Grand Narratives and Totalizing Tendencies in Urban Theory: A sketch for an alternative critical perspective

Radu Lungu

Introduction and Aim

Early sociological thought about the urban has been the subject of extensive critique since the second World War. Much of this critique has focused on a Foucaldian analysis of the discipline’s positivist and totalizing tendencies, which are generally ascribed to positivism and to a will to legitimize the discipline and give it an identity and purpose in the ‘ecology’ of theories about society (Meyer, 1982; Watkins, 1953). As a result of these critiques, sociology and urban theory have ‘officially’ purged themselves of most claims to objectivity, and have begun to favour a multiplicity of narratives and theoretical perspectives to the older grand unifying theories (Kughapan, 2014). Still, like a return of the repressed, grand narratives about society obviously rooted in concepts easily traceable to early sociology and urban theory appear from time to time, and when they do they usually generate a great deal of interest, both in the field and in adjacent disciplines, in particular in the arts.[1]

This essay is an attempt at sketching out why these theories enjoy these ‘revivals’ and why they stimulate such interest. I will argue that the brand of criticism mentioned fails to tell the complete story of the theorists’ motivations. Present in most of these critical accounts but never insisted on is an idea which has echoes in the writings of Frederic Jameson (1991: 308-11), and which links the tendency towards the formulation of grand narratives to an experience of ‘modernisation’. As we shall see, ‘modernisation’ implies a juxtaposition of different social orders, ways of living or modes of production. I aim to suggest that it is the very multiplicity of perspectives on different social orders coexisting in a global system of domination offered by postcolonial urban critique,[2] along with the experience of ‘Skyboxification’ in the West which are stimulating the persistence of these theoretical tendencies.[3] These tendencies then point to more than just the theoretician’s ‘will to power’—they are symptoms of the effects of late-capitalism, of our attempts at understanding it as a system which seems to be able to perpetuate the sort of ‘unevenness of development’ older theorists were so concerned with.

Positivism, Historicism and the Roots of Sociology

Many take the publication of Auguste Comte’s ‘Course in Positive Philosophy’ (1830-1842) as the moment marking the birth of Sociology. Comte does indeed come up with both the term ‘sociology’ in roughly the sense it was later to be understood in, and with the term ‘positivism’, which is now and has been for a while, the subject of much critique (Heilborn, 1990: 153). Comte’s direct influence on Sociology as an academic discipline is realistically speaking, not very significant (Heilborn, 1990: 154-5). Still, as we shall see, positivist ideas of the sort Comte was advocating sit at the centre of the discipline’s original epistemological system.

Positivism has since become virtually synonymous with what Peyton V. Lyon calls ‘scientism’ —’the belief that all, or virtually all, moral and political problems can be solved by methods similar to those used in the natural sciences’ (Lyon, 1961: 55). As Heilborn (1990: 153) points out, labelling someone a positivist is one of the more serious accusations that can be made in an academic context today. But, in Comte and even Durkheim’s time, positivism was seen in a very different light. It is important then to sketch out how positivism was originally outlined as an approach, how it became integrated into sociological thought and how it was later critiqued.

If one wants simply to make the point that the 19th century marked a high point of confidence in the methods of the natural sciences and in their scope, Saint-Simon is the perfect example.[4] He argued, before Comte or Marx and in parallel with Hegel for the idea that history is progressing in a series of stages, and that each stage corresponds to a particular philosophical system embodied in a specific social and professional class (Manuel, 1963: 233). Our age, he claimed, was the age of science—it followed that society needed to restructure itself following a ‘positive’ approach—that is, following the methods and approaches of the natural sciences, under a class of scientist-leaders (Manuel, 1963: 211). Saint-Simon’s professed confidence in science was so great that he was the first to make the claim that one can, from deductions about the past, make accurate predictions about the flow of history and the future—he was, in effect, the first historicist proper (Lyon, 1961: 59).

But a confidence in the natural sciences and in man’s ability to gain knowledge about the world around him through them was not the only impetus behind Saint Simon’s ideas. It pays to remember that, as Lyon notes, Saint-Simon’s thought is also marked by the belief that periods of social change are inherently dangerous and must be transcended in favour of a new period of order:

Having narrowly survived the French Revolution, he was obsessed with the need to re-establish social order on a new basis which would prevent the recurrence of such catastrophic upheavals. He believed that unrest would last until ideological uniformity had been reimposed and control over society transferred to new elites which, had they but the wit to recognize it, already possessed the elements of power. (Lyon, 1961: 55)

There are of course some disturbing overtones to these ideas, as they imply a ‘setting apart’ of the researcher from his object of study. But, we are not dealing with a Luddite either—Saint-Simon never advocates for a return to older forms—only for an authoritarian control of the transition to new ones.

These three strands of thought—first, a confidence in the natural sciences and a belief in the transferability of their methods, second, a general apprehension of change and a belief that society must be organized from above, and third, a tendency to respond to this perceived danger with an attempt to form a theory on the basis of which to assume control of society’s development—will come to mark the social sciences until the Second World War, and to a lesser extent after.

American Urban Sociology and Social Control

Skipping ahead to the early 20th century, we see that all three strands are still alive and well in sociology, in particular in urban theory from the United States, where they have been introduced to academic circles by John Stuart Mill who argued along similar lines to Saint-Simon, whom he had in fact met at the age of 14:

The first of the leading peculiarities of the present age is that it is an age of transition. Mankind have outgrown old institutions and old doctrines, and have not yet acquired new ones. When we say outgrown, we intend to prejudge nothing. A man may not be either better or happier at six-and-twenty, than he was at six years of age: but the same jacket which fitted him then, will not fit him now. (Mill, Robson & Priestley, 1963: 228)

Many of the early urban theorists like Louis Wirth and Robert E. Park held views along similar lines. Because of their concern for the preservation of social order in the face of change, many have labelled their thought ‘anti-urban’ (Goist, 1971: 46-7) or conservative (Watkins, 1953:). But, as Park (1971: 47) argues, this is not quite right. None of these theorists are advocating a return to previous forms of community, though they may lament the loss of what they perceived to be the effects—the forms of social organisation—those communities produced. It is interesting to remark that a key point for Goist is the idea that what he calls the ‘search for community’ came to be the dominating concern of Park’s thought as a response to the social upheaval caused by the Civil War, the industrialisation of society and the westward expansion of the US (Goist, 1971: 47).

To put it briefly, the American formulation of the problem of social control was essentially this—how can civility and cooperation be ensured in the face of changes that cause the loosening of the social structures which have ensured them in the past—and the original answer given was, as Meier (1982: 36) and other critics note (Entrikin, 1980; Watkins, 1953) —through the scientific study and organisation of society in accordance with the methods of sociology.

Sociology, in turn, was to borrow from the natural sciences. The natural sciences offered two things: guaranteed legitimacy in that intellectual context, as we have seen, and, equally importantly, metaphoric and interpretative potential. Park in particular borrowed heavily from ecology (Goist, 1971: 51), and this led to the Zonal Approach to urban theory, championed by the Chicago School. Ecologically speaking populations are conceived of as supported and determined by the territories they occupy: so Park imagined a theory of the urban along similar lines (Goist, 1971: 52).

This approach has been subjected to a set of criticisms that are now standard in academia when such ‘imports’ from the natural sciences are concerned. I will not review them here extensively. Meier (1982: 52) for instance claims that a determining factor in the sociological approach was the imperative to differentiate itself from economics. Seen in this light, the borrowing from the natural sciences is reduced to a Foucaldian claim to legitimacy in the search for the power to turn ‘theory’ into ‘practice’.

Postmodern and Postcolonial Urbanism and The Return of the Repressed

This strand of anti-positivist critique coupled with a historicist critique, have dominated later urban theory, especially in postcolonial and postmodern contexts (Kughapan, 2014; Lynn, 2014). Of the original scientism or positivism, all that is left today is (a harshly critiqued) architectural determinism, as in the work of Marc Augé (1995) or Tim Gregory (2009). Grand narratives and totalizing theories have proven more resilient however—though not for a lack of critique.

