This pitiless century, the twentieth.
    Albert Camus   

This evening we are not going to talk about piety or impiety but about pity, the pitiful or pitiless nature of 'contemporary art'. So we will not be talking about profane art versus sacred art but we may well tackle the profanation of forms and bodies over the course of the twentieth century. For these days when people get down to debate the relevance or awfulness of contemporary art, they generally forget to ask one vital question: Contemporary art, sure, but contemporary with what?

In an unpublished interview with Francois Rouan, Jacqueline Lichtenstein recently recounted her experience: 

When I visited the Museum at AUSCHWITZ, I stood in front of the display cases. What I saw there were images from contemporary art and I found that absolutely terrifying. Looking at the exhibits of suitcases, prosthetics, children's toys, I didn't feel frightened. I didn't collapse. I wasn't completely overcome the way I had been walking around the camp. No. In the Museum, I suddenly had the impression I was in a museum if contemporary art. I took the train back, telling myself that they had won! They had won since they'd produced forms of perception that are all of a piece with the mode of destruction they made their own.

What we will be asking this evening will thus take up where Jacqueline Lichtenstein left off: did the Nazi terror lose the war but, in the end, win the peace? This peace based on ' the balance of terror' not only between East and West but also between the forms and figures of an aesthetics of disappearance that would come to characterize the whole fin de siecle.

'To humanize oneself is to universalize oneself from within', they say. Hasn't the universality of the extermination of bodies as well as of the environment, from AUSCHWITZ to CHERNOBYL, succeeded in dehumanizing us from without by shattering our ethic and aesthetic bearings, our very perception of our surroundings? 

At the dawn of industrial modernity, Baudelaire declared, 'I am the wound and the knife.' How can we fail to see that, in the wake of the hecatomb of the Great War, when Braque and Otto Dix found themselves on opposite sides of the trenches in the mud of the Somme, modern art for its part forgot about the wound and concentrated on the knife the bayonet with the likes of Oskar Kokoschka, 'the scalpel-wielding artist' , before moving on through the German Expressionism of Der Sturm to the Viennese Actionism of Rudolf Schwarzkogler and his cohorts in the 1960s ... 

ART MAUDIT or Artist Maudit? What can you say, meanwhile, about the likes of Richard Hiilsenbeck, one of the founding fathers of Dada, who told a Berlin audience in 1918, at a conference on the new trends in art, 'We were for the war. Dada today is still for war. Life should hurt. There is not enough cruelly! The rest is history. Twenty years later the 'Theatre of Cruelty' would not be the one defined by Antonin Artaud but by Kafka, that prophet of doom of the metamorphosis engineered by the camps, the smashing to smithereens of humanism. 

The slogan of the First Futurist Manifesto of 1909 'War is the world's only hygiene' led directly, though ​thirty years later this time, to the shower block of Auschwitz-Birkenau. And Breton's 'Surrealism' , following hot on the heels of Dada, emerged fully armed from the fireworks of the Great War where common reality was suddenly transfigured by the magic of explosives and poison gases at Ypres and Verdun. 

After that, what is left of Adorno's pompous pronouncement about the impossibiliry if writing a poem after AUSCHWITZ? Not much at the end of the day, for everything, or almost everything, kicked off at the turn of a pitiless and endlessly catastrophic century from the TITANIC in 1912 to CHERNOBYL in 1986, via the crimes against humanity of HIROSHIMA and NAGASAKI, where one of the paintings in van Gogh's 'Starry Night' series went up in the nuclear blast. 

Perhaps at this juncture it is worth remembering Paul Celan, the German poet who committed suicide in Paris in 1970, the same year that painter Mark Rothko did in New York . .. But why stop there in art's death roll, featuring as it does a constant suicide rate from the self-destruction of Vincent van Gogh, ' the man with the missing ear'? 

You would think the drive to extinguish the suffocating culture of the bourgeoisie consisted specifically in exterminating oneself into the bargain the dubious bargain of the art market thus giving ideas, for want of cultural ideals, to the great exterminators of the twentieth century! 

Remember what Friedrich Nietzsche advised: 'Simplify your life: die!' This extremist simplification in which 'ornament is a crime', has stayed with us throughout the history of the twentieth century, from the pointlessly repeated assault on the peaks of the Chemin des Dames in 191 7 to the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s. 

Avant-garde artists, like many political agitators, propagandists and demagogues, have long understood what TERRORISM would soon popularize: if you want a place in 'revolutionary history' there is nothing easier than provoking a riot, an assault on propriety, in the guise of art. 

Short of committing a real crime by killing innocent passers-by with a bomb, the pitiless contemporary author of the twentieth century attacks symbols, the very meaning of a 'pitiful' art he assimilates to 'academicism'. Take Guy Debord, the French Situationist, as an example. In 1 952, speaking about his Film Without Images, which mounted a defence of the Marquis de Sade, Debord claimed he wanted to kill the cinema 'because it was easier than killing a passer-by'.

A year later, in 1953, the SITUATIONISTS would not hesitate to extend this attack by trashing Charlie Chaplin, pitiful actor par excellence, vilifying him as a sentimental fraud, mastermind of misery, even a proto-fascist!

All this verbal delirium seems so oblivious of its own century and yet condescends to preach to the rest of the world in the name of freedom of artistic expression, even during a historical period that oversaw the setting up of the balance of terror along with the opening of the laboratories of a science that was gearing up to programme the end of the world notably with the invention, in 1951, of thermonuclear weapons. It corresponds equally to the autodissolution of the avant-gardes, the end of the grand illusion of a modernite savante. You would think it was not so much impressionism that laid the foundations for the latter as the nihilism of the calamitous intelligentsia of nineteenth-century Russia, with men like Netcha'iev decreeing that one had to 'forge full steam ahead into the mire' ... And he was not talking about Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed (The Great Western Railway), the painting that paved the way for Monet's Impressionism. 

Inseparable from the suicidal state of representative democracies, the art of the twentieth century has never ceased dangerously anticipating or at least ​saluting from afar the abomination of the desolation of modern times with their cardboard cut-out dictator that keeps popping up, whether it be Hitler or the 'Futurist', Mussolini, Stalin or Mao Zedong.

And so the emblematic figure emerges not so much of Marcel Duchamp as Charlie Chaplin or Bonnard, pitiful painter par excellence, as was Claude Monet, that miracle-worker of a Rising Sun, which is not quite the same as the one rising over the laboratories of LOS ALAMOS.

The new German painting, naturally, represents current sensibility in Germany and it really frightens me. The Ancients invented and represented the world of witches, but the world of Hate is a modern invention, the invention of Germany, spread out over the canvas. The demons of gothic pictures are child's play when it comes to the human, or, rather, inhuman, heads of a humanity bent on destruction. Furious, murderous, demoniacal heads not in the style of the old masters but in completely modern manner: scientific, choking with poison gas. They would like to carve the Germans of tomorrow out of fresh meat ... 

So wrote the great art dealer, Rene Gimpel, in his diary of 1925. Gimpel was to disappear in the NEUENGAMME camp twenty years later on New Year's Day, 1945 ... Thoroughly convinced of the lethal character of the works of Oskar Kokoschka, Emil Nolde or the sculptor, Lehmbruck, Gimpel goes on to tell us that there never has been any such thing as old-master art or modern or contemporary art, but that the 'old master' shaped us, whereas the 'contemporary' artist shapes the perception of the next generation, to the point where no one is 'ahead of their time for they are their time, each and every day'. 

How can we not subscribe to this statement of the bleeding obvious if we compare the fifteenth-century PIETA OF AVIGNON with the sixteenth-century lssenheim Altarpiece of Matthis Grunewald both pitiful works the 'expressionism' of the German master of the polyptych illustrating the atrocity of the battles and epidetnics of his time in the manner of Jerome Bosch? 

Today we could apply this observation about lack of anticipation to 'issues' such as the 'contaminated blood affair' in France and the (alleged ) nonculpability of the politicians in charge at the time ...

Without harking back to Jacques Callot or even Francisco de Goya and ' the miseries of war' of the Napoleonic era, we might remember what Picasso said when a German interrogated him in 1937 about his masterwork, GUERNICA: "That's your doing, not mine!"

If so-called old-master art remained demonstrative right up until the nineteenth century with Impressionism, the art of the twentieth century became 'monstrative' in the sense that it is contemporary with the shattering effect of mass societies, subj ect as they are to the conditioning of opinion and MASS MEDIA propaganda and this, with the same mounting extremism evident in terrorism or total war.  

At the end of the millennium, what abstraction once tried to pull off is in fact being accomplished before our very eyes: the end of REPRESENTATIVE art and the substitution of a counter-culture, of a PRESENTATIVE art. A situation that reinforces the dreadful decline of representative democracy in favour of a democracy based on the rule of opinion, in anticipation of the imminent arrival of virtual democracy, some kind of 'direct democracy' or, more precisely, a presentative multimedia democracy based on automatic polling. 

In the end, 'modern art' was able to glean what communications and telecommunications tools now accomplish on a daily basis: the mise en abyme of the body, of the figure, with the major attendant risk of systematic hyperviolence and a boom in pornographic high-frequency that has nothing to do with sexuality: We must put out the excess rather than the fire, as Heraclitus warned. 

Today, with excess heaped on excess, desensitization to the shock of images and the meaninglessness of words has shattered the world stage . PITILESS, contemporary art is no longer improper. But it shows all the impropriety of profaners and torturers, all the arrogance of the executioner.

The intelligence of REPRESENTATION then gives way to the stunned mullet effect of a 'presence' that is not only weird, as in the days of Surrealism, but insulting to the mind. The whole process, moreover, implies that the 'image' suffices to give art its meaning and significance. At one extreme the artist, like the journalist, is redundant in the face-off between performer and viewer. 

'Such a conception of information leads to a disturbing fascination with images filmed live, with scenes of violence and gruesome human interest stories', Ignacio Ramonet writes on the impact of television on the print media. 'This demand encourages the supply of fake documents, sundry reconstructions and conjuring tricks.

But surely we could say the same today of art when it comes down to it. Take the example of the NEW NEUROTIC REALISM of adman and collector, Charles Saatchi, as revealed in the London (and New York) exhibition, 'Sensation' , with i ts fusion/confusion of the TABLOID and ​some sort of would-be avant-garde art. Yet the conformism of abjection is never more than a habit the twentieth century has enjoyed spreading round the globe. 

Here, the brutality is no longer so much aimed at warning as at destroying, paving the way for the actual torturing of the viewer, the listener, which will not be long coming thanks to that cybernetic artefact: the interactive feed-back if virtual reality. 

If the contemporary author is redundant see Picasso on Guernica and if the suicide rate has only kept accelerating in cultural circles to the point where it will soon be necessary to set up a WALL OF THE FEDERATED COMMUNE OF SUICIDES in museums (to match the wall of the federated communards of the Paris Commune in Pere Lachaise cemetery), then make no mistake: the art lover's days are numbered! 

This is how Rothko put it: 'I studied the figure. Only reluctantly did I realize it didn't correspond to my needs. Using human representation, for me, meant mutilating it'. Shot of all moral or emotional compromise, the painter seeks to move 'towards the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, between the idea and the onlooker'.

This is the radiographic triumph of transparence, the way radiation of the real in architecture today goes hand in glove with the extermination of all intermediaries, of all that still resists revelation, pure and simple.

But this sudden OVEREXPOSURE of the work, as of those who look upon it, is accompanied by a violence that is not only 'symbolic', as before, but practical, since it affects the very intentionality of the painter: 'To those who find my paintings serene, I'd like to say that I have trapped the most absolute violence in every square centimetre of their surface', Mark Rothko confesses before proving the point by turning this repressed fury against himself on a certain day in February, 1970. 

Thirty years on, how can we fail to feel the concentration of accumulated hate in every square metre of the 'uncivil cities' of this fin de siecle? Go one night and check out the basements or underground parking lots of suburban council estates, all that the clandestine RAVE PAR TIES and BACKROOM brothels are only ever the tourist trappings of, so to speak! 

After having 'only reluctantly' abandoned the figure on the pretext of not mutilating it, the American painter then chose to end this life himself as well by exercising the most nihilistic of freedoms of expression: that of SELF-DESTRUCTION. 

If God died in the nineteenth century, according ​to Nietzsche, what is the bet that the victim of the twentieth century will not turn out to be the creator, the author, this heresy of the historical materialism of the cen tury of machines? 

But before we bid the Artist farewell, we should not forget for a moment that the words PITY and PIETY are consubstantial something the members of the Holy Inquisition obviously overlooked ... Let's not repeat their crimes, let's not become negationists of art. 

​by Paul Virilio

'Remaining silent, now there's a lesson for you! What more immediate notion of duration?' , Paul Valery noted in 1938, shortly before the tragedy of the camps, the silence of the lambs ... ​

To speak or to remain silent: are they to sonority what to show or to hide are to visibility? What prosecution of meaning is thus hidden behind the prosecution of sound? Has remaining silent now become a discreet form of assent, of connivance, in the age of the sonorization of images and all audiovisual icons? Have vocal machines' powers of enunciation gone as far as the denunciation of silence, of a silence that has turned into MUTISM? ​

To better understand such a heretical point of view about the programmed demise of the VOICES OF SILENCE, think of the perverse implications of the colouration of films originally shot in BLACK AND WHITE, to cite one example, or the use of monochromatic film in photographing accidents, oil spills. The lack of colour in a film segment or snapshot is seen as the tell-tale sign of a DEFECT, a handicap, the loss of colour of the rising tide under the eflects of maritime pollution ...  ​

Whereas in the past, engraving enriched a painting's hues with its velvety blacks and the a rainbow array of its grays, BLACK and WHITE are now no more than traces of a degradation, some premature ruin. ​

Just like a yellowed photograph of the deceased mounted on their tomb, the MONOCHROMATIC segment merely signals the obscurantism of a bygone era, the dwindling of a heroic age in which the VISION MACHINE had yet to reveal the PANCHROMATIC riches of Technicolor ... gaudy, brash AGFACOLORI over-privileging hot colours to the detriment of cold. But surely we can say the same thing about the sonorization of what were once silent films. ​

Nowadays everything that remains silent is deemed to consent, to accept without a word of protest the background noise of audio-visual immoderation that is, of the 'optically correct'. But what happens as a result to the SILENCE OF THE VISIBLE under the reign of the AUDIO-VISIBLE epitomized by television, wildly overrated as television is? How can we apply the lesson of Paul Valery's aphorism in considering the question, not of the silence of art so dear to Andre Malraux, but of the DEAFNESS of the contemporary arts in the age of the multimedia? ​

Silence no longer has a voice. It LOST ITS VOICE half a century ago. But this mutism has now come to a head ... The voices of silence have been silenced; what is now regarded as obscene is not so much the image as the sound or, rather, the lack of sound. ​

What happens to the WORLD OF SILENCE once the first SON ET LUMIERE productions are staged, again under the aegis of Malraux, invading as they do the monumental spaces of the Mediterranean? The 'son et lumiere' phenomenon has been followed most recently by the craze in museums as venues for live shows, though you would be hardpressed to beat the calamitous NIGHT OF THE MILLENNIUM, when the mists of the Nile Valley suddenly broke up a Jean-Michel Jarre concert. After the deafening felt of Beuy's London installation, PLIGHT, they managed to bring SMOG to the foot of the pyramids. ​

​'I don't want to avoid telling a story, but I want very, very much to do the thing Valery said to give the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance.' These words of Francis Bacon's, taken from David Sylvester's interviews with the artist and quoted as a lead-in fbr the 'Modern Starts' exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, 1999, beautifully sum up the current dilemma: the less you represent, the more you push the simulacrum of REPRESENTATION!

​But what is this 'situation' concealing if not the contraction if time? Of this real time that effaces all duration, exclusively promoting instead the present, the directness of the immediacy of ZERO TIME ... a contraction of the LIVE and of LIFE, which we see once more at work in the recent appeal of live shows, which are to dance and choreography what the video installation already was to Fernand Leger's Mechanical Ballet. 

All in all, the invention of the CINEMATOGRAPH has radically altered the experience of exposure time, the whole regime of temporality of the visual arts. In the nineteenth century, the aesthetics of CINEMATIC disappearance promptly supplanted the multimillennial aesthetics of the appearance of the STATIC. ​

Curiously, it is in the era of the Great Depression that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1 929 that  ​SILENCE WAS PUT ON TRIAL in Europe as in the United States. From that moment, WHOEVER SAYS NOTH ING IS DEEMED TO CONSENT. No silence can express disapproval or resistance but only consent. The silence of the image is not only ANIMATED by the motorization of film segments; it is also ENLISTED in the general acquiescence in a TOTAL ART the seventh art which, they would then claim, contained all the rest. ​

During the great economic crisis which, in Europe, would end in Nazi TOTALITARIANISM, silence was already no more than a form of abstention. The trend everywhere was towards the simultaneous synchronization of image and sound. Whence the major political role played at the time by cinematic NEWSREELS, notably those produced by Fox-Movietone in the United States and by UFA in Germany, which perfectly prefigured televisual prime time. ​

Those days are long gone. No one is waiting any more for the REVOLUTION, only for the ACCIDENT, the breakdown, that will reduce this unbearable chatter to silence. ​

In olden days a pianist used to punctuate segments of old burlesque movies; now the reality of s cenes of everyday life needs to be subtitled in similar vein, the AUDIO-VISUAL aiming to put paid to the silence of vision in its entirety. ​

All you have to do is dump your mobile phone and grab your infra-red helmet. Then you are ready to go wandering around those museums where the sound-track amply makes up for the image track of the picture-rail. ​

Victim of the prosecution of silence, contemporary art long ago made a bid for divergence in other words, to practise a CONCEPTUAL DIVERSION before opting for convergence. ​

Surely that is the only way we can interpret the Cubists' newspaper collages or the later, post- 1918, collages and photomontages of Raoul Hausmann, say, or his Berlin Dadaist confrere, John Heartfield, not to mention the French Dadaists and Surrealists, among others. ​

In a decidedly fin de siecle world, where the automobile questions its driver about the functioning of the handbrake or whether the seatbelt is buckled, where the refrigerator is gearing itself up to place the order at the supermarket, where your computer greets you of a morning with a hearty 'hello', surely we have to ask ourselves whether the silence of art can be sustained for much longer. ​

This goes even for the mobile phone craze that is part and parcel of the same thing, since it is now necessary to impose silence in restaurants and places ​of worship or concert halls. One day, following the example of the campaign to combat nicotine addiction, it may well be necessary to put up signs of the 'Silence Hospital' variety at the entrance to museums and exhibition halls to get all those 'communication machines' to shut up and put an end to the all too numerous cultural exercises in SOUND and LIGHT. ​

Machine for seeing, machine for hearing, once upon a time; machine for thinking very shortly with the boom in all things digital and the programmed abandonment of the analogue. How will the silence if the infinite spaces of art subsist, this silence that seems to terrify the makers of motors of any kind, from the logical inference motor of the computer to the research engine of the network of networks? All these questions that today remain unanswered make ENIGMAS of contemporary ethics and aesthetics.  ​

With architecture, alas, the jig is already up. Architectonics has become an audio-visual art, the only question now being whether it will shortly go on to become a VIRTUAL ART. For sculpture, ever since Jean Tinguely and his 'Bachelor Machines', this has been merely a risk to be run. As for painting and the graphic arts, from the moment VIDEO ART hit the scene with the notion of the installation, it has been impossible to mention  ​CONCEPTUAL ART without picking up the background noise of the mass media behind the words and objects of the art market. ​

Having digested the critical impact of Marcel Duchamp's retinal art, let's hear what French critic, Patrick Vauday, had to say a little more recently:  ​

At those words, you could be forgiven for fearing that the waxing twenty-first century were about to reproduce the first years of the twentieth, albeit unwittingly! ​

Under the guise of 'new technologies', surely what is really at work here is the actual CLONING, over and over, of some SUPER-, no, HYPERABSTRACTION that will be to virtual reality what HYPER-REALISM was to the photographic shot. This is happening at a time when someone like Kouichirou Eto, for instance, is gearing up to launch SOUND CREATURES on the Internet along with his own meta-musical ambient music! ​

What this means is a style of painting not only without figures but also without images, a music of the spheres without sound, presenting the symptoms of a blinding that would be the exact counterpart to the silence of the lambs. Speaking of the painter Turner, certain nineteenth-century aesthetes such as Hazlitt denounced the advent of 'pictures of nothing, and very like'. You can bet that soon, thanks to digital technology, electro-acoustic music will generate new forms of visual art. Electro-optic computer graphics will similarly erase the demarcation lines between the different art forms. ​

Once again, we will speak of a TOTAL ART one no longer indebted to the cinematograph, that art which supposedly contained all the rest. Thanks to electronics, we will invent a GLOBAL ART, a 'single art' , like the thinking that subtends the new information and communications technologies. ​

To take an example, think of the influence of  Wagner on Kandinsky in 1910, when the very first ABSTRACT canvases emerged; or think of the influence of Kurt Schwitters whose Ursonate was composed of oral sounds ... Then, of course, there is the influence of JAZZ on works like the 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' of New York based Mondrian, an artist who would not have a telephone in the house during the years 1 940 to 1 942 . Unlike MoholyNagy, who was already making TELE-PAINTINGS twenty years earlier using the crank phone to issue instructions at a distance to a sign painter ... and inventing pictorial INTERACTIVITY in the process. ​

All this interaction between SOUND, LIGHT and IMAGE, far from creating a 'new art' or a new reality to borrow the name of the 1950 Paris salon dedicated to French painter Herbin's geometric abstraction only destroys the nature of art, promoting instead its communication. ​

Last autumn, the BBC began broadcasting recordings of murmurs and conversation noises destined for the offices at the big end of town where employees complain about the reigning deathly silence. ​

'We're trying to get a background of ambient sound', explains a spokesman for the British station. 'These offices are so quiet that the slightest noise, such as the phone ringing, disturbs people's concentration which, of course, can lead to stuff-ups. ​

Following the muzak that is piped through shops and supermarkets, let's hear it for AMBIENT MURMURING, the voice of the voiceless! After the promotion of domestic consumerism via the euphoria of radiophony, it is now production that finds itself beefed up with a sound backdrop designed to improve office life ... ​

Similarly, over at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the post-renovation reopening exhibition, which was called 'Le Temps vite' or ' Time, Fast' was underscored by a sound piece composed by Heiner Goebbels. ​

On the eve of the new millennium, the aesthetics of disappearance was completed by the aesthetics of absence. From that moment, whoever says nothing consents to cede their 'right to remain silent' , their freedom to listen, to a noise-making process that simulates oral expression or conversation. ​

Today, when the AUDIO-VISIBLE of the mass media reigns, beamed out twenty-four hours a day seven days a week, what remains of that effect of immediacy of visual representation? Media presentation dominates everywhere you turn.  ​

Struck 'deaf and 'dumb' over the course of the waning century, the visual arts have taken a battering, not only from the animated image, but especially from the TALKIES.  ​

​Remember, too, what the poet said when he insisted on the fact that so-called SILENT cinema was only ever DEAF, the first cinema-goers of the darkened movie halls being less aware of the actors' lack of words than of their own deafness. The early devotee of the seventh art of cinematography translated the silence of the movies into their own imaginary handicap, their personal limitation in seeing without hearing what the characters up on the screen were saying to each other. ​

Yet has anyone ever experienced this feeling of infirmity looking at a painting representing singers or angelic musicians? Hardly! So why did the aesthetics of the animated image suddenly disable the viewer of silent films, rendering strangely deaf a person hitherto not deaf in the slightest? ​

'Looking is not the same as experiencing' , Isabelle Adjani reckons and she would know when it comes to looks. Adjani here goes one further than Kafka, who expressed his specific anxiety to his friend, Gustav Janouch, some time in the years between 1910 and 1912 : ​

What can you say about the 'talkies' and about the sound-track that puts the finishing touches on the effect of mastery of the image track, except that they are a lot more harmful than people realize? Must we wheel in radiophony and telephony yet again to explain 'the accident of the visible' ' that goes by the name of the AUDIO-VISUAL?  ​

​Bear in mind Demeny's bit of chronophotography in which a man mouths 'je t'aime' to a camera that only records the movement of his lips. We've all seen the smile of the Mona Lisa; here you can see the smile of Etienne-Jules Marey's pretty niece as a prelude to hearing speech enunciated in front of a microphone. ​

The contemporary cnsls in the plastic arts actually started here, with the enunciation if the image of the TALKIES and the concomitant denunciation of our deafness. You do not lend speech to walls or screens with impunity not without also attacking the fresco and mural art and, ultimately, the whole panoply of the parietal aesthetics of architecture every bit as much as painting.
​
After the eye, mobilized by the whipping past of film sequences denounced by Kafka, it is the turn of the ear, traumatized suddenly by imaginary deafness. Victim of the war in which the unfolding of time is speeded-up, the field of perception suddenly becomes a real battlefield, with its barked commands and its shrieks of terror; whence the quest for the SCREAM as for FEAR conducted by the German Expressionists throughout the traumatic years of the 1920s and 1930s when the disqualification of the silence of paintings would usher in the impending tyranny of mass communications tools. 

This bestowing of speech upon images, upon the whirling rush of film, meant unwittingly triggering a phenomenon of panic in which the audio-visual would gradually lead to this silence of the lambs whereby the art lover becomes the victim of sound, a hostage of the sonorization of the visible. In his 1910 tract Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto, Marinetti, ​after all, declared, 'Our sensations must not be whispered; we will make them sing and shout upon our canvases in deafening and triumphant fanfares.'  ​

'To command, you must first of all speak to the eyes', Napoleon Bonaparte decreed. 'The cinema means putting your eyes into uniform' , Kafka confirmed . Between these two complementary assertions, oral culture has slowly evaporated. The art of speaking has bowed out before the ' talking' cinema and the oratorical power of the political tribune has been defeated by media culture. From now on, what speaks is the image any image, from billboard images to images at home on the box. ​

Wherever TELEPRESENCE has taken over from PRESENCE, whether physical or graphic, silence spreads, endlessly deepening.  ​

​Having been wired for sound at the end of the 1920s in 1927, to be precise, with the film The Jazz Singer the cinematograph has not only pulled blinkers over viewers' eyes or iron shutters, as Kafka would say. It has also, according to Abel Gance, stymied looking before going on to render the visual arts hoarse and then swiftly dumb. ​

By indirectly promoting the rise of TOTALITARIANISM, Democratic Germany's 'silent prosecution' promptly authorized every kind of negationism. Bear in mind the confession of the German priest, Father Niemoller: 'When they arrested the gypsies, I said nothing. When they arrested the homosexuals, I said nothing. When they deported the Jews, I said nothing. But when they arrested me, the others said nothing.' Early warning signs of the pitiless nature of MODERN TIMES as portrayed by Charlie Chaplin, the visual arts of that historical period never ceased TORTURING FORMS before making them disappear in abstraction. Similarly others would not cease TORTURING BODIES afterwards to the tune of the screams of the tortured prior to their asphyxiation inside the gas chambers.  ​

On that note, let's hear the testimony of Valeska Gert, the actress who starred in German filmmaker G. W. Pabst's 1 925 'street' film, Joyless Street: ​

A still figure coming to life, silhouettes, shadows flapping about: the camera obscura had already been there, done that with the invention of visual perspective. But an animated image, one that talks, calls out to you ... This was the birth of a sonorous audio-visual perspective that far outdid what instrumental music had already done for the history of oral culture. Suddenly Plato's cave became the Sybil's lair and there was not a thing the visual arts could do about this sudden irruption of the AUDIO-VISIBLE. ​

When Al Jolson, the white singer who mimicked the movements of a black singer, launched his celebrated 'Hello Mammy' in the first talking film, in 1927, he was answering the unarticulated scream of Edvard Munch. In 1 883, two years before the Lumiere brothers invented cinema, Munch had tried to puff up the painted image with a sort of SOUND RELIEF, which was until that moment the sole province of music and its attendant notations. ​

Similarly, around 1910, newly hatched abstraction would typify the bid for mental sonorization in the pictorial realm. Here's the way Kandinsky put it: 'The clearer the abstract element of form, the purer, the more elementary, the sound.'  ​

While theatre and dance those arts involving immediate presence still demand prolonged ​attention, we sum up the visual arts immediately, or as good as. The very recent development of REALTIME computer imagery only ever accentuates this effect of iconic stupefaction. ​

Whence contemporary art's shrillness in its bid to be heard without delay that is, without necessitating attention, without requiring the onlooker's prolonged reflection and instead going for the conditioned reflex, for a reactionary and simultaneous activity.
And strangely, as British art historian, Norbert Lynton, notes: ​

To thus vociferously denounce OMERTA, this law of the silence of art, and promote instead some socalled 'freeing up of speech' , was to trigger a system of informing that George Orwell would later portray to perfection. NEWSPEAK, the language Orwell invented in his novel, Nineteen-Eighty-Four, beautifully exemplifies not only the linguistic cliches of the emergent totalitarianisms, but also the crimes and misdemeanours of the audio-visual language of the MASS MEDIA and, in particular, those of this denunciatory telesurveillance we see being installed all over the world. ​

​While psychoanalytical culture managed to bring artists up to speed with tales from the FREUDIAN DIVAN, twentieth-century political culture would embark on the rocky road of trying to control the silent majorities. TO MAKE SOMEONE TALK would suddenly become a major requirement with the advent of the poll and television ratings systems. ​

​Despite Magritte and a handful of others, commercial imagery verbal art, visual art would wreak the havoc we are all too familiar with yet which has for some reason provoked less of an outcry than that wreaked by 'Socialist Realism', the official art of the defunct Soviet Union ... The comic strip iconography of the likes of Roy Lichtenstein taking on the noisy sound effects of the Futurist machines, Mimmo Rotella apeing systematic billposting, etc. Why go on?​

excerpt from the book: Art and Fear by PAUL VIRILIO ​

There are two problems here that certain people confuse in order to construct the phantom of a historical reality that would solely be made up of ‘fictions’. The first problem concerns the relationship between history and historicity, that is to say the relationship of the historical agent to the speaking being. The second problem concerns the idea of fiction and the relationship between fictional rationality and the modes of explanation used for historical and social reality, the relationship between the logic of fiction and the logic of facts. 

It is preferable to begin with the second problem, the ‘actuality’ of fiction analysed by the text you refer to.15 This actuality itself raises a twofold question: the general question of fiction’s rationality, i.e. the distinction between fiction and falsity, and the question of the distinction - or the indistinction - between the modes of intelligibility specific to the construction of stories and the modes of intelligibility used for understanding historical phenomena. Let’s start from the beginning. The specificity of the representative regime of the arts is characterized by the separation between the idea of fiction and that of lies. It is this regime that confers autonomy on the arts’ various forms in relationship to the economy of communal occupations and the countereconomy of simulacra specific to the ethical regime of images. This is what is essentially at stake in Aristotle’s Poetics, which safeguards the forms of poetic mimesis from the Platonic suspicion concerning what images consist of and their end or purpose. The Poetics declares that the images consist of and their end or purpose. The Poetics declares that the arrangement of a poem’s actions is not equivalent to the fabrication of a simulacrum. It is a play of knowledge that is carried out in a determined space-time. To pretend is not to put forth illusions but, to elaborate intelligible structures. Poetry owes no explanation for the ‘truth’ of what it says because, in its very principle, it is not made up of images or statements, but fictions, that is to say arrangements between actions. The other consequence that Aristotle derives from this is the superiority of poetry, which confers a causal logic on the arrangement of events, over history, condemned to presenting events according to their empirical disorder. In other words - and this is obviously something that historians do not like to examine too closely - the clear division between reality and fiction makes a rational logic of history impossible as well as a science of history.

The aesthetic revolution rearranges the rules of the game by making two things interdependent: the blurring of the borders between the logic of facts and the logic of fictions and the new mode of rationality that characterizes the science of history. By declaring that the principle of poetry is not to be found in fiction but in a certain arrangement of the signs of language, the Romantic Age blurred the dividing line that isolated art from the jurisdiction of statements or images, as well as the dividing line that separated the [57] logic of facts from the logic of stories. It is not the case, as is sometimes said, that it consecrated the ‘autotelism’ of language, separated from reality. It is the exact opposite. The Romantic Age actually plunged language into the materiality of the traits by which the historical and social world becomes visible to itself, be it in the form of the silent language of things or the coded language of images. Circulation within this landscape of signs defines, moreover, the new fictionality, the new way of telling stories, which is first of all a way of assigning meaning to the ‘empirical’ world of lowly actions and commonplace objects. Fictional arrangement is no longer identified with the Aristotelian causal sequence of actions ‘according to necessity and plausibility’. It is an arrangement of signs. However, this literary arrangement of signs is by no means the solitary self-referentiality of language. It is the identification of modes of fictional construction with means of deciphering the signs inscribed in the general aspect of a place, a group, a wall, an article of clothing, ​a face. It is the association between, on the one hand, accelerations or decelerations of language, its shuffling of images or sudden changes of tone, all its differences of potential between the insignificant and the overly significant or overly meaningful, and on the other hand, the modalities of a trip through the landscape of significant traits deposited in the topography of spaces, the physiology of social circles, the silent expression of bodies. The ‘fictionality’ specific to the aesthetic age is consequently distributed between two poles: the potential of meaning inherent in everything silent and the proliferation of modes of speech and levels of meaning. 

