|
Frederic Jameson’s essay on the postmodern reveals an uneasiness with its superficiality, emotionlessness and falseness. He gives examples of modern and postmodern works. In the postmodern works, a key missing element is ‘affect’, or emotional expression. Emotional expression relies on notions of the human as a free thinking and acting agent, a ‘subject’ capable of projecting expression into an external world. The capitalist bureaucracy has induced a culture of conformism by invalidating the expressive, autonomous individual.
‘Cultural production is thereby driven back into the mental space which is no longer of the monadic subject, but of some degraded collective....’ In art and literature, the collective’s interpretation of history as stereotypes of ‘1950s-ness’prevail over truthful historical account, emphasizing fashion and style, like David Lynch or kitsch retro art. Stereotypes relate the account of the collective zeitgeist over the actual history which would relate stories of individuals and facts. But it is precisely this absence of any reality in our accounting of history that causes us to crave the proliferation of fake history, as seen in historical fiction, pastiche art and ‘vintage’ fashion. These problematic postmodern stylistic features are related to the ‘death of the subject’, e.g. the discrediting of the ability of an individual to act with free will. Free will no longer has credence after the double whammy of capitalist bureaucratisation/ institutionalisation and post-structuralist theory eschewed ideas like rationality, interpretation and truth. Perhaps there is equilibrium to be reached between abandonment of all interpretation and truth as manufactured by elites and the staunch adherence to a single idea. Even if there is no single accurate version of events or philosophy, the intention to relate them faithfully will doubtlessly render them closer to accuracy than otherwise. The difference is simply a difference of intent: intending to tell the truth versus intending to recreate the appearance/semblance/simulacra of the truth. Since intention is already admittedly subjective, it embraces relativism and truth at once. There cannot multiple interpretations of an individual's phenomeonlogical processes such as intention, in the way that it is hard to argue against the logic of Descartes ‘I think therefore I am’. Artists who pay homage to religion in art have subsumed a philosophical tradition proposing art as a religious alternative. In his essay The entry into 'Postmodernity: Neitzsche as a Turning Point' Jurgen Habermas describes how the thinking of various philosophers from the enlightenment to modernism criticized reason while embracing art as a religious experience. They hoped to create an artistically-inspired socially unifying consciousness like religion. Nietzsche paved the way for postmodernity with his critiques of both religion and reason. He 'can imagine modern art' as he claims that intellectualism is futile and devitalizing, as the end of reason is 'paralyzing' and divisive relativism. He proposes the creation of a new kind of 'Dionysian myth': A re-innovation of religiously-inspired irrationality, play, dance and rapture. The strains of his 'create new myths' argument are echoed in Artaud and Benjamin. All three of these theorists claim that new myths will empower consciousness. Habermas cites Benjamin who envisioned interpreting the manufactured objects of consumer culture like mystical symbols, and through them experiencing a 'profane illumination' akin to Jewish mysticism. Bataille followed Nietzsche and Benjamin in his advocacy of 'profane illumination' through art and experience, adding surrealist themes of violent death, shock and taboo. Heidegger likewise proposed destruction and self-denial as a means for overcoming reason. Habermas concludes by saying that all philosophers failed to use reason to replace religion, apparently because the ideas of 'myth' and 'artistic transcendence' were vague, subjective and therefore could never be a socially unifying force. One can picture these tubby, house-bound professors fantasizing about frolicking in Dionysian orgies, destroying things in bloody battles and becoming supermen. You can sense their own feelings of powerlessness in the poetic furor with which they write about attaining heroic pinnacles. Postmodern artists, musicians and performers continue evoking ritual today as if it were in vogue. Religious symbolism is used in pop music videos and is culturally pervasive. At the least artists, in creating images are shared by a collective, continue to feed the pseudo-religious desire for social cohesion. New symbols are required to fulfil a primal desire to perform and witness ritual acts, which, like the dreaming or children's fantasies, help people to mentally assimilate the world by materialising unseen processes. In ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’, Jean-François Lyotard uses the ideas of Emmanuel Kant as a framework for explaining how postmodernism evolved out of modernism as a more powerful means of challenging the conformist forces of capitalism and government. Postmodernism is paradoxically more logical and more nonsensical as it eludes the elites. The writing parallels this argument, evolving from a logical statement of events to a romantic lauding of masochism.