In his highly influential Postmodern Geographies, Ed Soja argues for a re-evaluation of contemporary social theory and analysis from a spatial instead of a temporal perspective. The focus on time, with the grand narratives it has produced, has failed, for Soja, to offer up a valid theory for postmodern cities like Los Angeles (Dear, 2000: 71). Soja and the LA School he is part of, along with postmodern urbanism in general have contributed significantly to the ‘spatial turn’ in social sciences, and to the critique of historicist thought in its disciplines. Still, even in Soja there are tendencies towards older styles of narratives. Dear gives an overview of Soja’s thought that shows its totalizing tendencies:

According to Soja, modernization refers to ‘a continuous process of societal restructuring that is periodically accelerated to produce a recomposition of space-time-being in their concrete forms […] that arises primarily from the historical and geographical dynamics of modes of production. (Dear, 2000: 74)

Soja in fact identifies three characteristics of our ‘age’: posthistoricism, post-Fordism (an increasingly flexible, disorganized regime of capitalist accumulation, to which I shall return in a moment) and postmodernism: a change in how we experience social being (Dear, 2000: 75).

This is not at all that different to the narrative Augé offers. His concept of supermodernity rests on a set of three similar root causes, though this time around seen in a fatalistic light: posthistoricism becomes an excess of time, through which history is pushed out of our search for meaning; post-Fordism, an excess of space, having to do with the suppression of the authentic ‘anthropological place’ as a result of the imperatives of modern capitalism, and its replacement with the ‘non-place’; postmodernism, which is characterized as an ‘excess of self’, a sort of anomie writ large (Augé, 1995: 22-37). Both Soja and Augé’s ideas are predicated on the idea of a total shift—from a condition of relative equilibrium to one of fundamental imbalance—from ‘old’ or proto-modernity to ‘supermodernity’ or ‘postmodernity’.

Towards an alternative critical approach

One way to explain the tendency towards totalizing views of society which sidesteps the Foucaldian perspective discussed above is to frame it following Frederic Jameson’s observations on what he calls ‘modernisation’.

For Jameson, modernism as a cultural phenomenon and all that it entails—in particular its search for root causes and grand explanatory narratives is the result of what he calls the ‘uneven’ process of modernisation (Jameson, 1991: 309). As our society transitions from one mode of production to another, we experience ‘modernisation’—the very instability identified by the early urban theorists and discussed above. While the process is not yet complete, Jameson argues, the co-existence of two modes of productions, two versions of society, is what triggers the ‘modern’ cultural response—the attempt to understand how this coexistence is possible and how it will develop. Once modernisation is complete, postmodernism follows and the drive to historicist thought is lost:

Ours is a more homogenously modernized condition: we no longer are encumbered with the embarrassment of non-simulateneities and non-synchronicities. Everything has reached the same hour on the great clock of development or rationalization (at least from the perspective of the West). This is the sense in which we can affirm, either that modernism is characterized by a situation of incomplete modernisation, or that postmodernism is more modern than modernism itself. (Jameson, 1991: 310)

So, Jameson’s ideas seem to offer a valid alternative explanation for the drive towards grand narratives and totalizing approaches in the earlier urban theorists. To understand why it persists in a postmodern period, apparently in defiance of Jameson’s account, we need look no further that postmodern urban theory itself. First, as Napong Tao Kugkhapan (2014: 126) and Andrew Lynn (2014) show in their reviews of the stages of the disicpline, a fundamental contemporary development is the opening up of the field to postcolonial and non-western theory in general. These ideas, developed in places where the economic and social realities are very different to Western ones, step in to fill the conceptual hole left in Jameson’s idea of the process of ‘modernisation’ once it has completed in the west. Postcolonial urban theory also needs, by virtue of its vocation, to think in terms of global relationships and gobal systems of exchange, a project which will always involve some form of grand historical narrative and which will always come back to the effects of ‘modernisation’—which in the colonial context has often been experienced as a violent upheaval of society from the outside.[5]

Modernisation, in fact, understood in this Jamesonian way, as the unbalanced coexistence of two socioeconomic realities also persists in the West. Lynn (2014) and Dear (2000: 151-57) both identify ‘Skyboxification’, post-Fordism/flexism and the tendency towards the sharp segregation of communities in terms of wealth into areas that sometimes support vastly different social systems as key to the postmodern built environment.

Conclusion

What this analisis suggests—short and selective as it is—is that postmodern critique of the Foucauldian manner discussed above and exemplified by Robert Meyer—while effective at purging the discipline of scientism and positivism—even when coupled with the sort of critique coming from economists like J. W. N. Watkins is unlikely to lead to a full understnading of the motivations behind the drive to formulate the sort of theoretical concepts discussed. It also suggests that we may expect, if these tendencies towards inequality among global and local regions are to persists, several other ‘modernist’ reactions—and, as Jameson points out—modernisms can just as easily be luddite as they can be progressive. My tentative suggestion is to consider turning to a Marxist-based critique of the sort suggested by Jameson, which looks for explanations beyond the ‘will to power’ of the theorist, in the structure of the reality he or she is responding to.

 

Notes

[1] Examples within the discipline include Auge (1991) and Gregory. (2009) For an overview of some responses from the Arts see Pecotic (2005).

[2] For a review of the major tendencies in postcolonial urban theory see Kughapan (2014).

[3] This is part of the current jargon in the field representing the tendency of postmodern metropolitan centers to display sharp segregation along class lines in its environment and social structure—enclaves of gated communities and ghettoes in Andrew Lynn’s terms (Lynn, 2014).

[4] For an overview of Saint-Simon’s thought, see Marcuse (1941/1955: 331), referring to Memoire sur la Science de l’Homme, written in 1813.

[5] For a postcolonial perspective on the restructuring of urban theory, see Roy (2009) and Robinson (2002); For an overview of postcolonial approaches to urban theory in general see Kugkhapan (2014:126).

 

Bibliography

 

Augé, Marc (1995), Non-Places—Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso: London.

Dear, M. J. (2000), The Postmodern Urban Condition. Blackwell:London.

Entrikin, Nicholas J. (1980), Robert Park’s Human Ecology and Human Geography, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 70, No. 1, pp. 43-58.

Goist, Park D. (1971), City and “Community”: The Urban Theory of Robert Park, American Quarterly, Vol. 23, No.1, pp. 46-59.

Gregory, Tim (2009), No Alarms and No Surprises—The Rise of the Domestic Non-Place (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of New South Wales).

Heilbron, Johan (1990), Auguste Comte and Modern Epistemology, Sociological Theory, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 153-162.

Jameson, Frederic (1991), Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso: London.

Kugkhapan, Napong Tao (2014), Narratives in Urban Theory, Agora Journal of Urban Planning and Design, pp. 120-129.

Lyon, Peyton V. (1961), Saint-Simon and the Origins of Scientism and Historicism, The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science / Revue canadienne d’Economique et de Science politique, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 55-63.

Lynn, Andrew (2014), Do Cities Tear Us Apart? Thriving Cities [online] Avialiable at: http://thrivingcities.com/blog/do-cities-tear-us-apart-part-3 [Accessed 11 Dec. 2015]

Manuel, F. E. (1963), The New World of Henri Saint-Simon. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana.

Meier, Robert F. (1982), The Concept of Social Control, Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 8, pp. 35-55.

 Mill, J., Robson, J. & Priestley, F. (1963). Collected works of John Stuart Mill. Volume XXII— Newspaper Writings December 1822—July 1831 Part I, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Park, Robert E. (1915), The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City Environment, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 20, No. 5, pp. 577-612.

