would simply be a return to the classical conception of truth as philosophical sufficiency. Rather, through a logic of metastability or superposition, the truth of art is realized through the perpetual withdrawal or virtualization of truth.

​Through such techniques-hyper-difference, irreversibility, and truth as superposition-we arrive at an image of Laruelle's non-standard aesthetics. His aesthetic theory is not so much the weak immanence of phenomenology or even the immanence of Deleuzianism, but a strong theory of immanence entirely devoid, at least according to Laruelle, of any kind of philosophical or metaphysical residue.

​As such it deviates from the modern tradition of aesthetic theory, initiated by Kant and continuing through all manner of varying and often incompatible permutations, from romanticism and modernism to postmodernism and beyond. Von Briesen forces us to reconsider Kantian aesthetic theory, radicalizing and unilateralizing the classic notions of "judgment without concept" and "finality without end;' formulations that seem practically non-philosophical already despite their metaphysical core. As Laruelle puts it, 

Von Briesen's drawings are, in this way, not exactly abstraction, nor are they modernist, and they certainly have nothing to do with the tradition of modern nihilism. "Von Briesen's work a priori invalidates this entire critical and aesthetic apparatus". Instead-and here the influence of Henry is clear-Laruelle describes a "recurrent force" that relies upon an "identity" or an "aesthetic common sense, a faculty of the imagination that limits or hampers radically the notorious 'free play' of representations:' This "common art" or "generic art" is the necessary outcome of a realist aesthetics. In fact, the only kind of art possible for non-standard philosophy would be a common (namely, generic) art. 

In the wake of this discussion, and to summarize what is meant by a "realist;' "immanent;' or "non-standard" aesthetics, we might recapitulate a number of points culled from both this chapter and the previous one. First, light and the alternations of light and dark are central to the standard model of philosophy. Thus the previous chapter was devoted, in part, to an exploration of light and dark as immanent (not philosophical) phenomena. This led to the work of James Turrell and the notion that light might be approached as such, not merely as a means of illumination or a vehicle for something else. A pure black-or alternately a pure bright-produces a crypto- or non-standard ontology in which nothing is philosophically revealed to anything else. Laruelle labels this a "uchromia;' a non-color or color utopia. 

In both this chapter and the previous one we also discussed photography as a typical, albeit not special, non-standard art form. Like von Briesen's own drawing technique, the photographic apparatus inscribes the real automatically and "mechanically" and thus directly enacts the unilaterial duality of the one. This led to a discussion of von Briesen in terms of an "aesthetics without representation;' that is, a superposition of music and drawing into a suspended or noncommunicative relation. This is the last and most important detail of the entire discussion. The "non-musical aspect of all music" is an a-synthetic relation between two things, a relation without a synthesis. Laruelle's aesthetics is based on a unilaterial logic in which two terms are subsumed not by a third, but by the one term. In other .words, the two terms and the relation are immanent to the one term (with the second term as the unilaterial clone of the one). This is, in essence, Laruelle's single greatest discovery as a thinker: a new concept of relation that is neither dialectical nor differential; a relation that is not digital.

"There are no great utopian texts after the widespread introduction of computers," Fredric Jameson remarked recently, "the last being Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia of 1975, where computers are not yet in service".

1975 was a year of crisis. Saigon had fallen that spring, marking the end of the war in Vietnam. A few years prior, OPEC's oil embargo had sent price shocks around the world. The boom years of the 1950s and '6os had given way to new economic crises by the early to mid-197os. And these crises would, in part, usher in a new economic regime that would place the digital computer at the heart of value production.

​It was the time of waning modernity. In Jameson's estimation, it was the last time one might propose a kind of non-place apart from this world, a utopia in which alternative axioms generated alternative worlds. Indeed, the years since have been marked by a failure of imagination, particularly arriong progressives, during which it has become impossible to conceive of viable alternatives to the new cybernetic universe. 

Today, instead of utopian texts, 

The end of the utopian text thus signals for Jameson an end to representation. Or at least it indicates that representation, as complicated or flawed as it might be under otherwise normal conditions, has been interrupted and outsourced to another domain entirely (digitality and computation).

​Does Laruelle contradict Jameson's argument, the argument that no great utopian texts exist after digital machines enter everyday life? Not at all, it ratifies it all the more. Laruelle's work confirms a particular kind of historical periodization: formerly existing as narrative or world or image, utopia perished by the end of the 1970s; but, where it perished as narrative, it was reborn as method. Such is the key to Laruelle's utopianism. For him utopia is a technique, not a story or a world. 

Utopia means simply to decline to participate in the philosophical decision, to decline the creation of worlds. Counterintuitively then, Laruelle's refusal to create alternative worlds is what makes him a utopian thinker, for his non-standard world is really a non-world-just as utopia is defined as "non-place:' To abstain from the philosophical decision is to abstain from the world. And thus to discover the non-standard universe is to discover the non-place of utopia. (Or, using the parlance of media aesthetics: the pre-197os utopia is a diegetic or worldbound utopia, but the Laruellean utopia is a non-diegetic or non-worldbound utopia.)

Cold comfort for Jameson however, because Laruelle's marginality today-his recent exposure in the Anglophone world a burst of visibility after thirty-plus years laboring in obscurity-is but further evidence of the marginality of utopian thinking. Indeed the chief difficulty lies in the fact that a "utopia of difference and variety" is no longer the goal, ever ​since big business has become so adept at selling these many different and varying worlds. When difference enters the mode of production, as it has under post-Fordism, it is no longer possible to conceive of utopia as difference. Rather, the chief challenge for utopian thinking today is to force the generic condition in the here and now, a utopia not of another place, but of an impoverished and finite common real. Such is the task of the two remaining chapters. 

excerpt from the book:  Laruelle (Against the Digital) by  ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAY ​

(Marcel Duchamp)

​(Merleau-Ponty) 

1. The question raised by the contemporary artist as a non-philosopher is first and foremost: what is the relation between the generic singularity and the artistic project as a form - content proposition? Within this question we find three basic aspects of that which constitutes the thought-space of a contemporary artist. Firstly, we have the generic singularity as a mode of existence: a human being who becomes something within a generic space of social categories. Secondly, we have the artistic project as a system of competing interests that designates how knowledge is not only embedded but also operative in the artistic agent. And lastly, we have the form-content proposition as the specific artwork-event, which designates what is actually produced and made real in institutional contexts. A generic singularity is a human being who develops his own knowledge and insights through the mode of existence, the artistic project and the actual artworks produced throughout his life: artwork-events appear, from one to thousands, that in their totality are a life’s work. All these artwork-events, which sum up the artistic output of a ​life lived as a gesture towards art and life in general, present their own kind of thinking in action: a non-philosophy. In three words, we can sum up the nature of this non-philosophy: self positioning, investigation and intervention. Some kind of self positions itself within the art world, some kind of investigation through a system of competing interests is carried forth, and finally the artwork-events intervene into some more or less established contexts for presenting art. Self-positioning, investigation and intervention are here understood as taking a position and emitting objects, gestures, signs, situations or environments that are received in a more or less defined context for viewing art. It is a non-philosophy because the contemporary artist thinks, but in a personalised way, through his experiences, the position he has taken, whatever artworks he has made and finally, what is stated about them. 

3.1. In order to outline a fundamental ontological29 insight regarding the relationship between non-philosophy and contemporary art, I need briefly to clarify the historical background of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of non-philosophy. According to the philosopher, classical systemic philosophy reached its metaphysical endpoint with the Hegelian master-narrative of the spirit becoming absolute self-consciousness through the unfolding of the system itself. History – as the progression towards emancipation – having reached the stage of the modern democratic state, ensuring the freedom of the individual, had also come to an end in an abstract sense. This is not to say that historical events would no longer take place, but that the substance of the spirit as freedom had now become real as a rational structure within historical reality. ‘What is rational, is real, what is real is rational,’ is the infamous quote from the introduction to Hegel’s Philosophie des Rechts (1820). One of the ways for philosophy after Hegel to escape his dialectical prison was to turn him upside down by thinking about that cleavage in the system that negates this totality: the individuality of experience. In Philosophie et non-philosophie depuis Hegel, Merleau-Ponty quotes two pages from Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) where what is called ‘experience’ is defined: ‘This dialectical movement, which consciousness exercises (ausübt) on its self – on its knowledge as well as its object – is, in so far as the new, true object emerges to consciousness as the result of it, precisely that which is called experience. ’Experience for Hegel is the development of ‘new, true’ knowledge after it has been sent to the testing-ground of the real. In the encounter with something outside the system, the system of knowledge breaks apart, has to enlarge itself, and in this movement expand its understanding of the world. Experience becomes a rupture (Bruch-erfahrung): it breaks me apart and forces me to reconsider my being in the world. I am forced to interrogate the relation between the system and that which goes against it. That which goes against also holds the potential of something new. ‘The experience, that is to say, the effective assumption of a being, is capable of giving space to a dialectic, because it alone is the opening towards something that can reveal itself, that has its depths, a latency, and that can become a space for an ecstasy from where a true novelty may emerge.’ (Merleau-Ponty). By designating the possibility of such a point within the space of consciousness (and that it can be ripped apart: ‘Zerrissenheit’, Hegel is also opening a back door for those who later came to insist upon the absoluteness of experience. There are experiences that cannot be surpassed and integrated into the transcendental system. They designate a specific encounter between a subject and something other to it: concrete experiences happening to the individual. This insight will become integral to my understanding of the power of contemporary art today. Ultimately, contemporary art takes place in that corridor between the already established world of signs and conventions and that fringe of the other, the unforeseen, the virtual, that excess of being that points towards something beyond me. Contemporary art is visibility with infinite depth, because the contemporary artist has moved into the space of contingency: he has been ripped apart from the conventional space of art and into a new state of mind (epistemic rupture); he contains within himself that specific experience of being able to think himself and the world differently. And because epistemic ruptures happen all the time, opening up towards situations of contingency, we never know what exactly will happen in the space of contemporary art. In this state of mind I locate the fundamental thought-power of the contemporary artist as a non-philosopher.