The aesthetic sovereignty of literature does not therefore amount to the reign of fiction. On the contrary, it is a regime in which the logic of descriptive and narrative arrangements in fiction becomes fundamentally indistinct from the arrangements used in the description and interpretation of the phenomena of the social and historical world. When Balzac places his reader before the entwined hieroglyphics on the tottering and heteroclite façade of the house in At the Sign of the Cat and Racket, or has his reader enter an antique dealers shop, with the hero of The Magic Skin, where jumbled up together are objects both profane and sacred, uncivilized and cultured, antique and modern, that each sum up a world, when he makes Cuvier the true poet reconstructing a world from a fossil, he establishes a regime of equivalence between the signs of the new novel and those of the description or [59] interpretation of the phenomena of a civilization. He forges this new rationality of the obvious and the obscure that goes against the grand Aristotelian arrangements and that would become the new rationality for the history of material life (which stands in opposition to the histories of great names and events). 

The Aristotelian dividing line between two ‘stories’ or ‘histories’ - poets’ stories and the history of historians - is thereby revoked, the dividing line that not only separated reality and fiction but also empirical succession and constructed necessity. Aristotle established the superiority of poetry, recounting ‘what could happen’ according to the necessity or plausibility of the poetic arrangement of actions, over history, conceived of as the empirical succession of events, of ‘what happened’. The aesthetic revolution drastically disrupts things: testimony and fiction come under the same regime of meaning. On the one hand, the ‘empirical’ bears the marks of the true in the form of traces and imprints. ‘What happened’ thus comes directly under a regime of truth, a regime that demonstrates the necessity behind what happened. On the other hand, ‘what could happen’ no longer has the autonomous and linear form  of the arrangement of actions. The poetic ‘story’ or ‘history’ henceforth links the realism that shows us the poetic traces inscribed directly in reality with the artificialism that assembles complex machines of understanding. 

This connection was transferred from literature to the new art of narrative, film, which brought to its highest potential the double resource of the silent imprint that speaks and the montage that calculates the values of truth and the potential for producing meaning. Documentary film, film devoted to the ‘real’, is in this sense capable of greater fictional invention than ‘fiction’ film, readily devoted to a certain stereotype of actions and characters. Chris Marker’s Le Tombeau d A’ lexandre (The Last Bolshevik), the object of the article you refer to, fictionalizes the history of Russia from the time of the czars to the postcommunist period through the destiny of a film-maker, Alexander Medvedkin. Marker does not make him into a fictional character; he does not tell fabricated stories about the USSR. He plays off of the combination of different types of traces (interviews, significant faces, archival documents, extracts from documentary and fictional films, etc.) in order to suggest possibilities for thinking [61] this story or history. The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought. This proposition should be distinguished from any discourse - positive or negative - according to which everything is ‘narrative’, with alternations between ‘grand’ narratives and ‘minor’ narratives. The notion of ‘narrative’ locks us into oppositions between the real and artifice where both the positivists and the deconstructionists are lost. It is not a matter of claiming that everything is fiction. It is a matter of stating that the fiction of the aesthetic age defined models for connecting the presentation of facts and forms of intelligibility that blurred the border between the logic of facts and the logic of fiction. Moreover, these models were taken up by historians and analysts of social reality. Writing history and writing stories come under the same regime of truth. This has nothing whatsoever to do with a thesis on the reality or unreality of things. On the contrary, it is clear that a model for the fabrication of stories is linked to a certain idea of history as common destiny, with an idea of those who make history’, and that this interpenetration of the logic of facts and the logic of stories is specific to an age when anyone and everyone is considered to be participating in the task of ‘making’ history. Thus, it is not a matter of claiming that [62] ‘History’ is only made up of stories that we tell ourselves, but simply that the ‘logic of stories’ and the ability to act as historical agents go together. Politics and art, like forms of knowledge, construct ‘fictions’, that is to say material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done. 

It is here that we encounter the other question that you asked, which concerns the relationship between literarity and historicity. Political statements and literary locutions produce effects in reality. They define models of speech or action but also regimes of sensible intensity. They draft maps of the visible, trajectories between the visible and the sayable, relationships between modes of being, modes of saying, and modes of doing and making. They define variations of sensible intensities, perceptions, and the abilities of bodies.18 They thereby take hold of unspecified groups of people, they widen gaps, open up space for deviations, modify the speeds, the trajectories, and the ways in which groups of people adhere to a condition, react to situations, recognize their images. They reconfigure the map of the sensible by interfering with the functionality of gestures and rhythms adapted to the natural cycles of production, reproduction, and submission. Man is a political animal because he is a literary animal who lets himself be diverted from his ‘natural’ purpose by the power of words. This literarity is at once the condition and the effect of the circulation of‘actual’ literary locutions. However, these locutions take hold of bodies and divert them from their end or purpose insofar as they are not bodies in the sense of organisms, but quasi-bodies, blocks of speech circulating without a legitimate father to accompany them toward their authorized addressee. Therefore, they do not produce collective bodies. Instead, they introduce lines of fracture and disincorporation into imaginary collective bodies. This has always been, as is well known, the phobia of those in power and the theoreticians of good government, worried that the circulation of writing would produce ‘disorder in the established ​system of classification. It was also, in the nineteenth century, the phobia of‘actual5 writers who wrote in order to denounce the literarity that overflows the institution of literature and leads its products astray. It is true that the circulation of these quasi-bodies causes modifications in the sensory perception of what is common to the community, in the relationship [64] between what is common to language and the sensible distribution of spaces and occupations. They form, in this way, uncertain communities that contribute to the formation of enunciative collectives that call into question the distribution of roles, territories, and languages. In short, they contribute to the formation of political subjects that challenge the given distribution of the sensible. A political collective is not, in actual fact, an organism or a communal body. The channels for political subjectivization are not those of imaginary identification but those of ‘literary’ disincorporation.

I am not sure that the notion of utopia takes this into account. It is a word whose definitional capabilities have been completely devoured by its connotative properties. Sometimes it refers to the mad delusions that lead to totalitarian catastrophe; sometimes it refers, conversely, to the infinite expansion of the field of possibility that resists all forms of totalizing closure. From the point of view that concerns us here, i.e. the point of view of the reconfigurations of the shared sensible order, the word utopia harbours two contradictory meanings. Utopia is, in one respect, the unacceptable, a no-place, the extreme point of a polemical reconfiguration of the sensible, which breaks down the categories that define what is considered to be obvious. However, it is also the configuration of a proper place, a non-polemical distribution of the sensible universe where what one sees, what one says, and what one makes or does are rigorously adapted to one another. Utopias and forms of utopian socialism functioned based on this ambiguity. On the one hand, they dismissed the obvious sensible facts in which the normality of domination is rooted. On the other hand, they proposed a state of affairs where the idea of the community would have its adequate forms of incorporation, a state of affairs that would therefore abolish the dispute concerning the relations of words to things that makes up the heart of politics. In The Nights of Labor, I analysed from this perspective the complex encounter between workers and the engineers of utopia. What the Saint-Simonian engineers proposed was a new, real body for the community where the water and rail routes marked out on the ground would take the place of paper dreams and the illusions of speech. The workers, for their part, did not set practice in contrast with utopia; they conferred upon the latter the characteristic of being ‘unreal’, of being a montage of words and images appropriate for reconfiguring the territory of the visible, the thinkable, and the possible. The ‘fictions’ of art and politics are therefore heterotopias rather than utopias. 

excerpt from the book: The Politics of Aesthetics(The Distribution of the Sensible), by JACQUES RANCIÈRE ​

by JACQUES RANCIÈRE 

The first possible meaning of the notion of a ‘factory of the sensible’ is the formation of a shared sensible world, a common habitat, by the weaving together of a plurality of human activities. However, the idea of a ‘distribution of the sensible’ implies something more. A ‘common’ world is never simply an ethos, a shared abode, that results from the sedimentation of a certain number of intertwined acts. It is always a polemical distribution of modes of being and ‘occupations’ in a space of possibilities. It is from this perspective that it is possible to raise the question of the relationship between the ‘ordinariness’ of work and artistic ‘exceptionality’. Here again referencing Plato can help lay down the terms of the problem. In the third book of the Republic, the mimetician is no longer condemned simply for the falsity and the pernicious nature of the images he presents, but he is condemned in accordance with a principle of division of labour that was already used to exclude artisans from any shared political space: the mimetician is, by definition, a double being. He does two things at once, whereas the principle of a well-organized community is that each person only does the one thing that they were destined to do by their ‘nature’. In one sense, this statement says everything: the idea of work is not initially the idea of a determined activity, a process of material transformation. It is the idea of a distribution of the sensible: an impossibility of doing ‘something else’ based on an ‘absence of time’. This ‘impossibility’ is part of the incorporated conception of the community. It establishes work as the necessary relegation of the worker to the private space-time of his occupation, his exclusion from participation in what is common ​to the community. The mimetician brings confusion to [68] this distribution: he is a man of duplication, a worker who does two things at once. Perhaps the correlate to this principle is the most important thing: the mimetician provides a public stage for the ‘private’ principle of work. He sets up a stage for what is common to the community with what should determine the confinement of each person to his or her place. It is this redistribution of the sensible that constitutes his noxiousness, even more than the danger of simulacra weakening souls. Hence, artistic practice is not the outside of work but its displaced form of visibility. The democratic distribution of the sensible makes the worker into a double being. It removes the artisan from ‘his’ place, the domestic space of work, and gives him ‘time’ to occupy the space of public discussions and take on the identity of a deliberative citizen. The mimetic act of splitting in two, which is at work in theatrical space, consecrates this duality and makes it visible. The exclusion of the mimetician, from the Platonic point of view, goes hand in hand with the formation of a community where work is in ‘its’ place.

​The principle of fiction that governs the representative regime of art is a way of stabilizing the artistic exception, of assigning it to a  techne, which means two things: the art of imitations is a technique and not a lie. It ceases to be [69] a simulacrum, but at the same time it ceases to be the displaced visibility of work, as a distribution of the sensible. The imitator is no longer the double being against whom it is necessary to posit the city where each person only does a single thing. The art of imitations is able to inscribe its specific hierarchies and exclusions in the major distribution of the liberal arts and the mechanical arts.

The aesthetic regime of the arts disrupts this apportionment of spaces. It does not simply call into question mimetic division - i.e. the mimetic act of splitting in two - in favour of an immanence of thought in sensible matter. It also calls into question the neutralized status of technë, the idea of technique as the imposition of a form of thought on inert matter. That is to say that it brings to light, once again, the distribution of occupations that upholds the apportionment of domains of activity. This theoretical and political operation is at the heart of Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Behind the Kantian definition of aesthetic judgement as a judgement without concepts - without the submission of the intuitive given to conceptual ​determination -, Schiller indicates the political distribution that is the matter at stake: the division between those who act and those who are acted upon, between the cultivated classes [70] that have access to a totalization of lived experience and the uncivilized classes immersed in the parcelling out of work and of sensory experience. Schillers ‘aesthetic’ state, by suspending the opposition between active understanding and passive sensibility, aims at breaking down - with an idea of art - an idea of society based on the opposition between those who think and decide and those who are doomed to material tasks.

In the nineteenth century, this suspension of work’s negative value became the assertion of its positive value as the very form of the shared effectivity of thought and community. This mutation occurred via the transformation of the suspension inherent in the aesthetic state’ into the positive assertion of the aesthetic will. Romanticism declared that the becoming-sensible of all thought and the becoming-thought of all sensible materiality was the very goal of the activity of thought in general. In this way, art once again became a symbol of work. It anticipates the end - the elimination of oppositions - that work is not yet in a position to attain by and for itself. However, it does this insofar as it is a production, the identification of a process of material execution with a community’s self-presentation of its meaning. Production asserts itself [71] as the principle behind a new distribution of the sensible insofar as it unites, in one and the same concept, terms that are traditionally opposed: the activity of manufacturing and visibility. Manufacturing meant inhabiting the private and lowly space-time of labour for sustenance. Producing unites the act of manufacturing with the act of bringing to light, the act of defining a new relationship between making and seeing. Art anticipates work because it carries out its principle: the transformation of sensible matter into the community’s self-presentation. The texts written by the young Marx that confer upon work the status of the generic essence of mankind were only possible on the basis of German Idealism’s aesthetic programme, i.e. art as the transformation of thought into the sensory experience of the community. It is this initial programme, moreover, that laid the foundation for the thought and practice of the avant-gardes’ in the 1920s: abolish art as a separate activity, put it back to work, that is to ​say, give it back to life and its activity of working out its own proper meaning.

I do not mean by this that the modern valorization of work is only the result of the new way for thinking about art. On the one hand, the aesthetic mode of thought is much more than a way of thinking about art. It is an idea of thought, linked to an idea of the distribution [72] of the sensible. On the other hand, it is also necessary to think about the way in which artists’ art found itself defined on the basis of a twofold promotion of work: the economic promotion of work as the name for the fundamental human activity, but also the struggles of the proletariat to bring labour out of the night surrounding it, out of its exclusion from shared visibility and speech. It is necessary to abandon the lazy and absurd schema that contrasts the aesthetic cult of art for art’s sake with the rising power of industrial labour. Art can show signs of being an exclusive activity insofar as it is work. Better informed than the demystifiers of the twentieth century, the critics in Flaubert’s time indicated what links the cult of the sentence to the valorization of work, said to be wordless: the Flaubertian aesthete is a pebble breaker. At the time of the Russian Revolution, art and production would be identified because they came under one and the same principle concerning the redistribution of the sensible, they came under one and the same virtue of action that opens up a form of visibility at the same time as it manufactures objects. The cult of art presupposes a revalorization of the abilities attached to the very idea of work. However, this idea is less the discovery of the essence of human activity than a recomposition of the landscape of the visible, a recomposition of the [73] relationship between doing, making, being, seeing, and saying. Whatever might be the specific type of economic circuits they lie within, artistic practices are not exceptions’ to other practices. They represent and reconfigure the distribution of these activities.

excerpt from the book: The Politics of Aesthetics(The Distribution of the Sensible), by JACQUES RANCIÈRE 

​​The Network Ensemble was born out of a pun.

​The legendary Roland TR 808, an analog drum machine who allowed a new kind of freedom to music producers in the 80s (just play Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force), provided the pun: we were going to build TR 802.11.

​​A physical device was ready by summer. Built into a flight-case to be easily carried, the machine was taken around London to explore the WiFi network territory. When shut, 2 ports accessible on the outside let the user tune into the network with an antenna and hear its raw sounds with headphones. When open, a set of peripherals (stored in the bottom half of the flight-case) can be connected to 6 ports built into an operational panel (located on the other half), letting the user perform the network space.

​​Building on the software developed for the early TR 802.11 virtual experiments, we developed NE.app, a software tool for the capture and analysis of network data. Sitting at the hearth of the operational panel, NE.app collects as much WiFi packets from the local networks as it can. Upon receipt it categorises them according to their intent and transforms them into an electrical pulse, which is transmitted to the ports on the operational panel. Each port corresponds to a slice of the network: structure, gatekeeping, communications, data, broken and unknown.

​​The peripherals sonify these network slices. When plugged into the ports, they translate the electrical pulse into a digital sound, a mechanical tap, and so on… The peripherals are various in shape, scope and configuration: an antenna, a set of speakers, a series of solenoids, to name a few. Together, they form an autonomous orchestra which plays the network data live onto its physical surroundings, allowing serendipitous and distorted soundscapes to be uncovered by a user, whether performing or exploring. It is this horizontal relationship between machine and human that we dubbed “Network Ensemble”.

​A third machine, the NE3, was built in 2017. NE3 is a compact board which uses a stripped down version of the NE.app employed in previous Network Ensemble experiments to receive packets on all networks local to it and convert their content into sound as directly as possible. A single knob on the top-side of the board allows control of the speed at which the network data is transformed, ranging from high speeds, staying true to the intense nature of the WiFi, to low speeds, making it possible to identify patterns in the noise or investigate the sonic character of a particular slice of the network. Two jack ports allow for the connection of audio equipment for sonic manipulation and performance. As a base, the NE3 has a surface transducer which turns nearly any surface into a speaker.

​​Originally conceived as a drum machine to amplify the activity of network landscapes, the Network Ensemble is now a free-form and ever-changing set of tools and experiences for sonically uncovering the hidden operational layer at the very core of the network. Since 2015, we heve performed as part of the ensemble, under this moniker, in a number of locations across three countries. We have also used the machinery to study wireless networks, exploring physical and network territories, creating audiovisual work from our findings.

​Some of this sound and video work is released for the first time through Selected Network Studies.

Perhaps first I should clear up a misunderstanding concerning the notion of mechanical arts’. The connection I established was between a scientific paradigm and an aesthetic paradigm. Benjamin’s thesis presupposes something different, which seems questionable to me: the deduction of the aesthetic and political properties of a form of art from its technical properties. Mechanical arts, qua mechanical arts, would result in a change of artistic paradigm and a new relationship between art and its subject matter. This proposition refers back to one of modernism’s main theses: the difference between the arts is linked to the difference between their technological conditions or their specific medium or material. This assimilation can be understood either in the simple modernist mode, or in accordance with modernatist hyperbole. The persistent success of Benjamin’s theses on art in the age of mechanical reproduction is, moreover, undoubtedly due to the crossing-over they allow for between the categories of Marxist materialist explanation and those of Heideggerian ontology, which ascribe the age of modernity to the unfurling of the essence of technology. This link between the aesthetic and the onto-technological has, in fact, been subjected to the general fate of modernist categories. In Benjamin, Duchamp, or Rodchenko’s time, it coexisted with the faith in the capabilities of electricity and machines, iron, glass, and concrete. With the so-called ‘postmodern’ reversal, it has kept pace with the return to the icon, which presents the veil of Veronica as the essence of painting, film, or photography.

It is thus necessary, in my opinion, to take things the other way around. In order for the mechanical arts to be able to confer visibility on the masses, or rather on anonymous individuals, they first need to be recognized as arts. That is to say that they first need to be, put into practice and recognized as something other than techniques of reproduction or transmission. It is thus the same principle that confers visibility on absolutely anyone and allows for photography and film to become arts. We can even reverse the formula: it is because the anonymous became the subject matter of art that the act of recording such a subject matter can be an art. The fact that what is anonymous is not only susceptible to becoming the subject matter of art but also conveys a specific beauty is an exclusive characteristic of the aesthetic regime of the arts. Not only did the aesthetic regime begin well before the arts of mechanical reproduction, but it is actually this regime that made them possible by its new way of thinking art and its subject matter.

The aesthetic regime of the arts was initially the breakdown of the system of representation, that is to say of a system where the dignity of the subject matter dictated the dignity of genres of representation (tragedy for the nobles, comedy for the people of meagre means; historical painting versus genre painting; etc.). Along with genres, the system of representation defined the situations and forms of expression that were appropriate for' the lowliness or loftiness of the subject matter. The aesthetic regime [49] of the arts dismantled this correlation between subject matter and mode of representation. This revolution first took place in literature: an epoch and a society were deciphered through the features, clothes, or gestures of an ordinary individual (Balzac); the sewer revealed a civilization (Hugo); the daughter of a farmer and the daughter of a banker were caught in the equal force of style as an ‘absolute manner of seeing things’ (Flaubert). All of these forms of cancellation or reversal of the opposition between high and low not only antedate the powers of mechanical reproduction, they made it possible for this reproduction to be more than mechanical reproduction. In order for a technological mode of action and production, i.e. a way of doing and making, to be qualified as falling within the domain of art - be it a certain use of words or of a camera - it is first necessary for its subject matter to be defined as such. Photography was not established as an art on the grounds of its technological nature. The discourse on the originality of photography as an ‘indexical’ art is very recent, and it is less a part of the history of photography than of the history of the postmodern reversal touched upon above.11 Furthermore, photography did not become an art by imitating the mannerisms of art. Benjamin accurately demonstrated this regarding David Octavius Hill: it is with the little anonymous fishwife from New Haven, not with his grand pictorial compositions, that he brought photography into the world of art. Likewise, it is not the ethereal subject matter and soft focus of pictorialism that secured the status of photographic art, it is rather the appropriation of the commonplace: the emigrants in Stieglitz’s The Steerage, the frontal portraits by Paul Strand or Walker Evans. On the one hand, the technological revolution comes after the aesthetic revolution. On the other hand, however, the aesthetic revolution is first of all the honour acquired by the commonplace, which is pictorial and literary before being photographic or cinematic. 

We should add that the honour conferred on the commonplace is part of the science of literature before being part of the science of history. Film and photography did not determine the subject matter and modes of focalization of new history’. On the contrary, the new science of history and the arts of mechanical reproduction are inscribed in the same logic of aesthetic revolution. This programme is literary before being scientific: it shifts the focus from great names and events to the life of the anonymous; it finds symptoms of an epoch, a society, or a civilization in the minute details of ordinary life; it explains the surface by subterranean layers; and it reconstructs worlds from their vestiges. This does not simply mean that the science of history has a literary prehistory. Literature itself was constituted as a kind of symptomatology of society, and it set this symptomatology in contrast with the clamour and imagination of the public stage. In his preface to Cromwell, Hugo called for a literature based on the story of the customs of everyday life that would be opposed to the story of events practised by historians. In War and Peace, Tolstoy contrasted the documents of literature, taken from narratives and testimonial accounts of the action of innumerable anonymous actors, with the documents of historians, taken from the archives - and from the imagination - of those who believe to have been in charge of battles and to have made history. Scholarly history took over this opposition when it contrasted the history of the lifestyles of the masses and the cycles of material life based on reading and interpreting mute witnesses’ with the former, history of princes, battles, and treaties based on courts’ chronicles and diplomatic reports. The appearance of the masses on the scene of history or in new’ images is not to be confused with the link between the age of the masses and the age of science and technology. It is first and foremost rooted in the aesthetic logic of a mode of visibility that, on the one hand, revokes the representative tradition’s scales of grandeur and, on the other hand, revokes the oratorical model of speech in favour of the interpretation of signs on the body of people, things, and civilizations.

This is what scholarly history inherited. However, its intention was to separate the condition of its new object (the life of the anonymous) from its literary origin and from the politics of literature in which it is inscribed. What it cast aside - which was reappropriated by film and photography - was the logic revealed by the tradition of the novel (from Balzac to Proust and Surrealism) and the reflection on the true that Marx, Freud, Benjamin, and the tradition of ‘critical thought’ inherited: the ordinary becomes beautiful as a trace of the true. And the ordinary becomes a trace of the true if it is torn from its obviousness in order to become a hieroglyph, a mythological or phantasmagoric figure. This phantasmagoric dimension of the true, which belongs to the aesthetic regime of the arts, played an essential role in the formation of the critical paradigm of the human and social sciences. The Marxist theory of fetishism is the most striking testimony to this fact: commodities must be torn out of their trivial appearances, made into phantasmagoric objects in order to be interpreted as the expression of society’s contradictions. Scholarly history tried to separate out various features within the aesthetico-political configuration that gave it its object. It flattened this phantasmagoria of the true into the positivist sociological concepts of mentality/expression and belief/ignorance. 

I call the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. This apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution. Aristotle states that a citizen is someone who has a part in the act of governing and being governed. However, another form of distribution precedes this act of partaking in government: the distribution that determines those who have a part in the community of citizens. A speaking being, according to Aristotle, is a political being. If a slave understands the language of its rulers, however, he does not ‘possess’ it. Plato states that artisans cannot be put in charge of the shared or common elements of the community because they do not have the time to devote themselves to anything other than their work. They cannot be somewhere else because work will not wait. The distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed. Having a particular ‘occupation’ thereby determines the ability or inability to take charge of what is common to the community; it defines what is visible or not in a common space, endowed with a common language, etc. There is thus an ‘aesthetics’ at the core of politics that has nothing to do with Benjamin’s discussion of the ‘aestheticization of politics’ specific to the age of the masses’. This aesthetics should not be understood as the perverse commandeering of politics by a will to art, by a consideration of the people qua work of art. If the reader is fond of analogy, aesthetics can be understood in a Kantian sense - re-examined perhaps by Foucault - as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of  spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time. 

It is on the basis of this primary aesthetics that it is possible to raise the question of‘aesthetic practices’ as I understand them, that is forms of visibility that disclose artistic practices, the place they occupy, what they ‘do’ or ‘make’ from the standpoint of what is common to the community. Artistic practices are ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility. The Platonic proscription of the poets is based on the impossibility of doing two things at once prior to being based on the immoral content of fables. The question of fiction is first a question regarding the distribution of places. From the Platonic point of view, the stage, which is simultaneously a locus of public activity and the exhibition-space for ‘fantasies’, disturbs the clear partition of identities, activities, and spaces. The same is true of  writing. By stealing away to wander aimlessly without knowing who to speak to or who not to speak to, writing destroys every legitimate foundation for the circulation of words, for the relationship between the effects of language and the positions of bodies in shared space. Plato thereby singles out two main models, two major forms of existence and of the sensible effectivity of language - writing and the theatre -, which are also structure-giving forms for the regime of the arts in general. However, these forms turn out to be prejudicially linked from the outset to a certain regime of politics, a regime based on the indetermination of identities, the delegitimation of positions of speech, the deregulation of partitions of space and time. This aesthetic regime of politics is strictly identical with the regime of democracy, the regime based on the assembly of artisans, inviolable written laws, and the theatre as institution. Plato contrasts a third, good form of art with writing and the theatre, the choreographic form of the community that sings and dances its own proper unity. In sum, Plato singles out three ways in which discursive and bodily practices suggest forms of community: the surface of mute signs that are, he says,  like paintings, and the space of bodily movement that divides itself into two antagonistic models (the movement of simulacra on the stage that is offered as material for the audiences identifications and, on the other hand, the authentic movement characteristic of communal bodies). 

Here we have three ways of distributing the sensible that structure the manner in which the arts can be perceived and thought of as forms of art and as forms that inscribe a sense of community: the surface of ‘depicted’ signs, the split reality of the theatre, the rhythm of a dancing chorus. These forms define the way in which works of art or performances are ‘involved in politics’, whatever may otherwise be the guiding intentions, artists’ social modes of integration, or the manner in which artistic forms reflect social structures or movements. When Madame Bovary was published, or Sentimental Education, these works were immediately perceived as ‘democracy in literature’ despite Flaubert’s aristocratic situation and political conformism. His very refusal to entrust literature with any message whatsoever was considered to be evidence of democratic equality. His adversaries claimed that he was  democratic due to his decision to depict and portray instead of instruct. This equality of indifference is the result of a poetic bias: the equality of all subject matter is the negation of any relationship of necessity between a determined form and a determined content. Yet what is this indifference after all if not the very equality of everything that comes to pass on a written page, available as it is to everyone’s eyes? This equality destroys all of the hierarchies of representation and also establishes a community of readers as a community without legitimacy, a community formed only by the random circulation of the written word. 
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In this way, a sensible politicity exists that is immediately attributed to the major forms of aesthetic distribution such as the theatre, the page, or the chorus. These ‘politics’ obey their own proper logic, and they offer their services in very different contexts and time periods. Consider the way these paradigms functioned in the connection between art and politics at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Consider, for example, the role taken on by the paradigm of the page in all its different forms, which exceed the materiality of a written sheet of paper. Novelistic democracy, on the one hand, is the indifferent democracy of writing such as  it is symbolized by the novel and its readership. There is also, however, the knowledge concerning typography and iconography, the intertwining of graphic and pictorial capabilities, that played such an important role in the Renaissance and was revived by Romantic typography through its use of vignettes, culs-de-lampe, and various innovations. This model disturbs the clear-cut rules of representative logic that establish a relationship of correspondence at a distance between the sayable and the visible. It also disturbs the clear partition between works of pure art and the ornaments made by the decorative arts. This is why it played such an important - and generally underestimated - role in the upheaval of the representative paradigm and of its political implications. I am thinking in particular of its role in the Arts and Crafts movement and all of its derivatives (Art Deco, Bauhaus, Constructivism). These movements developed an idea of furniture - in the broad sense of the term - for a new community, which also inspired a new idea of pictorial surface as a surface of shared writing.

Modernist discourse presents the revolution of pictorial abstraction as painting’s discovery of its own proper medium’: two-dimensional surface. By revoking the perspectivist illusion of the third dimension, painting was to regain  the mastery of its own proper surface. In actual fact, however, this surface does not have any distinctive feature. A ‘surface’ is not simply a geometric composition of lines. It is a certain distribution of the sensible. For Plato, writing and painting were equivalent surfaces of mute signs, deprived of the breath that animates and transports living speech. Flat surfaces, in this logic, are not opposed to depth in the sense of three-dimensional surfaces. They are opposed to the ‘living’. The mute surface of depicted signs stands in opposition to the act of ‘living’ speech, which is guided by the speaker towards its appropriate addressee. Moreover, painting’s adoption of the third dimension was also a response to this distribution. The reproduction of optical depth was linked to the privilege accorded to the story. In the Renaissance, the reproduction of three-dimensional space was involved in the valorization of painting and the assertion of its ability to capture an act of living speech, the decisive moment of action and meaning. In opposition to the Platonic degradation of mimesis, the classical poetics of representation wanted to endow the ‘flat surface’ with speech or with a ‘scene’ of life, with a specific depth such as the manifestation of an action, the expression of an interiority, or the transmission of meaning. Classical poetics established a relationship of correspondence at a distance between speech and painting, between the sayable and the visible, which gave ‘imitation’ its own specific space. 
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It is this relationship that is at stake in the supposed distinction between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space as ‘specific’ to a particular form of art. To a large extent, the ground was laid for painting’s ‘anti-representative revolution’ by the flat surface of the page, in the change in how literature’s ‘images’ function or the change in the discourse on painting, but also in the ways in which typography, posters, and the decorative arts became interlaced. The type of painting that is poorly named abstract, and which is supposedly brought back to its own proper medium, is implicated in an overall vision of a new human being lodged in new structures, surrounded by different objects. Its flatness is linked to the flatness of pages, posters, and tapestries. It is the flatness of an interface. Moreover, its anti-representative ‘purity’ is inscribed in a context where pure art and decorative art are intertwined, a context that straight away gives it a political signification. This context is not the surrounding revolutionary fever that made Malevich at once the artist who painted Black Square and the revolutionary eulogist of ‘new forms of life’. Furthermore, this is not some theatrical ideal of the new human being that seals the momentary alliance between revolutionary artists and politics. It is initially in the interface created between different ‘mediums’ - in the connections forged between poems and their typography or their illustrations, between the theatre and its set designers or poster designers, between decorative objects and poems - that this ‘newness’ is formed that links the artist who abolishes figurative representation to the revolutionary who invents a new form of life. This interface is ​political in that it revokes the twofold politics inherent in the logic of representation. On the one hand, this logic separated the world of artistic imitations from the world of vital concerns and politicosocial grandeur. On the other hand, its hierarchical organization - in particular the primacy of living speech/action over depicted images - formed an analogy with the socio-political order. With the triumph of the novels page over the theatrical stage, the egalitarian intertwining of images and signs on pictorial or typographic surfaces, the elevation of artisans’ art to the status of great art, and the new claim to bring art into the décor of each and every life, an entire well-ordered distribution of sensory experience was overturned.