Pecotic, Edita (2005), Non-Places of Travel in Visual Art Korkula Info [online] Available at: http://www.korculainfo.com/nonplaces/ [Accesed on 11/12/2017]

Robinson, Jennifer (2002), Global and World Cities: A View From off The Map, International Journal of urban and Regional Research, Vol. 26, No.3, pp. 531-54.

Roy, Ananya (2009), The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory, Regional Studies, Vol. 43, No.6, pp. 819-830.

Watkins, J. W. N. (1953), Scientism and Society, Ethics, Vol. 64, No.1, pp. 56-59.

Wirth, Louis (1938), Urbanism as a Way of Life, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 44, No. 1, pp. 1-24.

 

‘The hacienda must be built’: How successful were the Situationist International’s experimental practices in challenging the society of the spectacle?

 

Fig. 1. Image from the 15 December 1952 issue of LIFE magazine, later used for the front cover of the 1983 edition of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.

Katherine Tynan

The ‘spectacle’ as defined by Guy Debord meant that all human relations were mediated by images from the mass media, driven towards controlling our activities and consciousness. (1967, p. 7). This conceptualisation was the driving force in the Situationist International’s (SI) critique of contemporary society—but how can we evaluate how successful was it? This essay focuses on the experimental practices that the SI employed during their active years between 1957-1972, and the extent to which these practices provided a successful challenge to the society of the spectacle. First I will assess their concept of psychogeographical exploration (dérive) as a critique of urban geography by looking at its origins, influences and practice of mapping. Then I will evaluate détournement’s ability to provide a critique of mass media as a product of industrial capitalist society. To conclude the analysis I will look at their ideas on the construction of situations and search for a unitary urbanism. The analysis assesses the methods they used with respect to their theoretical arguments and ultimately argues that these practices are not merely confined within the theoretical realm, but succeeded in providing a new form of critical practice.

The concept of the ‘spectacle’ was presented in Debord’s seminal text, comprising of 221 theses analysing and critiquing spectacular society. In the same year, The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem (1967) was also published and together, these would become known as the two key texts representative of the revolutionary and political ideas of the SI. Appearing five years before its dissolution, both these texts draw on their years of experimentation and debate, as well as the previous work of the Letterist International (LI), the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus and the London Psychogeographical Association (LPA), who would merge to form the SI. The methods championed by the SI were neither new nor original ideas, but it is their theorisation through publication, particularly in their respective journals, which have enabled these practices to remain pertinent to discussing cities today.

Psychogeographical Exploration

The SI’s critique of the modern city was formed upon the concern that its inhabitants’ experience of the city was no longer ‘directly lived’ but mediated by the spectacle (Debord, 1967, p. 7). The development of a contemporary society dominated by capitalist production had resulted in free-thinking becoming stifled by opinions imposed by advertising campaigns and other mass media communications. Furthermore, the stage had been reached where the spectacle that had infiltrated all aspects of everyday life (Debord, 1967, p. 21). The notion of the spectacle was developed from the ideas discussed in Marx’s Das Kapital, regarding the commodification of society in the way in which people (the consumers) had become dominated and controlled by commodities (Plant, 1992, p. 11). Debord uses the term ‘spectacle’ to develop these ideas with respect to the negative elements of these advancements in technology which consumerised everyday life.

Fig. 2.The Naked City, 1957.

‘Psychogeography’ was defined by Debord as ‘the study of precise laws and the specific effects of the geographic milieu, consciously planned or not, acting directly on the affective comportment of individuals’ (Knabb, 1981, p. 5). It was the direct emotional effects of the city, within the context of Paris, which initiated the SI’s line of enquiry at the time of their formation. Ivan Chtcheglov’s ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’, is perhaps the first text in which ‘dérive’ is first proposed as the practical means of carrying out a psychogeographical study of the city (Knabb, 1981, p.1-4). Moreover, Debord explains this as a ‘technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances’, and this method of drifting through the city without a pre- determined motive was an attempt to reveal its ‘true spirit’ (Knabb, 1981, p. 24). Led by the participants’ feelings of attraction or repulsion of different areas, this data was to be analysed against a study of the terrain of the city. Subsequently, this aimed to present a new reading of the city, shaped by unexpected encounters rather than dictated by routes of habit.

The theme of urban wandering was not original to the SI or the LI before them but has been a key theme in literature and art over the past century. Undoubtedly influence was drawn from the explorations undertaken by the Dadaists and Surrealists which the Letterists later criticised for concentrating too much on chance and the subconscious, rather than the social conditions of the city. Further still, influence can be drawn from the flâneur, a term popularised by Walter Benjamin through his analysis of Charles Baudelaire’s work, particularly  ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ which became the emblem of modern man in the nineteenth century (Coverley, 2010, p. 50). Flânerie describes the practice of strolling without a purpose, the flâneur being a man of leisure who wandered the streets of Paris (Coverley, 2010, p. 62). For Benjamin, the flâneur became a symbol of the alienation of the city, whose demise would come with the succession of consumer capitalism (Coverley, 2010, p. 64). This predicts the later concern with consumerist influences on the city-goer, where the observer as an individual of original thought no longer exists. Furthermore, Debord recognised Thomas de Quincey as the precursor of the dérive, his 1821 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater had detailed his wanderings through the labyrinthine streets of London (Sadler, 1998, p. 75) which were referenced in (1959) Internationale Situationniste #3. It is these literary references that engage with the idea of the urban wanderer as both psychological analyst and city surveyor, that can be directly translated into the psychogeographic work of the SI.

Fig. 3. Fin de Copenhague, 1957.

The data collected from the dérives and other psychogeographic investigations were to be synthesised primarily in the form of mapping. Far from the traditional mapping to date, Debord’s ‘Psychogeographic guide to Paris’ and ‘The Naked City’ (Fig. 3), aimed to chart the psychological effects of his dérive explorations and urged others to implement similar means. ‘The Naked City ‘was created from the Plan of Paris, cut up into nineteen parts and rearranged into a new kind of map shaped by the social and cultural forces experienced (Pinder, 1996, p. 420). Arrows connect the cuttings, larger ones symbolising the paths of greater attraction, pulling the fragments together like a magnetic field. Paul Henry Chombart de Lauwe’s work provided inspiration for the SI’s psychogeographic maps, in his view of the city divided into quarters which were distinguished by boundaries perceived by its inhabitants (McDonough, 2009, p. 77). Moreover, his study of a student’s route to university over the course of a year, drew attention to the concentrated area within which an individual experiences the city and so further influencing the SI’s appeal for people to become urban explorers. Graphically, their representations sought to both publish the emotional findings of their explorations as well as emphasise the limitations of using a map to understand the city. Furthermore, this was an attempt to challenge the way in which maps present a ‘god’s eye’ view of a place; highlighting them as images created by people and arguing that often elements are emphasised or suppressed to impose political opinion (Pinder, 1996, p.409). The SI wanted people to explore the city on their own terms, uninfluenced by these forms of communication and based on their own feelings and emotions.

The method of dérive aimed to investigate the existing conditions of the city on the premise of informing hypotheses for a new architecture. This provided a basis upon which to establish their concrete interventions within the urban environment, through discovering the overlooked aspects of the city, and so directly addressing the social issues that need to be improved. When evaluating the extent of the SI’s success in challenging the society of the spectacle, there are some limitations due to the lack of material produced. Their seemingly contradictory use of mapping to record their investigations as well as argue the map as a political tool, further reinforces their concern with people’s view of the city being imposed upon them rather than resulting from experience. Ultimately, the success of the SI’s practice of dérive lies in its establishment of a critical methodology by exploring their theoretical position through direct experience of the city.