1.4.

​I propose to think of the contemporary artist – who has been around for almost 100 years as a conceptual person – as a non-philosopher. As a starting point, the contemporary artist has the radical contingency of art. Art as an essential phenomenon tied to certain ideas, genres or media no longer exist. Artworks only exists as propositions about art: ‘This could be art.’ And he who makes the proposition is the contemporary artist, because it is in the act of making art that he becomes contemporary. The contemporary artist is he who proposes artwork from an absolute background of the virtual. He proposes the artwork as an offering to art, because this is the only way in which art attains a presence.40 But this absolute freedom of the contemporary artist does not relieve the artist from his embeddedness in the generalised space of human existence: a body, a social world and a being in time (the metaphysical knot). A contemporary artist is situated in life, because he exists as the specific instantiation of the metaphysical knot: as someone who has transformed his relations to a specific body (the monstrous body) appearing within a social context (the art world) at a point in historical time (historicity). Contemporary artists become generic singularities because through their life trajectories they are framed by institutional and ideological regimes of discourses, but nonetheless have a sovereign right to their individual interests, to be proactive and to develop new ideas for future artworks. Simply put, the contemporary artist exists with a right and a power to make art. And here, ‘to make art’ is understood in a narrow semiotic fashion: the ability and will to produce whatever signs, objects and events and make them circulate within contexts of viewing art. Artists can authorise their artworks simply by proposing and presenting them to an audience. From this perspective, even the most minimal, conceptual or collective art project is expressive because it originates from somewhere and has a destination. To be able to express is to have the power to exist as the ability to produce difference in a social environment.

1.5. The proposition I am trying to present here is that a contemporary artist can be seen as a nonphilosopher because from his embedded situation he is confronting contingency. From this position he develops and presents a thought-space that is personalised as a specific way of engaging with the fact that everything is possible. It is a thinking in the sense that certain aspects of an artist’s thinking can be externalised and communicated (the interview, statement or projectdescription), but most importantly, it is an operative thinking, because the artist does something in this world: he produces form-content propositions – the whatever artworks that burst into the future and one day crash into our present. This demands a level of thinking infused with some kind of knowledge and certain skills to make interesting artworks. But, it is not a knowledge that follows the same criteria as the production of scientific knowledge, such as the possibility of iteration, verification and systematic study. It can be knowledge infused with desire, memory, ambition, but also a sense of uncertainty and joy in experimenting. It can be knowledge informed with the intention of making a statement. It can be knowledge infused with a white energy of freedom and exuberance. Ultimately, it is a thinking-knowledge infused with transformed experience. Firstly, the experience of having encountered numerous artworks and projects (perceptual); secondly, the experience of producing one’s own artwork or initiating collaborative art projects (pragmatic); and finally the experience of being transformed and inspired by other artists and life in general (radical). I have lived with art, and this living in all its totality has become a complex experience that fuses with my position as an exhibiting artist. My field of experience as an artist is that of having ideas for exhibitions and projects, putting artworks on display, of presenting them to a public and receiving a response. ​I have experienced knowledge of how this can be done, and which rhetorical possibilities exist as to how to install, to present and to mediate artworks, exhibitions and gestures. 

1.6. Not all artists of today are contemporary artists. There are many artists still working in traditional media, who do not reflect on their art practice, who do not engage with any of the insights or breakthroughs that have happened in that massive space of art that was opened with Duchamp’s readymade. The extreme version of the non-contemporary artist, who states he is an artist but makes art in the basement without any knowledge of contemporary art and with no audience from the contemporary art world in mind, is not a contemporary artist. Thus, I disagree with the all-inclusive position on the contemporary artist: that all artists and artworks of today are contemporary, the argument being that all art being made is always contemporary, since it comes into being in time and is thus present to the time of its own making. I disagree, because I believe that to be a contemporary artist is a state of mind, the result of a specific reflective operation, and thus a change of consciousness. A contemporary artist is aware of other contemporary artists and produces art for a contemporary art-world context. So, a contemporary artist has consciousness of the contemporary as a cultural field, and also wishes to participate in that specific art world that constitutes the contemporary. Knowledge and desire produce an intention: the contemporary artist wants to make art that is presented at institutions or exhibition spaces showing contemporary art. To be a contemporary artist is to belong to a contemporary art world. A contemporary artist exists within the post-medium condition (Krauss).45 This condition has its origins in the radical contingency of art that Duchamp revealed with his readymade urinal, and that later Merleau-Ponty designated as the condition for philosophy to become non-philosophy. The post-medium condition is the situation in which the institution of art as a system allows for whatever object or event to appear and become designated as an art object. As Arthur Danto states in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: ‘Something is an artwork if it satisfies certain institutionally defined conditions, though outwardly it may appear no different from an object that is not an artwork.’ Contemporary artists might be working with certain materials or be framed by their media, such as being categorised and labelled as a painter, sculptor, photographer or media artist, but these artists are aware that other possibilities exist, and that there is no absolute hierarchy between the different material outputs. Contemporary artists are no longer defined by the material support of the media with which they are working. 

1.7.

These reflections presented here are an attempt to show that contemporary artists are thinking beings both through their act of being contemporary and through the way they establish their artistic projects. I believe that there is a relation between the condition of non-philosophy and that of contemporary art. Contemporary artists present a vision of the world that is equivalent to a way of thinking; a non-philosophy in action. Non-philosophy is a mode of existing that becomes a mode of vision: a gaze that entails a theory of seeing and perceiving, but most importantly is ‘externalizing a way of viewing the world.’ (Danto). Inspired by Merleau-Ponty, non-philosophy is the name I want to give to this specific way of thinking about the world, which has exploded since the early historical avant garde. In the following pages I will try to demarcate the nature of this thinking and why contemporary art has become one of the more potent sites of enacting non-philosophy. Thus this book consists of two sections. The first section, The Depth of Experience, attempts to describe Merleau-Ponty’s idea and conception of non-philosophy through a reading of his manuscripts from the period of 1957–61. Here, key ideas are the role and power of experience, the turn towards the lived experience, and Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh. Thereafter, I develop my own thoughts on the body, existence, position and method of a non-philosopher. Finally, I present some thoughts on Merleau-Ponty’s actuality for contemporary art as a position and practice. The second section, Aspects of Contemporary Art, deals with the space of contemporary art in relation to institutions and the agent producing art: the contemporary artist as a generic singularity. Important aspects are the artwork as a proposition, the system of competing interests, the art of contemporaneity, the framing of art through institutions, nihilism, experimentation and the notion of systemic hysteria. These are attempts to encircle different elements of the force-field constituting contemporary art and thus not attempts to convey the absolute truth about contemporary art. I end the book by presenting my thoughts on the future of contemporary art.  

1.8.

I view these reflections as a presentation of a poetics for my own practice and existence as a contemporary artist and non-philosopher. They are aspirations for my life; thoughts and ideas that push me further, force me to re-consider my practice and the way I exist in the world. My writing transforms me: it feeds back into my mind as insights that I have to acknowledge are part of me and thus confront me with an understanding I did not know existed. They are the trace of an experience of thinking something beyond me. I am a contemporary artist and in the position of a non-philosopher. It is a state of mind. 

Introduction from the book: NON-PHILOSOPHY AND CONTEMPORARY ART by Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen

Since the 1980s, Chinese contemporary art has made a huge impact on the international scene, and continues to be one of the art world’s major areas of focus. With countless new museums, galleries, and talents coming to the fore, China is a rising start on the market. We profile ten of the most important figures in Chinese contemporary art.