This is how the ‘planarity’ of the surface of depicted signs, the form of egalitarian distribution of the sensible stigmatized by Plato, intervened as the principle behind an art’s ‘formal’ revolution at the same time as the principle behind the political redistribution of shared experience. The other major forms, among which there are those of the chorus and the theatre that I mentioned earlier, could be considered in much the same way. A history of aesthetic politics, understood in this sense, has to take into account the way in which these major forms stand in opposition to one another or intermingle. I am thinking, for example, of the way in which this paradigm of the surface of signs/forms entered into conflict or joined forces with the theatrical paradigm of presence, and with the diverse forms that this paradigm itself has taken on, from the Symbolist figuration of a collective legend to the actualized chorus of a new humanity. Politics plays itself out in the theatrical paradigm as the relationship between the stage and the audience, as meaning produced by the actor’s body, as games of proximity or distance. Mallarmé’s critical prose writings stage, in an exemplary manner, the play of cross-references, oppositions or assimilations between these forms, from the intimate theatre of the page or calligraphic choreography to the new ‘service’ performed by concerts. 
In one respect, these forms therefore appear to bring forth, in very different contexts, figures of community equal to themselves. However, they are susceptible to being assigned to contradictory political paradigms. Let us take the example of the tragic stage. It simultaneously carries with it, according to Plato, the syndrome of democracy and the power of illusion. By isolating mimesis in its own proper space and by enclosing tragedy within a logic of genres, Aristotle - even if this was not his intention - redefined its politicity. Furthermore, in the classical system of representation, the tragic stage would become the stage of visibility for an orderly world governed by a hierarchy of subject matter and the adaptation of situations and manners of speaking to this hierarchy. The democratic paradigm would become a monarchical paradigm. Let us also consider the long and contradictory history of rhetoric and the model of the good orator. Throughout the monarchical age, democratic eloquence à la Demosthenes denoted an excellence in speaking, which was itself established as the imaginary attribute of the supreme power. It was also always receptive, however, to the recovery of its democratic function by lending its canonical forms and its consecrated images to the transgressive appearance of unauthorized speakers on the public stage. Let us consider as well the contradictory destinies of the choreographic model. Recent research has evoked the metamorphoses undergone by Labans notation of movement. It was developed in a context favouring the liberation of bodies and became the model for the large Nazi demonstrations before regaining, in the anti-establishment context of performance art, a new subversive virginity. Benjamins explanation via the fatal aestheticization of politics in the era of the masses’ overlooks, perhaps, the long-standing connection between the unanimous consensus of the citizenry and the exaltation of the free movement of bodies. In a city hostile to the theatre and to written law, Plato recommended constantly cradling unweaned infants. 

I have evoked these three forms because Plato conceptually charted them out and because they maintain a historical constancy. They obviously do not define all of the ways that figures of community are aesthetically designed. The important thing is that the question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics be raised at this level, the level of the sensible delimitation of what is common to the community, the forms of its visibility and of its organization.  It is from this perspective that it is possible to reflect on artists’ political interventions, starting with the Romantic literary forms that aimed at deciphering society, the Symbolist poetics of dreams or the Dadaist or Constructivist elimination of art, and continuing up to the contemporary modes of performance and installation. From this perspective, it is possible to challenge a good many imaginary stories about artistic ‘modernity’ and vain debates over the autonomy of art or its submission to politics. The arts only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parcelling out of the visible and the invisible. Furthermore, the autonomy they can enjoy or the subversion they can claim credit for rest on the same foundation.

JACQUES RANCIÈRE /The Politics of Aesthetics (The Distribution of the Sensible)

Rendering the invisible: the problem of painting - Deformation: neither transformation nor decomposition - The scream - Bacon's love of life - Enumeration of forces

From another point of view, the question concerning the separation of the arts, their respective autonomy, and their possible hierarchy, loses all importance. For there is a community of the arts, a common problem. In art, and in painting as in music, it is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces. For this reason no art is figurative. Paul Klee's famous formula "Not to render the visible, but to render visible" - means nothing else. The task of painting is defined as the attempt to render visible forces that are not themselves visible. Likewise, music attempts to render sonorous forces that are not themselves sonorous. That much is clear. Force is closely related to sensation: for a sensation to exist, a force must be exerted on a body, on a point of the wave. But if force is the condition of sensation, it is nonetheless not the force that is sensed, since the sensation "gives" something completely different from the forces that condition it. How will sensation be able to sufficiently turn in on itself, relax or contract itself, so as to capture these nongiven forces in what it gives us, to make us sense these insensible forces, and raise itself to its own conditions? It is in this way that music must render nonsonorous forces sonorous, and painting must render invisible forces visible. Sometimes these are the same thing: Time, which is nonsonorous and invisible - how can time be painted, how can time be heard? And elementary forces like pressure, inertia, weight, attraction, gravitation, germination how can they be rendered? Sometimes, on the contrary, the insensible force of one art instead seems to take part in the "givens" of another art: for example, how to paint sound, or even the scream? (And conversely, how to make colors audible?). 
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This is a problem of which painters are very conscious. When pious critics criticized Millet for painting peasants who were carrying an offertory like a sack of potatoes, Millet responded by saying that the weight common to the two objects was more profound than their figurative distinction. As a painter, he was striving to paint the force of that weight, and not the offertory or the sack of potatoes. And was it not Cezanne's genius to have subordinated all the techniques of painting to this task: rendering visible the folding force of mountains, the germinative force of a seed, the thermic force of a landscape, and so on? And Van Gogh: Van Gogh even invented unknown forces, the unheard-of force of a sunflower seed. For many painters, however, the problem of capturing forces, no matter how conscious it may have been, was mixed with another problem, equally important but less pure. This other problem was the decomposition and recomposition of effects: for example, the decomposition ​and recomposition of depth in the Renaissance, the decomposition and recomposition of colors in impressionism, the decomposition and recomposition of movement in cubism. We can see how one problem leads to the other, since movement, for example, is an effect that refers both to a unique force that produces it, and to a multiplicity of decomposable and recomposable elements beneath this force.  
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Bacon's Figures seem to be one of the most marvelous responses in the history of painting to the question, How can one make invisible forces visible? This is the primary function of the Figures. In this respect, we will see that Bacon remains relatively indifferent to the problem of effects. Not that he despises them, but he thinks that, in the whole history which is that of painting, they have been adequately mastered by the painters he admires, particularly the problem of movement, of "rendering" movement. But if this is the case, it is reason enough to confront even more directly the problem of "rendering" invisible forces visible. This is true of all Bacon's series of heads and the series of self-portraits, and it is even the reason he made these series: the extraordinary agitation of these heads is derived not from a movement that the series would supposedly reconstitute, but rather from the forces of pressure, dilation, contraction, flattening, and elongation that are exerted on the immobile head. They are like the forces of the cosmos confronting an intergalactic traveler immobile in his capsule. It is as if invisible forces were striking the head from many different angles. The wiped and swept parts of the face here take on a new meaning, because they mark the zone where the force is in the process of ​striking. This is why the problems Bacon faces are indeed those of deformation, and not transformation. These are two very different categories. 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. When a force is exerted on a scrubbed part, it does not give birth to an abstract form, nor does it combine sensible forms dynamically: on the contrary, it turns this zone into a zone of indiscernibility that is common to several forms, irreducible to any of them; and the lines of force that it creates escape every form through their very clarity, through their deforming precision (we saw this in the becoming-animal of the Figures). Cezanne was perhaps the first to have made deformations without transformation, by making truth fall back on the body. Here again Bacon is Cezannean: for both Bacon and Cezanne, 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.. . ."2 Everything is now related to forces, everything is force. It is force that constitutes deformation as an act of painting: it lends itself neither to a transformation of form, nor to a decomposition of elements. And Bacon's deformations are rarely constrained or forced; they are not tortures, despite appearances. On the contrary, they are the most natural postures of a body that has been reorganized by the simple force being exerted upon it: the desire to sleep, to vomit, to turn over, to remain seated as long as possible...

We must consider the special case of the scream. Why does Bacon think of the scream as one of the highest objects of painting? "Paint the scream...". It is not at all a matter of giving color to a particularly intense sound. Music, for its part, is faced with the same task, which is certainly not to render the scream harmonious, but to establish a relationship between the sound of the scream and the forces that sustain it. In the same manner, painting will establish a relationship between these forces and the visible scream (the mouth that screams). But the forces that produce the scream, that convulse the body until they emerge at the mouth as a scrubbed zone, must not be confused with the visible spectacle before which one screams, nor even with the perceptible and sensible objects whose action decomposes and recomposes our pain. If we scream, it is always as victims of invisible and insensible forces that scramble every spectacle, and that even lie beyond pain and feeling. This is what Bacon means when he says he wanted "to paint the scream more than the horror." If we could express this as a dilemma, it would be: either I paint the horror and I do not paint the scream, because I make a figuration of the horrible; or else I paint the scream, and I do not paint the visible horror, I will paint the visible horror less and less, since the scream captures or detects an invisible force. Alban Berg knew how to make music out of the scream in the scream of Marie, and then in the very different scream of Lulu. But in both cases, he established a relationship between the sound of the scream and inaudible forces: those of the earth in the horizontal scream of Marie, and those of heaven in the vertical scream of Lulu. Bacon creates the painting of the scream because he establishes a relationship between 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. It was Kafka who spoke of detecting the diabolical powers of the future knocking at the door. Every scream contains them potentially. Innocent X screams, but he screams behind the curtain, not only as someone who can no longer be seen, but as someone who cannot see, who has nothing left to see, whose only remaining function is to render visible these invisible forces that are making him scream, these powers of the future. This is what is expressed in the phrase "to scream at" — not to scream before or about, but to scream at death-which suggests this coupling offerees, the perceptible force of the scream and the imperceptible force that makes one scream. 
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This is all very curious, but it is a source of extraordinary vitality. When Bacon distinguishes between two violences, that of the spectacle and that of sensation, and declares that the first must be renounced to reach the second, it is a kind of declaration of faith in life. The interviews contain many statements of this sort. Bacon says that he himself is cerebrally pessimistic; that is, he can scarcely see anything but horrors to paint, the horrors of the world. But he is nervously optimistic, because visible figuration is secondary in painting, and will have less and less importance: Bacon will reproach himself for painting too much horror, as if that were enough to leave the figurative behind; he moves more and more toward a Figure without horror. But why is it an act of vital faith to choose "the scream more than the horror," the violence of sensation more than the violence of the spectacle? The invisible forces, the powers of the future - are they not already upon us, and much more insurmountable than the worst spectacle and even the worst pain? Yes, in a certain sense - every piece of meat testifies to this. But in another sense, no. 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. When the visual sensation confronts the invisible force that conditions it, it releases a force that is capable of vanquishing the invisible force, or even befriending it. Life screams at death, but death is no longer this all-toovisible 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.6 Bacon, no less than Beckett, is one of those artists who, in the name of a very intense life, can call for an even more intense life. He is not a painter who "believes" in death. His is indeed a figurative miserabilisme, but one that serves an increasingly powerful Figure of life. The same homage should be paid to Bacon as can be paid to Beckett or Kafka. In the very act of "representing" horror, mutilation, prosthesis, fall or failure, they have erected indomitable Figures, indomitable through both their insistence and their presence. They have given life a new and extremely direct power of laughter.

Since the visible movements of the Figures are subordinated to the invisible forces exerted upon them, we can go behind the movements to these forces, and make an empirical list of the forces Bacon detects and captures. Although Bacon likens himself to a "pulverizer" or a "grinder," he is really more like a detective. The first invisible forces are those of isolation: they are supported by the fields, and become visible when they wrap themselves around the contour and wrap the fields around the Figure. The second are the forces of deformation, which seize the Figure's body and head, and become visible whenever the head shakes off its face, or the body its organism. (Bacon knows how to "render" intensely, for example, the flattening force of sleep [53, 76]). The third are the forces of dissipation, when the Figure fades away and returns to the field: what then renders these forces visible is a strange smile. But there are still many other forces. What can be said, first of all, of that invisible force of coupling that sweeps over two bodies with an extraordinary energy, but which they render visible by extracting from it a kind of polygon or diagram? And beyond that, what is the mysterious force that can only be captured or detected by triptychs? It is at the same time a force (characteristic of light) that unites the whole, but also a force that separates the Figures and panels, a luminous separation that should not be confused with the preceding isolation. Can life, can time, be rendered sensible, rendered visible? To render time visible, to render the force of time visible - Bacon seems to have done this twice. There is the force of changing time, through the allotropic variation of bodies, "down to the tenth of a second," which involves deformation; 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.

 Excerpt from the book: Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation/Painting Forces by Gilles Deleuze

edit  in Grammarly by Dejan stojkovski

Thus, the 'failing of the stable relationship between the perceptible and the intelligibIe' might perfectly well be construed as the unlimited character of the powers of representation. In order to interpret it in the sense of the 'unrepresentable" and posit certain events as unrepresentable, a double subreption has to be made - one involving the concept of the event, the other the concept of art. This double subreption is what is presented in Lyotard's construction of a coincidence between something unthinkable at the heart of the event and something unpresentable at the heart of art. Heidegger and 'The Jews' create a paraIlel between the immemorial fate of the Jewish people and the anti-representative modern destiny of art. Both similarly attest to an original poverty of mind. This is only set in motion when moved by an original terror, an initial shock that transforms it into a hostage of the Other, that unmasterable other which, in the individual psyche, is simply caIled the primary process. The unconscious affect, which not only penetrates the mind but literally opens it, is the stranger in the house, always forgotten, and whose mind must even forget this forgetting in order to be able to pose as master of itself. In the Western tradition, thus Other has supposedly assumed the name of the Jew, the name of the people that is witness to forgetfulness, witness to the original condition of thinking which is the hostage of the Other. It follows that the extermination of the Jews is inscribed in the project of self-mastery of Western thought, in, its will to have done with the witness of the Other, the witness of what is unthinkable at the heart of thought. This condition is supposedly comparable to the modern duty of art. The construction of this duty in Lyotard causes two heterogeneous logic to overlap: an intrinsic logic of the possibilities and impossíbilities specific to a regime of art and an ethical logic of denunciation of the very phenomenon of representation. 

In Lyotard, this overlap is created by the simple identífication of the divide between two regimes in art with the distinction between an aesthetic of the beautiful and an aesthetic of the sublime. 'With the aesthetic of the sublime: Lyotard writes in The Inhuman, 'what is at stake in the arts is their making they witness to the fact that there are things which are indeterminate.' Art supposedly makes itseIf the witness to the 'it happens' which always occurs before its nature, its quid can be grasped; wítness to the fact that there is something unpresentable at the heart of thought which wishes to give itself the material form. The fate of the avant-garde is to attest to this unpresentability that seizes hold of thought, to inscribe the shock of the material, and testify to the original gap. 
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​How is the idea of sublime art constructed? Lyotard refers to Kant's analysis of the powerlessness of the imagination which, faced with certain spectacles, feels carried off beyond its domain led to see in the sublime spectacle - what is called sublime a negative presentation of the ideas of reason that elevate us above the phenomenal order of nature. These ideas manifest their sublimity by the powerlessness of the imagination to create a positive presentation of them. Kant compares this negative presentation with the sublimíty of the Mosaic command thou shalt not make graven images'. The problem is that he does not derive from it any idea of a sublime art attesting to the gap between Idea and material presentation. The idea of the sublime in Kant is not the idea of a kind of art. It is an idea that draws us outside the domain of art, transferring us from the sphere of aesthetic play to that of the ideas of reason and practical freedom.

The problem of 'sublime art' is thus posed in simple terms: one cannot have sublimity both in the form of the commandment prohibiting the image and in the form of an image witnessíng to the prohibition. To resolve the problem, the sublime character of the commandment prohibiting the image must be identified wíth the principIe of a non-representative art. But in order to do that, Kant's extra-artistic sublime has to be identified with a sublime that is defined within art. This is what Lyotard does when he identifies Kant's moral sublime with the poetic sublime analysed by Burke.
 
What, for Burke, did the sublimity of the portrait of Satan in Paradise Lost consist in? In the fact that it brought together 'images of a tower, an archangel, the sun rising through mists, or in an eclipse, the ruin of monarchs, and the revolutíons of kingdoms'. This accumulation of images creates a sense of the sublime by virtue of its multiplicity and disorder - that is, through the under-determination of the 'images' proposed by the words. There ís, Burke noted, an affective power to words that is communicated directly to the mind, short-circuiting material presentation in images. The counter-proof of trust is provided when pictorial visualisation transforms the poem's sublime 'images' into grotesque imagery. Such sublimity is therefore defined on the basis of the very principles of representation and, in particular, the specific properties of the 'visíbility of speech'. Now, in Lyotard this under-determination - this loose relationship between the visible and the sayable - is taken to a limit where it becomes the Kantian indeterminacy of the relationship between idea and material presentation. The colIage of these two 'sublimes' makes it possible to construct the idea of sublime art conceived as a negative presentation, testimony to the Other that haunts thought. But this indetermination is, in reality, an over-determination: what arrives in the pIace of representation is, in fact, the inscription of its initial condition, the trace of the Other that haunts it displayed. 
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This is the price for an alignment of two sets of testimony, of two 'duties to witness'. Sublime art ís what resists the imperialism of thought forgetful of the Other, just as the Jewish people is the one that remembers the forgetting, which puts on the basis of its thought and existence this founding relationship to the Other. The extermination is the end-point of the process of a dialectical reason 'concerned to cancel from its core any alterity, to exude it and, when it is a people, to exterminate it. Sublime art is then the contemporary witness of this planned death and its implementation. It attests to the unthinkability of the initial shock and the unthinkable project of eliminatíng this unthinkability. It does it by testifying to the naked horror of the camps, hut to the original terror of the mind which the terror of the camps wishes to erase. It bears witness not by representing heaps of bodies but through the orange-coloured a flash of lightning that traverses the monochrome of a canvas by Barnett Newman, or any other procedure whereby painting carries out an exploration of its materiaIs when they are diverted from the task of representation.

But Lyotard's schema does quite the opposite of what it claims to do. It argues for some original unthinkable phenomenon resistant to any dialectical assimilation. But it itself becomes the principle of a complete rationalisation. In effect, it makes it possible to identify the existence of a people with an original determination of thought and to identify the professed unthinkability of the extermination with a tendency constituive of Western reason. Lyotard radicalises Adorno's dialectic of reason by rooting it in the laws of the unconscious and transformíng the 'impossíbility' of art after Auschwítz into an art of the unpresentable. But this perfectíng is ultimately a perfecting of the dialectic. What is assigning a people the task of representing a moment of thought, and identifying the extermination of this person with a law of the psychic apparatus, is not a hyperbolic version of the Hegelian operation that makes the moments of the development of spirit - and forms of art - correspond to the concrete hístorícal figures of a people or a civilisation? 

It will be said that this attribution ís a way of disrupting the machine. lt involves haltíng the dialectic of thought at the point where it is in the process of plungíng in. On the one hand, however, the plunge has already been taken. The event has occurred and this having happened is what authorises the discourse of the unthinkable-unrepresentable. On the other hand, we can query the genealogy of this sublime art, anti-dialectical witness to the unpresentable. I have said that Lyotard's sublime was the product of a singular montage between a concept of art and a concept of what exceeds art. But this montage, which confers on sublime art the task of witnessing to what cannot be represented, is itself highly determinate. It is precisely the Hegelian concept of the sublime, as the extreme moment of symbolic art. In Hegel's conceptualization of it, the peculiarity of symbolic art is that it is unable to find a mode of material presentation for its idea. The idea of divinity that inspires Egyptian art cannot hit upon an adequate image in the stone of the pyramids or colossal statues. This failing of positive presentation becomes a success of negative presentation in the sublime art, which conceíves the non-figurable infinity and alterity of the divinity and, in the words of the Jewish 'sacred poem', states this unrepresentability, this distance of divine infiníty from any finite presentation. In short, the concept of art summoned to disrupt the The Hegelian machine is none other than the Hegelian concept of the sublime. 
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In Hegel's theorization, there is not one moment of symbolic. art but two. There is the symbolic art prior to representation. And there is the new symbolic moment that arrives at the end, after the representative era in art, at the end of the Romantic dissociation between content and form. At this extreme point, the interiority that art wishes to express no longer has any form of determinate presentation. The sublime then returns, but in a strictly negative for it is no longer the simple impossibility of a substantial thought findíng adequate material for It is the empty infantilization of the relationshíp between the pure will to art and the thíngs which can be anything - in which ít asserts itself and contemplates its reflection. The polemical functíon of this Hegelian analysis is clear: it aims to reject the notion that another art might be a box out of the dissolution of the determinate relationship between idea and material presentation. For Hegel, such dissolution can only signify the end of art, a state beyond art. The peculiarity of Lyotard's operation is to reínterpret this 'beyond" to transform the bad infinity of an art reduced to reproducing solely íts signature into a fidelity to an original debt. But sublime unrepresentability then confirms Hegel's identification between a moment of art, a moment of thought, and the spírit of a people. The unrepresentable paradoxically becomes the ultimate form in which three speculative postulates are preserved: the idea of a correspondence between the form and the content of art; the idea of a total intelligibílíty of the forms of human experience. including the most extreme; and, finally, the idea of a correspondence between the explanatory reason of events and the formative reason of art. 

I shall conclude briefly with my opening question. Some things are unrepresentable as a function of the conditions to which a subject of representation must submit it is to be part of a determínate regime of art, a specífic regime of the relations between exhibition and signification. Corneille's Oedipe provided us with an example of maximum constraint, a determinate set of conditions defining the properties that subjects of the representation must possess to permit an adequate submission of the visible to the sayable; a certain type of intelligibility concentrated in the connectíon of actions and a well-adjusted dívision of proximity and distance between the representation and those to whom it is addressed. Thís set of conditions excIusively defines the representative regime in art, the regime of harmony between poiesis and aesthesis disrupted by the The Oedipal pathos of knowledge. If there are things which are unrepresentable, they can be located in this regime. In our regime - the aesthetic regime in art this notion has no determinable content, other than the pure notion of discrepancy with the representative regime. It expresses the absence of a stable relationship between exhibition and signification. But this maladjustment tends towards more representation, not less: more possibilities for constructing equívalences, for rendering what is absent present, and for making a particular adjustment of the relationship between sense and non-sense coincide wíth a particular adjustment of the relationship between presentation and revocation. 
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Anti-representative art is constitutively an art without unrepresentable things. There are no longer any inherent límits to representation, to its possibilíties. This boundlessness also means that there is no longer a language or for which is appropriate to a subject, whatever it might be. This lack of appropriateness runs counter both to credence in a language peculiar to art and to the affirmation of the írreducible singularity of certain events. The assertion of unrepresentability claims that some things can only be represented in a certain type of form, by a type of language appropriate to their exceptionality. Stricto sensu, the thís idea is vacuous. It simply expresses a wish: the paradoxical desire that, in the very regime which abolishes the representative suitability of ferrous to subjects, appropriate forms respecting the singularity of the exception still exist. Since this desire is contradictory in principIe, it can only be realised in an exaggeration which, in order to ensure the fallacious equation between anti-representative art and an art of the unrepresentable places a whole regime of art under the sign of holy terror. I have tried to show that this exaggeration itself merely perfects the system of rationalisation it claims to denounce. The ethical requirement that there should be an art appropriate to exceptional experience dictates exaggeration of the forms of dialectical intelligibility against which the rights of the unrepresentable are supposedly being upheld. In order to assert an unrepresentabílity in the art that is commensurate with an unthinkabílity of the event, the latter must itself have been rendered entirely thinkable, entirely necessary according to thought. The logic of the unrepresentable can only be sustained by a hyperbole that ends up destroying it.

Jacques Rancière​/The Future of the Image/Part 1: The Future af the Image/THE SPECULAtIVE HYPERBOLE OF THE UNREPRESENTABLE

The images exhibited by our museums and galleries today can, in fact, be classified into three major categories. First, of all, there ís what might be called the naked image: the image that does not constitute art, because what it shows us excludes the prestige of dissemblance and the rhetoric of exegeses. Thus, a recent exhibition entitled Mémoires des camps devoted one of its sections to photographs taken during the discovery of the Nazi camps. The photographs were often signed by famous names - Lee Miller, Margaret Bourke - White, and so on - but the idea that brought them together was the trace of history, of testimony to a reality that is generally accepted not to tolerate any other form of presentation. ​​

Different from the naked image is what I shall call the ostensive image. This image likewise asserts its power as that of sheer presence, without signification. But it claims it in the name of art. It posits this presence as the peculiarity of art faced with the media circulation of imagery, but also with the powers of meaning that alter this presence: the discourses that present and comment on it, the institutions that display it, the forms of knowledge that historicize it. This position can be encapsulated in the title of an exhibition recently organized at the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts by Thierry de Duve to exhibit 'one hundred years of contemporary art': Voice. The affect of the that was is here apparently referred to the identity without resídue of a presence of which 'contemporaneity' ís the very essence. The obtuse presence that interrupts histories and discourses becomes the luminous power of a face-to-face: facings, as the organizer puts it, obviously contrasting this notion with Clement Greenberg's flatness. But the very contrast conveys the meaning of the operation. Presence opens out into the presentation of presence. Facing the spectator, the obtuse power of the image as being-there-without-reason becomes the radiance of a face, conceived on the model of the icon, as the gaze of divine transcendence. The works of the artist's painters, sculptors, video-makers, installers - are ísolated in their sheer haecceity. But this haecceity immediately splíts in two. The works are so many icons attesting to a singular mode of material presence, removed from the other ways in which ideas and íntentions organíze the data of sense experience. 'Me voici'. 'Nous voici" 'Vous voici' - the three rubrics of the exhibition make them witness to an original co-presence of people and things, of things between themselves, and of people between themselves. And Duchamp's tireless urinal once again does service, via the pedestal on which Stieglitz photographed it. It becomes a display of presence making it possible to identify the dissemblances of art with the interactions of hyper-resemblance. 

The device of the installation can also be transformed into a theatre of memory and make the artist a collector, archivist or window-dresser, placing before the visitor's eyes not so much a critical clash of heterogeneous elements as a set of testimonies about a shared history and world. Thus the exhibition Voilà aimed to recap a century and illustrate the very nation of a century, by bringing together, inter alia, Hans-Peter Feldmann's photographs of ane hundred people aged 0-100, Christian Boltanski's installation of telephone subscribers, Alighiero and Boetti's 720 Letters fr0m Afghanistan, or the Martins' room devoted by Bertrand Lavier to exhíbíting 50 canvases linked only by the family name of their authors. ​

Contrasting with the ostensive image is what I shall call the metaphorical image. Its power as art can be summarized in the exact opposite of Voici: the Voilà that recently gave its time to an exhibition at the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, sub-titled 'te monde dans la tête'. This title and sub-title involve an idea of the relations between art and image that much more broadly inspires a number of contemporary exhibitions. According to this logic, it is impossíble to delimit a specific sphere of presence isolating artistic operations and products from forms of circulation of social and commercial imagery and from operations interpreting this imagery. The images of art possess no peculiar nature of their own that separates them in stable fashion from the negotiation of resemblances and the discursiveness of symptoms. The labor of art thus involves playing on the ambiguity of resemblances and the instability of dissemblances, bringing about a local reorganízation, a singular rearrangement of circulating images. In a sense, the construction of such devices assigns art the tab that once fell to the 'critique of images'. Only this critique, left to the artists themselves, is no longer framed by an autonomous history of forms or a history of deeds changing the world. Thus art is led to query the radicalism of its powers, to devote its operations to more modest tasks. It aims to play with the forms and products of imagery, rather than carry out their demystification. The thís oscillation between two attitudes was evident in a recent exhibition, presented in Minneapolis under the title 'Let's entertain' and in Paris as Au·delà du spectacle. The American title invited visitors both to play the game of an art freed from the criticai seriousness and to mark a critical distance from the leisure industry. For its part, the French title played on the theorization of the game as the active opposite of the passive spectacle in the texts of Guy Debord. Spectators thus found themselves called upon to accord Charles Ray's merry-go-round or Maurizio Catalan's giant table football set their metaphorical value and to take a semi-distance from the game through the media images, disco sounds or commercial mangas reprocessed by other artists.

​This is already true of the image that seems best able, and most obliged, to guard against it - the 'naked' image intent solely on witnessing. For witnessing always aims beyond what it presents. Images of the camps testify not only to the tortured bodies they do show us, but also to what they do not show: the disappeared bodies, obviously, but above all the very process of annihilation. The shots of the reporters from 1945 thus need to be viewed in two different ways. The first perceives the violence inflicted by invisible human beings on other human beings, whose suffering and exhaustion confront us and suspend any aesthetic appreciation. The second perceives not violence and suffering, but a process of de-humanízation, the disappearance of the boundaries between the human, animal and mineral. Now, this second view is itself the product of an aesthetic education, of a certain idea of the image. A photograph by Georges Rodger, displayed at the Mémoires des camps exhibitions, shows us the back of a corpse whose head we cannot see, carried by an SS prisoner whose bowed head shields his face from Our eyes. This horrendous assemblage of two truncated bodies presents us with an exemplary image of the common dehumanization of victim and executioner. But it does 80 only because we see it with eyes that have already contemplated Rembrandt's skinned OX and all the forms of representation which have equated the power of art with obliteration of the boundaries between the human and the inhuman, the living and the dead, the animal and the mineral, all alike merged in the density of the sentence or the thickness of the pictorial paste.

The same dialectic characterizes metaphorical images. These ímages, it is true, are based on a postulate of indiscernibility. They simply set out to displace the representations of imagery, by changing their medium, by locating them in a ditTerent mechanism of vision, by punctuating or recounting them differently. But the question then arises: what exactly is produced as a difference attesting to the specific work of artistic images on the forms of social imagery? This was the question behind the dísenchanted thoughts of Serge Daney's last texts: have not all the forms of critique, have not all the forms of critique, pIay, and irony that claim to disrupt the ordinary circulatíon of images been annexed by that circulation? Modern cinema and criticism claímed to interrupt the flow of media and advertising images by suspending the connections between narration and meaning. The freeze-frame that closes Truffaut's Quatre cent coups was emblematic of this suspension. But the brand thus stamped on the image ultimately serves the cause of the brand image. The procedures of cutting and humor have themselves become the stock-in-trade of advertising, the means by which it generates bath adoration of its icons and the positive attitude towards them created by the very possibility organizing it.

No doubt the argument is not decisive. By definition, what is undecidable can be interpreted in two ways. But it is then necessary discreetly to draw on the resources of the opposite logic. For the ambiguous montage to elicit the freedom of the critical or ladies gaze, the encounter must be organized in accordance with the logic of the ostensive face-to-face, representing advertising images, disco sounds, or television sequences in the space of the museum, isolated behind a curtain in small dark booths that give them the aura of the work damming the flood of communication. Even so, the effect is never guaranteed, because it is often necessary to place a small card on the door of the booth making it clear to viewers that, in the space they are about to enter, they will lead knew how to see and to put the flood of media messages that usually captivates them at a distance. Such exorbitant power attributed to the properties of the device itself corresponds to a rather simplistic view of the poor morons of the society of the spectacle, bathing contentedly in a flood of media images. The interruptions, derivations, and reorganizations that alter the circulation of images less pretentiously have no sanctuary. They occur anywhere and at any time.

But it is doubtless the metamorphoses of the ostensive image that best express the contemporary dialectic of images. For here it proves decidedly difficult to furnish the appropriate criteria for discerning the proclaimed face-to-face, for making presence present. Most of the works put on the pedestal of Voici can not in any way be distinguished from those that contribute to the documentary displays of Voila. Portraits of stars by Andy Warhol, documents from the mythical sectíon of the Aigles du Musée by Marcel Broodthaers, an installation by Joseph Beuys of a batch of commodities from the ex-GDR, Christian Boltanksi's family album, Raymond Hains's stripped posters, or Pistoletto's mirrors - these scarcely seem conducive to extolling the undiluted presence of Voici.