Détournement

Within the inaugural publication of Internationale Situationniste, a list of definitions give a clear summary of the SI’s theoretical framework at its foundation. Here,‘détournement’ is defined as ‘The integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu,’ therefore proposing a creative practice which uses or appropriates existing material, in order to create something new (Knabb, 1981, p. 45). Furthermore, in ‘Methods of Détournement’, Debord and Gil J.Wolman suggests the more appropriate materials which could be ‘détourned’, stating that whilst everything has the possibility of being used for this aim, the détournement of novels is potentially more difficult whereas the medium of film could be used to great effect (Knabb, 1981, p. 8-14). This is due to their critique of cinema as a product of industrial capitalist society, therefore arguing that this form of détournement is made possible due to its very existence (Hayes, 2017, p. 102). This seemingly contradictory notion is played upon by the SI, to form a critique by using existing materials in order to draw direct attention to that which they are challenging. For example, the SI deemed it necessary to both abolish and realise art in order to surpass it (Hayes, 2017, p. 213); destroying its current meaning and imbuing it with a new, improved version. This experimental use of existing materials raised questions due to the new context in which the material was being viewed. In turn, this was similar to the dérive in its use of existing parts of the city that had been neglected or overlooked, in an attempt to connect these fragments and challenge the way in which we view our urban environment.

Fig. 4.The Disquieting Duckling, 1959.

Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse) was recognised as the predecessor to détournement and was a major influence on the SI, with his open use of plagiarism, ‘Plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress.’ Debord plagiarised this phrase in his 207th thesis, stating that progress depends on plagiarism (Debord,1967). Debord and Jorn collaborated on two books together, compiled of found imagery and text from magazines and newspapers, collaged together and then splattered with ink from a great height. The news stand which the papers were stolen from, was seen as a symbol of propaganda that projects the spectacle upon the world, which people then perceive to be reality (Nolle, 2002). ‘Fin de Copenhague’ (Fig. 4) attempts to give a true reading of Copenhagen, a kind of psychogeographical map with all the fragments presented rather than a single, controlled and selective view. The second book, Mémoires published two years later, used the same technique but was based on Debord’s early psychogeographic studies and other works seen as significant in the founding of the SI; a kind of scrapbook diary that recorded the earlier years. This alternative account of history provided a disorientating and fragmented reading, an attempt to record the works of the SI in a way that avoids its memorialisation as another avant-garde group (Stracey, 2014, p. 21). This preoccupied Debord, who recognised the importance in capturing the SI’s theories within published works without wanting them to be later remembered as purely theoreticians rather than practitioners (Hayes, 2017, p. 105). In addition, Jorn embarked on his on experimentation in détournement through the medium of painting, buying traditional pieces and painting abstract imagery over them in order to give them new meaning.

Fig. 5. Retour a la Normal, 1968.

Named ‘modifications’ (Fig. 4), these seemingly vandalised artworks sought to create unexpected and accidental results (Ford, 2005, p. 66) in order to challenge the viewer to questions what they are observing. Debord also continued to explore détournement within film, as a means to criticise the way in which the medium itself was being used to the benefit of consumerism and therefore enhancing the presence of the spectacle. Détournement was utilised within his films, mostly through the use of clips from existing films and some text from other authors although most the script was written himself. Another method he used was the juxtaposition of narrative to the imagery on screen, a visual disconnect in order to challenge the meaning or the purpose of the film (Ford, 2005, p. 79). These methods challenged the viewer to react, rather than passively observe these artworks and films, critiquing the way in which mass media presents products to its consumers.

The SI emphatically rejected détournement as a purely theoretical approach and emphasised the concrete realisation of their hypotheses as vital to their programme (Hayes, p.105). Similarly, this bears relation to their rejection of the term ‘situationism’, as a ‘meaningless term’ which wrongly implies that the SI’s agenda only focused on the existing conditions. The May 1968 Paris protests showed the extent to which the SI’s ideas and theories had successfully disseminated the wider public and helped to mobilise students who wished to challenge the establishment. Here, détournement was used to great effect to use capitalist slogans and advertising imagery upon their posters and signs as a statement of subversion (Ford, 2005, p. 125). Moreover, détournement was successful in challenging the society of the spectacle through its direct use of materials which they deemed products of the capitalist forces which they were criticising. In terms of communicating the SI’s critique, détournement was more successful than dérive due to the larger production of material, which had a wider appeal to the public audience through the medium of both art and film. Like dérive, détournement also set up a methodology to explore the existing elements of the city that had been neglected, not as a historical record but in order to highlight its problems.

The Construction of Situations

A critique of urbanism was first set out by the LI as an aim for ‘unitary urbanism’, which would become the major concern of the SI. Wolman defined unitary urbanism as ‘the synthesis … incorporating arts and technology—in accordance with new values of life’ (Knabb, 1981, p.15), this integration of art and technology into everyday life was seen as the means with which society would continually experiment and adapt to provide for the needs of its inhabitants. Moreover, this provided a critique of the urban environment through re-addressing and re-using existing elements without dismissing them completely and starting anew.  The practice of experimenting and exploring these existing elements through the dérive and détournement was an attempt to unify the existing fabric of the city: the ‘unitary’ approach opposed the fragmentary nature of urbanism which they believed to typify that dominance of capitalism (Hayes, 2017, p. 125).

Fig. 6. Poster, n.d.

Experimentation became concrete practice through the constructing of situations, defined as ‘a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events’ (Knabb, 1981, p.45). The construction of situations were to be the main form of practice for the SI, indeed they defined a Situationist as ‘one who engages in the construction of situations’ (Knabb, 1981, p.45). The experimental explorations of dérive and détournement sought to inform their practical interventions and thus giving a basis to their constructed situations with the ultimate goal of achieving unitary urbanism.

Conclusion

The methods employed by the SI were not original ideas, however the publication of their work has ensured that we are able to review and critique their theories today.The value of the experimental practices of the SI lie in their established process of continual critique, through theory as well as exploration in order to support their hypotheses. Both the methods of dérive and détournement attempted to ultimately challenge the way it which people perceive the city and make them critical observers of their own environment. They realised that it was not only a constant critique in a negative sense: updating ideas to make the discussion relevant as a process of self-critique was also important.The SI’s unitary urbanism was not a conception of the totality, or intended to become one.This must be taken into account when measuring their success, which should not look to conclude whether they fulfilled their aims but rather review their methods as critical practices to insight change. Unitary urbanism was an instrument and it is this process of self-critique that the SI theorised and emphasised that makes their experimental practices successful in challenging the status quo of contemporary society.

 

Bibliography

 

Barnard,A., 2011.The Situationists and the Right to the City. In: International RC21,The Struggle to belong: Dealing with diversity in 21st century urban settings.Amsterdam, 7-9 July.

Coverley, M., 2010. Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials.

Debord, G., 1994.The Society of the Spectacle.Translated from French by D. Nicholson-Smith., New York: Zone Books.

Ford, S., 2005.The Situationist International: a user’s guide. London: Black Dog.

Hayes A., P., 2017. How the Situationist International became what it was. PhD.The Australian National University.

Home, S., 1991.The Assault on Culture: Utopian currents from Lettrisme to Class War. Stirling: AK. Press.

Knabb, K. ed., 1981. Situationist International Anthology.Translated from French by K. Knabb., Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets.

McDonough,T. ed., 2009.The situationists and the city. London:Verso.

Nolle, Christian., 2002. Books of Warfare:The Collaboration between Guy Debord and Asger Jorn from 1857-1959.[online]Vector [e-zine].Available at:<http://virose.pt/vector/b_13/nolle.html&gt; [Accessed 14 April 2018].

Pinder, D., 1996. Subverting cartography: the situationist and maps of the city. Environment and Planning A, 28, 405-427.

Plant, S., 1992.The most radical gesture:The Situationist International in a postmodern age. London: Routledge.

Sadler, S., 1998.The Situationist City. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Stracey, Frances., 2014. Constructed Situations:A New History of the Situationist International. London: Pluto Press.

Vaneigem, R., 2012.The Revolution of Everyday Life. New ed. Oakland: PM.

Wark, M., 2014.The Beach Beneath the Street.The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International. London:Verso.