Johnson Chang (Chang Tsong-zung) is Co-founder of the Asia Art Archive (AAA) and Founder and Director of Hanart TZ Gallery, established in 1983. Chang is also a Professor at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. He has been curating exhibitions since the 1980s and, with his gallery, has supported and contributed to the development of Chinese contemporary art and the art scene in Hong Kong. In 1993 he curated China’s New Art Post-1989, a seminal exhibition that opened at the Hong Kong Arts Festival and toured the United States and Europe. In 2010, Chang organised West Heavens, a contemporary art collaboration between China and India. In 2013, Hanart TZ celebrated its 30th anniversary and the achievements of its artists. The anniversary saw the organisation of events across three spaces in Hong Kong, outlining the development of Chinese contemporary art from its beginnings and through the works of some of its most important artists. Chang was in ArtReview’s Power 100 list in 2013 for his contributions to the Chinese contemporary art scene and building bridges between China and India.

Founder of Pearl Lam Galleries with branches in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore, Pearl Lam founded the China Art Foundation in 2008 to create a cultural bridge between the West and China. Lam established her gallery in 2005, with the vision of bridging the perceived gap between art and design, East and West. Lam runs frequent exhibitions of Chinese and international emerging, mid-career and established artists and designers, exposing Chinese art to the international scene, and the Chinese scene to the best international artists working today, from Jenny Holzer to Yinka Shonibare, Golnaz Fathi, Entang Wiharso and Gonkar Gyatso. Lam was among the Art Power 100 in L’Officiel Art in 2012 and in 2013 she was among Asia’s most powerful women in Forbes’ “Asia’s Women In The Mix, 2013: The Year’s Top 50 for Achievement In Business.”
                                                                                                                           Johnson Chang | Courtesy of Hanart TZ Gallery                                                                                                                           

Philip Tinari (b. 1979, Philadelphia) has been the Director of Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) since 2011. A former Fullbright Fellow at Beijing University, in 2009 Tinari founded LEAP (The International Art Magazine of Contemporary China) and is founding editor of Art Forum’s Chinese-language web edition. He has worked as China’s representative for Art Basel and Sotheby’s, and has been a lecturer in Art Criticism. In 2014, he was curator of Armory Focus: China in New York, a section of the fair dedicated to a presentation of Chinese contemporary art with works by lesser known and younger artists. Tinari was among ArtReview’s Power 100 in 2011.

Hou Hanru (b. 1963, Guangzhou) is an international curator and critic, and a pivotal figure in the international art world for his support and promotion of Chinese contemporary art. Hou spent part of his life in the United States and France before settling in Rome, where he’s been the Artistic Director of MAXXI since December 2013. He has been co-Director of the World Biennale Forum and curator of the 5th Auckland Triennial in 2013. In addition he’s curated numerous seminal exhibitions, from the Shanghai Biennale (2000) to the Gwangju Biennale (2002), the French Pavilion (1999) and the Chinese Pavilion (2007) at the Venice Biennale, among others. His critical writings can be found in publications such as Flash Art International, Art Asia Pacific, Yishu, and Art in America, to name a few.

Ai Weiwei (b. 1957, Beijing), perhaps China’s most famed contemporary artist, has been dubbed one of the region’s foremost ‘activist’ and ‘dissident’ figures. One of the pioneers of Chinese contemporary art, he was part of the avant-garde Stars Group in the 1970s, and has since made numerous international headlines for his consistent troubles with government authorities. He was imprisoned in 2011 for 81 days in Beijing for “economic crimes,” and he created S.A.C.R.E.D. for the 2013 Venice Biennale as a documentary artwork about his experience in prison. Through his practice, Ai investigated China’s government corruption and cover-ups, such as in Straight, also at the 2013 Venice Biennale, which explored the collapse of schools during the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. Ai has also curated exhibitions, including the controversial FUCK OFF (2000, Shanghai) and FUCK OFF II (2013, Groninger Museum). Ai Weiwei has been part of ArtReview’s Power 100 since 2006, and stole the number one

​Hou Hanru with Vedovamazzei’s work ‘Climbing’, 2000.
Photo by Cecilia Fiorenza | Courtesy Fondazione MAXXIspot in 2011.

​Claire Hsu co-founded Hong Kong’s Asia Art Archive (AAA) with Johnson Chang in 2000, and has since expanded the archive’s function of documentation to include research, exhibition and conversation on the recent history of Asian art. In 2011, she initiated a project of digitalisation of the archive’s materials into a freely accessible format. Hsu is a committee member for the M+ museum in Hong Kong, and she started the archive right after her Master’s Degree at the University of London, as ‘a personal project to solve a personal problem’, due to her frustration at locating reference materials for her dissertation on contemporary Chinese art. AAA includes materials on contemporary art from across Asia, both in a physical library with more than 43,000 books, catalogues and other resources and in the Collection Online, with around 20,000 digitised primary source material freely accessible on the website.. Hsu has been among ArtReview’s Power 100 since 2009 and was in Forbes’ Asia’s Women to Watch in 2013.

Dr. Uli Sigg (b. 1946) is a Swiss collector, renowned for holding the most extensive collection (1,510 pieces) of art from China from the 1970s onwards. In 1998, he established the Chinese Contemporary Art Award (CCAA) to honor the outstanding achievements of Chinese artists and art critics. The Sigg Collection encompasses Chinese contemporary art from its beginning, including Political Pop, Cynical Realism and the new generations of artists. The works range from painting to sculpture, photography, video and installation and feature names like Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun and Zhang Xiaogang. During his ambassadorship, Sigg invited Swiss curator Harald Szeemann for a visit that culminated in the inclusion of 20 Chinese artists at the 1999 Venice Biennale. In 2005, the Sigg Collection travelled for the first time around the world in an exhibition entitled Mahjong, in institutions like Kunstmuseum in Bern, Berkeley Art Museum in Berkeley, the Peabody Essex Museum. In 2013, Sigg donated his entire collection to Hong Kong’s M+ museum.

Zeng Fanzhi (b. 1964, Wuhan) is currently the highest-grossing living Chinese artist and Asian contemporary artist on the market – titles previously held by Zhang Xiaogang and Takashi Murakami, respectively. Zeng broke the record in October 2013 during Sotheby’s Hong Kong’s 40th Anniversary Evening Sale with The Last Supper (2001), which sold for USD $23.3 million. The work is based on Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting of the same name, but instead of depicting Jesus and the Apostles, Zeng’s version portrays masked Young Pioneers – a Chinese communist youth group. His Hospital Triptych No. 1 (1992-3) sold at Christie’s Hong Kong in November 2013 for USD $14.7 million, registering as the most expensive work sold at that particular auction. Zeng was among ArtReview’s Power 100 that same year.

Zhang Wei is the co-founder of the multidisciplinary Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou, an innovative art space that bridges the non-profit and commercial spheres. Zhang wanted to establish a space that could function as both a non-profit independent and commercial gallery, giving artists the benefits of both. Founded in 2012, Vitamin Creative Space explores this mixed working model, as a way of self-funding independently from government funds and grants. This experimental format allows for contributing to both the development of artistic practices and collaboration with institutions. The space also represents artists of international acclaim, like Olafur Eliasson, Koki Tanaka (represented Japan at the Venice Biennale 2013), Lee Kit (represented Hong Kong at the Venice Biennale 2013), Heman Chong, Cao Fei and Danh Vo (winner of the 2012 Hugo Boss Award).

​Dr. Wang Chunchen is Head of the Department of Curatorial Research of CAFA Art Museum at the Central Academy of Fine Arts China in Beijing and Adjunct Curator at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at the Michigan State University, USA. Dr. Wang is known for his contributions to the contemporary art scene through his works, research and publication, and international curatorial experience. In 2009, he won the Chinese Contemporary Art Award in Art Criticism, which culminated in the writing and publication of his 2011 book, Art Intervenes in Society. In 2013, he was the curator of Transfiguration, the Chinese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Dr. Wang has published more than 50 articles in the past five years concerning the various facets of the impact that Chinese contemporary artists are facing in today’s international art world. In addition to his own publications, he has been influential in Chinese contemporary art criticism by playing a major role in the translation of over ten books of art history and theory, including titles by American art critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto.

The Article is taken from: 

Recent years have seen a boom in Russia’s contemporary art scene. From St. Petersburg to Moscow and exhibition spaces all over the world, Russian artists are showcased in an increasing number of institutions – a powerful indication of how much the former Eastern bloc has come in transforming its approach to artistic expression. We have handpicked ten Russian contemporary artists to know.