Here too it is then necessary to draw on the opposite logic. The supplement of exegetical discourse proves necessary in order to transform a ready-made by Duchamp into a mystical display or a sleek parallelepiped by Donald Judd into a mirror of intersecting relations. Pop images, neo-realist décollages, monochrome paintings, or minimalist sculptures must be placed under the common authority af a primal scene, occupied by the putative father of pictorial modernity: Manet. But the father ofmodem painting must himself be placed under the authority of the Word made flesh. His modernism and that of bis descendants are indeed defined by Thierry de Duve on the basis of a painting from his 'Spanish' period - Christ mort Soutenu par les anges - inspired by a canvas of Ribalta 's. Unlike his madel, Manet's dead Christ has bis eyes open and is facing the spectator. He is thus an allegory for the task of substitution assigned painting by the 'death of God'. The dead Christ comes back to life in the pure immanence of pictorial presence.8 This pure presence is not that of art, but instead of the redeeming Image. The ostensive image celebrated by the Voici exhibition is the flesh of material presence raised, in its very immediacy, to the rank of absolute Idea. On this basis, ready-mades and Pop images in sequence, minimalist sculptures or fictional museums, are construed in advance in the tradition of icons and the religious economy of the Resurrection. But the demonstration is obviously double edged. The Word is only made flesh through a narrative. An additional operation is always required to transform the products of artistic operations and meaning into witnesses of the original Other. The art of Voice must the based on what it refused. It needs to be presented discursively to transform a 'copy', or a complex relationship between the new and the old, into an absolute origin. ​

Jacques Rancière​/The Future of the Image/Part 1: The Future af the Image/ 'NAKED IMAGE', 'OSTENSIVE IMAGE', 'METAPHORICAL IMAGE​'

edit in Grammarly by Dejan Stojkovski​

by Gilles Deleuze

Painting transmutes this cerebral pessimism into nervous optimism. Painting is hysteria, or converts hysteria, because it makes presence immediately visible
- Gilles Deleuze

​This ground, this rhythmic unity of the senses, can be discovered only by going beyond the organism. The phenomenological hypothesis is perhaps insufficient because it merely invokes the lived body. But the lived body is still a paltry thing in comparison with a more profound and almost unlivable Power [Puissance]. We can seek the unity of rhythm only at the point where rhythm itself plunges into chaos, into the night, at the point where the differences of level are perpetually and violently mixed. ​

Beyond the organism, but also at the limit of the lived body, there lies what Artaud discovered and named: the body without organs. "The body is the body / it stands alone / it has no need of organs / the body is never an organism / organisms are the enemies of bodies." The body without organs is opposed less to organs than to that organization of organs we call an organism. It is an intense and intensive body. It is traversed by a wave that traces levels or thresholds in the body according to the variations of its amplitude. Thus the body does not have organs, but thresholds or levels. Sensation is not qualitative and qualified, but has only an intensive reality, which no longer determines with itself representative elements, but allotropic variations. Sensation is vibration. We know that the egg reveals just this state of the body "before" organic representation: axes and vectors, gradients, zones, cinematic movements, and dynamic tendencies, in relation to which forms are contingent or accessory. "No mouth. No tongue. No teeth. No larynx. No esophagus. No belly. No anus." It is a whole nonorganic life, for the organism is not life, it is what imprisons life. The body is completely living, and yet nonorganic. Likewise sensation, when it acquires a body through the organism, takes on an excessive and spasmodic appearance, exceeding the bounds of organic activity. It is immediately conveyed in the flesh through the nervous wave or vital emotion. Bacon and Artaud meet on many points: the Figure is the body without organs (dismantle the organism in favor of the body, the face in favor of the head); the body without organs is flesh and nerve; a wave flows through it and traces levels upon it; a sensation is produced when the wave encounters the forces acting on the body, an "affective athleticism," a scream-breath. When sensation is linked to the body in this way, it ceases to be representative and becomes real; and cruelty will be linked less and less to the representation of something horrible, and will become nothing other than the action offerees upon the body, or sensation (the opposite of the sensational). As opposed to a miserabiliste painter who paints parts of organs, Bacon has not ceased to paint bodies without organs, the intensive fact of the body. The scrubbed and brushed parts of the canvas are, in Bacon, parts of a neutralized organism, restored to their state of zones or levels: "the human visage has not yet found its face ...." 

A powerful nonorganic life: this is how Worringer defined Gothic art, "the northern Gothic line." It is opposed in principle to the organic representation of classical art. Classical art can be figurative, insofar as it refers to something represented, but it can also be abstract, when it extricates a geometric form from the representation. But the pictorial line in Gothic painting is completely different, as is its geometry and figure. First of all, this line is decorative; it lies at the surface, but it is a material decoration that does not outline a form. It is a geometry no longer in the service of the essential and eternal, but a geometry in the service of "problems" or "accidents," ablation, adjunction, projection, intersection. It is thus a line that never ceases to change direction, that is broken, split, diverted, turned in on itself, coiled up, or even extended beyond its natural limits, dying away in a "disordered convulsion": there are free marks that extend or arrest the line, acting beneath or beyond representation. It is thus a geometry or a decoration that has become vital and profound, on the condition that it is no longer organic: it elevates mechanical forces to sensible intuition, it works through violent movements. If it encounters the animal, if it becomes animalized, it is not by outlining a form, but on the contrary by imposing, through its clarity and nonorganic precision, a zone where forms become indiscernible. It also attests to a high spirituality, since what leads it to seek the elementary forces beyond the organic is a spiritual will. But this ​spirituality is a spirituality of the body; the spirit is the body itself, the body without organs (The first Figure of Bacon would be that of a Gothic decorator).

Life provides many ambiguous approaches to the body without organs (alcohol, drugs, schizophrenia, sadomasochism, and so on). But can the living reality of this body be named "hysteria," and if so, in what sense? A wave with a variable amplitude flows through the body without organs; it traces zones and levels on this body according to the variations of its amplitude. When the wave encounters external forces at a particular level, a sensation appears. An organ will be determined by this encounter, but it is a provisional organ that endures only as long as the passage of the wave and the action of the force, and which will be displaced in order to be posited elsewhere. "No organ is constant as regards either function or position . .. sex organs sprout anywhere .. . rectums open, defecate and close .. . the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments." In fact, the body without organs does not lack organs, it simply lacks the organism, that is, this particular organization of organs. The body without organs is thus defined by an indeterminate organ, whereas the organism is defined by determinate organs: "Instead of a mouth and an anus to get out of order why not have one all-purpose hole to eat and eliminate? We could seal up nose and mouth, fill in the stomach, make an air hole direct into the lungs where it should have been in the first place." But what does it mean to speak of a polyvalent orifice or an indeterminate organ? Are not a mouth and an anus very distinct, and is not a passage of time needed to get from one to the other? Even in the meat, is not there a very distinct mouth, recognizable through its teeth, which cannot be confused with other organs? This is what must be understood: the wave flows through the body; at a certain level, an organ will be determined depending on the force it encounters; and this organ will change if the force itself changes, or if it moves to another level. In short, the body without organs is not defined by the absence of organs, nor is it defined solely by the existence of an indeterminate organ; it is finally defined by the temporary and provisional presence of determinate organs. This is one way of introducing time into the painting, and there is a great force of time in Bacon, time itself is being painted. The variation of texture and color on a body, a head, or a back (as in Three Studies of the Male Back of 1970 [63]) is actually a temporal variation regulated down to the tenth of a second. Hence the chromatic treatment of the body, which is very different from the treatment of the fields of color: the chronochromatism of the body is opposed to the monochromatism of the flat fields. To put time inside the Figure - this is the force of bodies in Bacon: the large male back as variation. 

We can see from this how every sensation implies a difference of level (of order, of domain), and moves from one level to another. Even the phenomenological unity did not give an account of it. But the body without organs does give an account of it, if we look at the complete series: without organs - to the indeterminate polyvalent organ - to temporary and transitory organs. What is a mouth at one level becomes an anus at another level, or at the same level under the action of different forces. Now this complete series constitutes the hysterical reality of the body. If we look at the "picture" of hysteria that was formed in the nineteenth century, in psychiatry and elsewhere, we find a number of features that have continually animated Bacon's bodies. First of all, there are the famous spastics and paralytics, the hyperesthetics or anesthetics, associated or alternating, sometimes fixed and sometimes migrant, depending on the passage of the nervous wave and the zones it invests or withdraws from. Then there are the phenomena of precipitation and anticipation or, on the contrary, of delay (hysteresis), of the afterward, which depend on the accelerations and delays of the wave's oscillations. Next, there is the transitory character of the organ's determination, which depends on the forces that are exerted upon it. Next, there is the direct action of these forces on the nervous system, as if the hysteric were a sleepwalker, a somnambulist in the waking state, a "Vigilambulist." Finally, there is a very peculiar feeling that arises from within the body, precisely because the body is felt under the body, the transitory organs are felt under the organization of the fixed organs. Furthermore, this body without organs and these transitory organs are themselves seen, in phenomena known as internal or external "autoscopia": it is no longer my head, but I feel myself inside a head, I see and I see myself inside a head; or else I do not see myself in the mirror, but I feel myself in the body that I see, and I see myself in this naked body when I am dressed ... and so forth. Is there a psychosis in the world that might include this hysterical condition? "A kind of incomprehensible stopping place in the spirit, right in the middle of everything . . ."

Beckett's Characters and Bacon's Figures share a common setting, the same Ireland: the round area, the isolator, the Depopulator; the series of spastics and paralytics inside the round area; the stroll of the Vigilambulator; the presence of the attendant, who still feels, sees, and speaks; the way the body escapes from itself; that is, the way it escapes from the organism .... It escapes from itself through the open mouth, through the anus or the stomach, or through the throat, or through the circle of the washbasin, or through the point of the umbrella. The presence of a body without organs under the organism, the presence of transitory organs under organic representation. A clothed Figure of Bacon's is seen nude in the mirror or on the canvas (Two Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, 1968 [50]). The spastics and the hyperesthetics are often indicated by wiped or scrubbed zones [71], and the anesthetics and paralytics, by missing zones (as in the very detailed 1972 triptych [70]). Above all, we will see that Bacon's whole "style" takes place in a beforehand and an afterward: what takes place before the painting has even begun, but also what takes place afterward, a hysteresis that will break off the work each time, interrupt its figurative course, and yet give it back afterward .... ​

Presence, presence ... this is the first word that comes to mind in front of one of Bacon's paintings. Could this presence be hysterical? The hysteric is at the same time someone who imposes his or her presence, but also someone for whom things and beings are present, too present, and who attributes to every thing and communicates to every being this excessive presence. There is therefore little difference between the hysteric, the "hystericized," and the "hystericizor." Bacon explains rather testily that the hysterical smile he painted on the 1953 portrait [11], on the human head of 1953 [13], and on the 1955 Pope [19] came from a "model" who was "very neurotic and almost hysterical." But in fact it is the whole painting that is hystericized. Bacon himself hystericizes when, beforehand, he abandons himself completely to the image, abandons his entire head to the camera of a photobooth, or rather, sees himself in a head that belongs to the camera, that has disappeared into the camera. What is this hysterical smile? Where is the abomination or abjection of this smile? Presence or insistence. Interminable presence. The insistence of the smile beyond the face and beneath the face. The insistence of a scream that survives the mouth, the insistence of a body that survives the organism, the insistence of transitory organs that survive the qualified organs. And in this excessive presence, the identity of an already-there and an always-delayed. Everywhere there is a presence acting directly on the nervous system, which makes representation, whether in place or at a distance, impossible. Sartre meant nothing less when he called himself a hysteric, and spoke of Flaubert's hysteria.

What kind of hysteria are we speaking of here? Is it the hysteria of Bacon himself, or of the painter, or of the painting itself, or of painting in general? It is true that there are numerous dangers in constructing a clinical aesthetic (which nonetheless has the advantage of not being a psychoanalysis). And why refer specifically to painting, when we could invoke so many writers or even musicians (Schumann and the contraction of the finger, the audition of the voice...)? What we are suggesting, in effect, is that there is a special relation between painting and hysteria. It is very simple. Painting directly attempts to release the presences beneath representation, beyond representation. The color system itself is a system of direct action on the nervous system. This is not a hysteria of the painter, but a hysteria of painting. With painting, hysteria becomes art. Or rather, with the painter, hysteria becomes painting. What the hysteric is incapable of doing - a little art - is accomplished in painting. It must also be said that the painter is not hysterical, in the sense of a negation in negative theology. Abjection becomes splendor, the horror of life becomes a very pure and very intense life. "Life is frightening," said Cezanne, but in this cry he had already given voice to all the joys of line and color. Painting transmutes this cerebral pessimism into nervous optimism. Painting is hysteria, or converts hysteria, because it makes presence immediately visible. It invests the eye through color and line. But it does not treat the eye as a fixed organ. It liberates lines and colors from their representative function, but at the same time it also liberates the eye from its adherence to the organism, from its character as a fixed and qualified organ: the eye becomes virtually the polyvalent indeterminate organ that sees the body without organs (the Figure) as a pure presence. Painting gives us eyes all over: in the ear, in the stomach, in the lungs (the painting breathes ...). This is the double definition of painting: subjectively, it invests the eye, which ceases to be organic in order to become a polyvalent and transitory organ; objectively, it brings before us the reality of a body, of lines and colors freed from organic representation. And each is produced by the other: the pure presence of the body becomes visible at the same time that the eye becomes the destined organ of this presence.

Painting has two ways of avoiding this fundamental hysteria: either by conserving the figurative coordinates of organic representation, even if that means using them in very subtle ways or making these liberated presences or unorganized bodies pass beneath or between these coordinates; or else by turning toward abstract form, and inventing a properly pictorial cerebrality ("reviving" painting in this direction). Velasquez was undoubtedly the wisest of the classical painters, possessing an immense wisdom: he created his extraordinary audacities by holding firmly to the coordinates of representation, by assuming completely the role of a documentarian... What is Bacon's relation to Velasquez, and why does he claim him as his master? Why, when he speaks of his versions of the portrait of Pope Innocent X, does he express his doubt and discontent? In a way, Bacon has hystericized all the elements of Velasquez's painting. We cannot simply compare the two portraits of Innocent X, that of Velasquez and that of Bacon, who transforms it into the screaming Pope. We must compare Velasquez's portrait with all of Bacon's paintings. In Velasquez, the armchair already delineates the prison of the parallelepiped; the heavy curtain in back is already tending to move up front, and the mantelet has aspects of a side of beef; an unreadable yet clear parchment is in the hand, and the attentive, fixed eye of the Pope already sees something invisible looming up [112]. But all of this is strangely restrained; it is something that is going to happen, but has not yet acquired the ineluctable, irrepressible presence of Bacon's newspapers, the almost animal-like armchairs, the curtain up front, the brute meat, and the screaming mouth. Should these presences ​have been let loose? asks Bacon. Were not things better, infinitely better, in Velasquez? In refusing both the figurative path and the abstract path, was it necessary to display this relationship between hysteria and painting in full view? While our eye is enchanted with the two Innocent Xs, Bacon questions himself.

But in the end, why should all this be peculiar to painting? Can we speak of a hysterical essence of painting, under the rubric of a purely aesthetic clinic, independent of any psychiatry and psychoanalysis? Why could not music also extricate pure presences, but through an ear that has become the polyvalent organ for sonorous bodies? And why not poetry or theater, when it is those of Artaud or Beckett? This problem concerning the essence of each art, and possibly their clinical essence, is less difficult than it seems to be. Certainly music traverses our bodies in profound ways, putting an ear in the stomach, in the lungs, and so on. It knows all about waves and nervousness. But it involves our body, and bodies in general, in another element. It strips bodies of their inertia, of the materiality of their presence: it disembodies bodies. We can thus speak with exactitude of a sonorous body, and even of a bodily combat in music — for example, in a motif - but as Proust said, it is an immaterial and disembodied combat "in which there subsists not one scrap of inert matter refractory to the mind." In a sense, music begins where painting ends, and this is what is meant when one speaks of the superiority of music. It is lodged on lines of flight that pass through bodies, but which find their consistency elsewhere, whereas painting is lodged farther up, where the body escapes from itself. But in escaping, the body discovers the materiality of which it is composed, the pure presence of which it is made, and which it would not discover otherwise. Painting, in short, discovers the material reality of bodies with its line—color systems and its polyvalent organ, the eye. "Our eye," said Gauguin, "insatiable and in heat." The adventure of painting is that it is the eye alone that can attend to material existence or material presence even that of an apple. When music sets up its sonorous system and its polyvalent organ, the ear, it addresses itself to something very different than the material reality of bodies. It gives a disembodied and dematerialized body to the most spiritual of entities: "The beats of the timpani in the Requiem are sharp, majestic, and divine, and they can only announce to our surprised ears the coming of a being who, to use Stendahl's words, surely has relations with another world."14 This is why music does not have hysteria as its clinical essence, but is confronted more and more with a galloping schizophrenia. To hystericize music we would have to reintroduce colors, passing through a rudimentary or refined system of correspondence between sounds and colors.

GILLES DELEUZE: Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation/ Hysteria

My title might lead readers to anticipate some new odyssey of the image, taking us from the Aurorean glory of Lascaux's paintíngs to the contemporary twilight of a reality devoured by media images and an art doomed to monitors and synthetic images. But my intention is different. By examíning how a certain idea of fate and a certain idea of the image are tied up in the apocalyptic discourses of today's cultural climate, I would like to pose the following question: are we in fact referring to a simple, univocal reality? Does not the term "image" contain several functions whose problematic alignment precisely constítutes the labour of art? On this basis it will perhaps be possible to reflect on what artistic images are, and contemporary changes in their status, more soundly. 

Let us start at the beginning. What is being spoken about, and what precisely are we being told, when it is said that there is no longer any reality, but only images? Or, conversely, that there are no more images but only a reality incessantly representing itself to itseIf? These two discourses seem to be opposed. Yet we know that they are forever being converted into one another in the name of a rudímentary argument: if there is now nothing but ímages, there is nothing other than the image. And if there is nothing other than the image, the very notion of the image becomes devoid of content. Several contemporary authors thus contrast the ​lmage, which refers to an Other, and the Visual, which refers to nothing but itself. 

This simple line of argument already prompts a question. That the Same is the opposite of the Other is readily intelligible. Understanding what this Other is its less straightforward. In the first place, by what signs is its presence or absence to be recognized? What allows us to say that the Other is there in one visible form on a screen but not in another? That it is present, for example, in a shot from Au hasard Balthazar and not in an episode of Questions pour un champion? The response most frequently given by detractors of the 'visual' is this: the television image has no Other by virtue of its very nature. In effect, it has its light in itself, while the cinematic image derives it from an external source. This is summarized by Régis Debray in a book called Vie et mort de I'image: "The image here has its light ín-built. It reveals ítself. With its source in itself, ít becomes in our eyes its own cause. Spinozist definition of God or substance."

​The tautology posited here as the essence of the Visual is manifestly nothing but the tautology of the díscourse itself. The latter simply tell us  that the Same is same and the Other other. Through the rhetorical play of telescoped, independent propositions, it passes itself off as more than a tautology by identifying the general properties of universals with the characteristics of a technical device. But the technical properties of the cathode tube are one thing and the aesthetic properties of the images we see on the screen are another. The screen precisely lends itself to accommodating the results both of Questions pour un champion and of Bresson's camera. It is therefore cIear that it is these results which are inherently different. The nature of the amusement television offers us, and af the affects it produces in us, is independent of the fact that the Iight derives from the apparatus. And the intrinsic nature of Bresson's images remaíns unchanged, whether we see the reels projected in a cinema, or through a cassette or disc on our television screen, or a vídeo projection. The Same is not on One side, while the Other is 0n the other. The set with in-built light and the camera of Questions pour un champíon place us before a feat of memory and presence of mind that is in itself foreign to them. On the other hand, the film of the film theatre or the cassette of Au hasard Ballhazar viewed 0f our screen show us images that refer to nothing else, which are themselves the performance. 

ShalI we say that Bresson 's fragmentation vouchsafes us, rather the narrative sequence of those who align cinema with the theater or the novel, the pure images peculiar to this art? But the camera's fixing on the hand' that pours the water and the hand that holds the candles is no more peculiar to cinema than the fixíng of Doctor Bovary's gaze on Mademoiselle Emma's nails, or of Madame Bovary's gaze on those of the notary's clerk, is peculiar to literature. And the fragmentation does not símply break the narrative sequence. It performs a double operation with respect to it. By separatíng the hands from the facial expression, it reduces the action to its essence: a baptism consists in words and hands pouring water over a head. By compressing the action into a sequence of perceptions and movements, add short-circuiting any explanation of the reasons, Bresson's cinema does not realize a peculiar essence of the cinema. It forms part of the novelistic tradítion begun by Flaubert: an ambivalence in which the same procedures create and retract meaning, ensure and undo the link between perceptions, actions and affects. The wordless immediacy of the vísible doubtless radicalizes its effect. but this radicalism itself works through the operatíon of the power which separates cinema from the plastíc arts and makes it approximate to literature: the power of anticipating an effect the better to displace or contradict it. 

The image is never a simple reality. Cinematic images are prímarily operations, relations between the sayable and the visible, ways of playíng wíth the before and the after, cause and effect. These operations involve different image-functions, different meanings of the word 'image'. Two cinematic shots or sequences of shots can thus pertain to a very different 'imaginess'. Conversely, one cinematic shot can pertain to the same type of imaginess as a novelistic sentence or a painting. That is why Eisensteín could look to Zola ar Dickens, as to Greco or Piranesi, for models of cinematic montage; and why Godard can compose a eulogy to cinema using Elie Faure's sentences 0f Rembrandt's painting. 

The image in films is thus not opposed to televisíon broadcasting as alterity is to identity. Television broadcasting likewise has its Other: the effective performance of the set. And cinema also reproduces a constructed performance in front of a camera. It is simply that when we speak of Bresson's images we are not referring to the relationship between what has happened elsewhere and what is happening before our eyes, but to operations that make up the artistic nature of what we are seeing. 'Image' therefore refers to two different things. There is the simple relationship that produces the likeness of an original: not necessarily its faithful copy, but simply what suffices to stand in for it. And there is the interplay of operations that produces what we call art: or precisely an alteration of resemblance. This alteration can take a myriad of forms. It might be the visibility given to brush-strokes that are superfluous when it comes to revealing who is represented by the portrait; an elongation of bodies that expresses their motion at the expense of their proportions; a turn of language that accentuates the expression of a feeling or renders the perception of an idea more complex; a word or a shot in place ​of the ones that seemed bound to follow; and so on and so forth. 

This is the sense in which art ís made up of images, regardless of whether it is figurative, of whether we recognize the form of identifiable characters and spectacles in it. The images of art are operations that produce a discrepancy, a dissemblance. Words describe what the eye might see or express what it wiII never see; they delíberately clarify or obscure an idea. Visible forms yield a meaning to be construed or subtract it. A camera movement anticipates one spectacle and discloses a different one. A pianist attacks a musical phrase 'behind' a dark screen. Ali these relations define images. This means two things. In the first place, the images of art are, as such, dissemblances. Secondly, the image is not exclusive to the visible. There is visibility that does not amount to an image; there are ímages which consist wholly in words. But the commonest regime of the image is one that presents a relationship between the sayable and the visible, a relationshíp whích play on both the analogy and the dissemblance between them. This relationship by no means requires the two terms to be materially present. The visible can be arranged in meaníngful tropes; words deploy a visibility that can be blinding. 

It might seem superfluous to recall such simple things. But if it is necessary to do so, it is because these simple things are forever being blurred, because the identitarian alterity of resemblance has always interfered with the operation of the relations constitutive of artistic images. To resemble was long taken to be the peculiarity of art, while an infinite number of spectacles and forms of imitation were proscribed from it. In our day, not to resembIe is taken for the imperative of art, while photographs, videos and displays of objects similar to everyday ones have taken the place of abstract canvases in galleries and museums. But this formal imperative of non-resemblance is itself caught up in a singular dialectic. For there is growing disquiet: does not resemblíng involve renouncíng the vísible? Or does it involve subjecting its concrete richness to operations and artífices whose matrix resides in language? A counter-move then emerges: what is contrasted with resemblance is not the operativeness of art, but material presence, the spirit made flesh, the absolutely other which is also absolutely the same. 'The Image will come at the Resurrection" says Godard: the Image - that is, the 'original image' of Christian theology, the Son who is not 'similar' to the Father but partakes of his nature. We no longer kill each other for the iota that separates this image from the other. But we continue to regard it as a promise of flesh, capable of dispelling the simulacra of resemblance, the artifices of art, and the tyranny of the letter. 

​In short, the image is not merely double; ít is triple. The artistic image separates its operations from the technique that produces resemblances. But it does so in order to discover a different resemblance en route a resemblance that defines the relation of a being to its provenance and destination, one that rejects the mirror in favour of the immediate relationship between progenitor and engendered: direct vision, glorious body of the community, or stamp of the thing itself. Let us call it hyper-resemblance. Hyper-resemblance is the original resemblance, the resemblance that does not provide the replíca of a reality but attests directly to the elsewhere whence it derives. This hyper-resemblance is the alterity our contemporaries demand from images ar whose dísappearance. together with the image, they deplore. To tell the truth, however, it never disappears. It never stops slipping its own activity ínto the very gap that separates the operations of art from the techniques of reproduction, concealing its rationale in that of art or in the properties of machines of reproduction, even if it means sometimes appearing in the foreground as the ultimate ratíonale of both. ​

It is what emerges in the contemporary stress on distinguishíng the genuine image from its simulacrum on the basis of the precise mode of its material reproduction. Pure form is then no longer counter-posed to bad image. Opposed to both is the imprint of the body which light registers inadvertently, without referring it either to the calculations of painters or the language games of signification. Faced with the image causa suí of the television idol, the canvas or screen is made into a vehicle on which the image of the god made flesh, or of thíngs at their birth, is impressed. And photography, formerly accused of opposing íts mechanical, soulless simulacra to the coloured flesh of painting, sees its image ínverted. Compared wíth pictorial artifices, it is now perceived as the very emanation of a body, as a skin detached from its surface, positively replacing the appearances of resemblance and defeating the efforts of the discourse that would have ít express a meaning.

The imprint of the thing, the naked identity of its alterity in place of its imitation, the wordless, senseless materiality of the visíble instead of the figures of discourse - this is what is demanded by the contemporary celebration of the image or its nostalgic evocation: an immanent transcendence, a glorious essence of the image guaranteed by the very mode of its material production. Doubtless no one has expressed this view better than the Barthes or Camera Lucida, a work that ironically has become the bible of those who wish to think about photographic art, whereas it aims to show that photography is not an art. Against the dispersive muItiplicity of the operatíons of art and games of signification, Barthes wants to assert the immediate alterity of the image - that ís, in the strict sense, the alterity of the One. He wants to establish a direct relationship between the indexical nature of the photographic image and the material way it affects us: the punctum, the immediate pathetic effect that he contrasts with the studium, or the information transmitted by the photograph and the meanings it receives. The studium makes the photograph a material to be decoded and explained. The punctum immediately strikes us with the affective power of the that was: that i.e. the entity which was unquestionably in front of the aperture of the camera obscura, whose body has emitted radiation, captured and registered by the black chamber, which affects us here and now through the 'carnal medium' of light 'like the delayed rays of a star'.

It is unlikely that the author of Mythologies believed in the para-scientific phantasmagoria which makers photagraphy a direct emanation of the body displayed. It is more plausible that this myth served to expiate the sin of the former mythologist: the sin of having wished to strip the visible world of its glories, of having transformed its spectacles and pleasures into a great web of symptoms and a seedy exchange of signs. The semiologist repents having spent much of his life saying: Look out! What you are taking for visible self-evidence is in fact an encoded message whereby a society ar authority legitimates itself by naturalizing itself, by rooting itself in the obviousness of the visible. He bends the stick in the other direction by valorizing, under the title of punctum, the utter self-evidence of the photograph, consigning the decoding of messages to the platitude of the studium.

But the semiologist who read the encoded message of images and the theoretician of the punctum of the wordless image base themselves on the same principIe: a principle of reversible equivalence between the silence of images and what they say. The former demonstrated that the image was in fact a vehicle for a silent discourse which he endeavoured to translate into sentences. The latter tells us that the image speaks to us precisely when it is silent, when it no longer transmits any message to us. Both conceive the image as speech which holds its tongue. The former made its sílence speak; the latter makes this silence the abolition of all chatter. But both play on the same inter-convertibility between two potentialities of the image: the image as raw, material presence and the image as discourse encoding a history. 

A round area often delimits the place where the person that is to say, the Figure is seated, lying down, doubled over, or in some other position. This round or oval area takes up more or less space: it can extend beyond the edges of the painting [64, 37] or occupy the center of a triptych [60, 61]. It is often duplicated, or even replaced, by the roundness of the chair on which the person is seated, or by the oval of the bed on which the person is lying. It can be dispersed in the small disks that surround a part of the person's body, or in the gyratory spirals that encircle the bodies. Even the two peasants in Two Men Working in a Field [66] form a Figure only in relation to an awkward plot of land, tightly confined within the oval of a pot. In short, the painting is composed like a circus ring, a kind of amphitheater as "place." It is a very simple technique that consists in isolating the Figure. There are other techniques of isolation: putting the Figure inside a cube, or rather, inside a parallelepiped of glass or ice [6, 55]; sticking it onto a rail or a stretch-out bar, as if on the magnetic arc of an infinite circle [62]; or combining all these means - the round area, the cube, and the bar - as in Bacon's strangely flared and curved armchairs [38]. These are all "places" [lieux]. In any case, Bacon does not hide the fact that these techniques are rather rudimentary, despite the subtlety of their combinations. The important point is that they do not consign the Figure to immobility but, on the contrary, render sensible a kind of progression, an exploration of the Figure within the place, or upon itself. It is an operative field. The relation of the Figure to its isolating place defines a "fact": "the fact is ...," "what takes place is ...." Thus isolated, the Figure becomes an Image, an Icon. 

Not only is the painting an isolated reality, and not only does the triptych have three isolated panels (which above all must not be united in a single frame), but the Figure itself is isolated in the painting by the round area or the parallelepiped. Why? Bacon often explains that it is to avoid the figurative, illustrative, and narrative character the Figure would necessarily have if it were not isolated. Painting has neither a model to represent nor a story to narrate. It thus has two possible ways of escaping the figurative: toward pure form, through abstraction; or toward the purely figural, through extraction or isolation. If the painter keeps to the Figure, if he or she opts for the second path, it will be to oppose the "figural" to the figurative. Isolating the Figure will be the primary requirement. The figurative (representation) implies the relationship of an image to an object that it is supposed to illustrate; but it also implies the relationship of an image to other images in a composite whole which assigns a ​specific object to each of them. Narration is the correlate of illustration. A story always slips into, or tends to slip into, the space between two figures in order to animate the illustrated whole.2 Isolation is thus the simplest means, necessary though not sufficient, to break with representation, to disrupt narration, to escape illustration, to liberate the Figure: to stick to the fact. 

Clearly the problem is more complicated than this. Is there not another type of relationship between Figures, one that would not be narrative, and from which no figuration would follow? Diverse Figures that would spring from the same fact, that would belong to one and the same unique fact rather than telling a story or referring to different objects in a figurative whole? Nonnarrative relationships between Figures, and nonillustrative relationships between the Figures and the fact? Coupled Figures have always been a part of Bacon's work, but they do not tell a story [60, 61, 66]. Moreover, there is a relationship of great intensity between the separate panels of a triptych, although this relationship has nothing narrative about it [55, 62, 38]. With modesty, Bacon acknowledges that classical painting often succeeded in drawing this other type of relationship between Figures, and that this is still the task of the painting of the future: 

What is this other type of relationship, a relationship between coupled or distinct Figures? Let us call these new relationships matters of fact, 4 as opposed to intelligible relations (of objects or ideas). Even if we acknowledge that, to a large degree, Bacon had already conquered this domain, he did so under more complex aspects than those we have yet considered. 

We are still at the simple aspect of isolation. A Figure is isolated within a ring, upon a chair, bed, or sofa, inside a circle or parallelepiped. It occupies only a part of the painting. What then fills the rest of the painting? A certain number of possibilities are already annulled, or without interest, for Bacon. What fills the rest of the painting will be neither a landscape as the correlate of the Figure, nor a ground from which the form will emerge, nor a formless chiaroscuro, a thickness of color on which shadows would play, a texture on which variation would play. Yet we are moving ahead too quickly. For there are indeed, in Bacon's early works, landscape-Figures like the Van Gogh of 1957 [23]; there are extremely shaded textures, as in Figure in a Landscape (1945) [2] and Figure Study I (1945-6) [4]; there are thicknesses and densities like those of Head II (1949) [5]; and above all, there is that alleged period of ten years which, according to Sylvester, was dominated by the somber, the dark, and the tonal, before Bacon returned to the "clear and precise."5 But destiny can sometimes pass through detours that seem to contradict it. For Bacon's landscapes are a preparation for what will later appear as a set of short "involuntary free marks" lining the canvas, asignifying traits^ that are devoid of any illustrative or narrative function: hence the importance of grass, and the irremediably grassy character of these landscapes (Landscape, 1952 [8]; Study of a Figure in a Landscape, 1952 [9]; Study of a Baboon, 1953 [14]; Two Figures in the Grass, 1954 [17]). As for the textures, the thick, the dark, and the blurry, they are already preparing for the great technique of local scrubbing [nettoyage local] with a rag, handbroom, or brush, in which the thickness is spread out over a nonfigurative zone. Clearly these two techniques of local scrubbing and asignifying traits belong to an original system which is neither that of the landscape, nor that of the formless or the ground (although, by virtue of their autonomy, they are apt to "make" a landscape or to "make" a ground, or even to "make" darkness). 

In fact, the rest of the painting is systematically occupied by large fields [aplats] of bright, uniform, and motionless color. Thin and hard, these fields have a structuring and spatializing function. They are not beneath, behind, or beyond the Figure, but are strictly to the side of it, or rather, all around it, and are thus grasped in a close view, a tactile or "haptic" view, just as the Figure itself is. At this stage, when one moves from the Figure to the fields of color, there is no relation of depth or distance, no incertitude of light and shadow. Even the shadows and the blacks are not dark ("I tried to make the shadows as present as the Figure"). If the fields function as a background, they do so by virtue of their strict correlation with the Figures. It is the correlation of two sectors on a single plane, equally close. This correlation, this connection, is itself provided by the place, by the ring or round area, which is the common limit of the two, their contour. This is what Bacon says in a very important statement to which we will frequently recur. He distinguishes three fundamental elements in his painting, which are the material structure, the round contour, and the raised image. If we think in sculptural terms, we would have to say: the armature; the pedestal, which would be mobile; and the Figure, which would move along the armature together with the pedestal. If we had to illustrate them (and to a certain degree this is necessary, as in the Man with Dog of 1953 [15]), we would say: a sidewalk, some pools, and the people who emerge from the pools on the way to their "daily round."