List of Figures

1. Eyerman, 1952. Full frame of movie audience wearing special 3D glasses to view film Bwana Devil which was shot with new “natural vision” 3 dimensional technology. [photograph] Available at: https://aphelis.net/ cover-debord-society-spectacle/ [Accessed 13 April 2018].

2. Debord, G., 1957.The Naked City. [image online] Available at: https://paulwalshphotographyblog. wordpress.com/2013/07/08/the-naked-city/ [Accessed 11 April 2018].

3. Debord, G., and Jorn,A., 1957. Fin de Copenhague. [image online] Available at: https://situationnisteblog. wordpress.com/2015/11/24/fin-de-copenhague-1957/ [Accessed 10 April 2018].

4. Jorn,A., 1959.The Disquieting Duckling. [painting] Available at: http://www.smk.dk/en/visit-the-museum/ exhibitions/asger-jorn-restless-rebel/immerse-yourself-in-jorn/1957-1961/ [Accessed 20 April 2018].

5. Anon., 1968. Retour a la Normal. [image online] Available at: https://www.theparisreview.org/ blog/2011/10/06/posters-from-paris-1968/ [Accessed 13 April 2018].

6. Anon., n.d. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images. [image online] Available at: http://www. notbored.org/yet.html [Accessed 13 April 2018].

How does video art play with the spectator’s consciousness in the case of Bill Viola and Douglas Gordon?

Xiaolian Lan

This essay aims to explore the research question by engaging with the practices of two representative artists: Bill Viola and Douglas Gordon. These artists bring together various elements combining performance, space and time, sound into the representation of artistic production. By encouraging visual and psychological engagement, Viola and Gordon’s art seeks a reflexive looking-relation with spectator to foreground their consciousness on what it is being seen and felt through the employment of installation, performance and time. Situating Viola and Gordon within a theoretical framework that is informed by the semiotic sign system discussed in Bal & Bryson (1991), and phenomenology informed by Heidegger (1962), and James (1886) perspectives on time: specifically, the concept ‘interval’ to analysis and explain the function and effect of time on viewer‘s consciousness. This essay begins its discussion firstly by drawing attention to the motive of using sign system in the video installation to create ‘metaphoric‘ spectacle which plays with the inner consciousness of viewers; secondly I proceed to focus on video performance to elaborate the relationship between performance in the video and viewer‘s self-conscious acts through the use of associative concept of retention and perception; lastly, the analysis centres around adopting slow-motion technique as an approach to investigate the spectators’ conscious of time. What I have concluded is that spectator‘s consciousness is activated through its engagement of sign, identity and perception of time. The employment of performance, installation and time is considered building a dialogue with spectators physically and mentally; their viewing experience and consciousness are also a reflection of the material and immateriality of video art.

Video Installation

In the late 1960s, Robert Morris introduced the notion of process and duration into sculpture practice, which was also a motivation to the early video artists (Kaye, 2007: 64-65) who started considering a new relationship with spectator through projecting video in the designated space. Along with straightforward visual engagement, the space put viewers in a constant negotiation with architecture, constructions, installation material and found sites; in turn, a very important part of the viewer’s consciousness towards the artwork was affected by their physical and psychological presence and experience.

Both Viola and Gordon view the space as a catalyst to evoke the spectator‘s perception and imagination to make an empathetic process possible, they also tend to use installation as an approach either transferring the exhibition site into spiritual space (Cook, 2002: 257) or, turning public viewing space a private meditational site (Young, 1997:65). Although their installations vary in terms of spatial dimension, material displacement and cultural context, Viola and Gordon’s practices depart from the notion of ̳metaphor‘, they create a new meaning based on the existing objects in the site, which naturally turn into visual symbols carrying multiple meanings within an open-structured installation. I will further apply the semiotic theory that contributes to the employment of ‘metaphor‘ in video installation below. In both cases, what they pursue is based on multi-meaning production through the creation of sign system.

Douglas Gordon, Between darkness and light, 1997

I firstly examine Gordon’s early video installations, an experimental projection in the small conservative Catholic town of Munster in 1997 ‘Between darkness and light (after William Blake)’. It projected two films into one screen: one is the black-and- white film ‘The Song of Bernadete’ showing a virtue model referencing Joan of D’Arc; the other is ‘The Exorcist’ by director William Friedkin. By playing both works simultaneously, the spectator‘s mind set seems to be trapped and embodied by the darkness that generates increasingly tension within the space. For Cooke (2002: 258) this work was ‘literally and metaphorically acted out exhibition.’ These emotions echo the spectator’s consciousness through the perception of overlapping images and uncanny sound, but does this fully interpret Gordon‘s ambition? Feinstein (1985:176) argues that metaphor is regarded as a shield that impedes the truth—polysemy is the nature of metaphor based on semantics and the real thoughts are always hidden behind the appearance of an image, language, text or object. Using the underpass as a metaphor for purgatory, Gordon’s installation served as ambiguous ritual aiming to foreground the spectator’s spiritual consciousness through provoking their awareness and memory of religion. Moreover, the juxtaposition of darkness, sound, environment and the narrative sends the viewer into a retrospective and reflexive journey. They gain awareness of the coexistence of good and evil within oneself; the significance of such consciousness has gone beyond the pursuit of the spiritual sublime but concerns moral and ethics. Bal & Bryson (1991:176-177) expressed similar concern: a body of material is assembled and juxtaposed with the work in question in the hope that such contextual material will reveal the determinants that make the work of art what it is. Consequently, the spectator is conscious of the hidden message—the video installation functions as a process of decoding that leads to an explicit cause and effect in their awareness.

Bill Viola, The Theatre of Memory, 1973

Similar methods can be found in Viola’s video art at the beginning of 70s. Revealing a thematic and conceptual nature in production, his early installations were experimental and contained strong metaphoric meanings. ‘The Theatre of Memory’ (1973) was an ambitious work touching upon concerns of life and death, as well as memory. The video images were presented upon a wall through projection while a dead tree occupied in the dark space, covered by flickering lanterns, which blocked the view of spectator from certain angles, and further restricted their walking path through limiting the viewing distance with the projection. Standing within the darkness, the viewers were challenged both visually and psychologically as the images in the video all appeared in the form of pulse signals while the flickering of lights from the lantern reinforced a repressive feeling. In this exhibition, Viola employs water—a motif that frequently appears in his work—as the metaphor for the video medium. To be specific, he refers to the fluidity of video light as the flow of water that carries life for human and animals, and took darkness as a symbol of death. Aristotle points out that metaphors should be fitting, they must fairly correspond to the thing signified (Feinstein, 1985:28): so the spectator consciousness accepts the sign of life and death, good and evil that are logically reflected through cross reference between diversified objects and materials. Additionally, the way Viola interpreted his metaphoric ideas on electronic signals and human experience is situated at the controversial point of semiotic study. Regarding the semiotic system, Saussure suggests the meaning of a sign is determined by a static system. If based on this immobility of the sign system, the electronic signal in Viola’s experiment can only be understood as physical phenomenon within its own language context. On the contrast, Derrida recognises the dynamism of sign and insists that meaning arose as moving from one sign to another; the meaning of sign is contextual dependency. Accordingly, Derrida’s theory better responds to the polysemy nature of metaphor. With Viola’s installation, our consciousness on the metaphoric relationship between video electronics and the human brain is also fully valid and activated (Bal & Bryson, 1991: 177-178).

Video Performance

Bill Viola, Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water), 2014

Viola uses performance to stimulate spectator consciousness via his investigation of human emotion and perception. The video ‘The Martyrs‘ commissioned by St. Paul’s Cathedral in London depicts four tortured scenes featuring four men and women suffering physical attack from earth, wind, fire and water. Their isolated bodies are either hung, burn or crashed against a black background, which highlighted the dynamic visualisation of the action, and the application of portrait lighting and austere clothing reinforced a sense of tension. This work uses the body to convey a spiritual sublime. Usually displayed in form of four large-panels, this straightforward presentation allows audiences to engage with the performers and their spontaneous action through direct gaze. Immediately, the viewers gain an impression of the idea of torture through the physical reaction and frustrated facial expression of performers. As the four videos are playing together as a whole, they form an immediate dialogue between each other, and the viewer could read the connection and relationship among them.