According to Lyotard, Modernism eluded the forces of industrialisation and consumerism by overturning the two conventions of beauty, established by Kant, which insist upon: 1) communicativeness and 2) subjective coherence. Modernism denied the consumerist need for a coherent message by making the content nonsensical to the public generally, aka ‘unpresentable’. It retained a private coherence for individuals, in other words it was still ‘conceivable’, as it relied on representation and figuration. Postmodernism took Modernism a step further: It made no sense to the public and it made no sense to individuals subjectively. Postmodernist paintings, as both inconceivable and unpresentable, were so abstract that they made no sense, and unexpressable ideas were represented through this absence of expression. Postmodernism thereby attains, to a higher degree, the mystical concept of the Kantian sublime: ‘The sublime is, according to Kant, a strong and equivocal emotion: it carries with it both pleasure and pain. Better still, in it pleasure derives from pain.’ Postmodern art is ‘more’ sublime’ as it deprives the viewer any pleasure or usefulness as a communicative tool. Postmodernity ‘Denies itself the solace of good forms,’ and ‘searches for new presentations not to enjoy them, but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.’ In his 1983 essay, Lyotard is simultaneously denouncing all attempts at coherency and unity, and extracting a hidden metanarrative which endured the fall of Catholicism, enlightenment, socialism and capitalism (yet remains an element of all three). It has a renaissance in punk and grunge and any number of subcultures. That metanarrative is masochism. Self-destruction is the only human act compatible with relativism as it apparently serves no cause and follows no logic. While masochism is absurd and inscrutable, it does describe a teleology when practiced by the human race as a whole. The teleology depicts a culture at the periphery of freedom, where increasing individualism, insularity and egotism are practiced to a degree beyond capitalism: the masochism of silencing art to the point of self-censure. The task of postmodern art, which as Lyotard says, is to continue experimentation, meeting ‘the challenge of the mass media’ through halting of communication. With all due respect to the achievements of Kant, the postmodernists and Lyotard, this author believes experimentation which involves self-censure, silence and pain is intrinsically limited. Creativity cannot be authentically linked with the paralysis of self-denial and destruction. Not only that, masochism is an excessively ‘easy’ solution to relativism precisely because artists don’t have to do anything: They don’t have to think and they don’t have to create. Alternatively, proactive artists could challenge the communicative monopoly of the mass media constructively by inventing new forms of communication. The human brain has the features of a complex system: It cannot be easily described by materialism or mechanism even though it is influenced by external factors, has a self-organising tendency towards equilibrium, non-linearity (unpredictability), and recursive (repeating) features. Complexity theory can predict and model computer algorithms, cloud formation and economic patterns with statistical formulas. A simplified, mystical and perhaps reductionist view could compare a complex system to a kind of animism or a 'god in the machine'.