We will see later what the various elements of this system have to do with Egyptian art, Byzantine art, and so forth. But what concerns us here is this absolute proximity, this co-precision, of the field that functions as a ground, and the Figure that functions as a form, on a single plane that is viewed at close range. It is this system, this coexistence of two immediately adjacent sectors, which encloses space, which constitutes an absolutely closed and revolving space, much more so than if one had proceeded with the somber, the dark, or the indistinct. This is why there is indeed a certain blurriness in Bacon; there are even two kinds of blurriness, but they both belong to this highly precise system. In the first case, the blur is obtained not by indistinctness, but on the contrary by the operation that "consists in destroying clarity by clarity,"9 as in the man with the pig's head in the Self-Portrait of 1973 [72], or the treatment of crumpled newspapers: as Leiris says, their typographic characters are clearly drawn, and it is their very mechanical precision that stands opposed to their legibility.10 In the other case, the blur is obtained by the techniques of free marks or scrubbing, both of which are also among the precise elements of the system. (We will see that there is yet a third case.)

excerpt  from  the  book: Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation/Chapter 1: The Round area, The Ring by GILLES DELEUZE

CD: Your work explores the world of today, a world where telecommunications technology tends to abolish space and time. In this context of worldspace, you advance the idea of a general delocalization. How would you define a delocalized art?

PV: It’s clear that one of the great philosophical and political questions of the day is deconstruction, and deconstruction in a broad sense, not only that of Derrida. Myself, I would say that art may have anticipated this debate over deconstruction, long before architecture and long before the philosophical situation as it stands today.

I would like to recall that the word delocalization has the same root as the Latin verb dislocate, to dislocate; the two words have the same source. The question is then to what extent art can be dislocated, delocalized? And that leads to the question of virtual reality.

We have gone from spatial dislocation – in abstractionism as well as cubism – to the temporal dislocation that is now under way. This means virtualization in its very essence: the virtualization of actions as they occur and not just simply of what was, to recall Barthes’s idea. This is not the virtualization of photography, of reproduction or of film; it’s no longer only in a time lag, but in real time.
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I would also say that relative speed has been the speed of art in general. All art has been a relative speeding-up, not only dance and music, but also painting. What is coming into play today is no longer relative velocity, but absolute velocity. We’re running up against the time barrier. Virtuality is the electromagnetic speed that brings us to the limit of acceleration. It’s a barrier in the sense of ‘no crossing’. This is the whole question of live transmission, global time, near-instantaneous intercommunication. Is the time barrier not also a barrier for art? Doesn’t art have to deal with this contingency, when it comes up short against the barrier of real time?

CD: How has art reached such a barrier? In what forms and under what conditions?

​PV: In order to see what has happened between the inscription of art and its delocalization, we need to look back in time. Art was initially inscribed in bodies and in materials. With cave paintings and tattoos, art was traced in matter. The art of the inscription is what it was, in a material fixity. That was art’s localization. Art and its localization were inseparable in the body of the marked man or in the body of the cave, and then later in frescoes, mosaics, etc. Thus there was a grounded localization of art since its origins; and then, in the course of time, delocalization began, with the easel painting that stepped free of the cave and the skin to become a displaceable, nomadic object. This was still just a relative delocalization, that is to say, not yet a loss of place, but a possibility of movement. Painting, for example, was still inscribed in the reliquary, the illustrated book, the canvas. The Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry were delocalized in the sense that they could be taken away by the feudal lord, but they were still localized in the book. The delocalization we’re dealing with today is nowhere. Art can be nowhere, it only exists in the emission and reception of a signal, only in feedback. The art of the virtual age is an art of feedback. And I’m not yet even talking about the Internet. So, moving from its initial inscription in a place, in a cave, pyramid, or castle, via museums, galleries, and travelling collections, and then through photographic reproduction – where the trip is of another nature – and the CD-Rom, which is still a material support, the art of today with its interactive techniques has now reached the level of instantaneous exchange between actor and spectator, the final delocalization.

Modern decomposition – divisionism, pointillism, cubism and abstractionism, which were all decompositions of figures – manifests another type of delocalization; these artistic movements are no longer to be read in human or animal figures, but in broken figures. This process of decomposition culminates in the fractal image and in computer graphics. We go from modern decomposition to fractalization, the digital image, and finally to absolute virtualization, that is to say, the emission reception of images which are totally instrumental.

That’s a brief summary of the process which has led to the dislocation or delocalization of art today.

Now, to understand what’s at stake here, I’d like to briefly evoke what I call cybersexuality, the climax of virtualization, which is now being pushed, by the Japanese in particular, toward the separation of bodies, the most absolute divorce there is. You can make long-distance love from thousands of miles away, by means of sensors that transmit impulses. I never laugh about cybersexuality, I really don’t find it funny …
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Now, if even sex becomes virtual, what will happen to art? Cybersexuality is the example of total dislocation or delocalization: there is no longer any specific place, just the emission and reception of sensations. It’s clear that art will suffer the consequences. It seems to me now that land art was the last great figure of an art of inscription, before the total delocalization of art in virtual reality. It was inscribed on the scale of the ​earth, the largest territory possible. Is it the beginning of a possible reterritorialization of art, or is it the very last sign, the swan song of art’s inscription on the terrain before its final disappearance into the virtual reality of instantaneous exchange?

CD: Let’s pause for a moment over land art. It seems to me that it’s one aspect of what was called the ‘dematerialization of art’ in the late sixties. The work took place in complex spaces – here and elsewhere – which Robert Smithson, but also Marcel Broodthaers, articulated in their exhibition structures. It was a way of expressing the fact that aesthetic experience takes shape in material and mental spaces which go beyond the singular object.
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​On the other hand, if you take a quick scan of the art scene today, what’s interesting is to see that all these artistic moments or phases are still present. You still have painting, sculpture, installations, cinema, and so-called ‘Internet works’. So there’s quite a broad range …

PV: Hasn’t that always been the case? In the nineteenth century, impressionism coexisted with art pompier, with the very worst of art. What interests me is the leading edge …

​CD: There’s just this one difference, that right now the most significant research is no longer necessarily connected to places of display, or to the traditional places for the experience of art. Could that be the problem today?

PV: That’s exactly why land art is such an important phase. Contrary to other transient forms, land art lasts long enough to exist. Inscription came before exhibition: even if a man exhibited his tattoos, the tattooing was initially done to mark a body. In the same way, if you believe Leroi-Gourhan and other anthropologists, the cave is first of all a place of mystery and initiation. I’m wondering, then, if art didn’t regress from the exhibition, the installation on a wall or in a gallery, to the inscriptions of land art, only finally to disappear, no longer inscribed anywhere but in the instantaneous exchange of sensations offered by virtual reality. What we have today would be a sidereal aesthetics, an aesthetics of disappearance, and no longer one of appearance. Can we hang on to the Raft of the Medusa represented by land art, like a kind of life-saver that would carry us toward a reinscription and reinstallation of art in the here and now, the hic et nunc that I insist on? Or is this life-saver the sign of a sinking ship, and will the victory fall to virtual reality as reciprocal electrocution, the instantaneousness of an art that leaves no trace?

​CD: The works of land art which have best resisted are precisely those which were able to articulate different places and/or times: Smithson with Spiral Jetty and The Monuments of Passaic, or Walter de Maria with Lightning Field. In that last work, the lightning field is integrated by the artist. The work was conceived for a non-urban space, wild, magnetic, and so on, a place you can decide to go to … The access and the effect are deferred, mediated, controlled by the artist himself, particularly through a very rigorous use of photography, which in this case can in no way appear as a convenience or a concession.

PV: I’d like to remark that with Lightning Field it’s also a case of electrocution! I feel like comparing this lightning field to the work of Stelarc, who is another man of electrocution. Body art doesn’t interest me in the least, but Stelarc interests me. He is a lightning field; he is already the support of an electrocution, of a terrifying feedback, like the earth is for Walter de Maria. He returns to the body, a body that is being absorbed, destroyed by foreign cells. He wants to become a non-body, a posthuman body, a ‘beyond-body’, to borrow the theme of an issue of Kunst-forum in which I participated. You had a territorial body for land art, an animal body, male or female, for body art. There is a correlation between the lightning field with its electromagnetic activity and Stelarc’s attempt to be the lightning field himself, through all his electric hook-ups.

CD: Don’t you get the impression that it’s a direct, almost archaic return to the body, a certain way of playing with living flesh, if I daresay … I’m wondering if he isn’t replaying some of the actionists’ strategies, or the strategy of Chris Burden when he had himself shot in the arm. These have never been precisely resituated in their context, the post-1945 context.

PV: Stelarc predates the attempt to replace man by machine, he is the contemporary of a crucifixion of the human body by technology. He is a prerobotic man, the apostle of the machine that will come after him. In a certain way he is the end of his art. He wants to be the Saint John of the body’s Apocalypse, the Saint John of Patmos who prophesies the Apocalypse. That’s why I liken him to Antonin Artaud. Like Kafka, Artaud was a contemporary of the concentration camps. Stelarc is the contemporary of the terrifying things that are happening right now in Yugoslavia and elsewhere, which are not much discussed in art and which we should discuss. I’m still scandalized by a Venice Biennial that takes place a few cable’s lengths from a civil war in Europe, and by the penury of references to that war in Venice. That war cuts right through us, and a man like Stelarc illustrates the fact that man has become useless, that the machine is replacing him. He plays out this loss of his own body; it’s his Baroque side. He actually brags about letting his body be replaced by the machine. [Outside, echoes of a demonstration by strikers and students.] The people marching in Paris while we do this interview are people cast into the street by mass unemployment, because electronic automation and hyperproductivity replace man. Man as a producer, a soldier, a parent, a procreator, is outmoded.
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​But to return to Walter de Maria, those lightning fields were ‘contemporary’ with the atom bomb and the flash of Los Alamos. They aren’t ordinary flashes of lightning. They come after the flashes of the bomb that exploded not far away …

CD: Your interpretation is quite different from the traditional readings of Walter de Maria, which have locked him away between minimal and land art, or criticized the megalomaniacal, even authoritarian aspects of his work [B. Buchloh].
​
​But I’d like to return to your regret over the lack of political involvement or strong testimony in contemporary art, apropos of Venice and Yugoslavia for example. Doesn’t the fading or disappearance of what could be called the critical art of the seventies have to do with the growing domination of communications, with everything involving advertising, with television, or in short, with the forces that tend toward consensus and homogeneousness?

PV: Communication has been taken captive by the media system and the advertising system. The movement of advertising practices is interesting, because it has gone increasingly toward the sidereal and the subliminal, where there is nothing to be seen. Only imperceptible, unconscious sensations, but very effective ones.
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The art market is an advertising market, and not only in the economic sense. It is clear that the critical function – and the function of art criticism – has in fact disappeared in the commercialization of signs. So when I refer to Artaud, for example, it is because Artaud was an art critic, he wasn’t simply an artist: he criticized his time with his art. Like Kafka, he was a kind of prophet of artistic calamity, and at the same time, a prophet of political calamity. Through his confinement and his Judaism, Kafka anticipates the camps – and they’ll all die there, even Milena, in Dachau. In his own way, Stelarc ‘prophesies’ through the very violence of his tribulation, through the dangerous pressure of technology on his body. Of course that’s not a political commitment like Picasso’s during the Cold War, with his doves and so on … Nor does it have anything to do with Sartre’s engagement.

So when I see Walter de Maria’s lightning field, I can’t help but think of Electromagnetic Impulses, EMP. I’m what’s called a ‘defensive intellectual’, in the sense that I’m familiar with military affairs, and with generals! The time of Lightning Field – 1977 – corresponds to the period of tension between the power blocs. A debate was raised over the EMP effect, that is, the electromagnetic discharge provoked by nuclear explosions in the upper atmosphere: before attacking the other side, a bomb would be set off in the upper atmosphere to knock out all the communication systems, all the intercommunication between the chiefs of staff. In fact, this was why the Americans launched the Internet, which at the time was called Arpanet. In the event of atomic war it was supposed to function after EMP, allowing for communication despite the destruction of other networks. It’s a matter of armouring the communication devices against this electromagnetic effect that blows all the fuses. Now we’re really in the theme of the flash! And lo and behold, an artist, who may not know a thing about it, stages EMP. His field is more than just lightning flashes, it’s a kind of atom bomb!
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The delocalization I’m talking about proceeds from electromagnetism. The problems of proximity, of localization if you wish, have always been linked to energies. The first proximity was linked to animal energy, it meant walking or going on horseback. The animal is the energetic element of the past and it’s no accident if people painted them in caves. Later the relations of proximity and localization are linked to mechanics, it’s the railway, the automobile, we’re still living in this one. But since the seventies we have entered an effect of electromagnetic proximity, through impulses, always that famous feedback between an emitter and a receiver.
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Therefore I have the strong impression that this question of dislocation and delocalization in art is also linked to the energy that replaces the mechanical energy of Léger’s Ballet mécanique, and of the experiments in concrete music which had such a formative influence on us. Because you need energy to delocalize, to lose your place.

CD: One also gets the feeling that excepting the minority of artists who are already working in virtual reality, the most visible, most spectacular development is the parasitic absorption of art by the aesthetics of communication, or better, of design, cultural, social, or political design. Energy isn’t really my specialty … But if you take a quick look around the scene, doesn’t it seem that the artistic postures or positions that can still hold their own are those that can mark distances, or as Godard would say, can still change speeds?

​PV: That’s exactly what’s threatened …

​CD: Such works aren’t caught up in events, in things, they avoid idiosyncrasy.

PV: Isn’t dislocation precisely a resistance to this dissolution of art? Take the example of architecture: it too is threatened with dissolution by the new technologies. The various avenues of research into glass and steel are signs of a possible dissolution of the materiality of architecture. When architecture is threatened with dissolution, that is, with ‘anything goes’, what’s brought into play is a kind of deconstruction: people invent forms that dislocate the geometrical orthodoxy of architectural space, of simple architectural figures. This is what you have with Libeskind, Zaha Hadid and Eisenmann. Faced with the threat of a dissolution of art, could a form of dislocation be an attempt at resistance?

​CD: How would you identify the artists of dislocation on the contemporary scene?

PV: They would be people working precisely with the fact that art no longer takes place, that it has become pure energy. Lots of artists have anticipated the loss of place, the non-place of art, they anticipate it in an energeticism that can include the most shocking of images, or the most rapid of images on the feedback level. Is this attempt at energeticism one of the last ways of standing up against dissolution? Like someone who feels his strength failing him and puts all his force into his last punch, precisely because he knows it’s his last.
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​I see that in dance, in theatre, in video, in all the arts I still enjoy. I’m repelled by the plastic arts now, there’s nothing left, for me it’s over …

​CD: Great news!

PV: There’s dance, there’s theatre, and video installations in the broad sense. Theatre, for example, is playing with video. It no longer plays with film as it once tried to, with little success. I’ll take the example of a very successful play by Heiner Müller which wasn’t much talked about, Bildbeschreibungen, which appeared shortly after my book Logistics of Perception: War and Cinema [1984/1989], and which was influenced by it, as Heiner Müller readily admits. I have great admiration for Heiner Müller. Here is a theatre that really plays with the deferred time of video: you have a video receiver that functions as a rear-view mirror, letting the spectator see something other than what’s to be seen on the stage. There’s a direct vision of bodies on the stage, plus the retroactive time of video that plays something else. That’s an experiment in the area of theatre; we could find many more. Let’s take another example from dance. I like William Forsythe very much. The effort demanded from Forsythe’s dancers goes all the way to the breaking-point. It’s a performance of the body. Forsythe is on the edge of dislocating his dancers.

As for video installations, they are dematerializing. The coherence and structure of Michael Snow’s La Région centrale – an absolute masterpiece in my opinion, as Deleuze also said so well – made it the film of the here and now: you plant an object in the ground, make it turn, and on that basis you show a world. That was absolute localization. When you see installations now, they are dislocating themselves, delocalizing. They are efforts to break through, to lose place, to be nowhere. To be dislocated, delocalized – and the people out demonstrating in the streets don’t realize this clearly enough – means being nowhere, not going somewhere else. In France people speak about delocalizing corporations and administrations. But being delocalized doesn’t mean going to the suburbs or the provinces, it means no longer being anywhere! This year IBM delocalized its head office to go nowhere, next year IBM won’t have any head office, the first delocalized corporation …

I’m mixing levels, of course, and I’m doing it on purpose. I’m not an art critic, I’m a critic of new technologies.
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​So it seems to me, through these examples of dance and theatre, that in order to resist the dissolution of art, not to say the end of art and its total disappearance, people are risking the challenge of dislocation, of delocalization, of a transfer into energy. An art that would be nothing other than energetic.

​CD: You haven’t mentioned cinema at all.

PV: For me, cinema is over. For years I haven’t been able to put up with cinema, first of all because I can no longer put up with the ritual of the movies. Cinema should have changed its theatres. It exists by virtue of a space called the movie theatre, and the movie theatre should be constantly revolutionized, like art. But obviously it’s more expensive to make new movie theatres every two years than to make new films every two years … Serge Daney and I often spoke of this: we need Godards of the movie theatre, otherwise Godard himself will disappear. Cinema takes place, it has its dark room, its camera obscura, and it needs to make that place evolve. Today the camera obscura is virtual space, it’s the video-helmet, there’s no more dark room. That’s another delocalization …

​CD: Aren’t the plastic arts somewhat like cinema in that they fundamentally need a place, even if it’s only temporary?

​PV: That brings us back to the same problem, the problem of the body. You no longer make a phone call from your home, in a place, but you phone out in the street, the telephone is on you, it’s portable, cellular. Are we heading toward a cellular art, just as we have cellular telephones? A portable art, on you or even in you?

​CD: How do you interpret the attitude of certain young artists today who claim to work on and in the social?

PV: Lucy Orta, for example, has done work along those lines. Work on the body, on clothes, on the portable. Her clothes are not for fashion but for survival, they are apocalyptic clothes in a certain way. She makes clothes for several people, five people who put on the same outfit: kinds of diving suits, places of junctural proximity … She does it because there are more and more people out in the street. In fact she began at the Salvation Army where her first exhibitions took place. Her art is a kind of alarm signal: the symptomatic clothing of a drama, the drama of survival in the city under normal conditions.

​CD: Would that be a critical contemporary art?

PV: Yes, in the sense of Kafka or Artaud. In the fundamental sense, not in the sense of political commitment. I’d like to return to the last hold-outs against delocalization and dislocation. Since art has already left its spaces and begun floating through the worlds of advertising and the media, the last thing that resists is the body. Whatever artists like Stelarc may think, whatever dancers and theatre people may think, they are artists of habeas corpus, they bring their bodies. And yet they are on the front lines, the possibility of going beyond the body is posited through them. The dramatic thing in theatre, dance and body art in the sense we were just talking about, is that they prefigure a limit. They ask the question ‘How far?’ That’s also an ethical question in the context of genetic engineering, in the problems of traffic in human beings as improvable raw materials, the body considered as raw material, the body of ‘hominiculture’, as some scientists say.
​That’s why I’m in love with bodies. I think that alongside ‘SOS save our souls’ we should invent an ‘SOS save our bodies from electromagnetic electrocution’. Everybody ought to reread the great book of Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Future Eve, the source for the Maria of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the electric woman. The book prefigures the overcoming of the body by wave bodies, bodies of emission and reception, and therefore cybersexuality, but also cybersociality and cyberculture in general …

​CD: How would you explain the paradoxical co-existence, among the youngest artists, of a certain kind of work on the body and a fascination for the Internet at the same time?

PV: It’s very tempting to become an angel, but there’s a thin line between being an angel and not being at all. Many young artists are tempted by dematerialization, it’s the angel’s leap. They don’t want to die, they want to be dead, that is, to be deprived in a certain way of the bother of having a body, the bother of feeling tired, of being disturbed by the people around them. And telecommunicating is a way of zapping your communicatees, of privileging the farthest over your neighbour. ‘Love the farthest as yourself’, said Nietzsche: that means being able to zap him. On the contrary, loving your neighbour is more difficult, because there’s no zapping; you have to deal directly with your neighbour, he smells bad or is demanding … There’s a kind of myth of becoming an angel which is tempting. When you’re older, you know that you will very soon be an angel …

​CD: If everything shifts, if even for a short time, you can no longer inscribe the meaning of it all, then what can you do?

PV: You shock the other, you electrocute him, you put him out of action. Terrorism isn’t just a political phenomenon, it’s also an artistic phenomenon. It exists in advertising, in the media, the reality show, the pornographic media. The last thing to do is to give the other a punch in the face to wake him up. It’s the image of that blind, deaf, and dumb kid in the 1950s who was totally isolated from the world and who was knocked out of his isolation by a slap. The shock gave him his speech back.
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You can see that in the suburbs right now, speech is replaced by violence. The punch is the beginning of communication: a punch brings you back into proximity when words are lacking. Art is at that point right now. The terrorist temptation of art has already settled in everywhere. But the exhibition Fémininmasculin should have been done as a punch in the 1950s, or in the Victorian age, today’s it’s just marketing.
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Despite Auschwitz, it’s true, everything has been done. One should never forget Adorno’s idea, ‘Can poetry still be written after Auschwitz?’ After the end of abstract art, after all those people who were still people of culture, we have stuttered the horror revealed by Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

​CD: And yet there was cinema, Rossellini …

PV: It’s true, at the same time there was Rossellini, Rome Open City, all that extraordinary documentary work …

​CD: In this context, what is the model for an exhibition?

​PV: You have to fight for the here and now. Being here is now one of the great philosophical questions, but its also one of the great artistic questions. Telesexuality is the disappearance of being, it’s a phenomenon of the diversion of the human species: making love with an angel, with the future Eve. The question of the here and now is an absolute question in all fields. It is absolute in democracy, in mores, in sociality. In the same way, you have to ask the question of the presence of art. Is there a telepresence of art and to what point can art be telepresent without disappearing?

​CD: This is the problem of the exhibition that must create or recreate a place for itself, even temporarily …

PV: The installation interests me because it poses the problem of place and non-place. Let’s take three examples in architecture: first, the non-place of the vestibule in the bourgeois home, a semi-public, semi-private space. The people entering are in a quasi-virtual space, because they enter without being greeted; that’s the case for the postman, for example. The second place is the telephone booth, which is also a semi-private, semipublic space, there’s no more body, there’s only the voice, and even that … And the third, which has just been brought into operation, is the virtual portal, what I refer to as the calling chamber. A room entered by the clone of your visitor, his spectre. Inside your data suit you see the clone, it sees you, you shake its hand, you smell its perfume. The only thing you can’t do with it is drink a glass of Bordeaux, tele-tasting is not possible, not yet!

This example is the final delocalization, the meeting of spectres, of angels, the dislocation of the real encounter with the other.
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​Art participates in this situation. The here and now is equally put into question.

CD: The ultimate interest of an exhibition is to offer an alternative to the meeting of clones. You take the trouble to go, you travel to see things you would never see elsewhere, or at least not under the same conditions.

PV: What has actually happened to the real presence of art? Here’s another image, Michel de Certeau gave me this one. When Galileo’s telescope was invented, the Jesuits of the time raised a theological question: do we attend mass if we watch it through a telescope?

Today when Bill Gates calls up all the paintings of the Louvre onto the screens lining the walls of his bunker-architecture, he sets off the process of the telepresence of art. The question of reproduction has been asked with photography. Barthes said it all on that subject. It’s a movement toward the spectralization of art, toward cloning!
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Even the non-place evolves and progresses toward the immaterial. The non-place in the sense of Marc Augé, airports, telephone booths, freeway interchanges, is none the less a constructed non-place. While the telephone booth is still quite present, the modular structure heralds the spectre. The statue of the commander is all of us.
So, is there a phantom of art?

CD: The great contemporary artists, like Smithson, Broodthaers, and Dan Graham, have worked intensively with exhibition structures. With Broodthaers, for example, the work is conceived as an exhibition and the exhibition as a work. We’re still far from telepresence.

PV: But they’re threatened with dislocation! Let’s take video, a medium that still had some materiality. Even if video was an art of the non-place, it still had an inscription, a materiality that virtual reality and computer graphics no longer have. So I come back to my question: what has happened to the presence of art? It’s a philosophical question which is practically without an answer, and at the same time, it’s the question being posed concretely right now.

​CD: Nonetheless, it seems to me that there are two realities: possibility and actuality. I have the feeling that telesexuality, for example, is not widely available … In the same way, only a minority of artists are working in virtual reality.

​PV: Of course, but it’s a tension. What’s interesting is not the fact that it exists, but that it’s being actively sought. The Gulf War was already a war by telecommand, long-distance. Now they’re working on cyberwar, with insect-size sensors. Instead of reconnaissance aircraft or drones, you send out tiny sound-and-image sensors that survey space like bees. And at the same time, it’s true, the war in Yugoslavia exists.

​CD: In the same way that art still assumes a material presence.

​PV: For how long?

CD: An exhibition like Documenta tries to work in the here and now.1 Therefore we have to enquire into the way of presenting works that still propose a real experience, an aesthetic, cognitive, sensible, even ethical experience.

PV: What should be shown is everything that fundamentally resists, not in a conservative way but a provocative way. I’m not a curator of ancient forms of art, I say that conservation becomes a provocative phenomenon. The conservation of the here and now, of presence and localization, is a provocative phenomenon. The Fauves of today are those who are working on the presence of art.

CD: That means inventing exhibition structures. It would be foolish and dangerous to try to outdo television. Some people consistently cite television as a possible model of exhibition. On the contrary, I believe it’s urgent to set up barriers to zapping.

PV: Anyway, television is out of date. It’s already in a state of breakdown! Multimedia will be the death of television, its absorption into virtual reality. Cinema is dead, as I already said, but cinema is what makes television resist. If there were no more cinema, television would be long gone. The two cadavers hold each other upright. I say that from within a love of cinema which I once had and can have no longer …

In a period of occupation you don’t speak of resistance, said Serge Daney. The occupation is by the media. We are occupied by teletechnologies and we must be part of the resistance. Today there are the collaborators and the resistance.
​
Me, I’m in the resistance. What we’re actually doing here, with lots of questions, is exploring the dark spot of art today. That’s resistance. It’s not conservative resistance, but liberating resistance.

​CD: How can an exhibition – which is more and more a place of cultural consumption ‘without qualities’ – be a space of resistance?

PV: At the time when François Burckardt was at the Pompidou Centre, after Lyotard’s exhibition Les Immatériaux, Lyotard and I received two commissions. Les Immatériaux was one of the great exhibitions, a failure and a stroke of genius all at once, a successful failure, a contradiction. He ​got a commission on resistance, all forms of resistance, electric, social, military, etc. And I got a commission on acceleration. Two contradictory exhibitions, obviously. Everything I’m talking about happens within an acceleration that emancipates us from places, from the body, from ourselves, from others, and finally from democracy …

​CD: Can strategies be invented to resist acceleration, to maintain the distances, depths and heterogeneous elements that still exist in aesthetic production – strategies other than desperate attempts at restoration, like the one we saw in Venice this summer?

PV: Initially, at the time when the Pompidou Centre was still being planned, what was envisioned was to present not only exhibitions but also art in the making, studios and labs, a zoo of working artists. It’s clear that it didn’t come out that way, but that aspect was at the basis of Beaubourg. A place where creation would be exhibited while taking place, not a depot of works but a research centre. The Frisco exploratorium has the same kind of dimension in a certain way; you have the work of the day, the work is presented as a trajectory and not as an object. You’re offered whatever has just arrived, like in a railway station. In this idea of Beaubourg, art was in the trajectory of art and not only in its arrival.
​
​But that wasn’t really a new idea, the romantic painters of the nineteenth century had artistic duels at their openings, they finished the canvas in front of the visitors. When Turner added the steam to the locomotive emerging from the fog and figured speed for the first time in a painting, he was anticipating art as a trajectory by trying to finish the painting in front of people. Something was played out there which continues in the idea of Beaubourg. Not consuming the finished product, but being at the level of the act, of the theatricalization of the act. It’s the idea of an art that wouldn’t be deferred but would exist in real time, live. Behind this temptation, something is being declared about the time of art, I don’t know what. It’s the same interest in improvisation, in jazz, an interest in art being made.

​CD: Nonetheless I have the impression that behind this desire for real time there are other, less admissible preoccupations, the search for the spectacular, the exhibitionism of the medium … Everything is art, all the time, everybody is an artist – absolute relativism!

PV: It’s true that if everyone is an artist there’s no more art, and that’s what’s happening. That’s the reason why I say that for me, the plastic arts are finished, it’s over, alles fertig. I’m not joking!

​CD: You’re saying that to someone in charge of a major exhibition! …

PV: … which is called ‘alles fertig’, it’s all over? No, let’s get serious again! The presence of art, and therefore its localization, is threatened. And yet that’s exactly where the solution to the threat lies, in the question of the temporality of art today. We have attained the limit of velocity, the capacity for ubiquity, for instantaneousness and immediacy. The fact of having reached the wall of the speed of light makes us the contemporaries of ubiquity. Art is in the phase of globalization.
​
I don’t have the answer, but it is in this question that the answer lies, and it’s up to the artists to answer. Some video artists have done it, Gary Hill, Michael Snow, Bill Viola; theatre does it, choreographers do it, plastic artists don’t do it enough.

​CD: But what’s happening in theatre, contrary to the plastic arts, is of the order of representation, and representation implies distance. An aesthetics with no step back is just advertising. How would you discuss this question of distance?

​PV: It’s the problem of the interval. The interval of space, of time, and the third interval, according to physicists, the interval of light, the zero sign. This third interval is what brings ubiquity into play. It’s what allows you to be the contemporary of an event on the other side of the world.

CD: Without an interval you’re in ‘the same’, you cannot be a witness. To be a witness is to have seen, from not far away. Can art still bear witness? I don’t want to subscribe to all the sociological recipes that are being served up just now. But the dimension of witnessing is important.

PV: We always come back to the dark spot of the presence of art today … The possibility of a disappearance of art was evoked in the nineteenth century by Rodin, Cézanne and many others, who thought at that time that art could disappear. They weren’t pretending. Nor did they say it was apocalyptic. Art can disappear. In a certain way Auschwitz was a disappearance of art, an event so far outside history that it is a kind of proof that the worst can happen. I am of the generation that can envisage the disappearance of art. All the questions that we’re asking here turn around this possible disappearance. As long as people censor the possible disappearance of art there will be no art. To think about the here and now, the temporality and presence of art, is to oppose its disappearance, to refuse being a collaborator.

Now, art plays with this possible disappearance, finds it amusing, because it doesn’t take it seriously. Lots of artists are already profiting from the death of art, they’re not like Artaud who announced the possibility of the end, they’re already in the after-death and they’re profiting. They’re inheriting from the cadaver.
​
I think our time is as unheard-of as the period before the Renaissance. Before the incredible explosion of the Renaissance there was the tragedy. Today we’re entering the tragedy. A world is coming to an end. Careful – it’s not the end of the world, I can’t stand all the apocalyptic ravings people indulge in today. But I’m sure it’s the end of a world. Once you recognize this situation – and what a daunting situation it is, to topple over into an unheard-of and ungraspable world – then you also have to recognize that it’s fantastically exciting!

​Translated by Brian Holmes

​The adventure of modern art is over. Contemporary art is contemporary only with itself. It no longer knows any transcendence either towards past or future; its only reality is that of its operation in real time and its confusion with that reality. 

Nothing now distinguishes it from the technical, promotional, media, digital operation. There is no transcendence, no divergence anymore, nothing of another scene merely a specular play with the contemporary world as it takes place. It is in this that contemporary art is worthless: between it and the world, there is a zero-sum equation.

Quite apart from that shameful complicity in which creators and consumers commune wordlessly in the examination of strange, inexplicable objects that refer only to their selves and to the idea of art, the true conspiracy lies in this; complicity that art forges with itself, its collusion with the real, through which it becomes complicit in that Integral Reality, by which it is now merely the image-feedback. 

There is no longer any differential of art. There is only the integral calculus of reality. Art is now merely an idea prostituted in its realization. 

Modernity was the golden age of a deconstruction of reality into its simple elements, of a detailed analytics, first of impressionism, then of abstraction, experimentally open to all the aspects of perception, of sensibility, of the structure of the object and the dismemberment of forms. 

The paradox of abstraction is that, by 'liberating' the object from the constraints of the figural to yield it up to the pure play of form, it shackled it to an idea of a hidden structure, of an objectivity more rigorous and radical than that of resemblance. It sought to set aside the mask of resemblance and of the figure in order to accede to the analytic truth of the object. Under the banner of abstraction, we moved paradoxically towards more reality, towards an unveiling of the 'elementary structures' of objectality, that is to say, towards something more real than the real.