​Russian artist Anna Parkina’s work examines the world in a state of flux, exploring the effect of modern society on human anxiety and experience. Her art harks back to a period of Russian Constructivism  and she counts leading artists such as Alexander Rodchenko as her influences. Yet, as well as being reminiscent of Soviet propaganda images popularized by the movement, her work also merges together novel styles, encompassing a myriad of influences and art mediums. Predominantly, Parkina’s use of collage has attracted her much attention, which stands as a visual metaphor for social and political undercurrents in society. By appropriating popular images onto canvases, such as the repeated use of silhouettes, she highlights the common yearning to make sense of an intriguing and somewhat fragmented, reality.

​Born in Novosibirk in 1971,  Dmitry Shorin studied at the M. Gorky Teaching Institute in Omsk, graduating with a specialization in costume design. Today, the artist lives in St. Petersburg and is a member of the prestigious UNESCO International Federation of Art. Working mainly in the medium of painting, Shorin’s images are greatly influenced by photography and mass media, with a distinct focus on the female form. Yet since 2013, it has been his work in sculpture that has been thrust in the spotlight. Adorning the halls of the new Pulkovo airport terminal in St. Petersburg, a series of dramatic sculptures portray ethereal young women with jet planes for wings, bringing to light theories of flying humans and the limits of the human body in an ever-expanding digital age.

​The son of a communist party official who died in the Second World War and a mother who fled Poland at 15 in support of the Russian Revolution, today Erik Bulatov  is known for being one of Russia’s most important living artists. Over the decades, his work has appeared in almost every important exhibition on 20th century Russian art and primarily focuses on the absurdity of Soviet reality. Today, many of his paintings constitute political art, even though they do not carry a clear-cut ideology or political manifesto. Metaphorically rich and overlaid with a distinct Russian pathos, his use of text and image layering has redefined Russian contemporary art as it is known today.

Born in 1981 and having studied at the Mukhina Art Academy in St. Petersburg,  Marina Federova continues to live and work in the Northern city. Receiving international acclaim for her solo exhibitions of graphic compositions, she has since participated in numerous art fairs and exhibitions. In particular, her intertwining of fashion and art has won her great support within the Parisian art scene. Primarily painting images of women, Federova’s work employs bold and sweeping lines, marking her out as one of Russia’s most promising emerging artists both nationally and on the international scene.

Mihail Chemiakin ​ experienced a very interesting childhood, having been born in Moscow in 1943, growing up in occupied East Germany, before returning to Soviet Russia in 1957. Despite being expelled from the St. Petersburg Repin Academy of Art for failing to conform to Socialist politics, and being subject to psychiatric treatment to ‘cure’ him of his nonconformity, Chemiakin has succeeded in developing an extensive art portfolio. Today, the artist continues to work in a broad range medias and is known for creating the 15-figure Children Are Victims of All Adult Vices sculptures for the City of Moscow in 2001. Similarly, he donated the Monument to Peter I to St. Petersburg in 1991 and further series adorn cities all over the world, including in New York, London and Paris.

​Born in 1962,  Olga Chernysheva ​ grew up in the wake of the Soviet Union’s demise and following a period of censorship and travel restrictions, she became the first Russian to study at Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie. Today, Chernysheva has firmly secured her position on the contemporary art scene. Often moving between different mediums, her work provides an intriguing glimpse into the world of post-Soviet Russia. With a focus on the effects of capitalism and collectivism, her photographs and montages illustrate her sociological approach to Russian society and the daily lives of its citizens. Her interest in the mundane reality of Moscow’s city streets is fascinating and offers another perspective into contemporary Russian life.

​Born in 1968 in the southern Urals of Russia,  Rinat Voligamsi ​ graduated from the architectural department of the Ufa State Technological University in 1984, following a brief interruption of studies due to conscription. Following this, he began exhibiting his works and was awarded the “State Prize for Russia” in 1994. His preoccupation with human bodily forms is particularly fascinating and he often focuses on duplicated figures, or bodies that are multiplied, halved or completely inverted. Throughout his works, Voligamsi explores the authority of Russia as a modern nation, which can be viewed as an attempt to resist the state’s regulation of its people. The young artist gained international acclaim with his project that modified original photographs of Lenin.

Born in 1976,  Roman Sakin  is a Russian sculptor and a nominee of the  Kandinsky Prize in 2009 and 2012. Known for working with unconventional instruments, the artist focuses on the positioning of objects and the transformation of their meaning for the viewer. With a firm foothold on the Moscow art scene, it is no wonder the Sakin has graced the exhibition halls of the Moscow Museum of Art, as well as other international galleries.

Vitaly Pushnitsky is a St. Petersburg based painter, sculptor and graphic artist who is widely considered to be one of Russia’s leading contemporary artists. With collections at the State Russian Museum and Moscow Museum of Modern Art, as well as numerous internationally renowned galleries, Pushnitsky’s work illustrates a working relationship between established painting traditions and modern graphic techniques. Photography, painting and graphics coexist in his artworks, addressing the problems with representing reality in art. Many of his exhibitions deal with the issue of time, metaphysics and mechanics, forging a dialogue between classical methods and contemporary art.

Born in a remote village in Russia’s Stavropol region, Vyacheslav Mikhailov ​ studied under the directorship of Yevsey Moisejenko, an acclaimed art professor at the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in St. Petersburg. Upon graduation, he formed the The Three Bogatyrs art group with his fellow colleagues, devoted to exploring new forms of artistic expression. Today, he still works with paint, utilizing various surfaces and materials in the creation of his works – in particular, his technique has become synonymous with the use of levkas, a material commonly employed in iconography. Awarded the title of “Honoured Artist of Russia,” Mikhailov’s projects have been featured in hundreds of gallery spaces worldwide.

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Sergei’s art is a strange combination of high aestheticism and folk “roots”, modernistic extravaganza and dadaistic fragility, symbolic bottomlessness and Russian past print metaphysics, artistic refinement and graphic roughness. But even all of those put together do not make his art unprofessional or eclectic. Rather, it transmits giant spiritual experience and marks the beginning of the sacred, mysterious, the beginning of all beginnings.

Most of Sergei Alferov’s works are executed in oil on paper, but he also employs pastels, silk-screen and various mixed media techniques.

Sergei Alferov was born in Tashkent in 1951, attended art college for four years, before moving to Moscow 1972. Two years later, in 1974 he decided to take part in the famous exhibition of ‘unofficial’ artists on the outskirts of Moscow that was destroyed by the authorities with a bulldozer, but he arrived on the site just as authorities were breaking the exhibition up.

Sergei Alferov was one of those artists who is called “out-of-minds”. His life was lacking stability and comfort. He deprived himself of comfort having chosen life in one of the artistic communes, together with vagabond philosophers, hippies and art fanatics. He slept in a sleeping bag, the wine box was his table, yet, he was open to any kind of “Space energy,” engulfing himself in it with greed and passion, catching and registering the in-coming winds of the universal information.

But Sergey Alferov was not just a medium to register Astral turbulence – coldly, showing no passion. His sight was directed first of all to the most ancient hideaways of consciousness. Fortunately, Sergey Alferov belonged to those few (he paints turtles with the whole Universe inside). His “internal” intermingles with the “external” so closely that unwillingly one remembers a postulate about a dialectical beginning of Nature which produced humans to study itself. The fact that artist’s perception of the world was different from that of the majority of the people is not his fault.

How “national,” how Russian Sergey Alferov’s art? On the on hand, it was easy to answer this question by quoting Cosmic character of Russian Soul (though we have to admit his art has absorbed the scent of many distant and mysterious cultures). On the other hand, he was so dissolved in primitive esoteric tradition, so assimilated spiritually that it seems he had lost his ethnic identity irreversibly. Yet his “internal” immigration didn’t break him away from the “Russian quintessence” – it was important to have at least some understanding of nuances and slight details of Oriental, relaxed view of the World, to see beyond the dizzy Anderssonian spires and attics, Slavic steppe, to feel its astringent odor, to hear the mares graze and neigh in the night. Indeed, the more fantastic and unattainable the goals of Russian artists, the more their restless spirit carries itself away from their native grounds, the better they feel about it, the better they work, producing an interesting, profound and original reality, adding substantial to the cultural treasures of the World.

Sergey Alferov, the lonesome Russian half-Daos, half-Suphy, wonders through times and legends with a leaking umbrella in his hand. He gave us his tender, touching revelations and… welcomed us to join him in unlimited, unknown, remote land. He died in 2005.

by Gilles Deleuze

The body is the Figure, or rather the material of the Figure. The material of the Figure must not be confused with the spatializing material structure, which is positioned in opposition to it. The body is the Figure, not the structure. Conversely, the Figure, being a body, is not the face, and does not even have a face. It does have a head, because the head is an integral part of the body. It can even be reduced to the head. As a portraitist, Bacon is a painter of heads, not faces, and there is a great difference between the two. For the face is a structured, spatial organization that conceals the head, whereas the head is dependent upon the body, even if it is the point of the body, its culmination. It is not that the head lacks spirit; but it is a spirit in bodily form, a corporeal and vital breath, an animal spirit. It is the animal spirit of man: a pig-spirit, a buffalo-spirit, a dog-spirit, a bat-spirit .... Bacon thus pursues a very peculiar project as a portrait painter: to dismantle the face, to rediscover the head or make it emerge from beneath the face. 