Complexity is a cousin of Actor Network Theory which is used to describe human behaviour in sociology. Both consider internal and external ‘actors’ acting on an object to create states of ‘go’ or ‘stop’. Both consider objects to be reinforced and stabilsed with repeated action. In contrast to Actor Network Theory, complexity theory considers a wider range of states than just stop and go: for example stop and go occurring at once (strange attractor), transition, and a movement in between states that involves disorganisation. Complexity thery allows for more disorganisation and unknowns, and is non-linear in approach but can nonetheless be used to create predictive statistical formulas. Complexity theory can describe culture, and perhaps will one day allow us to predict the direction that art and fashion will take. Online activity, for example, could be measured. Statistical formulas for predicting societal behaviour are already used in the field of market research. It has been posited that culture is an ultracomplex system evolving not of a single complex mind, but out of billions minds, and then millions of mediums (encompassing digital, vocal, mechanical, material expressions). Equillilbrium within complex systems, which, according to the theory is necessary for their continuation, is attained through the system’s being neither too rigid nor too chaotic. Postmodernity and all of its cultural corollaries remind one of chaoticness. Lyotard, paraphrasing Habermas equates postmodernity to fractured totality of experience into specializations ‘in the mode of that immense ennui' of succumbing to the chaos of disorganisation, which in the spectrum which meets at the extremes, equates to the ‘boring' hyper-rigidity of realism. Art is the chaos-making, then rigidity bringing, balancing ‘actor’ within the complex system of culture. Walking the line between chaos and realism, or making narratives out of nonsense, was the task of the Shadow puppeteer, the Preist and Surrealist, who mediated between cultural conventions and wild unconsciousness to banish deamons when times were too chaotic and excite a dull culture when they were too rigid. The solution to postmodernity’s problems is not a linear progression towards order: It is a balancing act. Symbolic acts such as doffing ones hat, throwing a gauntlet, offering a wedding ring, bowing and shaking hands are associated with a very rigid social systems: heraldic knights threw gauntlets, handshakes are reserved for the formality of corporate boardrooms, and bowing is still appropriate in the presence of a the queen. Ring exchanging in western marriages is associated with the socially-enforced and formal act of bonding for life.
Yet symbolic acts are proliferating with the use of networking applications. ‘Friending’ someone or ’liking’ their post is an interaction, and they even come, in the ‘Facebook’ image with the icon of a hand in the act of a ‘thumbs up’ or an ‘new head’, as though a universal physical gesture is involved. Habermas and Artaud, Lanier and Benjamin all theorized on a new artificial language, related to technological change in some cases, where symbols would be used in an ideal communication that was primarily visual – thus there could not be any untruths or misunderstandings associated with words, which could be interpreted in many ways and also used to deceive. These idealists were right: hypermedia graphics present a language truth. The semiotic language proliferates in road signage as it is a context in which it is vital that language be interpreted clearly and immediately. Perhaps increasing demands for rapidity in interaction is why it gains popularity online. There is only one way to interpret doffing a hat, and there is only one way to interpret someone accepting your ‘friend’ request. It can be understood as passivity is a negative response and any other response is positive. The symbolic acts are different however, because they are not binding. Sending emails, ‘friending’ someone, running an application, or posting a photo are not associated with the formality of real symbolic acts. They are too easily done and too easily be undone. And it can be argued that they represent reasonably temporary commitments. At the same time, the acts can be easily be seen by many people and then socially enforced, e.g. if you ‘friend’ the wrong person, your friends may comment on your choice. A new expansion of the public, the iron fist of social rules, into the realm of the private, to such a great extent it is as if ‘hat doffing’ had undergone flourishing revival. Theorists such as Gombrich have ousted the idea of an ‘evolutionism’, or that contemporary art is more realistic and evolved than primitive art. They favour the an idea that representation is a different, culturally acquired way of seeing the world. In a parallel argument, the language of Hypermedia cannot be considered not any more evolved medium of expression than print or cinema, Manovich stated. Arguably, speech has evolved from grunts to rhetoric to sound bytes, but even this may or may not be ‘evolution’. Manovich claimed that human machine interface (HCI) is ‘not necessarily suitable as a cultural machine.’ While not the ideal communication proposed by many people around the turn of the century, hypermedia ‘symbolic acts’ constitutes a substantial change. The change amounts to the equivalent of being presented with a virtual wedding ring every day of your life so that the real presentation of a wedding ring feels redundant. Additionally one must note that if indeed words are being replaced in the profusion of symbolic acts, our vocabulary has shrunk to what Lev Manovich calls a ‘few tools and commands’. What is necessary then, is for artists to develop a larger vocabulary of symbolic acts to adapt the new language of ‘gesture icons’ to something equally poignant and varied enough to express a gradation of emotions more intense and subtle than ‘liking’ or not. ‘Real art has the capacity to make us nervous,’ writes Susan Sontag in her 1966 essay, Against Interpretation, which is why we need to engage in ‘cowardly’ interpretation. Interpretation constitutes ‘a continually evolving defence of art’s existence,’ she wrote, and is the ‘revenge of the intellect upon art’.