Conversely, under the banner of a general aestheticization, art invaded the whole field of reality. 

​The end of this history saw the banality of art merge with the banality of the real world - Duchamp's act, with its automatic transference of the object, being the inaugural (and ironic) gesture in this process. The transference of all reality into aesthetics, which has become one of the dimensions of generalized exchange ... 

All this under the banner of a simultaneous liberation of art and the real world.

This 'liberation' has in fact consisted in indexing the two to each other - a chiasmus lethal to both.

​The transference of art, become a useless function, into a reality that is now integral, since it has absorbed everything that denied, exceeded or transfigured it. The impossible exchange of this Integral Reality for anything else whatever. Given this, it can only exchange itself for itself or, in other words, repeat itself ad infinitum. 

What could miraculously reassure us today about the essence of art? Art is quite simply what is at issue in the world of art, in that desperately self-obsessed artistic community. The 'creative' act doubles up on itself and is now nothing more than a sign of its own operation - the painter's true subject is no longer what he paints but the very fact that he paints. He paints the fact that he paints. At least in that way the idea of art remains intact. 

​This is merely one of the sides of the conspiracy. 

The other side is that of the spectator who, for want of understanding anything whatever most of the time, consumes his own culture at one remove. He literally consumus the fact that he understands nothing and that there is no necessity in all this except the imperative of culture, of being a part of the integrated circuit of culture. But culture is itself merely an epiphenomenon of global circulation. 

The idea of art has become rarefied and minimal, leading ultimately to conceptual art, where it ends in the non-exhibition of non-works in non-galleries - the apotheosis of art as non-event. As a corollary, the consumer circulates in all this in order to experience his non-enjoyment of the works .

At the extreme point of a conceptual, minimalis  logic, art ought quite simply to fade away. At that point, it would doubtless become what it is: a false problem, and every aesthetic theory would be a false solution.
​
And yet it is the case that there is all the more need to speak about it because there is nothing to say. The movement of the democratization of art has paradoxically merely strengthened the privileged status of the idea of art, culminating in this banal tautology of 'art is art', it being possible for everything to find its place in this circular definition . 

As Marshall McLuhan has it, 'We have now become aware of the possibility of arranging the entire human environment as a work of art'.

​The revolutionary idea of contemporary art was that any object, any detail or fragment of the material world, could exert the same strange attraction and pose the same insoluble questions as were reserved in the past for a few rare aristocratic forms known as works of art. 

That is where true democracy lay: not in the accession of everyone to aesthetic enjoyment, but in the transaesthetic advent of a world in which every object would, without distinction, have its fifteen minutes of fame (particularly objects without distinction). All objects are equivalent, everything is a work of genius. With, as a corollary, the transformation of art and of the work itself into an object, without illusion or transcendence, a purely conceptual acting-out, generative of deconstructed objects which deconstruct us in their turn.

No longer any face, any gaze, any human countenance or body in all this - organs without bodies, flows, molecules, the fractal . The relation to the 'artwork' is of the order of contamination, of contagion: you hook up to it, absorb or immerse yourself in it, exactly as in flows and networks. Metonymic sequence, chain reaction. 

No longer any real object in all this: in the ready-made it is no longer the object that's there, but the idea of the object, and we no longer find pleasure here in art, but in the idea of art. We are wholly in ideology. 

And, ultimately, the twofold curse of modern and contemporary art is summed up in the 'ready-made': the curse of an immersion in the real and banality, and that of a conceptual absorption in the idea of art. 

' ... that absurd sculpture by Picasso, with its stalks are leaves of metal; neither wings , nor victory, just a testimony; a vestige - the idea, nothing more , of a work of art. Very silmilar to the other ideas and vestiges that inspire our existence - not apples, but the idea, the reconstruction by the pomologist of what apples used to be - not ice-cream, but the idea, the memory of something delicious, made from substitutes, from starch , glucose and other chemicals - not sex, but the idea or evocation of sex - the same with love, belief, thought and the rest . . . '

Art, in its form, signifies nothing. It is merely a sign pointing towards absence.

But what becomes of this perspective of emptiness and absence in a contemporary universe that is already totally emptied of its meaning and reality? 

Art can now only align itself with the general insignificance and indifference. It no longer has any privileged status. It no longer has any other final destination than this fluid universe of communication , the networks and interaction. 

Transmitter and receiver merging in the same loop: all transmitters, all receivers. Each subject interacting with itself, doomed to express itself without any longer having time to listen to the other. 

The net and the networks clearly increase this possibility of transmitting for oneself in a closed circuit, everyone going ​at it with their virtual performances and contributing to the general asphyxia. 

This is why, where art is concerned, the most interesting thing would be to infiltrate the spongiform encephalon of the modern spectator, For this is where the mystery lies today: in the brain of the receiver, at the nerve centre of this servility before 'works of art'. What is the secret of it? 

​In the complicity between the mortification 'creative artists' inflict on objects and themselves, and the mortification consumers inflict on themselves and their mental faculties.

Tolerance for the worst of things has clearly increased considerably as a function of this general state of complicity.

Interface and performance - these are the two current leitmotifs.

In performance, all the forms of expression merge - the plastic arts, photography, video, installation, the interactive screen. This vertical and horizontal, aesthetic and commercial diversification is henceforth part of the work, the original core of which cannot be located.

A non-event like The Matrix illustrates this perfectly: this is the very archetype of the global installation, of the total global fact: not just the film, which is, in a way, the alibi, but the spin-offs, the simultaneous projection at all points of the globe and the millions of spectators themselves who are inextricably part of it. We are all, from a global, interactive point of view, the actors in this total global fact.

Photography has the self same problem when we undertake to multi-mediatize it by adding to it all the resources of montage, collage, the digital and CGI, etc. This opening-up to the infinite, this deregulation, is, literally, the death of photography by its elevation to the stage of performance. 

Since the nineteenth century, it has been art's claim: that it is useless . It has prided itself on this (which was not the case in classical art, where, in a world that was not yet either real or objective, the question of usefulness did not even arise). Extending this principle, it is enough to elevate any object to uselessness to turn it into a work of art. This is precisely what the 'ready-made' does, when it simply withdraws an object from its function, without changing it in any way, and thereby turns it into a gallery piece. It is enough to; turn the real itself into a useless function to make it an art object, prey to the devouring aesthetic of banality. Similarly, old objects, being obsolete and hence useless, automatically acquire an aesthetic aura. Their being distant from us in time is the equivalent of Duchamp's artistic act; they too become 'ready-mades', nostalgic vestiges resuscitated in our museum universe. 

We might extrapolate this aesthetic transfiguration to the whole of material production. As soon as it reaches a threshold where it is no longer exchanged in terms of social wealth, it becomes something like a giant surrealist object, in the grip of a devouring aesthetic, and everywhere takes its place in a kind of virtual museum. And so we have the modification, like a 'ready-made', of the whole technical environment in the form of an industrial wasteland. 

The logic of uselessness could not but lead contemporary art to a predilection for waste, which is itself useless by definition. Through waste, the figuration of waste, the obsession with waste, art fiercely proclaims its uselessness. It demonstrates its non-use-value, its non-exchange-value at the same time as selling itself very dear. 

There is a misconception here. Uselessness has no value in itself. It is a secondary symptom and, by sacrificing its aims to this negative quality, art goes completely off track, into a gratuitousness that is itself useless. It is the same scenario, more or less, as that of nullity, of the claim to non-meaning, insignificance and banality, which attests to a redoubled aesthetic pretension.

Anti-art strives, in all its forms, to escape the aesthetic dimension. But since the 'ready-made' has annexed banality itself, all that is finished. The innocence of non-meaning, of the non-figurative, of abjection and dissidence, is finished. All these things, which contemporary art would like to be, or return to, merely reinforce the inexorably aesthetic character of this anti-art.

Art has always denied itself. But once it did so through excess, thrilling to the play of its disappearance . Today it denies itself by default - worse, it denies its own death. It immerses itself in reality, instead of being the agent of the symbolic murder of that same reality, instead of being the magical operator of its disappearance.

And the paradox is that the closer it gets to this phenomenal confusion, this nullity as art, the greater credit and value it is accorded, to the extent that, to paraphrase Canetti, we have reached a point where nothing is beautiful or ugly anymore; we passed that point without realizing it and, since we cannot get back to that blind spot, we can only persevere in the current destruction of art.

​Lastly, what purpose does this useless function serve? 

From what, by its very uselessness, does it deliver us?

Like politicians, who deliver us from the wearisome responsibility of power, contemporary art,  by its incoherent artifice, delivers us from the ascendancy of meaning by providing us with the spectacle of nonsense. This explains its proliferation: independently of any aesthetic value, it is assured of prospering by dint of its very insignificance and emptiness. Just as the politician endures in the absence of any representativeness or credibility. 

So art and the art market flourish precisely in proportion to their decay: they are the modern charnel-houses of culture and the simulacrum. 

It is absurd, then, to say that contemporary art is worthless and that there 's no point to it since that is its vital function: to illustrate our uselessness and absurdity. Or, more accurately, to make that decay its stock in trade, while exorcising it as  spectacle.

If, as some have proposed, the function of art was to make life more interesting than art, then we have to give up that illusion. One gets the impression that a large part of current art participates in an enterprise of deterrence, a work of mourning for the image and the imaginary, a mostly failed work of aesthetic mourning that leads to a general melancholia of the artistic sphere, which seems to survive its own demise by recycling its history and its relics. 

​But neither art nor aesthetics is alone in being doomed to this melancholy destiny of living not beyond their means, but beyond their ends. 

Baudrillard, Jean/The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
First published in France, 2004 by Editions Galilee © Galilee, 2004, Le Pacte de lucidite ou l'intlelligence du Mal
Introduction and English translation © Chris Turner 2005 
English Edition by ​Berg 

by ​Jon Longhi

William S. Burroughs’s experiments with novel literary and media forms have a self-conscious relationship to Dada and Surrealism. Few artists or writers active after the Surrealists’ heyday of the 1940s did so much to champion their cause and to reaffirm the fertility of the Dadaists’ explorations into the nature of the work of art and its producer. Many of Burroughs’s innovative working techniques originated in Dada parlor games; his cut-ups and dream journals employ devices first pioneered by the Surrealists decades earlier; and his interest in the unconscious and the irrational basis of human nature closely parallels the outlook of key Surrealist figures. This excursus examines some of the intellectual and aesthetic similarities between Burroughs’s work and that of his Dadaist and Surrealist predecessors, with particular reference to the roles of automatism and dreaming in artistic technique. 

The common conceptual origin of both Burroughs’s ‘routines’ of the 1940s and 1950s—the spontaneous comedy monologues delivered as impromptu performances that gave rise to the revelatory and hallucinatory prose of Naked Lunch—and the free-form immediacy that characterized Dada is that of ‘automatic writing’. Automatic writing, a technique in which text is produced ‘spontaneously’, was introduced into public consciousness at the beginning of the twentieth century by, among others, W. B. Yeats and the psychic Helen Smith (Jochum 1993). The Dadaists’ adaptation of the method involved three elements: ‘the psychological concept of the liberation of psychic inhibitions, the mathematical one of the coincidences of chance verbal encounters, and the hermetic one of the oracular function of the medium-poet’ (Balakian 1971:61). All three of these themes are echoed in Burroughs’s reflections that ‘[t]he writer is simply someone who tunes in to certain cosmic currents. He’s sort of a transcriber, an explorer, a map maker’ (Ziegesar 1986:162), and in his 1957 letter to Allen Ginsberg, in which he ​remarks that ‘[t]he only way I can write narrative is to get right outside my body and experience it. This can be exhausting and at times dangerous. One cannot be sure of redemption’ (LWB 375).

​The technique of automatic writing was pioneered by the Dadaists in the ‘Cabaret Voltaire’ performances in the refugee-flooded no-man’s land of 1916 Zurich. These performances involved spontaneous poems that, like Burroughs’s routines, invoked the elements of unconscious creation. Tristan Tzara’s Zurich Chronicle—itself a stream-of-consciousness diary of the first days of the Dada movement—describes the free-form spontaneous poems improvised nightly by the Cabaret (Huelsenbeck 1920). Such poems, read ‘in various languages, rhythms, intonations, by several people at once’ (1920:112), evolved into more elaborate innovations: ‘Innovations came pouring in: Tzara invented the static poem, a kind of optical poem that one looks at as at a forest; for my part, I initiated the dynamic poem, recited with primitive movements, as never seen before’ (1920:112). Tzara always remained committed to the element of mathematical chance, however: ‘choice played no part: the refusal of the conscious self was the essential thing’ (Brandon 1999:100). Even four years after the invention of the cut-ups, during the 1919 Dada Parisian debut—a poetry reading organized by Andre Breton’s magazine, Litterature—Tzara’s method of writing was still the same: ‘Tzara appeared, blinking in the lights. He proceeded to cut up an article by Leon Dauder, dropped the pieces into a hat, and read out the resulting “poem”. In the wings on either side Breton and Aragon rang bells as he spoke, drowning out the words’ (Brandon 1999:138–9). 

Quite early on, however, two opposite dynamics developed in response to Tzara’s technique. Hans Arp interrupted the element of mathematical chance by discarding the poems he didn’t deem ‘successful’; from here it was a short step to Breton’s impatience and rejection of this core element of Dadaism. As Phillipe Soupault later commented, it was always in Breton’s nature to ‘draw conclusions’ (Brandon 1999:148). Two other key figures, Kurt Schwitters and Hugo Ball, however, went in a different direction, going beyond creating clusters of random words to reducing the poems to collections of sound-concoctions of rhythmic grunts, squeals and cries. Ball’s ‘intention was to free vowels from syntax and meaning, creating nuances and triggering memories’ (Huelsenbeck 1920:61), while Schwitters adopted Raoul Hausmann’s ‘optophonetics’, a technique for denoting atomized individual phonemes (which culminated in ​the 1932 composition ‘Die Sonata in Urlauten’, a 40-minute sound poem set in traditional sonata form [Nice 1988]).

While Burroughs often attributes the invention of the cut-up technique to Brion Gysin in September of 1959 at the Beat Hotel in Paris (see, for example, Miles 2000:194), there is no doubt that he was aware of Tzara’s techniques earlier than this (see, for example, BF 63). It is also possible that he was aware of Schwitters’s later experiments with collage and montage (a technique Schwitters dubbed Merz); certainly Burroughs’s visual works in Ports of Entry bear many similarities to Schwitters’s collages and canvases. 

​As the connection between Burroughs’s techniques and those of Dada may be understood in terms of automatic writing, his adaptation of Surrealist principles can be traced to a shared interest in the nature of the ‘unconscious’. The literary paths that Breton chose to travel following his disillusionment with Dada were strongly directed by his immersion in Sigmund Freud’s researches. Breton described Surrealism as ‘a systematic exploration of the unconscious’, and as existing ‘firmly in the realm of the non-rational, to be achieved by any number of routes—physical fatigue, drugs, extreme hunger, dreams, mental illness—all inducing similar hallucinatory phenomena’ (cited by Brandon 1999:215). Burroughs’s literary experiments were also closely linked to a view of human nature that, like psychoanalytic theory, emphasized instinct and the biological, non-rational basis of culture and consciousness. Burroughs experimented intensely with the manipulation and alteration of consciousness through the use of drugs, but he also viewed travel, sex, art, and machines of various types as portals to the unconscious. 

​The convergence between Burroughs, the Surrealists and psychoanalysis is nowhere more striking, however, than in their shared attitudes towards dreams. Both Burroughs and the Surrealists give the sleeping life an almost equal relevance to the waking world. As Burroughs wrote to Allen Ginsberg in 1958:

Burroughs also used his dreams ‘professionally’: ‘I get perhaps half my sets and characters from dreams. Occasionally I find a book or paper in a dream and read a whole chapter or short story … Wake up, make a few notes, sit down at the typewriter the next day, and copy from a dream book’ (AM 97). Burroughs was a restless sleeper and often woke many times a night, at which instances he recorded his dreams in a notebook kept next to the bed. A selection of these writings was published as My Education: A Book Of Dreams (1995).

Surrealist painters such as Salvador Dali and Max Ernst considered their paintings to be essentially recorded dreams. Major Dali works such as The Great Masturbator (1929) and The Lugubrious Game (1929) owe the majority of their images to Dali’s sleeping world (Descharnes and Neret 2001:139). In 1922, immediately following his break with Tzara, Breton initiated the ‘séance project’ (see Nadeau 1944:80–2). Breton was the lead ‘scientist’ and Robert Desnos his favorite patient. Desnos had narcoleptic tendencies and was capable of frequent catnaps in public. During these ‘sleep fits’, as the Surrealists called them, Desnos would scrawl down spontaneous poems. Breton was entranced by the results of these experiments and for months the Surrealists embarked on a series of séances, where groups of Surrealists would study sleeping subjects and prod them to write down or speak messages as a means of accessing their unconscious. The experiments produced only words at first, but the Surrealists rapidly began to externalize images as well. These experiments in the visualization of dreams reached their highest point in Dali and Luis Bunuel’s cinematic masterpiece Un Chien Andalou (1928). According to Bunuel:

​To cut through the ‘taint of culture and upbringing’ was a shared ambition of Burroughs and the Surrealists. Indeed, Dali argued that ‘I categorically refused to consider the Surrealists as just another literary and artistic group. I believed they were capable of liberating man from the tyranny of the “practical, rational world” ’ (1955:22).

The ‘logic of disintegration’ that may be said to inhabit both Dada and Surrealism as well as Burroughs’s work is not, of course, to be understood simply in terms of production, but also as reflection: their experiments in fragmentation anticipate—and helped to create the appetite for—the jumbled and confused circus of the nightly media, a spectacle that would not look out of place in the Cabaret Voltaire itself. However, while the Dadaists and Surrealists were marking the decline of Old World hierarchies, giving much of their work a playful and even celebratory dimension, Burroughs was in a position to observe the consequences of the appropriation of their techniques by the rapidly emerging hegemony of the culture industry. Burroughs’s vision, while it retains the humor and antinomianism of Dadaism and, to a lesser extent, Surrealism, has the nightmare quality of derangement, a reflection of an incoherent media landscape of constantly changing images, desires, and needs that the Surrealists and Dadaists could have only dreamed of.

Balakian, A. (1971) Andre Breton, Magus of Surrealism (New York: Oxford University Press).
Brandon, R. (1999) Surreal Lives (New York: Grove).
Dali, S. (1955) Diary of a Genius, Howard, R. trans. (London: Creation, 1994).
Descharnes, R., and Neret, G. (2001) Dali: The Paintings (Hamburgh: Benedik Taschen Verlag). 
Huelsenbeck, R. (1920) Dada Almanac, Green, M. trans. (London: Atlas Press, 1993).
Jochum, K. P. S. (1993) ‘Yeats’s Vision Papers and the Problem of Automatic Writing: A Review Essay’, English Literature in Transition (1880–1920) (36)3, pp. 323–36.
Miles, B. (2000) The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1968–1963 (New York: Grove Press). 
Nadeau, M. (1944) The History of Surrealism, Howard, R. trans. (New York: MacMillan, 1965).
Nice, J. ed. (1988) Futurism And Dada Reviewed [Brussels, Belgium: Sub Rosa Records].
Ziegesar, P. Von (1986) ‘Mapping the Cosmic Currents: An Interview with William Burroughs’, IN Hibbard, A. ed., Conversations with William S. Burroughs (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), pp. 160–70.

Retaking the Universe (William S.Burroughs in the Age of Globalization) 
Part1: Theoretical Depositions/Excursus: Burroughs, Dada and Surrealism /Edited by Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh
First published 2004 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA
www.plutobooks.com

​It marks an inner need of mine, my admiration for him, how I was moved by his death, by that unfinished work. Yes,earlier I'd done articles on particular points (utterances, power). But here I'm trying to find the logic of this thought, which I see as one of the greatest of modern philosophies. A thought's logic isn't a stable rational system. Foucault, unlike the linguists, thought that even language was a highly unstable system. A thought's logic is like a wind blowing us on, a series of gusts and jolts. You think you've got to port, but then find yourself thrown back out onto the open sea, as Leibniz put it. That's particularly true in Foucault's case. His thought's constantly developing new dimensions that are never contained in what came before. So what is it that drives him to launch off in some direction, to trace out some-always unexpected-path? Any great thinker goes through crises; they set the rhythm of his thought.

​Yes, thinking-as a perilous act, he says.It's definitely Foucault, along with Heidegger but in a quite different way,who's most profoundly transformed the image of thought. And this image has various levels, corresponding to the successive layers or areas of Foucault's philosophy. Thinking is in the first place seeing and talking, but only once the eye goes beyond things to "visibilities," and language goes beyond words or sentences to utterances. That's thought as archive. And then thinking's a capacity, a capacity to set forces in play, once one understands that the play of forces doesn't just come down to violence but is to do with acting upon actions, with acts, like "inciting, inducing, preventing, facilitating or obstructing, extending or restricting, making more or less likely. . . "That's thought as strategy. Finally, in the last books, there's the discovery of thought as a "process of subjectification": it's stupid to see this as a return to the subject; it's to do with establishing waysof existing or, as Nietzsche put it, inventing new possibilities oflife. Existing not as a subject but as a work of art-and this last phase presents thought as artistry. The key thing, obviously, is to ​show how one's forced to pass from one of these determinations to the next: the transitions aren't there ready and waiting, they correspond to the paths Foucault traces out, and the areas he reaches that weren't there before he reached them, and the jolts he himself precipitates as well as experiences.

Archaeology, genealogy, is also a geology. Archaeology doesn't have to dig into the past, there's an archaeology of the present-in a way it's always working in the present. Archaeology is to do with archives, and an archive has two aspects, it's audio-visual. A language lesson and an object lesson. It's not a matter of words and things (the title of Foucault's book5 is meant ironically). We have to take things and find visibilities in them. And what is visible at a given period corresponds to its system of lighting and the scintillations, mirrorings, flashes produced by the contact oflight and things. We have to break open words or sentences, too, and find what's uttered in them. And what can be uttered at a given period corresponds to its system oflanguage and the inherent variations it's constantly undergoing, jumping from one homogeneous scheme to another (language is always unstable). Foucault's key historical principle is that any historical formation saysall it can say and sees all it can see. Take madness in the seventeenth century, for instance: in what light can it be seen, and in what utterances can it be talked of? And take us today: what are we able to say today, what are we able to see? For most philosophers, their philosophy's like a personality they haven't chosen, a third person. What struck people who met Foucault were his eyes, his voice, and an erect bearing that went with them. Flashes, scintillations, utterances wresting themselves from his words-even Foucault's laugh was an utterance. And if there's a dislocation between seeing and saying, if there's a gap between them, an irreducible distance, it only means you can't solve the problem of knowledge (or rather, of "knowledges") by invoking a correspondence or conformity of terms. You have to look elsewhere for what links and weaves them together. It's as though the archive's riven by a great fault dividing visible form on one side from the form of what can be uttered ... other, each irreducible to the other. And the thread that knits them together and runs between them lies outside these forms, in another dimension.

Foucault always acknowledged a debt to Blanchot. This, perhaps, in three respects. First of all, "talking isn't seeing. . . ," a difference that means that by saying what one can't see, one's taking language to its ultimate limit, raising it to the power of the unspeakable. Then there's the primacy of the third person, the "he" or neuter, the impersonal "one," relative to the first two persons-there's the refusal of any linguistic personology. Lastly, there's the theme of the Outside: the relation, and indeed "nonrelation," to an Outside that's further from us than any external world, and thereby closer than any inner world. And it doesn't diminish the importance of these links to emphasize how Foucault takes the themes and develops them independently of Blanchot: the dislocation between seeing and talking, most fully developed in the book on Raymond Roussel and the piece on Magritte, leads him to a new determination of the visible and the utterable; the "one speaks" organizes his theory of utterance; the interplay of near and far along the line Outside, as a life-and-death experiment, leads to specifically Foucaldian acts of thought, to folding and unfolding (which take him a long way from Heidegger too), and eventually becomes the basis of the process of subjectification.

Power's precisely the nonformal element running between or beneath different forms of knowledge. That's why one talks about a microphysics of power. It's force, and the play of forces, not form. And the way Foucault conceives the play of forces, developing Nietzsche's approach, is one of the most important aspects of his thought. 

It's a different dimension from that of knowledge, although power and knowledge form concretely indivisible composites. But the fundamental question iswhy Foucault needs yet another dimension, why he goes on to discover subjectification as distinct from both knowledge and power. And people say: Foucault's going back to the subject, rediscovering the notion of subject that he'd alwaysrejected. It's not that at all. His thought underwent a crisis in all sorts of ways, but it was a creative crisis, not a recantation. What Foucault felt more and more, after the first volume of The History of Sexuality, was that he wasgetting locked in power relations. And it was all very well to invoke points of resistance as "counterparts" of foci of power, but where was such resistance to come from? Foucault wonders how he can cross the line, go beyond the play of forces in its turn. Or are we condemned to conversing with Power, irrespective of whether we're wielding it or being subjected to it? He confronts the question in one of his most violent texts, one of the funniest too, on "infamous men." And it takes him a long time to come up with an answer. Crossing the line offorce, going beyond power, involves as it were bending force, making it impinge on itself rather than on other forces: a "fold," in Foucault's terms, force playing on itself. It's a question of "doubling" the play of forces, of a self-relations that allows us to resist, to elude power, to turn life or death against power. This, according to Foucault, is something the Greeks invented. It's no longer a matter of determinate forms, as with knowledge, or of constraining rules, as with power: it's a matter of optional rules that make existence a work of art, rules at once ethical and aesthetic that constitute waysof existing or styles of life (including even suicide). It's what Nietzsche discovered as the will to power operating artistically, inventing new "possibilities oflife." One should, for all sorts of reasons, avoid all talk of a return to the subject, because these processes of subjectification vary enormously from one period to another and operate through very disparate rules. What increases their variability is that power's always taking over any new process and subordinating it to the play of forces, although it can always then recover by inventing new ways of existing, and this can go on indefinitely. So there's no return to the Greeks, either. A process of subjectification, that is, the production of a way of existing, can't be equated with a subject, unless we divest the subject of any interiority and even any identity. Subjectification isn't even anything to do with a "person": it's a specific or collective individuation relating to an event (a time of day, a river, a wind, a life. . . ). It's a mode of intensity, not a personal subject. It's a specific dimension without which we can't go beyond knowledge or resist power. Foucault goes on to analyze Greek and Christian ways of existing, how they enter into forms of knowledge, how they make compromises with power. But they are themselves different in nature from knowledge and power. For example, the Church as pastoral power was constantly trying to take control of Christian ways of existing, but these were constantly bringing into question the power of the Church, even before the Reformation. And Foucault, true to his method, isn't basically interested in returning to the Greeks, but in us today :what are our ways of existing, our possibilities oflife or our processes of subjectification; are there waysfor us to constitute ourselves as a "self," and (as Nietzsche would put it) sufficiently "artistic" ways, beyond knowledge and power? And are we up to it, because in a way it's a matter oflife and death?

The "death of man" is even worse than all the fuss about the subject; misinterpretations of Foucault's thought really thrived on it. But misinterpretations are never innocent, they're mixtures of stupidity and malevolence; people would rather find contradictions in a thinker than understand him. So they wonder how Foucault could get involved in political struggles when he didn't believe in man and therefore in human rights. . . The death of man is in fact a very simple and precise theme, which Foucault takes over from Nietzsche but develops in a very original way. It's a question of form and forces. Forces are alwaysinteracting with other forces. Given human forces (like having an understanding, a will . . . ), what other forces do they come into play with, and what's the resulting "composite" form? In The Orderof Things, Foucault shows that man, in the classic period, isn't thought of as man, but "in the image" of God, precisely because his forces enter into combination with infinitary forces. It's in the nineteenth century, rather, that human forces confront purely finitary forces-life, production, language-in such a way that the result​ing composite is a form of Man. And, just as this form wasn't there previously, there's no reason it should survive once human forces come into play with new forces: the new composite will be a new kind of form, neither God nor man. Nineteenth-century man, for example, confronts life and combines with it as the force of carbon. But what happens when human forces combine with those of silicon, and what new forms begin to appear? Foucault has two models here, Nietzsche and Rimbaud, and adds his own brilliant analysis to theirs: What new relations do we have with life, with language? What new struggles with Power? When he comes to consider modes of subjectification, it's a way of pursuing the same problem.

Yes, establishing ways of existing or styles of life isn't just an aesthetic matter, it's what Foucault called ethics, as opposed to morality. The difference is that morality presents us with a set of constraining rules of a special sort, ones that judge actions and intentions by considering them in relation to transcendent values (this is good, that's bad . .. ); ethics is a set of optional rules that assess what we do, what we say, in relation to the ways of existing involved. We say this, do that: what wayof existing does it involve? There are things one can only do or saythrough mean-spiritedness, a life based on hatred, or bitterness toward life. Sometimes it takesjust one gesture or word. It's the styles of life involved in everything that make us this or that. You get this already in Spinoza's idea of "modes." And is it not present in Foucault's philosophy from the outset: What are we "capable" of seeing, and saying (in the sense of uttering)? But if there's a whole ethics in this, there's an aesthetics too. Style, in a great writer, is alwaysa style of life too, not anything at all personal, but inventing a possibility of life, a way of existing. It's strange how people sometimes say that philosophers have no style, or that they write badly. It can only be because they don't read them. In France alone, Descartes, Malebranche, Maine de Biran, Bergson, even Auguste Comte in his Balzacian aspect, are stylists. And Foucault also belongs to this tradition, ​he's a great stylist. Concepts take on with him a rhythmic quality, or, as in the strange dialogues with himself with which he closes some of his books, a contrapuntal one. His syntax accumulates the mirrorings and scintillations of the visible but also twists like a whip, folding up and unfolding, or cracking to the rhythm of its utterances. And then, in his last books, the style tends toward a kind of calm, seeking an ever more austere, an ever purer line. . .

​Interview with Mladen Dolar

​Mladen Dolar is a co-founder of the Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis, together with Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič and Rastko Močnik. Conny Habbel met the Slovenian philosopher in June 2009 in Ljubljana.

​WgK: Is there an artwork that had a lasting effect on you?

Dolar: The work of Samuel Beckett – if I have to single out just one. It is both the importance it had for me and for the particular historic moment of the end of the twentieth century. I think he is the one who went the furthest in a certain way. There are various reasons for this, and one of them has to do with an enormous will to reduction. What Beckett did was to create an infinitely shrinkable world. There is never little enough. You can always take away more.

Take the The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. In the Beginning there is some sort of plot and some sort of characters. Then in the second novel you have just Malone, who is dying alone in his room and who is inventing stories as he is waiting for death. The space has shrunk, there is no more travel. And then you have the third novel, where you don’t even have this. You don’t even have a space, you don’t even have a character, you just have a voice. A voice which just rambles on and continues, and it doesn’t matter what it says in the end. It’s just the sheer thrust of perseverance, of persistence, which carries the whole thing. So just persist. You have to go on. And you know how this ends, it ends in the most beautiful way: “I must go on, I can’t go on, I will go on“.

I think this is an incredible point, I don’t think literature has ever gone this far this radically. This is so completely reduced to a bare minimum, what Beckett has called ‘the unnullable least’. And extremely powerful.

WgK: So what is art actually?

​Dolar: I think to make art is to make a break. And to make a cut. This would be the simplest way of answering your question.
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But there are different ways of answering. One of them would go to Freud’s theory, which looks at art through the spyglass of sublimation. I think what Freud conceives as drive, ‘der Trieb’, actually has to do with the transition between something natural and a creation of a separate space, and that everything he describes as the specificity of culture actually has to do with the structure of the drive. The drive is like thwarting of a natural hang, it gets thwarted towards a different sort of end. This is like a supposed initial natural need, but which in the process of its satisfaction actually gets thwarted. It produces something else than merely the satisfaction of a natural need. If you look at the way Freud describes culture in Unbehagen in der Kultur, he defines culture with a list of features.

The first on the list would be the question of tools. We’re getting more and more tools in order to be the masters of nature, so that we can do all the magic things, we can look at far away distances through the telescope, we can see the invisible in the microscope, we can talk through distance with the telephone, we can do absolutely magical things. And Freud uses the wonderful word, he says: “Der Mensch ist ein Prothesengott“. So he’s a god with prostheses. You just need some prostheses to be a god. So you have these extensions of the body. And what actually the drive to master nature produces at the same time – something more than the simple mastering of nature – it produces prostheses, a sort of ‘in between space’, a space which elongates your body, prolongs your body into the world. The eerie space between the inner and the outer is libidinally invested. And, to cut it short, this is also the area where culture comes in.

WgK: Do you have any idea of what good art is? Which art do you regard as good?