​The deformations which the body undergoes are also the animal traits of the head. This has nothing to do with a correspondence between animal forms and facial forms. In fact, the face lost its form by being subjected to the techniques of rubbing and brushing that disorganize it and make a head emerge in its place. And the marks or traits of animality are not animal forms, but rather the spirits that haunt the wiped off parts, that pull at the head, individualizing and qualifying the head without a face. Bacon's techniques of local scrubbing and asignifying traits take on a particular meaning here. Sometimes the human head is replaced by an animal; but it is not the animal as a form, but rather the animal as a trait - for example, the quivering trait of a bird spiraling over the scrubbed area, while the simulacra of portrait-faces on either side of it act as "attendants" (as in the 1976 Triptych). Sometimes an animal, for example a real dog, is treated as the shadow of its master  or conversely, the man's shadow itself assumes an autonomous and indeterminate animal existence. The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering. In place of formal correspondences, what Bacon's painting constitutes is a zone of indiscernibility or undecidability between man and animal. Man becomes animal, but not without the animal becoming spirit at the same time, the spirit of man, the physical spirit of man presented in the mirror as Eumenides or Fate. It is never a combination of forms, but rather the common fact: the common fact of man and animal. Bacon pushes this to the point where even his most isolated Figure is ​already a coupled Figure; man is coupled with his animal in a latent bullfight.

This objective zone of indiscernibility is the entire body, but the body insofar as it is flesh or meat. Of course, the body has bones as well, but bones are only its spatial structure. A distinction is often made between flesh and bone, and even between things related to them. The body is revealed only when it ceases to be supported by the bones, when the flesh ceases to cover the bones, when the two exist for each other, but each on its own terms: the bone as the material structure of the body, the flesh as the bodily material of the Figure. Bacon admires the young woman in Degas's After the Bath [101], whose suspended spinal column seems to protrude from her flesh, making it seem much more vulnerable and lithe, acrobatic.2 In a completely different context, Bacon has painted such a spinal column on a Figure doubled over in contortions (Three Figures and a Portrait, 1975 [78]). This pictorial tension between flesh and bone is something that must be achieved. And what achieves this tension in the painting is, precisely, meat, through the splendor of its colors. Meat is the state of the body in which flesh and bone confront each other locally rather than being composed structurally. The same is true of the mouth and the teeth, which are little bones. In meat, the flesh seems to descend from the bones, while the bones rise up from the flesh. This is a feature of Bacon that distinguishes him from Rembrandt and Soutine. If there is an "interpretation" of the body in Bacon, it lies in his taste for painting prone Figures, whose raised arm or thigh is equivalent to a bone, so that the drowsy flesh seems to descend from it. Thus, we find the two sleeping twins flanked by animal-spirit attendants in the central panel of the 1968 triptych; but also the series of the sleeping man with raised arms, the sleeping woman with vertical legs, and the sleeper or addict with the hypodermic syringe. Well beyond the apparent sadism, the bones are like a trapeze apparatus (the carcass) upon which the flesh is the acrobat. The athleticism of the body is naturally prolonged in this acrobatics of the flesh. We can see here the importance of the fall [chute] in Bacon's work. Already in the crucifixions, what interests Bacon is the descent, and the inverted head that reveals the flesh. In the crucifixions of 1962 and 1965, we can see the flesh literally descending from the bones, framed by an armchair-cross and a bone-lined ring. For both Bacon and Kafka, the spinal column is nothing but a sword beneath the skin, slipped into the body of an innocent sleeper by an executioner. Sometimes a bone will even be added only as an afterthought in a random spurt of paint.

Pity the meat! Meat is undoubtedly the chief object of Bacon's pity, his only object of pity, his Anglo-Irish pity. On this point he is like Soutine, with his immense pity for the Jew. Meat is not dead flesh; it retains all the sufferings and assumes all the colors of living flesh. It manifests such convulsive pain and vulnerability, but also such delightful invention, color, and acrobatics. Bacon does not say, "Pity the beasts," but rather that every man who suffers is a piece of meat. Meat is the common zone of man and the beast, their zone of indiscernibility; it is a "fact," a state where the painter identifies with the objects of his horror and his compassion. The painter is certainly a ​butcher, but he goes to the butcher's shop as if it were a church, with the meat as the crucified victim (the Painting of 1946 [3]). Bacon is a religious painter only in butcher's shops. 

Near the end of the eighteenth century, the novelist K. P. Moritz described a person with "strange feelings": an extreme sense of isolation, an insignificance almost equal to nothingness; the horror of sacrifice he feels when he witnesses the execution of four men, "exterminated and torn to pieces," and when he sees the remains of these men "thrown on the wheel" or over the balustrade; his certainty that in some strange way this event concerns all of us, that this discarded meat is we ourselves, and that the spectator is already in the spectacle, a "mass of ambulating flesh"; hence his living idea that even animals are part of humanity, that we are all criminals, we are all cattle; and then, his fascination with the wounded animal, 

a calf, the head, the eyes, the snout, the nostrils ... and sometimes he lost himself in such sustained contemplation of the beast that he really believed he experienced, for an instant, the type of existence of such a being ... in short, the question if he, among men, was a dog or another animal had already occupied his thoughts since childhood.

​Moritz's passages are magnificent. This is not an arrangement of man and beast, nor a resemblance; it is a deep identity, a zone of indiscernibility more profound than any sentimental identification: the man who suffers is a beast, the beast that suffers is a man. This is the reality of becoming. What revolutionary person - in art, politics, religion, or elsewhere - has not felt that extreme moment when he or she was nothing but a beast, and became responsible not for the calves that died, but before the calves that died? 

​But can one say the same thing, exactly the same thing, about meat and the head, namely, that they are the zone of objective indecision between man and animal? Can one say objectively that the head is meat (just as meat is spirit)? Of all the parts of the body, is not the head the part that is closest to the bone? Look again at El Greco or Soutine. Yet Bacon does not seem to think of the head in this manner. The bone belongs to the face, not to the head. According to Bacon, there is no death's-head. The head is deboned rather than bony, yet it is not at all soft, but firm. The head is of the flesh, and the mask itself is not a death mask, it is a block of firm flesh that has been separated from the bone: hence the studies for a portrait of William Blake [20, 21]. Bacon's own head is a piece of flesh haunted by a very beautiful gaze emanating from eyes without sockets. And he pays tribute to Rembrandt for having known how to paint a final self-portrait as one such block of flesh without eye sockets.6 Throughout Bacon's work, the relationship between the head and meat runs through a scale of intensity that renders it increasingly intimate. First, the meat (flesh on one side, bone on the other) is positioned on the edge of the ring or the balustrade where the Figure-head is seated [3]; but it is also the dense, fleshly rain that surrounds the head and dismantles its face beneath the umbrella [65]. The scream that comes out of the Pope's mouth and the pity that comes out of his eyes have meat as their object [27]. Later, the meat is given a head, through which it takes flight and descends from the cross, as in the two preceding crucifixions . Later still, Bacon's series of heads will assert their identity with meat, among the most beautiful of which are those painted in the colors of meat, red and blue [26]. Finally, the meat is itself the head, the head becomes the nonlocalized power of the meat, as in the 1950 Fragment of a Crucifixion , where the meat howls under the gaze of a dog-spirit perched on top of the cross. Bacon dislikes this painting because of the simplicity of its rather obvious method: it had been enough to hollow out a mouth from solid meat. Still, it is important to understand the affinity of the mouth, and the interior of the mouth, with meat, and to reach the point where the open mouth becomes nothing more than the section of a severed artery, or even a jacket sleeve that is equivalent to an artery, as in the bloodied pillow in the Sweeney Agonistes triptych. The mouth then acquires this power of nonlocalization that turns all meat into a head without a face. It is no longer a particular organ, but the hole through which the entire body escapes, and from which the flesh descends (here the method of free, involuntary marks will be necessary). This is what Bacon calls the Scream, in the immense pity that the meat evokes.

excerpt from the book: Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation by GILLES DELEUZE 

To sufer with or to sympathize with? That is a question that concerns both ethics and aesthetics, as was clearly intuited by Gericault, the man who made his famous 'portraits of the insane' at La Salperriere Hospital in Paris over the winter of 1822 at the invitation of one Dr Georget, founder of 'social psychiatry'. Gericault's portraits were meant to serve as classificatory sets for the alienist's students and assistants. 

Driven by a passion for immediacy, Gericault sought to seize the moment whether of madness or death live. Like the emergent press, he was especially keen on human interest stories such as the wreck of the Medusa, that TITANIC of the painting world ... 