I view this video work as demonstrating a strong sense of our existence through the performance of the body. Based on Heidegger (1962), the body is utilised here as phenomena, an object to be seen and appearing in the perception of others, and Being as an entity is formed by these phenomena. Consciousness emerges as the relationship between phenomena and the spectator: in turn, the conscious act also makes the object explicit through perception, memory, retention and pretention. In an interview on his early video ‘Information’, Viola pointed out that ‘technology is only half the issue, and the other half was the human perception system’ (Bellour & Viola, 1973: 32). After this early period, Viola has fully pursued his investigation into human consciousness with a concentration and intensity that can only be termed heroic (Judson, 1995: 30.

For me ‘The Martyrs’ is the work that best reflects this line of thought—Viola’s engagement in phenomenology is quite straightforward. He intends to take control of both what can be seen by viewers and what cannot be seen through the manipulation of performance and related stage setting, having viewers committed to ‘phenomena and Being’ rather than distracted by hypothesis. This act highlights the body as authenticate object in the perception of viewer. Based on Shusterman (2009) the awareness of the object only makes the viewer’s consciousness stay at a basic level, and consequently the body is only the vessel without life. By taking this idea to the next level, Viola is trying to revive emotion from the audience through creating a tragic circumstance, which made the body dynamic phenomenon that is reflective but responds only to its own environment, and audience responds to this situation with a sense of sympathy. For Shusterman (2009: 133) the highest level of consciousness is when “we are not only explicitly conscious of the object but also conscious of how we are conscious of it” this is also explicit in Viola’s practice. I view Viola’s video as achieving this transcendent quality because its performance has reached a point where the body realised coherence between inner and outer experience. In the video ‘Martyrs’, each performance starts from stillness, and then goes through different stage of torture until they all return to a state of peace. Watching the performance on the screen, the performers turn their role into the victim while the audience sees themselves as the witness of the transformation. This redemption process initiates the inner experience and an self-reflexive awareness. The spectators are awakening by the outward journey conveyed through video performance, which motivates them to seek what they lack inside.

Time consciousness

Alongside these aesthetic concerns, the use of slow motion directly affects the spectator’s consciousness: the duration of time and perception of temporality through the encounter of ‘constant intervals’ in the moving image. It changes the viewer access to, and experience of, time that is different from a real time span. I would like to focus on Viola and Gordon‘s cases for both use slow motion as a methodology to alter consciousness of time and duration.

Douglas Gordon, 24 Hours Psycho, 1993

Gordon’s ’24 Hours Psycho’ (1993) is a study on how artists interpret the relationship between time and the spectator’s consciousness. In an interview, Gordon commented on two major aspects of the work’s production. The first concerns the using of dream-like effect as a stimuli of viewer‘s awareness and memory; the second is a reflection of the temporal nature of video art, and further posited a question on how time should be perceived: is it either a sequenced events or various temporality happened simultaneously (Røssaak, 2014). William James introduced the concept ‘the specious present’ which recognised the original intuition of time as “a constantly conscious duration… a combination of shorter segments” (James, 1886: 377). To be specific, the continuous of consciousness is formed by the retrospective and the prospective sense of time. Time sensitivity is basically the perception of the succession between two ends, and this brought up the idea of interval of time. Both materialism and immaterialism of video determine the moving image can only run within certain span of time. The first video art by Nam June Paik was recorded on a reel-to-reel machine with maximum recording time of one hour, which was considered a video of “real time” (Elwes, 2005: 4). The ’24 Hours Psycho’ rearticulates the original film of Hitchcock in a peculiar way which slows the rate down to one frame every two second. Unlike the Nam June Paik, Gordon manipulates time by interrupting and dividing the space of presentness and extending the individual time segments; then every movement made by protagonists is clearly observed through a series of sequence of images. With the slow-motion, the “presentness” is the interval of time with doubled length comparing real time. It is an effect fixed in the mind of spectator in the form of the recollection of number of changes through retention. Philip Merlan (1947, 25) summaries retention as: “an object of a perception of a temporal event is bound to become an object of a corresponding retention.” It supports Gordon‘s idea on ‘human being can coexist on various levels simultaneously’: if people caught 10 minutes of 24-Hour Psycho, they might remember that it was still happening (Rossaak, 2014: 89).

Bill Viola, The Reflecting Pool, 1977-80

Gordon‘s experiment of slow-motion created déjà vu in the mind of spectator. His examination of the being of consciousness is based on a series of consecutive retention of a given interval of time. This idea is also evident in the work of Viola (Bellour & Viola, 1985:96-101) ‘consciousness is revealed through a successive event.’ However, what differentiates Viola from Gordon is his intervention on time is realised through manipulation of movement of attention. The awareness of attention is partially created by the residua in the perception. Viola‘s early work ‘The Reflecting Pool’ (1977-80), a man jumps into the pool except his body frozen in the mid-air for a long period of time before disappearing into the background of forest. This situation led to the distinctive moment that is vividly retained in the mind of viewer in the form of residua. The gradually fading image allows viewers to pay attention to the action of the man rather than the consequence which draws attention to the time-distance emerged during the slow dissolve. Viola signifies three separate time: the continuous time which is the perception of reality; the recoding time and edited time; he regards that times are not dependent on the absolute time of the videotape machine (Bellour & Viola, 1985:96). Therefore, by editing and recombining the level of time in the frame, the spectator’s attention toward the interval of time shifted and changed along with the reconstructed sequence of events.

Bill Viola, the Quintet of the Astonished, 2000

Viola’s concerns on time and successive events in his early work came from his interrogation of the fixed recording time of videotape. After the technology evolved into digital, Viola’s practice of time also moved from action to emotion expression. The work ‘the Quintet of the Astonished’ (2000) is a group of five people are seen standing close together as they undergo a wave of intense emotion that threatens to overwhelm them. The five individuals experience the rising emotional energy independently: the extreme slow motion makes visible the smallest of details and subtle nuances of expression, and creates a subjective, psychological space where time is suspended for both performers and viewers alike (Hanhardt & Viola, 2015: 184). In James (1886: 376) ‘all consciousness is in the form of time, or that time is the form of feeling, the form of sensibility.’ Viewers’ attention and emotion are particularly directed to the deliberate change of movement in gestures and facial expression; in slow-motion, this vividness is exaggerated, the viewer’s consciousness constantly oscillates between retrospective and the prospective sense of time. The continuity then makes time observable. The spectator does not always play a passive role in the contemplation but their inner experience usually starts their own sequence of the events; accordingly, their consciousness is motivated by these intensity of movements.

Conclusion

In summary, I pursued my investigation into the relationship between video and spectator consciousness with concentration on examining three key elements: installation, performance and time based on artists Bill Viola and Douglas Gordon. I identified that both explores viewer’s spiritual and mental potentials by employing metaphoric symbols in the construction of projection space. Regarding the difference between them, I began the description with Gordon’s early experimental installation in 90s, his practices on metaphor work through transformation between media: turning the abundant site into a spiritual space and making it part of the overall artwork, then making viewer a participator instead of a passerby. Whereas, Viola’s installation directly works with sign system to shape viewer understanding between appearance and truth. Additionally, I gave a thorough review of Viola‘s reputable video ‘Martyrs’, which takes the body dynamic as catalyst to evoke spectator ‘awareness and self-reflection. Finally, the essay draws attention to video technique ‘slow-motion‘ which controls consciousness through manipulating time. The analysis uses Gordon‘s ’24 Hours Psycho‘ as a starting point to expose viewer‘s time sensitivity that is decided by the succession of events and interval of time. As in Viola’s case, his works identify that viewer’s emotion and retention of image is shaped and lies in the reconstruction of video time.