‘Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the work that he will install [an interpetable meaning] within the work itself’. Thus there are conceptual artists revenging against themselves and their critics by creating art concepts which interpret their own work. Even Sontag admits that a certain amount of interpretation is acceptable to ‘help us see the thing’ but as a sensual object rather than an abstract concept. Interpretation is also a way of making art useful. By voicing our interpretations and hearing the interpretation of others, we assess each other’s reactions and measure them against our own. It is a way not of understanding the artist’s intent but of understanding ourselves and our friends. We don’t need interpret to justify art, but we do need to communicate about ourselves. Without relating the art to ourselves, communicating it, and discovering the use-value of the artwork as a communicative symbol within the context of our lives, it cannot be integrated into lasting memory as a mental tool. Instead, when an artwork is merely sensually and existentially experienced, it fills us with the ‘nervousness’ of being trapped alone with an emotion and unable to communicate it.  Art in Western society has served a social purpose as primarily status symbol, decoration and stimulation. However, the nature of the psychological stimulation has changed from the evocation of strong emotions, particularly those emotions present in interpersonal relationships, to the sense that the work is impressive.
Traditionally, figurative paintings took on a societal role of providing emotional stimulus and social training. The representation of a family member or of a religious story served as ‘sentimental education’. As Henry Moore observed, nothing is more capable of emotional expression than the human figure: from love to rage; from empathy to disgust. Humans developed a narrative of appropriate emotions in response to figurative art, and their learning could be applied practically in the context of their interactions with other humans. Yet from the time of the Modernists, figures were being replaced with violins, consumer objects and ultimately abstractions. The moderns moved away from 'old fashioned' representations of the human form and advanced to new mental challenges, which reflected the challenges of war, egalitarianism and technological modernity. Synchronously, society turned to the media for its social and emotional needs. Art which depicted interpersonal relationships and evoked strong emotions was replaced by photography and film. Watching film informed society about salient social rules, styles and status. The psychological role that art now occupies is an unemotional one. It still serves to impress with intellect and skill, but without conveying any emotion, not because westerners have wholly embraced empiricism or relativism and have a utopian socio-political reality, but because the media now enforces social rules. Art consistently fulfils its role of impressing others as a decoration and social status, a role also fulfilled or even excelled by media, (for example the impressive stunts in an action film), and in manifest today in what Gombrich calls one of the 'styles that unite [our] age in a supra-individual spirit.' One still sees art which is attractive and purposive as housewares: a Rothko blank as a wall, the landscape photograph, the simple patterns in lace, etc. Of these things we think 'It would make a relaxing and impressive ornament.' The present popularity gold leaf/diamond/pearl has only aggrandized art as a display of wealth. The decorative purpose of art remains the same, what has changed is the purely emotional reaction to a human face, which has been replaced by an intellectual reaction to an abstraction: the cleverness one feels and making a discovery or a realization. Take, for example, the following art pieces: a mitten made of iron, Tracy Emin, a mattress made of sand, or a hacksaw cast in crystal. These display technical skill or intellectual intelligence rather than social and emotional awareness. Perhaps we don’t have as many faces in our art because we have less of a need to interact with other humans, as we spend more time communicating to them by means of signs and symbols (text). The amusement we feel is the discovery is of our own stupidity when the artist undermines our tacit understandings about the social and physical situation. The artist has displayed their intellectual superiority, intelligence and wit. What's more, we feel briefly more intelligent than we actually are, having been 'let in on the joke', we are smug upon realizing how we were at first duped, and have a fleeting sense of belonging to the elite of the intellectually enlightened, while the unsophisticated remain on the other side. Concept explanations and titles which include 'monumentality', 'collective', 'immemorial', serve to enhance our sense of belonging to an educated elite that understands these impressive but empty terms. Postmodern art has roughly the same psychological impact as the architecture of corporate buildings: it informs us about the technical skill of the architect, impresses us with the quality of the materials and is strategically designed to make us feel inferior. The role of art has changed and people have changed: they feel mentally outwitted in today's technologically-based and less face-to-face, world. The role of art has adapted people's new needs by becoming less figurative and giving them prosthetic intelligence.  Ernesto Neto's use of fragrant herbs in his gigantic nylon playground is inspiring to all artists working in scent.