The art of painting at the time was already busy trying to outdo mere REPRESENTATION by offering the very presence of the event, as instantaneous photography would do, followed by the PHOTOFINISH and the first cinematographic newsreels of the Lumiere brothers and, ultimately, the LIVE COVERAGE offered by CNN. 

INTERACTIVITY was actually born in the nine teenth century with the telegraph, certainly, but also and especially with clinical electricity, which involved planting electrodes on the faces of the human guinea pigs used in such 'medical art' as practised by Dr Duchenne de Boulogne. The recent Duchenne exhibition at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, aimed no less than to 'rehabilitate' Duchenne's work, though this La Salpetriere Hospital photographer was no mare than an 'expressionist of the passions' for whom his p atients' faces were only ever laboratory material that enabledhim to practise 'live anatomy'. 

Already in the eighteenth century just prior to the French Revolution, this confusion of cold-bloodedness with a mode of perception that allowed the doctor or surgeon to diagnose illness due to the ability to repress emotion pity had contaminated the artistic representations of 'naturalistic' painters and engravers. Jacques Agoty, for instance, as a painter and anatomist on the trail of ' the invisible truth of bodies', wavered between an engraver's burin and an autopsy scalpel in his work.

But the truly decisive s tep had to wait until much more recently, till 1998, with ' The World of Bodies' exhibition at the the Mannheim Museum of Technology and Work (Landesmuseum fur Technik und Arbeit) , where close to 800,000 visitors rushed to contemplate 200 human corpses presented by Gunther von Hagens.  

The German anatomist actually has invented a process for preserving the dead and, in particular, for sculpting them, by plastination, thereby taking things a lot further than the mere embalming of mummies. Standing tall like statues of antiquity, the flayed cadavers either brandished their skins like trophies of some kind or showed off their innards in imitation of Salvador Dali's Venus de Milo with drawers.

As sole explanation, Dr von Hagens resorted to the modern buzzword : 'It's about breaking the last remaining taboos', he says ... A kind of slide occurs as a result of this Mannheim terrorist manifesto, j ust as it does with the exhibition 'Sensation' in London and New York: it will not be long before we are forced to acknowledge that the German Expressionists who called for murder were not the only avant-garde artists. By the same token so were people like Ilse Koch, the blonde romantic who, in 1939, settled in a gloomy valley near Weimar where Goethe once liked to walk and where, more to the point, he dreamed up his MEPHISTOPHELES that spirit that denies all. The place was Buchenwald.  

​The woman they would call ' the Bitch Dog of Buchenwald' actually enjoyed aesthetic aspirations pretty similar to those of the good Dr von Hagens, for she had certain de tainees sporting tattoos skinned so that she could turn their skins into various objects of art brut, as well as lampshades. 

'The painter brings his body with him first and foremost', wrote Paul Valery. In the course of the 1960s and 1970s, the painters of the Wiener Aktionismus, or Viennese Actionism, would follow this dictum to the letter, using their own bodies as the 'support surface' of their art. 

Hermann Nitsch's Orgies Mysteries Theatre 'masses' , in which he sacrificed animals in a bloody and bawdy ritual, were followed by what no doubt takes the cake as the most extreme case of AUTO-DA-FE by any artist. The story goes that Rudolf Schwarzkogler actually died after a bout of castration he inflicted on himself during one of his performance pieces that took place without a single viewer in the huis clos between the artist and a video camera. 

This is TERMINAL ART that no longer ​requires anything more than the showdown between a tortured body and an automatic camera to be accomplished. 

​At the close of the twentieth century, with Stelarc, the Australian adept at 'body art', the visual arts Schopenhauer wrote were 'the suspension of the pain of living' would turn into a headlong rush towards pain and death for individuals who have gradually developed the unconsidered habit of leaving their bodies not so much ' to science' as to some sort of clinical voyeurism harking back to the heyday of a certain Dr Josef Mengele who performed experiments we all know abou t, AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU for a time becoming the biggest genetic laboratory in the world. 

​'Immediacy is a fraud', Father Dietrich Bonhoffer declared before d isappearing in the camp at Flossenburg in 1945 ... Well, art is every bit as much of a fraud as amnesiac immediacy. 

If 'everything is ruled by lightning', as Heraclitus suggested, the PHOTO-FINISH imposes the instantaneity of its violence on all the various 'artistic representations' and modern art, like war ​BLITZKRIEG is no more than a kind of exhibitionism that imposes its own terrorist voyeurism: that of death, live. 

By way of illustrating the path the impiety of art has taken in the twentieth century, let's look at two types of funerary imagery back to back, though these are separated by almost 2,000 years. The first are the famous PORTRAITS OF THE FAYOUM in Upper Egypt; the second, the PHOTOFINISHES of the Tuol Sleng Memorial in Phnom Penh, where the Angkar the government of ' Democratic Kampuchea' had thousands of innocents put to death in cold blood, women and children first ... carefully photographing them beforehand. 

In Egypt at the dawn of Western history, people forced themselves to drag the deceased out of anonymity and into the public eye as an image in order to identify the essential being. In Cambodia at the going down of a pitiless century, the photographic identity of the detainee was filed before they were put to death. 

In the twinkling of an eye we have, on the one hand, the birth of the portrait in all its humility, its discretion. On the other, systematic use of the freeze frame as a death sentence revealing THE LOOK OF DEATH.  

Two versions of an 'art' that French artist, Christian Boltanski, has tried to pull off according to his own lights in order to fend off forgetting, negation: this aesthetic of disappearance that, alas, simply provides a cover for those who still, even now, reject the impiety of art. 

It is better to be an object of desire than pity, they say . .. Once the province of advertising, this adage surely now belongs to the realm of art, the desire to consume yielding to the desire to rape or kill. If this really is the case, the academicism of horror will have triumphed, the profane art of modernity bowing down before the sacred art of conformism, its primacy, a conformism that always spawns ordinary everyday fascism. 

How can we fail to see that the mask of modernism has been concealing the most classic academicism: that of an endlessly reproduced standardization of opinion, the duplication of 'bad feelings' identically reproducing the duplication of the 'good feelings' of the official art of yore? 

How can we ultimately fail to twig that the apparent impiety of contemporary art is only ever the inverted image of sacred art, the reversal of the creator's initial question: why is there something instead of nothing? 

Finally, just like the mass media, which no longer peddle anything other than obscenity and fear to satisfy the ratings, contemporary nihilism exposes the drama of an aesthetic of disappearance that no longer involves the domain of representation exclusively (political, artistic, and so on) but our whole vision of the world: visions of every kind of excess, starting with advertising outrages that ensure the succes de scandale without which the conditioning of appearances would immediately stop being effective .  

And speaking of disappearance and decline, note the underhand way the naif painters have been bundled away: without wanting to wheel out yet again the 'Douanier' Rousseau, whose masterwork, War, inspired Picasso's Guernica, think of painters like Vivin or Bauchant.

Why the Freudian lapse? This discreet elimination of painters who never laid claim to any art savant, whether atademic or avant-garde? Do we really believe that this trend of art's towards ingenuity suddenly stopped in its tracks, decidedly too pitiful like that ingenu libertin, Raoul Dufy? 

It will not be long before the drawings of kindergarten children are banned, replaced by digital calligraphic exercises.

Meanwhile, let's get back to art's fraudulent immediacy, to the PRESENTATION of works that supposedly come across as obvious to all and sundry without requiring the intercession of any form of reflection. Here's Marshall McLuhan, that bucolic prosateur of the 'global village' : 'lf we really want to know what's going on in the present, we should first ask the artists; they know a lot more than scientists and technocrats since they live in the absolute present. ' 

Here we find the same line of thought as Rene Gimpel's only, deformed by the Canadian sociologist's media-haunted ideology . What is this ABSOLUTE PRESENT (that 'absolute' is surely tautological!) if not the resurgence of a classicism that already laid claim to the eternal present of art, even going so far as to freeze it in geometric standards (witness the Golden Mean) bearing no relationship to the relative and ephemeral nature of analogical perception of events. Impressionism would try to free us from these standards, on the threshold of industrial modernity. 

Contrary to appearances, REAL TIME this 'present' that imposes itself on everyone in the speeding-up of daily reality is, in fact, only ever the repetition of the splendid academic isolation of bygone days. A mass media academicism that seeks to freeze all originality and all poetics in the inertia of immediacy. 

'Inertia is a raw form of despair', Saint-Exupery claimed, at the end of his life. This goes some way to explaining the relentless desire not to save phenomena, as in the past, but to shed them, to spirit them away behind the artifice of the manipulation of signs and signals by a digital technology that has now sunk its teeth into the whole array of artistic disciplines, from the taking of photographs to the capturing of sounds. Things have reached such a pitch that a pitiful musician par excellence like Bob Dylan can bemoan the fact that 

All the music you hear these days is just electricity! You can't hear the singer breathing anymore behind this electronic wall. You can't hear a heart beating anymore. Go to any bar and listen to a blues group and you'll be touched, moved. Then listen to the same group on a CD and you'll wonder where the sound you heard in the bar disappeared to. 