Dolar: Well, this is not a subjective question. There is a strong tendency to reduce art to the question of taste. And the question of taste is kind of dangerous because it always goes down to the question of narcissism. There is something profoundly narcissistic in the judgement of preference. ‘I prefer this, I am a connoisseur, I prefer the late Beethoven quartets against symphonies.’ The difference which means difference as such and which means that you are distinguished and that you can distinguish yourself from the common lot of people by being the man of refined taste, to see all these differences that the others don’t see.

I have this conception of art, which is that art has to do with universality and infinity. It introduces something into the continuity of being, into the continuity of our survival. A break. Which is a universal break. A break to universality. It can speak universally. What is important in art is not a question whether it is an expression of a certain individual or whether it is an expression of a certain ethnic group or nation or of a certain age.

I think that the break is such that it makes the universal out of particularities.

But the problem is how to do this with the subjective means at your disposal, within the nation to which you belong, or language, or culture, within a particular type of civilization, within this historic moment – which are all very finite and singular things. How to produce universality and infinity out of this? And this I think is the moment of art. This is not a production of spirit, this is a material production of the break. I like very much this saying, which is on t-shirts like: “Art is a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it“. You have to get your hands dirty. This is a very material thing. You produce the idea with the material, with the matter. Art has always worked with the sensual. If one tries to get immediately to universality or the infinity of a beyond, an idea, the sublime or whatever – this is, I think, a big mistake. You cannot do this. You just have to produce it the hard way. But it depends on being able to produce a break.
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And this sets the standard by which it can be judged. I don’t think it can be judged on the basis of taste, it’s not just a question of whether I like it or not. It has the power to produce universality. It creates a potential virtual audience which goes far beyond this audience here. And I think the awareness that it goes beyond this, beyond my particular taste and reaction, is what makes good art.

WgK: Is art a benefit for society? Why does there have to be someone who does this dirty job?

​Dolar: Well, I think that in the question with which I started, the question of drawing a line, making a cut in the continuity of our animal or social being, of our finite being, that this is what defines humanity. I’m not saying that art is the only way to do this. I think thought is something which does this also, it breaks with the conditions of its own production. This is the practice of philosophy. I think philosophy, similarly, but also very differently, makes a conceptual break in the continuity of particular received ways of thinking.
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We have the definition of man as homo sapiens, the thinking animal, but the trouble is that thought is very rare. It’s not that men think all the time, it happens very rarely. There are very few occasions when thought happens and when it does, it seriously changes the very parameters of the ways we conceive the world, ourselves, whatever. There’s a handful of thinkers. This is a strange thing in the history of philosophy, there’s only a handful of thinkers with which we have to deal continually. But I don’t think – this is important – that thought is some sort of prerogative of philosophy, that philosophers are very special because they have this specialisation in thought. I don’t think that at all. I think thought can happen anywhere. In silence and…

WgK: Does it also happen in art?

Dolar: Oh yes. It does most definitely. It has a different way and the question of art working with the sensual, with sensuous material means is very important, this is a materialised thought. It’s the thought which works within the matter and shapes the matter. It is attached to matter, and matter thinks in art. This is very important, the materiality of thought. I think thought actually happens in a number of areas of human endeavour. And art is one of the most reflected.

WgK: Which are the others?

Dolar: Do you know the work of Alain Badiou? He has made a list of four truth procedures, four areas where truth emerges.

These are: Science, and above all the completely constructed science like mathematics. It doesn’t refer to anything in the world, it just creates its own entities, pure entities. Then: Poetry and art as such. Then politics. Politics not of opinions but politics of truth. There’s an opposition between the two. Democracy basically is a democracy of opinions. Anybody is free to hold any kind of opinion and then you count the votes. This is not a politics of truth. There is a sort of truth at stake in politics which has to do with justice and equality, it has to do with an idea. And then there is the question of love, which is the emergence of a truth event. A subjective truth event.
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Badiou lists the four areas as the areas in which this break happens. I am not sure that this list is the best, exhaustive or conclusive. Maybe this list is too neat in some way. I think things are messier in life. In many everyday situations, even trivial ones, there may be a sudden and unexpected break, people show an inventive creativity and do something very unexpected, and actually change the parameters of the situation and their own lives and the lives of others. I would leave this field open.

WgK: I just had this spontaneous thought if humour might be one of those areas too?

​Dolar: Well, you have an old suggestion which goes back to Aristotle, that the man is a laughing animal. You have various proposals for the definitions of man, one is the thinking animal, another one is the tool-making animal, which goes back to Benjamin Franklin. Marx takes this up that one can define the man through the tool which conditions his capacity for work. And then you have Aristotle’s suggestion: Man is a laughing animal. The only animal that can laugh – laugh at what? To laugh, precisely, at being able to produce a certain break. The break in meaning, in the very parameters of making sense. One way of describing this could be where I started – to make a break, to make a cut – which is also to make a break in meaning in order to produce sense, if I may use this Deleuzian opposition between meaning and sense. And sense is the sort of unexpected thing which emerges. In order to produce this you have to cut down the usual expectation of meaning. The very horizon of meaning in which you move, in which you live your life. And this is the capacity of art.
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As far as humour is concerned, I would just point out that there’s a question of humour and there’s a question of ‘Witz’. Freud has written a book on ‘Witz’ and a different paper on humour and he says that those things are absolutely not to be confused. Additionally there’s a question of comedy and there’s a question of irony. So we have four different things which are not the same. We may laugh as a result, but there is laughter and laughter. Laughter itself does not have to be subversive. It can also be very conservative.

WgK: Who becomes an artist? What is it that makes people become artists?

Dolar: I don’t think there’s a rule. There is the capacity, well, the break-making capacity. The way that we relate to ourselves is always conditioned by a break, there is a question of redoubling. Culture is always a question of redoubling: it redoubles the ‘normal’ life. It reflects it into something else, but redoubling is always already there.

WgK: But still there are some people who don’t become artists or intellectuals.

Dolar: No, no, of course. I think the capacity is there, and it is a capacity which defines humanity and subjectivity. And… how the hell do you become an artist? What particular things have to come together? I think what makes the greatness of art is precisely its singularity. Which means that if you could establish this rule art would stop being art.

WgK: But couldn’t it be that there is some reason why people start to make art? Robert Pfaller once suggested that artists might have some traumatic experience that they – all their lives – try to handle by making art.

Dolar: Don’t we all have to handle some sort of traumatic experience? It’s very hard to say. I mean, the question has been asked many times, so you have art schools which precisely can teach you everything except what is essential.

WgK: Yeah, but art school starts at a moment where you already decided to go to art school. Who is likely to go to art school? So there are two aspects of this question. The one is: How do you become a good artist? The other question – which actually interests me – is: Why does someone want to become an artist? No matter if good or bad, if successful or not: What makes a person take up this way?

Dolar: If you want to become an artist, what do you want to become? If I take some of the greatest musicians of all times, like Bach and Mozart or Haydn. You can see what? Who was Haydn? He was hired by the Esterhazy family as a craftsman. I mean, did he want to become an artist? I don’t think he ever thought of himself in that way actually. He was a paid craftsman. And if you look at Mozart, he was all the time trying to get hired by some court or something. If you look at Bach, he was employed by the St. Thomas church in Leipzig to produce a piece of music for mass every week.
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It was not a question of genius or inspiration. You were hired. Because this was another craft and I don’t think anybody would look at themselves this way today. If you want to become an artist you don’t want to become a craftsman. You see yourself as a person with a special vocation, which goes beyond all usual vocations. This is due to the romantic model of art and then to the modernist conceptions.

WgK: Let’s stick to today’s understanding of art: Do you think artists are narcissistic?

​Dolar: The question of art and narcissism… I would say that on the one hand it’s profoundly narcissistic. It’s usually linked with a project of profound narcissism of self-expression and the precious treasure I have in me and want to disclose to the world.. But I don’t think that this is what makes art. As I said before: Art is not expression. It’s not an expression of yourself. People may want to do it to express themselves, but what makes the break and what makes the universal appeal, the claim of art, is not a question of whether they express themselves well or not. It’s just not the question by which art is ever judged. So on the one hand I’m sure that the motivation for doing this is in most cases narcissistic.

WgK: Did I understand you right when you say art is not an expression – could you say art is one of the ‘Prothesen’?

Dolar: Yes. Oh yes.

WgK: I really like this picture.

Dolar: The ‘Prothesengott’? Yes. But, well, Freud uses this in the context of technology and tool-making.

WgK: I have the feeling that it’s very good, maybe not only for tools.

Dolar: Yes. It’s a good thing. It’s not just a question of tool. A tool is never a tool. It’s a libidinally invested extension of the body.

WgK: So you could also say art is a libidinal extension of yourself. Of the body.

Dolar: Well, it has something to do with the libidinal extension. The way Freud introduces the notion of prosthesis, it has more to do with technology than with art. But I think it’s nevertheless a useful metaphor also to think about art.

WgK: Could you also call it objet a? Art as an extension towards objet a?

​Dolar: Well, yes. I didn’t want to use the heavily technical Lacanian language for this. I mean this could be described in another language, but what Lacan calls objet a is precisely the object of transition between the interior and exterior, which doesn’t quite fall either into interior or the external world out there; the objective world. I mean it’s neither subjective nor objective. In this sense it’s always in this zone of indeterminacy, in the zone which opens in between. And which is the zone of ‘Prothesen’ if you want, I mean, the Prothesen always fill the zone: you put something between subjects and objects. You extend your body into the world, and at the same time the world extends into you. Still, what Lacan calls the object a doesn’t coincide with any existing object, it has no substance of its own, while art produces existing objects whose task is to evoke this impossible object. To evoke the impossible.

WgK: Would you agree that artists and philosophers share similarities in the realities they live in?

Dolar: Yes. I think there’s a lot of common ground. The tools with which they work are different, but I think they work on a common ground and that they can’t be neatly delineated. One way of differentiation – which I particularly dislike – is to say that artists have the passions and the feelings and they work with this and philosophers have the reason and understanding and they work with this. I don’t think this opposition is worth anything. It never works this way. I think that any human activity has both: indiscriminately passion and reason inscribed into it.
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If you look at the history of philosophy – look at Plato, look at Spinoza, look at Augustine, look at Hegel, Marx, Kant, Wittgenstein – there is always a huge passion. This is terrible passion you have in this. They are all passion-driven. To describe this as works of mere intellect is completely misguided. This is the erroneous common conception of philosophy, rationality and concepts. If it doesn’t involve passionate attachment and passionate involvement, then it’s not philosophy. There is very, very serious passion at work in this. And at the opposite end I think there is very, very precise thinking involved in art. If it’s not, it’s just not good art.

WgK: We were talking about passion and reason – do you think artists or philosophers can have a family? Do you think it can be organised to do such an ambitious or passionate work and to have love for people?

Dolar: On the general level I don’t see why it should be exclusive. But this is not a question which concerns only art. I think it’s a question which concerns any sort of passionate attachment to your profession. I mean it could be a lawyer, a politician, a scientist, a teacher, all kinds of things. It can be sport, it can be all kinds of things and it does produce problems, very practical problems, how the hell you then deal with your family, with your love, with your private life. I suppose it very much depends on what kind of person you are. There are people who would somehow erase everything else and there are people who would always find ways, no matter how. They can work twenty hours a day but they will nevertheless find a way to have a private life.

WgK: And what can you tell me about passion? Where does it come from and what can you do to prevent its disappearance?

Dolar: To prevent its disappearance?

WgK: Can anything be done?

​Dolar: Have you ever read Ovid? Remedia Amoris, the remedies against love. The question that he asks is the opposite. Not how to keep the passion going but how to prevent it happening.

You can see this through thousand years of antiquity: It’s not the problem how to keep your passion alive. It’s the problem of detachment. “Remedia Amoris“ are rather humorous. Ovid’s advice is: don’t go for it. Keep your mind aloof, otherwise you go crazy. Passion is folly. This is a bad thing for you. It would completely ruin your life. So you have a history of passions. This is a stage of antiquity and then you have a certain stage of Christianity which again is very differentiated in itself. I mean the passion is the passion of Christ. So the passion worth having is the passion in this other sense. There is a passion worth having and which is this suffering you must undergo in order to be worthy of redemption. The ultimate passion to sacrifice all other passions. This gives the word passion a very different meaning. It comes from ‘patior’, ‘passus’, which means suffering. Like ‘Leidenschaft’ comes from ‘leiden’.
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If I put it in this very reduced, simplistic way, the question of passion which drives you, the question of passionate love is a question of romantic love, a certain conception of romantic love which we deal with. It emerged only in the 19th century.

WgK: It’s a very interesting point that you made about the difference between trying to get rid of it or trying to keep it alive. You said before philosophy is always passionate, driven, so in this way it’s actually necessary to keep it. I didn’t only mean passion in private life, also as an activating thing like in your work.

Dolar: Yes, there has to be a passion which drives this. There’s an interesting passage in Helvetius. Helvetius was a philosopher of the French Enlightenment and he has written this book De l’esprit in 1759 – the book was actually burnt at that time and banned. He has a passage there which I always found terribly funny, he says: “Why are passionate people more intelligent than others?” He completely overturns this common view that you either have intelligence – and then you can control your passions – or if you let the passions have the upper hand, then you lose your head. He puts these two together and he says: People never use their intelligence unless they are driven by a serious passion. It’s only the passionate people who are intelligent. Otherwise they are lazy. Come on, why use your head? You can always get along somehow. So it’s only the passion which actually drives you to use your reason. And this is just a funny way of putting it that you can’t see the two as being on opposed sides.

WgK: Do you have an influence on it, can you do something to keep it or to feed it?

​Dolar: I think passion is what drives you, drives you towards something. But it’s not that passion as such is enough. It’s not that it just drives you and you let yourself be driven. It actually demands a hell of a lot if you want to pursue this passion! It demands that you put something, everything at stake.

To risk the usual ways of your life, the ‘bequemes Leben’, if you are lucky enough to have a comfortable social position. There is the spontaneous hang to pursue your social survival within a certain slot, the script for your career is waiting for you. And this is where the question of break comes in. The passion is what makes a break. But the break, it demands a hell of a lot of ‘Anstrengung’ and you have to put things at risk. Sometimes drastically at risk. You risk everything for the question of passion, to pursue your passion.
​
What Freud names ‘Todestrieb’ (death drive) in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) is not some striving towards death, but too much of life. There’s too much life, more than you can bear. So this is the excessive moment which derails the usual course of things and in order to pursue this it takes a lot of courage and persistence, perseverance. I think most people give up at a certain point. There are many ways of giving up, also as an artist. One way of giving up is to somehow be content with your role or to… ‘übereinstimmen’. So that you consent to being that role. And this is a socially assigned role which can bring glory and awards. If it started with a break, then the big danger is that the break starts functioning as the institution of the break. The break itself gets institutionalised and highly valued.

WgK: It has a place then.

​Dolar: Yes, it has a place then. Freud has this wonderful phrase “people ruined by their own success“. And I think that in art many people are ruined by their own success. Precisely by succeeding in what they wanted to do and then they fit into this. They have made an institution of themselves and somehow started to believe that they are this. You have this wonderful phrase in Lacan: who is a madman? It’s not just an ordinary person who thinks that he’s a king. The definition of a madman is a king who thinks that he’s a king. And you have this madness among artists who believe that they are artists. This is psychosis, in a certain sense, if you really think that you are what you are. You really think that you are an artist. This is the end of art, I think.

WgK: You were saying that one has to be courageous to proceed with passionate work. I have the feeling that there is another big thing, besides from missing courage, which might be a cushion for passion: The desire for containment, for feeling secure. I don’t know the best translation, I mean ‘Geborgenheit’.

Dolar: Geborgenheit?

WgK: Yeah. You know Geborgenheit? Feeling secure.

​Dolar: Security, yes. Sicherheit.

WgK: A warm feeling.

Dolar: Feeling at home. Is there a good way to feel at home? I don’t know. I think there’s always an ideological trap in this. What you mostly feel at home with is always ideology because it offers a sort of security. I mean security in the sense of providing a certain status within which you can dwell. And also security of meaning, which means that it provides you with some answers as to ‘What does it all mean?’ ‘We live in parliamentary democracy, we’re a free society, in the aera of progress and prosperity’, etc. I mean the words which fulfil a certain horizon of meaning which situates you within a certain social moment and social structure, within a certain type of social relations. And this is always ideology, ideology is what makes this run. And I think that the break that we are talking about – the break with meaning or the break with the continuity of things – it could be described as a break with ideology. Art and ideology are at the opposite ends. Art always makes a break, a cut into the ideological continuity of what you most feel at home with. And what you feel at home with is entrusted upon you. But this is not to say that art is immune to ideology, it can easily be made into ideology.

WgK: At that point when you feel content.

Dolar: Yes. When you feel content in your role. One could make a certain opposition between art and culture. I think culture is a sort of domestication of art. You establish canonical artworks which you are taught at school. And it’s a question of what comes into the canon and is it a good thing to have a canon or how to include or exclude works. Of course you always have a canon. There’s no escaping this, but at the same time you have to understand that culture is always a domestification of what is dangerous or excessive in art. It domesticates things by giving them a sort of proper place and value. You can say: ‘Well, Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist of all time.’ I mean it’s quite true, but it’s also a very forced statement to domesticate Shakespeare’s work. You glorify it instead of dealing with it.

​WgK: It ends their quality of being a break by giving them a place.

​Dolar: Yeah. You reinscribe them into a continuity of a tradition, of a cultural identity.

WgK: I have the feeling it’s a regressive desire.

​Dolar: For home?

WgK: Yeah. Isn’t it?

Dolar: Yes. Ultimately yes. I think that being at home means being in the ideology and being in the meaning and having some sort of meaning secured. And I think that creating a home as a way of being with yourself – or being with another person – is precisely to try to deal with the unhomely element of it. To keep the unhomely element of it alive. What Freud called das Unheimliche, litterally the unhomely, but with the utter ambiguity where it can be given the comic twist. I think that love is keeping the non-homely element alive. It’s not to finally ‘go home’ with someone, but actually to keep this thing in the air. Keep this thing in the air. And comedy is precisely – to keep the ball in the air. Keep the ball in the air, I mean constantly.

WgK: So then I can come to my last question: How can one become happy in life?

Dolar (laughing): It beats me!

WgK: So this is why I kept it till the end. Is there a good strategy?

Dolar: Ah, god knows! But I am an atheist.

​Exploratorium Artist-in-Residence Nina Katchadourian works crosswise over different media—including photography, sculpture, video, and sound—joining perky juxtapositions and reasonable turns to incite us to re-see ordinary normal and social wonders. 

Her new work for the Exploratorium is Floater Theater, a personal showy condition that eccentrically prompts members to investigate the intriguing, usually experienced the wonder of eye floaters. 

Katchadourian's two-year engagement in the Exploratorium's research facility like condition, took as its purpose of takeoff her experience as a guinea pig in the supposed Marshmallow Test. Directed by Walter Mischel at Stanford University's Bing Nursery School in the mid 1970s, this notorious review examined the limit with respect to postponed gratifica­­tion in youngsters. Katchadourian's understanding as a guinea pig, and her recollections about whether she opposed or gave into allurement as a four-year old, have been a long lasting distraction. 

​While Katchadourian started examining the social conduct encompassing postponed delight amid her residency, she got to be distinctly inquisitive about weariness. Are the wanderings of the mind important to creativity? What do we do when we’re bored? She considered how the marvels that we connect with weariness, and additionally the particulars that we end up thinking about when we need incitement—tidy, exhaust rooms, background noise—really be very interesting. This prompted to an investigation of eye floaters, and the dialect used to portray this discernible marvel in our visual field that others can't straightforwardly involvement. 

Katchadourian's work has been exhibited locally and globally at PS1/MoMA, the Serpentine Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, Turner Contemporary, Artists Space, SculptureCenter, the Palais de Tokyo, and De Appel. In June 2006, the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs showed a ten-year review of her work and distributed a going with monograph entitled All Forms of Attraction. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego exhibited a performance show of late video establishment works in July 2008. In February 2010, she was the Artist-in-Residence at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in Dunedin, New Zealand, which finished in a performance indicate entitled Seat Assignment. She as of late finished work on a prize-winning perpetual open piece, Grand State of Maine, charged by the GSA for an outskirt crossing station between the United States and Canada. In April 2013, the monograph Sorted Books was distributed by Chronicle Books on the 20-year commemoration of Katchadourian's Sorted Books extend. Another video work by Katchadourian is as of now on view as a component of the show Explode Every Day at MASSMoCA. In spring 2016 the Museum of Modern Art in New York will present Katchadourian's sound-construct extend in light of the subject of tidy as a major aspect of their program "Specialists Experiment." In Spring 2017, a visiting solo gallery show of Katchadourian's work will open at the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas. Katchadourian is on the personnel at New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She is spoken to by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco.

Watch the video  below :

​by Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal

DANCE LIKE the possessed girl from The Ring. The haunted house of hip-hop, birds dropping dead—these are some of the ways I've heard Nina McNeely's style of choreography described. I have taken her experimental contemporary dance class almost every week for two years. The class was recently named "The Witching Hour," a title with cultish overtones. The instructor—a choreographer, dancer, animator, and artist—often wraps herself in black fabric. Her long hair has been various shades of green, black, and blonde. Her pointed acrylic nails accent her often incantatory gestures. 

The studio is called the Sweat Spot. Its appearance in a 2009 New York Times article about workouts for Los Angeles hipsters had kept me away (perhaps in denial), but I eventually became, and am now, a regular.  At first I didn't know fourth position from fifth, but I instantly appreciated choreography's distinct jouissance: freedom through constraint. For every class, McNeely picks hicuppy, intricate music with heavy bass, a brooding blend of electronic and hip-hop. But she's just as likely to play a new track by Rihanna, one of the pop stars who have used McNeely's choreography onstage and in videos. McNeely likes distinct layers of sound (many options to move to): a rattle, a rhythmic voice, an errant screech. 

At each class, she makes the same brisk introductory speech, admonishing us to keep our knees over our toes when we plié. "Don't pull yourself over, just hang, let the weight of your body bring you down," she says, as we lower our hands to our toes. The warm-up is always the same, to songs whose melodic synthesizers and beat-dropping crescendos I now know by heart. The moment of rest before the start of the real instruction is always the same as well, and McNeely always says, "don't fidget." As a good student (and a rather short person), I learn each month's combinations from the front row. They're only about twenty or thirty seconds long. 

McNeely likes twisted shapes, tiny hand adjustments, and fast footwork in low pliés, all of which look as bizarre as they feel. She likes sharp, "schizophrenic" contrasts in dynamics: slow, "juicy" body rolls on one count and a convulsive twitch on the next, from countering imagined resistance as though "moving through Jell-O" to collapsing "like dead weight." 

Over time, I've become attuned to her embodied vocabulary, internalizing the metaphors she gives us, mostly with a laugh: "wizard hands" are swirling circular gestures, "sparkle fingers" are like Bring It On's famous spirit ones, to "snake it up" is to writhe from plié to standing. She also uses language borrowed from technology: a quick inhalation, expanding the chest in a jolt, is a "glitch"; moving side to side like a wave interrupted by locking stops is a "video missing a few frames."

Often, there are imaginary props: snatch something out of the air, throw it up like it's a feather and catch it like it's a rock; contract as if something punched you in the chest; follow the slinky working its way down the stairs. I've imagined myself as a statue coming to life then crumbling into ash, a puppet yanked by strings, a doll awakening while my owner is asleep. McNeely asks us to experience our bodies as weight, animated by the music or possessed by the movement. Every week I bask in the endorphins of exercise, practicing a sport I have few other words for besides "cool." Or else, every week I learn an artwork that evokes a cultural history of labor, sexuality, race, art, and entertainment. 

McNeely shuttles between the music industry and the art world. With Jasmine Albuquerque and Kristen Leahy, she is a member of the dance trio WIFE, which has performed in Los Angeles at the Museum of Contemporary Art among other venues, and has honed a signature style. Animated images (often of New Age symbols and flora and fauna) are projected onto the trio's bodies as they perform restrained, staccato gestures, as small as the flick of a wrist . 

McNeely contributes the illustrations and animations; the trio collaborates on choreography, costumes, sound, and theme. WIFE's use of projection mapping allows whatever metaphor might have motivated their movements to appear literal. If, in class, McNeely instructs us to conjure a ball of energy and crumble it in our fingers, in WIFE's performances the ball exists, a black form that floats above the dancers' open palms before decomposing down their sides. 

In Past Lives (2015), which the trio has performed at various venues, the three dancers perch on plinths. They are costumed in white, with large headpieces that expand their bodies as projection surfaces. Images of three hourglasses line up with their three forms, and as the sand drains, their bodies collapse, evacuated like balloons. Branches snake up their bodies and bloom into flowers. Green, red, and yellow lights bathe each performer as they strike poses to a sequence of bass hits. Red bursts of smoke appear as if from their mouths. Triangles layered on top of each other become pentacles on their chests. Their bodies are X-rayed into skeletons. They grab their breasts where blood begins to spurt. 

WIFE's work is most successful as an exercise in self-imposed constraint: they dance while sitting down, or keep their erect frames completely still in order to direct all attention to a single gesture, illuminated by the projector. 

I admit to tiring of WIFE's allusions. The New Age iconography they employ, borrowed from seemingly every religion, can read as a symptom of an unattached and ahistorical neoliberal spiritualism rather than a real engagement with ritual. One of their most ambitious works is Enter the Cave (2016), which the trio performed at the Hammer Museum. The production was recently expanded into a three-part work with a larger company at a warehouse in the Frogtown neighborhood of Los Angeles. I rolled my eyes at the hooded creatures carrying canes, whose job it was to lead us between three linked performance spaces. Priestly figures perfumed the venue with incense. One trio of dancers, standing atop a platform in a large fabric cone and wearing gauzy white gowns, resembled a three-headed bride, their faces caked in white makeup. They danced impeccably, timing twists of their heads and contortions of their arms like puppets tethered to a single string. I delighted most of all in recognizing them from the real ritual, McNeely's weekly class, where I gladly trade the animated visualization of her imaginary to embody it myself.

"ENTERTAINMENT IS making art to survive," McNeely tells me over coffee and a joint. She doesn't seek value in being called an "artist," but in being paid for her work-and paid in the kind of currency she can use to buy food. McNeely credits her interest in mysticism to the Catholic Church, whose religious pageantry relies on chants, candles, and timed swings of incense: "shock and awe," as she puts it. McNeely was often praised for her piety as a child, having recognized piety as something one could perform. She locates her penchant for the life of inanimate objects in the saints, "statues that have power over you." 

McNeely's was a ballerina's rebellion. She defected to modern dance, then to hip-hop and burlesque. She declared her initial burlesque performance an "effective accident." Not knowing how to emulate the swift athletics of other dancers, she slowly, simply crawled across the stage. No one moved. No one talked. The restrained movement captured the audience's unwavering attention: they were, as she put it, in "a trance." In the art of seduction, one application of sexuality is control.

Seductive and repulsive, caring and sadistic, manipulated and manipulating, cast as ugly, turned grotesque, sexuality in McNeely's work is never simple self-expression. It extracts attention. I'm reminded of the eighteenth-century category of the "vagrant" in English law, which criminalized as equals sex-workers, beggars, witches, and entertainers. Vagrancy laws prohibited unauthorized kinds of work that entertainers and witches did, work that involved exerting control. I'm also reminded that the etymology of "entertainment" includes the Latin root for "to hold."

"How can you catch something if you're too busy looking at yourself in the mirror? Focus!" McNeely often tells us in class to make our movements smaller. "Don't yell at me with your body," or, because movement is a language, "Stop dancing in all caps." Make it tiny, she offers, modeling a tiny shift in the position of her right hand and her neck, or a fast chain of arms, hands, and elbows-out, in, grab, pull-held close to her body, as if protecting her chest. You want the audience to be "like this," she always says:  "this" looks like a stiff body leaning forward, smoothly, slowly, as if sucked toward the dancer, spellbound, as if dance were something you could fall into like a well. 

IN ADDITION TO working as a teacher and an artist, McNeely is a commercial director and choreographer for live performances and music videos. She's collaborated with pop stars including Eve, Selena Gomez, and Fitz and the Tantrums. For Dillon Francis's "Candy" video, released last year, two white dancers make a humping duet. Decked out in tattered outfits like zombies, they pierce the air and strike mirrored shapes with their arms. In Yogi and Skrillex's "Burial" (2015), a black dance troupe, its double-jointed members wearing stockings over their faces, improvise skin-crawling contortions of their shoulders with break-dancing slides and flips. At one point they form a many-armed creature like an Indian god, before, inexplicably, Dennis Rodman chases them away. 

In McNeely's commercial choreography, as in her classes, pedagogy is central. The dancers have to do a routine she invents. Unlike other pursuits in the art world, where learning has taken on astronomical costs and increasing uncertainty of purpose, teaching is built into the structure of choreography itself. And here, there is no hiding art from its market. McNeely's labor has value in both use and exchange—videography is commercial work (music videos are advertisements for albums and concert sales, establishing a performer's brand); I pay about fifteen dollars a class.

McNeely choreographed Rihanna in the video for "Sledgehammer," a song she contributed to the soundtrack for the movie Star TrekBeyond (2016). Rihanna appears in flowing red fabrics on a craggy desert planet beneath a spectacular starry sky. With part of her hair stuck up like a Mohawk, the middle of her face painted with made-up symbols, she hops easily into the trope of the Africanized alien (see: Avatar). Forcing visible tension into her fingertips, she draws her arms together, summoning a swarm of birdlike, CGI spacecraft, which fill up and then fly off the screen. She draws her hands in a circle beside her, and the sand rises to meet her palms. She conjures a ball of light and juggles electricity. At the video's end she seems to have dissolved into a constellation (a step up, perhaps, from a star). 

Rihanna's circular hand gestures, jagged poses, and tweaked shapes bear McNeely's influence. She told me that to shoot the video, she and Rihanna established a vocabulary of shapes. As the camera rolled, McNeely danced behind it, offering her movements for Rihanna to mirror, if she chose to. This isn't merely puppeteering—the exchange was more an improvisational feedback loop.

TO CHOOSE A song for her class , McNeely studies the graphic sound waves presented on Soundcloud, the music streaming service, looking for a dip and a burst. The music is always first, and the dances follow: every single movement has a sound. To make a dance, many choreographers improvise movements, sketching their combinations before fixing the steps. McNeely stares at the empty space of her room, choreographing herself from outside. This visualization process works its way into her movements: bodies appear to be convulsing, possessed, or animated by some external force. McNeely's choreography involves a kind of bodily ventriloquism.

Multiple ways of thinking about the animated body converge in McNeely's practice. Her performances with WIFE evoke the religious experience of possession: dancers move as if compelled by an alien presence. But her style is also intelligible in terms borrowed from political economy, the jolting, repetitive movements suggesting the condition of alienated labor. Animated by capital, put to work, the human is less an agent than an instrument, a body, receptive to control.

Of course, political economy is inseparable from histories of gender and race, in which women and black people have been viscously treated as pliable. Highlighting unfunded, unauthorized performance—a legacy of vagrancy—McNeely puts "black street performers" and "strippers" on the "same level as ballerinas." Mexican, Filipino, and Irish, McNeely identifies jokingly as "dulce de leche." When I ask her if she's concerned with the politics of borrowing from black music and dance she answers, true to character, "I use what moves me." 

Black people often stand in our contemporary imagination as figures of what it means to survive total commodification.Does hip-hop function in McNeely's practice to emphasize this exploration, citing its "underprivileged" source, or am I merely trying to defend my investment, in other words, my implication? 

IN HER CLASSES, McNeely promotes stealing. By the end, after drilling us in the routine at least a dozen times, she chooses smaller groups of dancers to perform in the center of the room. (For the record, I was chosen once, and screamed like I was about to thank my mother.) The dancers she picks always variously kill it, meaning they look like they are doing next to nothing. I have come to pick some favorites: a lanky, curly-haired white woman who performs like a creature, a black man whose moves are so sharp it makes the spaces between them seem eternal. The rest of the class is meant to "take" or "translate" the movements that they see. "You learn by trying to copy, it doesn't matter what the copies look like," McNeely says. The translations, in my case, feel bleak, or pale, but I press on anyway, knowing that trying on other bodies for size erupts in failures, misalignments, and falsehoods.

 McNeely said her style solidified when she was forced, as a teacher, to choreograph dances for nondancers, stripping out ballet's rigid shapes. She also "surrendered" to her influences-hip-hop street dance, circus, and burlesque-when she "let them in." Here, McNeely lets us in on a paradox of animation: making the puppet move often has the effect of mechanizing the puppeteer.