I walked for several minutes before identifying the fragrance coming from the diaphanous walls as 'chammomile'. Further down the labarinthine passage, tiny lavender buds formed an assymetrical line, sewn into a wall of yellow nylon. Most pungent were the flavours of chili which were suspended in a tent-like structure. I took of my shoes to enter. I felt the spongy nylon cushion under my toes and smelled the intoxicating smell of chili powder, which percolated from a sack suspended from the ceiling. A couple of adult visitors were already lying inside. This was a realm which inspired childlike behavior. I stuck my arm into a soft nylon hole at a passerby on the others ide, visible through the translucent mesh, and they smiled. I am:
Technosexual. That is, I breathe pixels, I eat pixels, my cells are pixels and I am stimulated by pixels, as I am a picture beside a picture, linking to another picture, one after the other, mating together orgiastically. With the stimulation of a virtual image, the action of right-click is the action of a piston in a barrel. And the action does not end, for virtual sex lasts forever, there is no shedding of organs but only hypnosis; the mental echo of real sexuality, the unconscious movement of a willing object inducing unconsciousness, the unconscious acting reflexively to the titillations of a stimulus, the object of an object. Conveniently for capitalism, the most forward-thinking philosophers are nymphomaniac objectophiles. In Actor Network Theory (ANT), objects and people are both caused by preceding events and are equivalent in causing effects. Any successful action producing an effect forms a network link or 'quasi object' that becomes more concrete each time it is completed, and must be repeated or else it will disappear. There is nothing outside this network, that is, that all actions are interlinked yet they can be deactivated and the links can disappear. Actors are only broken off from the network by deactivating. To say that people and objects are only the result of preceding actions, and that ideas are objects are equivalent, undermines the traditional importance given in philosophy to human consciousness and agency, such as, humans decided to make cars out of objects because they decided it would be good to haul grain and thus 'be fruitful and multiply'. In ANT. A human is a car, and won't work without its parts, can't have existed without being made as a factory, will run better the more you drive it and if it stays put it dies. ANT has been criticized this as being 'purely descriptive'. ANT reminds me of Robert Ornstein's model of brain circutry, whereby networks which are more used become more stable and more easily triggered, promoting recurring thought/action, except that Ornstein emphasises the agency of the individual, underlining that the decision to repeat an action and thereby strengthen its neural network, or to sustain from it, is the heart of consciousness. Another new materialist school of thought developed at a 2007 Goldsmiths University conference, Speculative Realism/Speculative Materialism, seems to say succinctly, ' Real things exist and more knowable than subjective things, so therefore reason does not exist either.' It is a form of Object-Oriented Philosophy which seeks to negate anthropocentricism. However, according to the theory itself, even a 'clear' view of subjective reality is not knowable anyway. Isn't it pointless to pursue a true philosophy if it makes you nihilistic about the pursuit of the truth? It becomes clear that the motivation is not pursuit of truth but to reinforce the status quo (normative passive consumer culture) of which their institution is part. These viewpoints seem to have forgotten that the purpose of philosophy is not to serve the interests of objects, it is to serve the interest of humans. Humanism is antithesis of nihilism is that it favours human life over death, consciousness to insentience, complexity over nothingness. Art problematizes ANT and speculative realism. In art, humans manipulate objects very directly in a spontaneous action that has no apparent idea or object as its cause. Artistic creation thereby epitomizes agency. Not only that, but viewing art is neither caused by an idea nor object, but the enjoyment taken in the illumination of subjective experience of another’s consciousness: agents reach out and touch one another. A manmade object, a computer, or a natural object, like an asteroid, all exist and act without us, but their actions are not complex nor are they capable of evoking emotional response in a void. The networks, images and substances and actions like exploding supernovae, while sensual and beautiful, will not be sensual or beautiful in a world without life, one dimensional, flat, dead. Thus objects cannot be sexualized, cannot stimulate in a world that is truly dead, unconscious. Technosexuality is a lie. If the (ANT) promoters are right, the Speculative Realists, by virtue of their decrying the reality of subjective thought, will wind up unthinking themselves into nonexistence. 