The demise of the relative and analogical character of photographic shots and sound samples in favour of the absolute, digital character of the computer, following the synthesizer, is thus also the loss of the poetics of the ephemeral. For one brief moment Impressionism in painting and in music was able to retrieve the flavour of the ephemeral before the nihilism of contemporary technology wiped it out once and for all. 

'We live in a world traversed by a limitless destructive force', reckoned Jonathan Mann, the man in charge of the World Health Organization's fight against AIDS, before he disappeared, a victim of the crash of Swissair Flight 111 .

Impossible indeed to imagine the art of the twentieth century without weighing the threat of which it is a prime example. A quiet yet visible, even blinding, threat. ls In the wake of the counter culture, aren't we now at the dawning of a culture and an art that are counter-nature? 

That, in any case, was the question that seemed to be being posed by a conference held at the Institut Heinrich Heine in Paris in the winter of 1999. The title of the conference was: 'The Elimination of Nature as a Theme in Contemporary Art'

As far as contemporary science and biology go, doubt is no longer an option, for genetics is on the way to becoming an art, a transgenic art, a culture of the embryo to purely performative ends, just as the eugenicists of the beginning of the twentieth century hoped. When Nietzsche decided that 'moral judgements, like all religious judgements, belong to ignorance', he flung the door to the laboratories of terror wide open. 

To demonstrate or to 'monstrate', that is the question: whether to practise some kind of aesthetic ​or ethic demonstration or to practise the cleansing of all 'nature', all 'culture', through the technically oriented efficiency of a mere 'monstration', a show, a blatant presentation of horror.  

​The expressionism of a MONSTER, born of the labour of a science deliberately deprived of a conscience ... As though, thanks to the progress of genetics, teratology had suddenly become the SUMMUM of BIOLOGY and the oddball the new form of genius only, not a literary or artistic genius anymore, but a GENETIC GENIUS. 

The world is sick, a lot sicker than people realise. That's what we must first acknowledge so that we can take pity on it. We shouldn't condemn this world so much as feel sorry for it. The world needs pity. Only pity has a chance of cobbling its pride. 

So wrote George Bernanos in 1939 . . . Sixty years on, the world is sicker still, but scientist propaganda is infinitely more effective and anaesthesia has the territory covered. As for pride, pride has gotten completely out of hand, thanks to globalization; and pity has now bitten the dust just as piety once succumbed in the century of philo-folly a la Nietzsche. 

They say the purpose of ethics is to slow down the rate at which things happen. Confronted by the general speeding-up of phenomena in our hypermodern world, this curbing by conscience seems pretty feeble. 

We are familiar with extreme sports, in which the champion risks death striving for some pointless performance 'going for it'. Now we find the man of science, adept in extreme sciences, running the supreme risk of denaturing the living being having already shattered his living environment.

Thanks to the decryption of the map of the human genome, geneticists are now using cloning in the quest for the chimera, the hybridization of man and animal. How can we fail to see that these 'scientific extremists', far from merely threatening the unicity of the human race by trafficking embryos, are also taking their axe to the whole philosophical and physiological panoply that previously gave the term SCIENCE its very meaning? In so doing, they threaten science itself with disappearance.

Extreme arts, such transgenic practices, aim at nothing less than to embark BIOLOGY on the road to a kind of 'expressionism' whereby teratology will no longer be content just to study malformations, but will resolutely set off in quest of their chimeric reproduction. 

As in ancient myths, science, thus enfeebled, will ​once more become the 'theatre of phantasmatic appearances' of chimera of all kinds. And so the engendering of monsters will endeavour to contribute to the malevolent power of the demi-urge, with its ability to go beyond the physiology of the being. Which is only in keeping with what was already being produced by the German Expressionism denounced by Rene Gimpel. But also, first and foremost, by the horror of the laboratories of the extermination camps.

It is no longer enough now to oppose negationism of the Shoah; we also need to categorically reject negationism of art by rejecting this 'art brut' that secretly constitutes engineering of the living, thanks to the gradual decryption of DNA; this 'eugenics' that no longer speaks its name yet is gearing up all the same to reproduce the abominiltion of desolation, not just by putting innocent. victims to death anymore but by bringing the new HOMUNCULUS to life.

In 1 997, a member of the French National Ethics Committee, Axel Kahn, wrote of cloning: 'It is no longer a matter of tests on a man but of actual tests for a man. That a life so created is now genetically programmed to suffer abnormally this constitutes absolute horror.

How can we fail to see here the catastrophic continuation of Nazi experimentation, experimentation destined as a priority for the pilots of the Luftwaffe and the soldiers of the Wehrmacht, those supermen engaged body and soul in a total war?

In Hitler's time, Professor Eugen Fischer, founder and director of the 'Institute of Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics (lEG) , declared that animal experiments still dominated research only because we have very limited means of obtaning human material. Fischer went on to say that, 'When we have done with research on rabbits, which remains the main type of research for the moment, we will move on to human embryos'. With the abundant stock of human embryos at the end of the twentieth century this is, alas, a done deal ... 

But stay tuned to what the German geneticist went on to say in 1940 . 'Research on twins constitutes the specific method for studying human genetics. '  Two years later, Adolf Hitler made Eugen Fischer an honorary member of the 'Scientific Senate' of the Wehrmacht; he was succeeded as head of the IEG by Professor Otmar von Verschuer, a specialist in twins ... 

From that moment, AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU became a research laboratory undoubtedly unique in the world, the laboratory of the ' Institute of Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics' . The name of Professor Verschuer's assistant was Josef Mengele. You know the rest. 

As recently as 1998, the British medical weekly The Lancet condemned the initiatives of the European Union and the United States in trying to introduce a total ban on the practice of human cloning. A year later, the editors were still arguing that 'the creation of human beings' had become 'inevitable', regardless. The editors of the London publication wrote that: 

The medical community will one day have to address the care of and respect for people created by cloning techniques. That discussion had better begin now, before the newspaper headlines roll over the individuality of the first person born this way.

They went on to stress that, all in all, ' there is no difference between an identical twin and a clone (delayed identical twin) ' . 

It is not too hard to imagine the consequences of this confusion between PROCREATION and CREATION, of the demiurgic pretensions of a eugenics that no longer has any limits. Now that medically assisted procreation of the embryo has led to genetically programmed creation of the double, the gap ​between HUMAN and TRANS HUMAN has been closed j ust as those old New Age disciples had hoped; and the celebrated British review The Lancet can arrogate to itself the exorbitant right to remove the term INHUMAN from our vocabulary! 

Sir Francis Galton, the unredeemed eugenicist, is back in the land of his cousin Darwin: freedom of aesthetic expression now knows no bounds. Not only is everything from now on 'possible'. It is 'inevitable' ! 

Thanks to the genetic bomb, the science of biology has become a major art only, an EXTREME ART. 

This helps make sense of the title of that Heinrich Heine I nstitute conference, 'The Elimination of Nature as a Theme in Contemporary Art' . It also makes sense of the recent innovation not only of a COUNTER CULTURE, opposed to the culture of the bourgeoisie, but also of an art that is frankly COUNTER-NATURE, peddling as it does a eugenics that has finally triumphed over all prejudice absolutely, in spite of the numberless horrors of the waning century. 

Having broken the taboos of suffocating bourgeois culture, we are now supposed to break the being, the unicity of humankind, through the impending explosion of a genetic bomb that will be to biology what the atomic bomb was to physics.  

You don't make literature out of warm and fuzzy feelings, they say. And they are probably right. But how far do we go in the opposite direction? As far as SNUFF LITERATURE, in which the conformism of abjection innovates an academicism of horror, an official art of macabre entertainment? In the United States, to take one example, the torturing of the human body by sharp instruments seems to have become the preferred image of advertising, according to the Wall Street Journal of 4 May 2000. 

Hit over the head by such media bludgeoning, the art lover is surely already the victim of what psychiatrists call impaired judgement. Which is the first step in an accelerated process of derealization, contemporary art accepting the escalation in extremism and therefore in insignificance, with significance going the way of the 'heroic' nature of old-fashioned official art, and obscenity now exceeding all bounds with SNUFF MOVIES and death, live ... 

Let's turn now to contemporary theatre and dance, in particular the work of choreographer, Meg Stuart. Since the early 1 990s, Stuart has been taking her stage performance to the limit. In Disfigured Study of 1991, the dancer's skin looked like it was straining to contain a body in the process of dislocating itself in a brutal vision of automatic self-mutilation. Devastated bodies seemed like so many panicky signs of a live spectacle in which 'the catastrophic intensity condenses a terrifying serenity at the edge of the abyss' as you could read in the press apropos Stuart's most recent work, Appetite, conceived with the installation artist, Ann Hamilton.  