Her emphasis on possession and animation amounts to an ambivalence about subjectivity. Her puppetlike movements reflect how the systems and logic of capitalism can be embodied. At the same time, her work shows that defying that logic—creating a gap between individuals and the forces that animate them—doesn't have to look like escape or transcendence; it can look like doubling down and experimenting with the weird tensions, twitchy resistances, and downright magic within. It is only fitting that I find McNeely's project most compelling not when it has been codified as "art" but when it appears most like a commodity—a class that I pay for, or a form of entertainment. 

At the end of the half-dozen WIFE performances I've seen, the stage goes black, and McNeely and her collaborators disappear. There is no curtain call. The audience claps to a closed curtain, to an empty stage, to themselves. But at the end of every class, she takes a bow.   

The article first ​was published in www.artinamericamagazine.com

​Barbara Kasten’s restless innovation and unique artistic vision come to the fore in Intervals at Thomas Dane Gallery, London. The exhibition encompasses both historic and recent work that highlights the Chicago-based artist’s distinctive approach to multidisciplinary compositions. Her practice, described as “painting in motion” marries sculpture, photography and film in a poignant exploration of light and space. Meticulous planning and intricate detail go into the assemblies, with the use of glass, mirrors, acrylic and metal elements adding an extra dimension of depth into each.

​Kasten takes inspiration from a wide range of sources, from postmodern design and architecture, constructivism, alongside the lives and works of Kazimir Malevich and Lázló Moholy-Nagy. Furthermore, she is deeply informed by the 1970s California Light and Space Movement, and as a trained sculptor and painter, began to challenge the conventional notions of these disciplines through lens-based practice.

​A chronological approach to her oeuvre reveals a manipulation of space  through elegant style and complex compositions. For example, in Construct, developed in the late 1970s, Kasten captures the transformation of building materials into tableaux with a Polaroid camera. A similarly adventurous approach can be seen in her recent series Transpositions (2014-2016) and Collisions (2016), in which she uses Plexiglas elements to create large-scale installations. The use of this material imbues each piece with its fascinating properties, the combination of its transparency and vivid colour fuse the foreground and background as one abstract surface. In amalgamating a meticulous treatment of materials and an inherent interest in the mysticism of light, Kasten evokes questions concerning the nature of the image-making process. With the descent of physical photographs and the rise of digital pictures, the tension between the substantial and the flat surface adds a poignant and increasingly topical dimension to her oeuvre.

Barbara Kasten: Intervals, Thomas Dane Gallery,  London

​www.thomasdanegallery.com

​by Sarah Williams Goldhagen​

Once finished, any change in the built environment has a way of settling in quickly to become the new normal. A new park or high-rise or bridge takes so long to build that we get habituated to its existence within months of its official opening, indeed sometimes days after the construction workers clear away the orange cones or peel the protective film off glass doors. This, combined with the fact that we tend to pay little mind to that which is static and seemingly immovable, means that we often don’t fully consider the design of preexisting structures or public works, rarely wonder how they might have been different from what we behold. Moreover, unless they impinge directly on our daily routine, even extraordinary, life-altering changes to our surroundings can be overlooked or insufficiently examined.

For most of the past seventy-five years, New York was an introverted city. Residents could be forgiven if they barely registered that four of the city’s five boroughs were on islands, collectively featuring 578 miles of coastline. Most New Yorkers led landlocked lives, as the city offered few opportunities to engage meaningfully with its harbor or waterways. After all, the final portion of Battery Park City’s splendid mile-long esplanade, with its expansive views of New York Harbor, opened only in 1996. The first segment of 550-acre Hudson River Park was completed in 2003. Before the plan for Freshkills Park was drafted in 2001, the Fresh Kills estuary in Staten Island was the site of the world’s largest landfill. Governors Island, the Coast Guard’s local base of operations until 1995, sat wholly out of sight and mind. Sure, we could take in the splendor of the Upper Bay from Brooklyn—but mainly when perched high above it, on the promenade in Brooklyn Heights. To actually feel the spray of water on our faces—without heading to a beach in the outer reaches of Brooklyn or Queens—all we could do was catch a ride on the Staten Island Ferry, just for the fun of it. 

How different the city is becoming. A few decades into an ongoing waterfront reclamation and park-building spree, New York might soon lay claim to being America’s greatest water city. Freshkills Park in Staten Island, which at a gargantuan 2,315 acres will be New York’s largest green space after Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, is to open in stages over the next three decades, with Schmul Park, Owl Hollow Fields, and the bike paths of the New Springville Greenway, all bordering Staten Island’s residential neighborhoods, already completed. Freshkills’s 21-acre North Park Phase 1 is expected to open in 2019, and the 482-acre East Park, one year later. Manhattan-based James Corner Field Operations designed the park’s master plan. On Governors Island, which can be reached by a five-minute, 800-yard ferry ride from Manhattan’s southern tip, 40 acres of new park and public spaces, designed by New York and Rotterdam–based West 8, opened last summer. And the 1.3-mile-long, 85-acre Brooklyn Bridge Park by local firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), which begins north of the Manhattan Bridge and snakes southward along the East River’s shoreline to end at Atlantic Avenue, is open, and nearly finished. 

Collectively, these large urban parks are thoroughly transforming not just how New Yorkers experience their city but also our understanding of what urban life can and will be in the twenty-first century. So it is important to consider how these parks came to be and what they are. After all, landscape architecture is design, which means that it comprises a series of decisions that could have been made otherwise.  

There are many reasons why New York’s harbor and waterways have become hot sites for urban revitalization. Most immediately, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Vision 2020 plan included mandates to improve the city’s water quality, restore degraded waterfront habitats, and address the anticipated effects of climate change. Parks advance all these goals. They expand the variety of habitats for flora and fauna (including water creatures), thereby fostering species diversity. They increase the city’s permeable surfaces, mitigating flooding caused by heavy rain that can pollute the city’s waterways through effluent overflow. Because parks shift the ratio of absorbent to reflective surfaces, they also help combat New York City’s substantial urban heat-island problem: heat-retaining asphalt and concrete make city temperatures skew hotter than those in the surrounding countryside.

New York’s waterfront park-building campaign epitomizes a reorientation of major cities around the globe toward their aquatic edges, which they increasingly view as valuable public amenities. In the United States and abroad, similar projects are underway from Austin to Los Angeles, from Hamburg to Shanghai. The principal historic factor driving this phenomenon is the consolidation of the shipping and cargo industry: the most profitable container ships today are supersize behemoths, which can dock in only a handful of deepwater ports. The Port Newark–Elizabeth Marine Terminal in New Jersey, the busiest on the East Coast, has been leeching business from countless smaller urban ports for decades, including those that once lined the East and Hudson rivers. Combine this with the more recent reversal of long-standing demographic trends: more and more people are choosing cities over suburbs.1 That has created a generation of urban dwellers who crave the kinds of services and life experiences for themselves and their families that suburban playgrounds and yards once offered them. ​

Most of New York’s shorelines, long in desuetude, were already held in the public trust. So they came to be regarded as obvious sites for major urban redevelopment, and parks were the choice. Mustering the political will to build a new public park is easier than convincing people to build, say, prisons or affordable housing, and a less controversial enterprise than turning land over to private developers. ​

Given the immense financial pressures on public resources today, not only in New York but nearly everywhere, one might reasonably maintain that it scarcely matters what a new public park looks like. Grass, trees, water, playground equipment . . . it’s all good, right? Well, maybe. But there’s good, and then there’s better than good, or even great. Frederick Law Olmsted’s extraordinary 843-acre Central Park—still the gold standard, since 1858—exemplifies the sizable urban park that offers much more than patches of green respite from the asphalt jungle. Designed by Olmsted in collaboration with architect Calvert Vaux, Central Park simultaneously enhances and substantively shapes people’s experience of Manhattan. And while not every park should be Central Park, Olmsted’s masterpiece still offers valuable lessons that can be extrapolated and used to evaluate contemporary park design. ​

​Olmsted’s sculpted, carefully constructed hills, dales, open lawns, and smaller, more protected glades and clearings greatly expand Central Park’s sweep, both literally and perceptually. They create an array of middle grounds between foreground and background, spaces where people compose themselves into discrete tableaux for our delectation: ambling lovers, a father playing Frisbee with his kids, a klatch of mothers with strollers finding relief from the heat under the shade of a tree. Over the course of an hour-long stroll, these vignettes unfold, then change at regular ten- or fifteen- minute intervals. The park’s panoramas befit the shifting, glancing, surveying character of our vision, felicitously coupling monumental vistas with more intimate and protected places where we and our eyes can rest. Here is Olmsted’s brilliance: Central Park is designed to work with human minds and bodies. From the Great Lawn to the Ramble to the lightly managed wilds of the North Woods, the park’s deliberately sculpted topography resonates with our walking feet, scanning eyes, and narrative compulsions. The shifting elevations and vantage points offer up little green scenes from which to construct a variety of memorable images. It all adds up to an immensely rich, layered experience of place.

​We should expect no less of New York’s three most important new or forthcoming parks on Fresh Kills 
and Governors Island, and along the shoreline under the Brooklyn Bridge. Indeed, given the substantial public resources pouring into them and the impact they will have on generations of New Yorkers—if not, through their influence, on parkgoers worldwide—our expectations for this new spate of parks should be sky-high. How will their designs shape our experiences of one of the world’s greatest cities?

The responsibility for designing large urban parks falls on the shoulders of landscape architects. This is a tiny profession—the roster of the American Society of Landscape Architects counts fifteen thousand members, many fewer than the American Institute of Architects’ eighty-eight thousand—and one that has undergone a revolution of sorts in the past two decades. Before the turn of this century, if the phrase “landscape architect” evoked any image, it was of a soil-encrusted WASP designing precious gardens for private clients. The profession seemed engaged in a less-than-urgent enterprise. But the maritime trade’s withdrawal from urban waterfronts, along with declining industry in Rust Belt cities—all those empty lots in Detroit—have left monumental swaths of unused land ripe for redevelopment. Add concerns about climate change and catastrophic weather events like Hurricane Sandy, and the question of how best to design and make use of cityscapes is now being shoved into every urban policy maker’s face. Landscape architecture, once an effete and marginal practice, has become a frontline design profession.  ​

The lead designers of the new parks on Fresh Kills and Governors Island and by the Brooklyn Bridge are three of landscape architecture’s luminaries. British-born James Corner, founder of James Corner Field Operations, shot from obscurity to celebrity nearly overnight with a single gemlike project, the High Line, for which he led a large team of designers that included Diller + Scofidio (Renfro came to the firm later) and Piet Oudof, a Dutch designer of sublime gardens. Field Operations now has dozens of commissions for parks and public spaces around the United States as well as a handful of important projects abroad. Adriaan Geuze leads West 8, which earned early fame for its let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom master plan for defunct docklands in the Borneo-Sporenburg neighborhood in eastern Amsterdam. More recently, West 8 completed Madrid Rio, a major new park on a 3.7-mile stretch along the Manzanares River in the southwestern portion of the Spanish capital. Michael Van Valkenburgh of MVVA snagged the commission for the Brooklyn Bridge Park in 2005 after having prepared its preliminary plan. At that time, his firm was best known for achingly poetic smaller projects such as Wellesley College’s Alumnae Valley and Battery Park City’s Teardrop Park, but since then MVVA has taken on many other gritty large-scale projects, including the Maggie Daley Park in Chicago and the Corktown Common on the Don River in Toronto. For all three firms, designing a major waterfront park in New York was the commission of a lifetime. ​

​Corner, Geuze, and Van Valkenburgh preside over very different constellations in the firmament of contemporary landscape design ideas and sensibilities. Considering each firm individually clarifies their differences in approach; considering all three together reveals some of the most important themes and patterns that dominate discussions about how best to negotiate the natural world’s increasingly fraught, necessary role in urban life.

We must start with the sites for these three parks. Fresh Kills, an extraordinarily beautiful and, in Corner’s words, “strange” place,2contains wetlands, salt marshes, trees, and meadows, all abutting the large William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge. Governors Island’s new 40-acre park occupies the south side of the 172-acre island, and the Brooklyn Bridge Park runs along the shore of the East River. However great the ecological and topographical differences among these sites, Geuze, Corner, and Van Valkenburgh faced similar challenges. All three projects were prepared amid heightened concern about climate change, owing in part to the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy. There remains a palpable sense of urgency to the cause of reconfiguring fragile coastlines. And none of the sites is remotely “natural.” Freshkills Park sits on a monumental pile of fetid garbage that will continue to emit methane and other noxious gases for years. Governors Island more than doubled in size and acquired its current oblong configuration after decades of having landfill dumped along its southern edge, much of it excavated during the construction of the Lexington Avenue subway line and the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel. The mile-plus-long shoreline of the Brooklyn Bridge Park featured six piers of decrepit warehouses and docks that were severed from surrounding neighborhoods by the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway. ​

Beyond their commitment to enhancing public life, Corner, Geuze, and Van Valkenburgh have little in common when it comes to building on postindustrial sites. Corner made his name as the leading intellectual figure in landscape urbanism, a movement promoting the importance of ecology and the management of open spaces in city planning. In a succession of conference presentations and treatises laced with postmodern jargon, Corner has argued the somewhat obvious case that the best design is a “dynamic, open-ended matrix [that] can never be operated upon with any certainty as to outcome and effect.”3 The landscape urbanism he champions “escapes design”: the right scheme will magically emerge when data collected using various disciplines and methods—forestry, marine biology, graphic design, environmental engineering, acoustics—is inputted into a parametrically sophisticated program of sufficient computational power. Corner’s is a broad-brush approach: nature and people, he maintains, will fill in the details over time. ​

Geuze, too, associates himself with landscape urbanism, but in practice his approach is quite different. The Dutch have traditionally taken a heavy hand when it comes to sculpting landscapes, since much of the Netherlands sits on dike-protected reclaimed land below sea level. Despite echoing Corner to criticize colleagues who, he feels, do “too much design,”4 Geuze brings a rather conventional sensibility to his appointed task, with an interest in narrative and strongly modeled views, in the spirit of formal European gardens. His designs for waterfront parks in Toronto and Madrid feature simple oppositions, large monochromatic planes, aggressively repetitive patterns, and nakedly iconic gestures such as torquing and trussed bridges painted bright red. ​

Van Valkenburgh, by contrast, deeply believes in the redemptive power of design, and unapologetically approaches landscape architecture as an art. If Corner’s approach is top-down, Van Valkenburgh’s is bottom-up. He combines an encyclopedic knowledge of ecology with a dogged focus on human sensory experience that is informed by intuition, along with occasional assists from environmental psychology. His complexly layered, topographically varied landscapes feature curving paths, constructed hillocks, and mystery-laden sequences culminating in surprises, like a monumental view or a rough-hewn, rocky amphitheater. ​

What are New Yorkers getting in their new waterfront parks? Freshkills Park, by dint of both its enormity and the complexity of its challenges, differs substantially from the other two. Even though very little of Corner’s design has been executed, Freshkills Park is an exceptionally beautiful place. At sea level, a linked series of wetlands, freshwater creeks, and tidal saltwater flats stretch over 3.4 square miles to create a meandering, many-fingered landscape of marshy, soft edges. It is kayaking heaven. From these waterways rise first swamp grasses, then intermittent woodlands, and finally, the four hills comprising fifty-plus years of New York’s garbage. Each one rises over one hundred feet. The city sanitation department sealed the trash mounds (except for the West Mound, which will be capped by 2021), then spread dirt around them and planted grass seeds. In most of the park, the only visible remnants of the site’s malodorous past are the occasional leachate-monitoring wells and landfill gas-well header pipes, which are capped metal tubes protruding knee-high from the ground. Today, Freshkills features astonishing, unbounded expanses of meadows where tall, wheat-colored, red-tinged grasses sway in breezes, layered above meandering waterways and beneath the big skies one associates more with the western plains than with the East Coast, much less Staten Island. ​

Corner describes his vision for Freshkills as “more of a national park kind of experience” than a conventional urban park.5 Nature over time will be his coauthor. Everything Field Operations has proposed for this site treads lightly on the land, and rightly so. The North Park Phase 1, which borders the West Shore Expressway, the Travis neighborhood, and the Davis Wildlife Refuge, will run along the base of the North Mound in a long, lazy arc edged by a screen of trees, slowly rising to culminate in a lightly wooded plateau with a simply designed bird-watching tower. For the 482-acre East Park, expected to open in 2021, Field Operations envisions open grasslands with a wetland boardwalk, a picnic area, and a kayak launch. ​

​However well or poorly Corner’s less-is-more approach works in other Field Operations projects, it suits the manifold challenges of Freshkills precisely. Enhance these wondrous offerings by making them accessible, and otherwise leave them alone. Even though it remains closed to the public, Freshkills is already accruing substantive ecological benefits for the region, foremost among them enhancing species diversity, which is woefully absent in New York’s overbuilt environment. The New York City Parks Department has already counted many species that have reappeared on the site long after fleeing the region, such as deer, northern snapping turtles, gray squirrels, raccoons, weasels, and foxes. Returning bird species include the American kestrel, turkey vulture, ring-necked pheasant, red-winged blackbird, tree swallow, American goldfinch, osprey, and red-tailed hawk. The birds disperse seeds in the meadows, helping propagate more indigenous plants. For the meadows, Corner envisions fields of native flora: switchgrass, yarrow, goldenrod.

​If Freshkills Park will serve as New Yorkers’ refuge from the city, Governors Island and Brooklyn Bridge Park both offer refuges in the city. The uninhabited thirty-three-acre northern portion of Governors Island features a historic district and national monument anchored by Fort Jay (1806–09) and the semicircular, hewn-sandstone Castle Williams (1811), both administered by the National Parks Service. This area also contains Colonel’s Row, a collection of late nineteenth-century historic homes arrayed around a small grassy knoll, as well as Nolan Park, which has the feel of a New England village green, and the enormous U-shaped Liggett Hall, originally a 350,000-square-foot army barracks, designed by McKim, Mead & White and completed in 1930.

West 8’s new park begins at Liggett Terrace, a public plaza by the hall, and spreads from there to occupy nearly all of the island’s southern tip, which sits about one thousand yards from Liberty Island. Geuze organized a collection of petal-shaped, low-slung green-and-brown areas that progressively increase in size, with plantings and play equipment arranged in a variety of visual patterns.Near Liggett Terrace, low, tightly floriated hedgerows trace out little paths. Further out, a long, linear climbing structure encourages kids to hoist and swing themselves while their parents loll about on its suspended nets. On a third, larger, grassy section, fifty red hammocks stretch between tree trunks. This so-called Hammock Grove doesn’t look like much now, but when the trees mature and spread their leafy crowns, it could offer an appealingly idle way to spend a pleasant summer afternoon. ​

The curvilinear zones are accessible via wide, asphalt-paved pathways lined with white pillowed curbs in patterned concrete. Everything points toward the main event, the Hills, which opened to the public in July. Four artificial mounds, ranging in height from twenty-five to seventy feet, first hide, then reveal views of the harbor and—voila!—the Statue of Liberty. Geuze’s instinct to sculpt at least a portion of Governors Island’s pancake-flat topography into a more three-dimensional landscape repeats Olmsted’s modeling of Central Park. But here the gesture feels simplistic. A forty-acre park should offer much more than a show-stopping main event. Indeed, it’s not even certain that such a place needs a single climactic moment. (Leslie Koch, former president and CEO of the Trust for Governors Island, would likely disagree, as she reasoned that only something extraordinary would convince people to get on the ferry to make the trip out there in the first place.)

Consistent with Geuze’s interest in narrative, the sequence we travel from Liggett Terrace to the Hills gradually unfurls a view of the Statue of Liberty, spatially telling a story about the anticipation of democratic tolerance symbolized by the monument. But that’s a tale that all of us already know and don’t really need to hear again. Overall, the problem with West 8’s design is that it’s a single, banged-out chord rather than the symphony of high notes and low notes that characterizes a really great urban park. It doesn’t offer the shifting rhythms that make us want to return again and again, knowing that we will find something new. It’s telling—and damning—that Geuze, happily envisioning people’s experience on Outlook Hill, says, “We expect people will take a selfie there.”7 Although the long chutes on Slide Hill invite more sustained engagement, at least for kids, not much else does. It’s all too one-shot, or snapshot. The Hills are little more than a view-production device. Rachel Whiteread’s otherwise haunting Cabin (2016), a concrete cast of a wooden hut on Discovery Hill, exacerbates rather than mitigates the impression. A house that no one can enter, this is a piece of public art that deflects rather than invites engagement, let alone exploration. Once you’ve seen this place, you’re done. ​

There are other disappointments in West 8’s design. Geuze reportedly spent a quarter of the budget raising the level of the park site by sixteen feet, warning of its imperilment by flooding; in the process, he fortified the bastionlike quality of the shoreline rather than breaking it up. Sure, it’s a vulnerable site. But to maximize ecological benefit of such reclamation projects, sloping inclines and soft, fuzzy edges work best, because they foster species diversity in a way that raised, hard edges don’t. (To be fair, the depth of the surrounding waters may have made softening the park’s descent to the water prohibitively expensive.) Either way, the oddest things about West 8’s design remain its contextual disconnects. Here you stand on an uninhabited island in New York Harbor, in a funky but mannered update of a formal European garden. And your relationship to the water is never more than purely visual, a pictorial scene rather than a three-dimensional, embodied immersion in the landscape. The whole composition feels abstracted from the site. ​

It would be challenging to imagine a greater contrast to either the Hills or Freshkills Park than the new $355 million park in Brooklyn. Complex, urbane, ecologically rich, and experientially layered, Brooklyn Bridge Park represents a triumph so astonishing that Olmsted may no longer need to serve as the touchstone for all that landscape architecture can accomplish and be. Van Valkenburgh could be the Olmsted that our twenty-first century needs.  ​

​We should start by considering the site as it looked in 2005, when MVVA completed the master plan: an asphalt-paved shoreline cleaved from the city by the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway and strung with a monotonous series of deteriorating concrete piers. Reconceptualizing this as a major urban park took grit, along with a good deal of imagination. Matthew Urbanski, the lead designer on the project under Van Valkenburgh, told me that during the design process, he constantly asked himself one question: for this park’s projected users, what experiences are missing from the city that landscape architecture can realistically provide?8 In interviews and publications, Van Valkenburgh frequently recounts one early community “visioning” meeting, when an elderly woman said that she lived on a fixed income and owned no country house where she could escape the summer heat. She wanted a place where she could go at dusk, take off her shoes, and stand in the East River while gazing up at the moon.

Olmsted maintained that great parks offer a wide range of experiences for the many different people who use them in various times and seasons. Brooklyn Bridge Park, now 90 percent complete, does that in spades. MVVA parceled out a variety of spaces for passive and active recreational pursuits. Pier 1, to the north, features spacious, sculpted lawns, a waterfront promenade, terraces paved with variegated stone, including a twenty-nine-foot-high amphitheater built from rough-hewn granite blocks where you can look out on the bay and take in the skyline of lower Manhattan. At Piers 2 and 5, jocks young and old congregate, using the basketball and handball courts, an in-line skating track, and the playing fields for soccer, field hockey, and lacrosse. Pier 3, which has a projected completion date of spring 2018, will feature the kind of undulating, highly controlled, seemingly naturalistic landscapes that earned Van Valkenburgh his reputation: hillocks and gently sloping dales bordered with shrubbery and trees to define a central lawn. A serpentine labyrinth garden at Pier 3’s northern edge is reminiscent of MVVA’s stunning Monk’s Garden at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. ​

Everywhere in Brooklyn Bridge Park topographical relationships are precisely planned, carefully managed. During the design process, Van Valkenburgh climbed up on a ladder at the site to gauge the projected height of slopes and refine the design of the paths up and down constructed hills. Again and again, spatial sequences lead us from compressed, heavily planted, winding paths to an explosive release, where horizontal vistas offer up grassy expanses, paved promenades, and monumental waterfront views. As in Olmsted’s parks, the design starts from the individual human body, walking and scanning, listening, touching and imagining touching, anticipating. ​

Upland from the natural outcroppings and the piers, a green spine connects it all. One section of the park’s central Greenway sits quite close to the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway, so MVVA designed a thirty-five-foot-high berm, called the Ridge, that redirects the highway’s deafening drone, cutting noise in the park by 75 percent. (Last summer, goats could be spotted grazing on the Ridge.) Proliferating along the Greenway is an appealingly wild composition of trees, shrubs, grasses, and flowers, many of them native to the area. Between the piers, riprap attenuates the East River’s waves, as will floating boardwalks when funding is secured. A sloping shoreline offers all manner of inviting amenities: a sinuous kayak launch, marshy wetlands, a pebble beach where elderly women and everyone else can stand in the water and gaze at the moon. ​

Urbanski told me that Brooklyn Bridge Park’s design is guided by faith in complexity.10 This park is full: full of ways for people to use and enjoy and regard the city and its harbor, together and alone. It is also full of sustainability and resilience: green roofs, recycled materials, soft edges. It’s full of varied ecological habitats, including a saltwater lagoon and marshes, a shallow subtidal pebble beach, a dune, a wildflower meadow, a freshwater swale, wetlands, and a coastal forest with dense berried shrubbery to attract birds along the Atlantic flyway. It is full of public art. It is full of social initiatives, like the barbecue pits and picnic tables that draw people from neighborhoods geographically close to but economically distant from tony Brooklyn Heights. And most of all, Brooklyn Bridge Park is full of people: in 2014, the yet-unfinished park received an estimated  4.5 million visitors between May and August alone.  ​

MVVA embraced the site’s industrial past, starting from the preexisting twenty-five acres of concrete pier slabs, working alongside and with their detritus. On the piers, the firm demolished the warehouse sheds but retained their steel frames, painting them sky blue. These serve as scale-giving devices that help visitors visually reconcile the enormity of the bay with the smallness of human bodies on the ground. Tens of thousands of feet of longleaf yellow pine were harvested from the demolished cold storage building on Pier 1 and recruited for use in park benches, small structures, and wood decking. The waterlogged, rotting wood pilings were left in place, offering a poignant anthem to Brooklyn’s ferrying, shipping past. ​

​The zenith of the park’s design is the 1.6-acre Children’s Playground, located near the Atlantic Avenue entrance, which Urbanski designed in collaboration with environmental psychologists Nilda Cosco and Robin Moore at the Natural Learning Initiative. It features multifarious opportunities for children of all ages to explore, wonder, learn, and play. There’s a marsh garden scaled to little feet and hands, as well as a jet field and a “water lab,” which includes teaching structures such as the large wood-and-metal contraption that funnels a stream of water with propulsive force to rotate a pinwheel made of cups in various sizes. There is a valley of swing sets sized for young bodies, ranging from infants to teens, and a two-story slide that ends in a large sandbox. The box is dotted with wooden, metal, and rope-climbing structures in striking geometric shapes, and populated with stone animals as sentinels. The last time I visited, on a hot midsummer day, the playground was crammed with children and their guardians, clad in cutoff jeans and kippas and hijabs and whatever passed that Saturday for Brooklyn casual chic. Brooklyn Bridge Park is the very democratic social condenser that only a great urban park can provide.

Van Valkenburgh, like Corner, grounds his design in research drawn from a variety of disciplines and methodologies. What his Brooklyn Bridge Park shows is that research, though necessary, will never be sufficient. You need something more. Van Valkenburgh calls it heart. What he means, though, is that the landscape architect—like any architect—must have a deep appreciation for the complex, multisensory nature of human experience. Seeing and selfies matter. But so do sounds, tactile sensations, and memories cultivated over time. Moreover, Van Valkenburgh understands that great landscapes offer different things to different people, as well as different things to the same people over time: in darkness and light, in winter and spring, on quiet days and noisy ones. ​

Brooklyn Bridge Park has been fifteen years in the making. It will take perhaps twice that long for the same kind of progress to be visible at Freshkills Park. But slowly, these landscape architects and their projects are utterly reconfiguring New Yorkers’ relationship to the city’s extraordinary harbor, that protected deepwater estuary that helped make New York what it is by offering first explorers, then traders, access to both the ocean and the wide, navigable Hudson River. Today, life in the big city includes navigating through oaks and hickories, sighting barn swallows and chimney swifts high in the sky or herons and egrets at the water’s edge, listening to the sounds of cattails in the breeze and the rustle of squirrels foraging for elderberries. ​

​Who knew? Perhaps life in the hyper-dense global cities of our age will be something worth treasuring after all.

​SARAH WILLIAMS GOLDHAGEN is an author and architecture critic based in New York.

Only a day after the planner's off-timetable show in Kaliningrad, Russia, Super Sunglasses has discharged the promoting effort for its cooperation with Gosha Rubchinskiy. ​

Coordinated and altered by one of Rubchinskiy's long-term colleagues, Julian Klincewicz (the 21-year-old skater, artist, originator, picture taker and movie producer), the film highlights a few diverse solo moves. One artist (presented above) performs on the shoreline wearing one of the planner's SS17 tracksuits made in a joint effort with Italian sportswear mark Kappa. ​

​Portrayed by Super as like "an expressive dance", the film brings the universes of move and design together, shot in Klincewicz's mark lo-fi stylish. Concerning the shades themselves, they take after oversize wrap arounds, in dark and in white with yellow-tinted focal points.

Rubchinskiy has collaborated with a great deal marks in his time – from Reebok, Supreme and Vans, to Fila, Kappa, and Sergio Tacchini for SS17. At yesterday's show, the fashioner divulged an unexpected coordinated effort with German sportswear monster adidas. Drawing motivation from footballers' on-field and off-field garbs, the accumulation saw a combination of soccer and skate style. ​

“In the 90s or 80s, it was separated: football fans were football fans and skaters were skaters,” the designer said post-show. “But now things are changing, you see skate kids wearing football clothes and you can see football fans wearing skate stuff. Cultures mix, subcultures mix.

​The theme of the carnival has always been one of the most important for Mikhail Shemyakin - mystical carnival, gofmanian. The artist started out as befits Soviet nonconformist, a janitor and a loader work at the Hermitage, with expulsion from school at Repin Institute, and then out of the country. Since Shemyakin received worldwide fame and returned to Russia, but its gloomy ambiguous (could not tell people or dolls) characters have not changed. It seems natural that his first theatrical performance was staged by Dmitri Shostakovich opera "The Nose", on which the artist worked at the Leningrad Conservatory studio in 1967. Since then have been a series of graphic works and sculptures with distinctive characters and, most importantly, ballet gofmaniana Shemyakin - costumes and scenography "Nutcracker" performances (2001), "The Princess Pirlipat" (2003) and "The Magic Nut" (2005) at the Mariinsky Theatre. It works for these performances are the basis of an opening at the St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music Exhibition. They complement the work of others, one-act ballets, costumes march "Great Embassy of Peter the Great," which Mikhail Shemyakin, together with Vyacheslav Polunin set for the carnival in Venice, lithographs from the series "St. Petersburg Carnival". Interestingly, the heroes of the Shemyakin graphics and scenography broke in volume: in porcelain (represented by a series created by the Imperial Porcelain Factory), Christmas toys, miniatures (in conjunction with the jewelry house Sasonko). The organization of the exhibition participated Fund - Mikhail Shemyakin.

The exhibition is open from 16 February until April 9 ​

​The book collected closest friend of the artist, the master of performance Vladislav Mamysheva Monroe (1969-2013) Elizaveta Berezovskaya, include sufficient numbers of memoirs evidence.

​Here, among other things, you can find extensive and penetrating lyrics Nina Mamysheva (mother of the artist), fine essays prominent art critic Ekaterina Andreeva (a fellow member of his affairs at St. Petersburg), essays by Alexander Borovsky, Olga Sviblova and a host of other precious materials. There is a book and stupid like small fragments of memoir Andrey Bartenev, who showed that Mamyshev Monroe also held in the Department of jokes.

​Meanwhile, it is not. Of course, the Monroe loved fun, outrageous, wore a beautiful and expensive things, and did everything to get into high society, whose members are often bought his work (at least it is constantly referred to in the various posthumous publications).

​But Monroe, unlike Bartenev was not just a showman in the celebration of life. His varied work combines virtuosity and handicraft, united by the desire to show that human beings desperately empty and needs filling.

That's why (nature, as we know, abhors a vacuum) so he needed masks and decorations: three-layer makeup, formal suit, royal coat and other simulative accessories.
​

That's why it's so important to find, invent itself double, for example, in the face of the legendary actress, whose life has not yet been solved: how much pain it was for all of her novels and luxury style ...
​

What do we expect from the memoirs of a memorial book about one of the key characters of his time?
​

Firstly, the accuracy in the image of the hero contradictory. Monroe loved and knew how to stay in the memory of anyone, even accidentally encountered a person forever: for him, they say, it was impossible to remain indifferent.
​

​Secondly, of course, expect from such a collection of absorption at a time when the main character and his friends were young and live it in full.

​This book is quite a lot, but not enough to block the moment in which, in contrast to the main character's memoirs, alive and all his reminiscing and talking about it.