'Western man may be said to have been undergoing a massive sensory anaesthesia...with modern art functioning as a kind of shock therapy for both confounding and unclosing our senses.' - Susan Sontag
Sontag claims that pop art, which conceals sensuality with its illogical, bland, reduced and deindividuated qualities, acts to both conceal and to revive the senses through sensationalism. I say, it mostly just handicaps them, and that is why artists need to consider the senses. Pop art, soaring to ever dizzying heights of sensationalism, is different from sensuality in that sensuality is the inward enjoyment of a single experience, specifically something that evokes tactile and olfactory response, such as a fauvist red or even a voluptuous, beflowered figurations of Alphonse Mucha. Yet Pop art's sensationalism is buzzing, quivering fear or thrill, which seeks, in Borough’s case according to Sontag, to disorient and silence the critic. Sensationalism is distinct from sensory feeling in three ways: it is not intended to cause enjoyment. Secondly, sensational art is not private, because it is confrontational to the point that it obligates us to give an opinion on it. This implicit engagement of mass opinion is also intrinsic in pop art it often makes the mass media or masses a direct or implied subject. Finally, the pleasure that sensationalist art produces comes from thrill, which is as closely linked to fear as it is to pleasure, and fear can only produce numbness. As an extension of the mass media, pop art has removed privacy and sensuality from the human environment, and therefore redefined human senses. As Marshall McLuhan says, electronic media alters sensory ratios, and ‘When these ratios change, men change.’ The redefinition of the senses is thus strengthening our response to fear, to public engagement and violence and causing us to become as bored with mundane private sensory experience as a skydiver would be with everyday life. To be removed from the circumstance where we are given the illusion of constant publicity and shunted, by sensual art, into the private world of the senses is so jarring a dislocation that it reverberates through everyday experience like the sound of artillery fire for a shell-shocked veteran, unable to experience private enjoyment of the senses. The redefinition of the senses by art increases in proportion to the amount of art we experience. Our exposure to art has increased if we define art to include all artificial objects, including digital technology, which are increasingly prevalent in an increasingly manmade, pre-fabricated, bureaucratized and processed post-industrial society. We are living in a collective artwork. This world of art-cum-technology makes artistic creation equivalent to the formation, or birth or a new mankind. Artists are new social engineers, eugenicists, and mothers of mankind, as they have more opportunity to, as Harold Rosenberg said, 'Make something themselves and therefore make their own selves.' Sontag is correct when she claims that this gives the task of making art the character of a spilgrimage. 'The uncertainty of art's situation, the breadth of its occupations...invested in it a ceaseless redefining of its aims and remapping of consciousness ranking it among the most vital symbols of the spiritual venture in the modern period.' Witness kitsch. Witness high rise 'atrocities' posturing as architecture, totally devoid of narrative and sensuality: rather like the human corpse without sensual and mental functions. Mechanical reproduction has taken the craftsmanship out of artwork. No doubt remains: art is dead, and technology has killed it. Or has it? Can we possibly decry the impact mechanical reproduction has had upon art by liberating it from meaning? Meaning, so intertwined with a craftsman's thought and intention, has been blithely shunted aside by the technology of mechanical production. If