In work like this, everything is dance, dance involving ' bodies without hands, twisted legs, wavering identity expressing who knows what selfhatred'. After the SNUFF VIDEO, we now have the SNUFF DANCE, the dance of death of the slaughterhouses of modernity. 

Whether Adorno likes it or not, the spectacle of abjection remains the same, after as before Auschwitz . But it has become politically incorrect to say so. All in the name of freedom of expression, a freedom contemporary with the terrorist politics Joseph Goebbels described as 'the art of making possible what seemed impossible'.

But let's dispel any doubts we might still have. Despite the current negationism, freedom of expression has at least one limit: the call to murder and torture. Remember the media of hate in the ex-Yugoslavia of Slobodan Milosovic? Remember the 'Thousand Hills Radio' of the Great Lakes region of Africa calling Rwandans to inter-ethnic genocide? Confronted by such 'expressionist' events, surely we can see what comes next, looming over us as it is: an officially terrorist art preaching suicide and selfmutilation thereby extending the current infatuation with scarring and piercing. Or else random slaughter, the coming of a THANATOPHILIA that would revive the now fo rgotten fascist slogan: VIVA LA MUERTA! 

At this point we might note the project of the multinational Monsanto designed to genetically programme crop sterilization and designated by the telling name, 'TERMINATOR'. Are we still talking biotechnology here? Aren't we really talking about a form of necro-technology aimed at ensuring one firm's monopoly? 

Thanatophilia, ,necro-technology and one day soon, teratology . :. Is this genetic trance still a science, some new alchemy, or is it an extreme art? 

For confirmation we need loqk no further than the Harvard Medical School where Malcolm Logan and Clifford Tabin recently created a mutation that says a lot about the fundamentally expressionist nature of gene tic engineering. 

After locating a gene that seemed to play a decisive role in the formation of a chicken's hindlimbs, Logan and Tabin took the radical step of introducing the gene into the genome of a virus which they then injected into the developing wings of a chicken embryo to test the function of the gene.

​Some weeks later, this TERATOLOGICAL breakthrough made headlines.  

The chicken's wings have undergone major transformations and now look like legs, with the wing twisted into a position suitable for walking and the fingers pivoting to facilitate pressure on the ground. The placement of the muscles is radically different, too, better adapted to the specific functions of walking.

But this monster is not yet perfect, however, for its Kafkaesque metamorphosis is incomplete ... The 'four-legged chicken' is in fact an experimental failure worthy of featuring in the bestiary of a Jerome Bosch! After the 'Doctor Strangeloves' of the atomic bomb, voila 'Frankenstein', no less: the monster has become the chimerical horizon of the study of malformations. And it won't be long before human guinea pigs are used instead of animals in future experiments. 

​Let's hear it from those trying to denounce this drift of genetic expressionism, from the inside: 

The dazzle of success is goading biologists implacably on, each obstacle overcome leading them to take up the next challenge a challenge even greater, even more insane? We should note that if this challenge is not met, the consequences will not be felt by the biologists alone but also by this improbable and uncertain child whose birth they will have enabled in spite of everything. 

​So writes Axel Kahn apropos 'medically assisted procreation'. Kahn concludes, 'Everything in the history of human enterprise would indicate that this headlong rush into the future will one day end in cat-astrophies in botched attempts at human beings.

How can we fail here to denounce yet another facet of negationism: that of the deliberate overlooking of the famous NUREMBURG CODE, set down in 1 947 in the wake of the horrors the Nazi doctors perpetrated? 'The Nuremburg Code established the conditions under which tests on human beings could be conducted; it is a fundamental text for modern medical ethics', as Axel Kahn rightly reminds us ... There is not a hint of respect for any of this in the contemporary trials: 'When will the Nuremburg Code be applied to medically assisted procreation ... to the attempts at creating a human being?' asks Kahn, as a geneticist and member of the ​French National Ethics Committee, by way of conclusion. 

Ethics or aesthetics? That is indeed the question at the dawn of the millenni um. If freedom of SCIENTIFIC expression now actually has no more limits than freedom of ARTISTIC expression, where will inhumanity end in future? 

After all the great periods of art, after the great schools such as the classical and the baroque, after contemporary expressionism, are we not now heading for that great transgenic art in which every pharmacy, every laboratory will launch its own 'lifestyles', its own transhuman fashions? A chimerical explosion worthy of featuring in some future Salon of New Realities if not in a Museum of Eugenic Art.  

As one critic recently put it: 'Artists have their bit to say about the laws of nature at this fin de siecle. ' What is urgently required is 'to difine a new relationship between species, one that is not conceived in the loaded terms of bestiality'.

It is not entirely irrelevant to point out here that if 'extreme sports' came before 'extreme sciences' , there is a good reason for this, one that has to do with the cult of performance, of art for art's sake, the breaking of records of every imaginable kind. 

When it comes to the ingestion of certain ​substances by top-level sportspeople, a number of trainers are already asking about limits. 'We are at the beginnings of biological reprogramming yet we don't know how far we are not going to be able to go.' Beyond the drug tests and medical monitoring that champions are already subject to, the general lack of guidelines opens the way to gene tic manipulation and cellular enhancement as well as doping on a molecular level. According to Gerard Dine, head of the 'Mobile Biological Unit' launched by the French Minister of Youth and Sport: 

Sportspeople are managed by an entourage who are under more and more pressure from the media and their financial backers. If the current debate isn't settled pretty .. swiftly, a person will only have to ask in order to be programmed to win.  

'The assembly-line champion is already on the drawing board. Soon we will even be able to intervene with precision on energy levels and mechanical, muscular and neurological elements' , one expert claims. After all, the German Democratic Republic did it in the 1 970s using synthetic hormones, but these left a trace. Thanks to genomics, you can now enter the human system in the same way as you break into a computer bank without leaving any trace at all. 

'The lack of guidelines requires us urgently to define an ethical boundary that would make clear what comes under therapy and what is out of bounds' . 

If we do not put in place some sort of code that would extend what was covered by the Nuremburg Code in the area of experimentation on top-level sports people, the Olympic Games of the year 2020 or 2030, say, will be mere games of the transgenic circus in which the magicians of the human genome will hold up for our applause the exploits of the stadium gods of a triumphant super-humanity. 

Ethical boundary, aesthetic boundary of sport as of art. Without limits, there is no value; without value, there is no esteem, no respect and especially no pity: death to the referee! You know how it goes ... 

Already, more or less everywhere you turn, you hear the words that precede that fatal habituation to the banalization of excess. For certain philosophers the body is already no more than a phenomenon of memory, the remnants of an archaic body; and the human being, a mere biped, fragile of flesh and so slow to grow up and defend itself that the species should not have survived ...

To make up for this lack, this 'native infirmity' as they call it, echoing a phrase used by Leroi-Gourhan: man invented tools, prostheses and a whole technological corpus without which he would ​not have survived ... But this is a restrospective vision incapable of coming to terms with the outrageousness of the time that is approaching. Ghicault, Picasso and Dali, Galton and Mengele ... Who comes next? 

Where will it end, this impie ty of art, of the arts and crafts of this 'transfiguration' that not only fulfils the dreams of the German Expressionists but also those of the Futurists, those 'hate-makers' whose destructiveness Hans Magnus Enzensberger has dissected. 

Remember Mayakovsky's war cry, that blast of poetic premonition: ' Let your axes dance on the bald skulls of the well-heeled egoists and grocers. Kill! Kill! Kill! One good thing: their skulls will make perfect ashtrays. 

Ashtrays, lampshades, quotidian objects and prostheses of a life where the banality of evil, its ordinariness, is far more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, as Hannah Arendt noted while observing the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. 

Under the reign of Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea, the hopes of the poet of the October Revolution were satisfied yet again, though it was with spades, not axes, that the self-mutilation of a social body of nearly two million Cambodians was perpetrated. 'The murderers did not use firearms. ​The silence, they knew, added further to the climate of terror'. 

The silence of the lambs still required the silence of the executioners. The silence of an untroubled conscience, such as that enjoyed by a so-called 'political science' now disowned by former 'revolutionary' Leng-Sary who today declares, apparently by way of excuse, 'The world has changed. I no longer believe in the class struggle. The period from 1975 to 1979 was a failure. We went from utopia to barbarity. '

Meanwhile, Tuol Sleng has become a museum a genocide museum. The sinister Camp-S2 1 (Security Office 21), where the gaolers were teenagers, offers visitors a tour of the gallery of photographic portraits of its multitudinous victims. Here, contrary to the German extermination camps, the bodies have disappeared, but the faces remain ...