References

Bal, M., & Bryson, N. (1991). Semiotics and Art History. The Art Bulletin, 73(2), 174-208. doi:10.2307/3045790

Bellour, R., & Viola, B. (1985). An Interview with Bill Viola. October, 34, 91-119. doi:10.2307/778491

Birtwistle, A. (2012). Douglas Gordon and cinematic audiovisuality in the age of television: Experiencing the experience of cinema. Visual Culture in Britain, 13(1), 101-113. doi:10.1080/14714787.2012.641780

Cooke, L. (2002). Douglas Gordon. Los Angeles. The Burlington Magazine, 144(1189), 257-258. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/889519

Elwes, C., & University of the Arts London. (2005). Video art: A guided tour. London: I.B. Tauris.

Feinstein, H. (1985). Art as Visual Metaphor. Art Education, 38(4), 26-29. doi:10.2307/3192822

Hanhardt, J. G., Perov, K., & Viola, B. (2015). Bill Viola. London: Thames & Hudson.

Heidegger, Martin (1962) Being and Time. New York: Harper & Row.

James, W. (1886). The Perception of Time. 20(4), 374-407. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25668117

Johnson, W. (1979). Literature, Film, and the Evolution of Consciousness. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 38(1), 29-38. doi:10.2307/430042

Judson, W. (1995). Bill Viola: Allegories in Subjective Perception. Art Journal, 54(4), 30-35. doi:10.2307/777691

Kaye, N. (2007). Multi-media: video – installation – performance. London: Routledge.

Keith, C. (1998). Image after Image: The Video Art of Bill Viola. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 20(2), 1-16. doi:10.2307/3245924

Meigh-Andrews, C. (2014). A History of video Art (2nd ed.). London; New York;: Bloomsbury Academic.

Røssaak, E. (2014). The delay in the system: Why Douglas Gordon needed Alfred Hitchcock. Millennium Film Journal, (59), 86.

Shusterman, R. (2009). Body Consciousness and Performance: Somaesthetics East and West. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 67(2), 133-145. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40206398

Young, L. (1997). The Elemental Sublime. Performing Arts Journal, 19(3), 65-71. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3245727

Zeami (1983). On the Art of the No Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami, trans. J. T. Rimer and Y. Masakazu. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Impermanence

Kyalo Searle-Mbullu

Audio-visual/mixed media, available to view: http://bit.ly/2jMf0SN

It is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them.—Baudrillard, 1981

The artwork was created as a response to the “phases of the image” posited by Baudrillard (1988)—the copy of the original, or simulacrum, representing the successive reflection, masking and perversion, then absence of, a basic reality (1988 This is manifested by the gradual disintegration of a video file of a closeup, blinking eye. Using the music editing software Audacity to process the raw data of the stock footage yielded the resulting unpredictable, data-bent artefacts. Each successive loop was then individually processed again and again (48 times, precisely) to make up the nearly 8 minute long piece. Concordantly, the audio element was constructed from a frozen guitar loop, employing granular synthesis techniques to further mould and sculpt the soundscape from a single source, “using tiny snippets of sound that can be manipulated individually and are recombined to generate the final output” (Price, 2005). The combination of the audio and the visual components results in a short film which subsequently disseminates the idea of repetition as transferral of value between individuals and how that value is communicated.

In this case it can be contextualised as a Platonic interpretation of representation – the artwork is self-aware in that it is a warning of the illusory nature of signs and images: the eye can signify a range of cultural and psychological connotations, including – but not limited to—surveillance, moral conscience, spiritual awakening, divine omniscience and cyclopean sub-humanism. Using this classic symbol of visual perception therefore creates a self-reflexive relationship with the viewer, in turn making them the subject of the artwork’s own literal gaze:

… when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you. (Nietzsche, 1886)

The piece also provokes and brings into question our perceived judgement and understanding of things. Can an entity or object be understood without comparing it to another thing? It stands to Kantian reasoning that the representation, image, or simulacrum, is not the thing in of itself.

The Treachery of Images | Rene Magritte, 1928-9

It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo that fact that we are surrounded by it… We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves… constituting what is present to us as we are. (Berger, 1972: 7-9)

White (2006) contends that we are continuously ascribing value to things with reference to what they are not; how else could we understand big without small, red without blue, good without bad? Likening something to another thing, or being reminded of a similar thing, enables us to make sense of what we are looking at and thereby elicit an emotional response. This is what allows us to create “primary value judgement”. Shrivastava (1996: 97) expands on this notion of representation:

It is not clear how and why the Imaginary fails to organize [sic] perception (meaning/signification) … When we look at something, we perceive that thing; then, when we look at something else, we perceive something else. A change takes place but we still perceive without any help from an entity.

The sonic aspect of the artwork can be similarly discussed in that the looping samples and phrases are an inherent abstraction of the original. Inspired by Basinski’s Disintegration Loops (2001), the soundtrack is “an appropriation of an appropriation… a simulation of a musical work, a copy of a copy, with the original obscured.” (Leaman, 2015) This approach can be interpreted as deriving from a Warholian process of “the dissolution of the real by the image” (Dinallo, n.d.) and ascribes the concept of simulacra to both audial and visual elements. With every blink of the eye, and every playback of the hypnotic guitar loop —the “unique and accumulative damage” (Leaman, 2015) is demonstrated:

as a wholly new work based on the previous passage through the machine… Each loop is to some degree heterogenous, unrelated to the previous loops and yet fundamentally altered and influenced by that which precedes it. (ibid)

With further reference to The Disintegration Loops, Guimond (2007: 127-8) also postulates that “each loop—each ‘sub-work’ of the whole recording —[contains] its own past and its own future.” The very process of the creation of the artwork requires a transformation and adaptation of the pre-existing components. This is in accordance with Kreitler (2009), “as the piece progresses it can no longer be said to be a sequence of loops, but rather a continuous rearrangement and destruction of shards of sound.”

Maloy (2010: 10) eloquently surmises; the “recontextualization [sic] of the audio snippets spells the death sentence of every reference and becomes a simulacrum.” This process of replication results in the interminable decay of the source material:

initiating the new work’s own destruction… it is destroyed as the recontextualisation process is documented… it never again resembles its hypotext fully, resulting in an uncanny, ostensibly meaningless work in its wake… any truth or sense of the real in the original is now lost, leaving behind a work that is not real in itself, yet is still derived from the real… It retains, to a certain extent, the aesthetic properties of the real, yet sheds itself of any of the semantic content that previously tied the original work to the socio-cultural context whence it came. (Leaman, 2015)

This brings us full circle, back to Baudrillard’s “dissimulation” (1981). It is not what the constructed hyperreality “(doesn’t) signify, but the sense of hyperreality itself.” (Leaman, 2015). Ultimately then, it is the process of degradation, rather than the audial and visual content, which becomes the focus of the piece:

To an ever-increasing degree, the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility. From a photographic plate, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. (Benjamin, 1936: 24-5)

The physical act of ‘reproducing’ the tape loop through the machine is what causes the disintegration, exhibiting the process of an artwork’s reproduction causing its own destruction. It is thus not a reproduction of an artwork, in the conventional sense, but what we might call a ‘deproduction’, a destruction of an artwork—or, more accurately, the production of one artwork documenting the destruction of another. (Leaman, 2015)

And so finally, the inspiration for the title? All of my recent audiovisual experiments exist in a digital, online capacity. Imbued with a sense of hypnotic wistfulness, the common themes running throughout engage with ephemerality at their core. White (2006) asserts that the degradation of signifier and signified will “perhaps… be reduced to such a degree that it becomes unintelligible data, an unfinished thought.” I believe this approach to temporality to be a positive outlook, inherent to a mindful mode of being:

To feel the scourge of impermanence and loss and to appreciate it at the same time profoundly as the beautiful essence of what it means to be at all.” (Fischer, 2012)