you say that art is not devoid of meaning today, you need to look no further than Damien Hirst's diamond covered skull which has taken meaning (defined as having an interpretable intended signification) and turned it into a cute conceptual toy. At first, the Futurists and Constructivists romanticised the machines of reproduction. Machines had positive, warlike characteristics of brute force, virility and sensuality. But the glittering machines of war, like soldiers themselves, have long since been rusted-out and broken down and assumed innocuous civilian functions. However, Walter Benjamin remained optimistic about 'art in the age of mechanical reproduction' and thought that the photographic and cinematic image would end romanticised narratives. As a Jew who died fleeing the Nazis, he hoped for a world with less ideology. He would be pleased that, in the post-modern age we have attained art 'free from ideology', being cleansed and purified by mechanical means, via electronic enema. Benjamin was prophetic, as Warhol, who said, 'I think everybody should be a machine', made mechanically reproduced art the stylistic norm for the next half a century. He did this by taking reproduced commercial products, labelling them art, declaring 'art means nothing' at the top of his lungs and finding it hilarious, (probably because he was on LSD at the time). And last we are presented with the internet, a new era in the reproduction of art with a potentiality, perhaps Pan-modern, for the great synthesis of everything within a locale, if not within a narrative. Is there a possibility of pan-modernist art within the internet? We see warnings from Gibson and Dick of the cybernetic future of art: digitized stars, androids given synthetic memories, confusing our sense of what is human. This confusion comes partly from the indirectness of the referent and the hidden hand of the artist; from image capture, to commercialization, to cyberspace, we are thrice removed from from the sensual experience of the artist creating artwork, and so from original meaning. One problem facing artists drawing from the cybernetic glut of information is that they find it difficult to narrow down possible meanings and convey them in the short time for which they hold the viewers attention, and thus they must rely either on clichés overburdened with meaning or on the shock value of scary randomness. The question remains: how can art convey meaning in the postmodern age? Meaning is bound within the artistic process. To know what the artist meant, we must be able to re-experience how they created the artwork. This is because the artist's process of production and distribution communicates the intention of the work itself, as much as the meaning of a found object placed in a gallery differs from a soda can found in the street. For example, a photograph does not always have an elaborate artistic process. The intended effect upon the audience, therefore, cannot be interpreted clearly and its meaning is confusedly subjective, as described by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucinda. I was impressed by a piece I saw at the Gargosian's Homage to Ballard the other day, a constructed space called 'Preface to The 2004 Edition' by Mike Nelson. It was a simulation of an old hotel hallway. I could imagine the artist creating this piece, and though envisioning him scraping the walls by hand and putting it together from refuse, I could establish his intent by envisioning his process, and found his positive valuation of the subject readily conveyed by the sensuality in the first hand experience of a piece which, smelling of cigarettes and requiring me to open old doors, was tactile and olfactory. With reference to pan-modernism, perhaps in such an artwork there is a return to the past by reconstituting it. There is memory and human thought echoing off of Nelson's piece, like what Benjamin once called the 'aura'. Perhaps this is the attraction to the bodily specimens, such as taxidermy and bloody undergarments, found in works by Emin and Hirst: We want to experience history first hand, wonder at an artistic process, and understand the artist's feeling on the subject. Technology's critics and champions agree as to its impact upon art, and that the outcome has thus far been a post-modern commerciality, sterility and meaninglessness. We will create meaningful art when we find a way to combine technology's productive potential with a new sensuality in art and artistic process. |