 

Bibliography

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Benjamin, W. (1936) The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. In: Jennings, M. W., Doherty, B. Levin, T.Y. (eds.) Harvard University Press, 2008. [Online] Available: https://monoskop.org/images/6/6d/Benjamin_Walter_1936_2008_The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Its_Technological_Reproducibility_Second_Version.pdf

Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing. Penguin Books

Dinallo, L. (n.d.) Thesis: Warhol’s work expresses philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the extermination of the real by the image, a phenomenon that is an outstanding feature of our mass-media shaped culture. [Online] Available: http://concordiaproject.tripod.com/essay2.html

Fischer, N. (2012) Impermanence is Buddha Nature. [Online] Available: https://www.lionsroar.com/impermanence-is-buddha-nature-embrace-changemay-2012/

Guimond, D. (2007) Intermediality: The Sounds of Disappearance. [Online] Available: https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/im/2007-n10-im1814928/1005556ar/

Kreitler, B. (2009) The Music Was Dying. [Online] Available: https://brooklynrail.org/2009/06/music/the-music-was-dying

Leaman, G. (2015) Memorials Without Mimesis: Abstraction and Intertextuality in William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops. [Online] Available: https://disposableeverything.co.uk/2015/05/17/memorials-without-mimesis-abstraction-and-intertextuality-in-william-basinskis-the-disintegration-loops/

Maloy, L. (2010) “Stayin’ Alive in Da Club”:The Illegality and Hyperreality of Mashups. In: Journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music [Online] Available: http://www.iaspmjournal.net/index.php/IASPM_Journal/article/viewFile/372/560

Nietzsche, F. (1886) Beyond Good and Evil [Online] Available: http://www.holybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/Nietzsche-Beyond-Good-and-Evil.pdf

Price, S. (2005) Granular Synthesis: How It Works & Ways To Use It. [Online] Available: http://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/granular-synthesis

Shrivastava, V. (1996) Aesthetics of Sound: Critical Analysis of Sound Design in Television and Motion Pictures. Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company

White, R. (2006) Decontextualisation of the Art Object: Making Nothing Out Of Something. [Online] Available: http://www.counterwork.co.uk/writing/decontextualisation.pdf

What is the aesthetic of the new apathy?

Connor MacDonald

The aesthetic of the new apathy is a way of describing the aesthetic of modern globalised society. It is a complete privatisation of experience facilitated by the twin apparatuses of multinational capitalism and a postmodernist value system. It is a mass commodification of expression, which produces at a rate that exhausts the meaning of all messages. It requires the destruction of meaning to facilitate the acceptance of contradiction, and so those who live within the aesthetic rely on apathy, irony, cynicism and parody to anchor themselves in a reality they do not fully understand. The aesthetic is amorphous and irresistible as everything created within it is subject to the same exhaustion of meaning. This short essay will examine some of the facets of our modern apathetic aesthetic and attempt to illustrate how it privatises experience, promotes contradiction, and destroys meaning in relation to social theories by writers like Karl Marx, Frederic Jameson, and Eduardo De La Fuente.

The aesthetic owes its existence to a ‘totalising structure’ (Jameson, 1991: 272), which sets out the framework from which all works derive value. At the heart of this structure lies the symbiotic relationship between aestheticism, postmodernism and multinational capitalism. For Murphy & Fuente (2009: 3) the cultural conditions of capitalism are inherently paradoxical; however where Marx (1867: 493) imagined these contradictions to be the eventual death of capitalism the opposite has come to pass. What Marx could not have foreseen was the scale and rapidity at which these contradictions would be broadcast. Our global media apparatus, simply by virtue of its size and proliferation, has become the driving force of apathy in the modern world. The result of this apathy is seen in the privatisation of experience that creates a system where reality becomes a series of aesthetic choices.

This is one of the reasons the aesthetic of the new apathy has no definable, ‘style’, as it is used here to describe the cultural phenomenon of personal and privatised experience. However it is possible to point to individual examples as symptoms of the larger culture. Parisian fashion brand Vetements took to the catwalk in 2015 with a DHL logo shirt that they sold for £185 (when you could buy a nearly identical shirt from DHL direct for a little over £6.50). In the fashion world this was lauded as a bold statement of individualism but in a system where experience is privatised, all things possess the veneer of individualism as everything is experienced in a social vacuum (Cochrane, 2015: 1). Castoriadis (2003: 184) argued that as long as we remain within this state of apathy and privatisation we can only experience a pseudo-individualism taken here to be an individualistic consumerism that offers no real resistance to the system from which it comes and instead exists simply as a method of entrenching ourselves further in our private realities. The view of Dupuy is that this is a natural and a self-organising principle of the economy. As with the large religious powers that ruled our society before modern capitalism, the economy is not able to generate rules and principles to restrict its validity (Dupuy, 2012: 116-117). Therefore any possible resistance to the aesthetic is dependent on developing large scale ideological mechanisms to shape our beliefs, but the absence of definable truth or meaning within the aesthetic reduces every organising principle to the level of a thought-exercise as all experiences are private and so all arguments equally valid.

The continued proliferation of the aesthetic can be attributed to the rise of postmodernism as a replacement for modernism, which was criticised for its implication in the rise of totalitarianism (Shorten, 2012: 26). However postmodernism has enabled a kind of tribalism where there are so many competing agendas at play that it becomes impossible to separate truth from lie. This is one of the reasons for the rise of cynicism, apathy and parody as a social crutch. The cultural cache given to apathy in the aesthetic is partly the result of an attempt to come to terms with our inability to understand reality.

That is not to say ideology is not still a powerful force, but rather we have reached a point where the only true ideology that can flourish within the aesthetic is consumerism and a firm belief in the market as the sole arbiter of what is valuable. If true, then all art, whether intended to be sold or otherwise, exists as a commodity. To illustrate this, you need look no further than last year’s sale of a section of wall from the town of Glastonbury for an undisclosed sum because it supposedly featured a Bansky mural hidden under several layers of white paint. The intention of street art, presumably, is to engage with a wide public audience, but the market deemed the piece of wall valuable enough to become part of somebody’s private experience. This helps to illustrate postmodernism’s role in reinforcing the aesthetic as the market can imbue value in resistance and turn it into a commodity to furnish the consumer with a supposedly, ‘real’, and ‘authentic’ experience. The aesthetic provides the ultimate form of commodity fetishism that incorporates all forms of resistance as product. As Lev Kreft explains in his essay on Capitalism and Marxist Aesthetics:

The attack on art as bourgeois institution, at first recognized as something radically anti-capitalist, found its place inside institution of art. Anti-art developed into mainstream art, anti-artwork is now museum artifact, and anti-aesthetics is new academism: de Stijl is now Art Deco. What is wrong with avant-garde anti-art? To simplify a little: Peter Bürger’s answer is that proletarian revolution failed, so avant-garde cannot but fail too.

This has created a system where social statements sprayed on pieces of wall and ‘working class’ signifiers like DHL are repackaged and marked up for sale to those who feel the need for some sort of meaning in their life, while simultaneously feeding this need for meaning by devaluing all messages through commodification. This is just one of the central paradoxes of the aesthetic of the new apathy. Where modernism used authority used to control and coerce with a series of simple value judgements, postmodernism uses ‘authenticity’ to appeal to the consumer. Authenticity has many definitions but appears to serve two functions within the aesthetic. Firstly, it is used as a sales tool, it too now a commodity, a contradiction to itself. Secondly, modern authenticity might best be described as an admission of artifice and a laying bare of process. In the age of apathy, the most authentic form of expression may well be an honest admission of the manipulation of truth, as it too has no inherent value other than as a commodity. As Junk (2010: 1) writes in his short essay on postmodernism and the commodification of authenticity, ‘authenticity has supplanted authority as the guiding principle of fiction’. This idea of ‘authenticity’ as it relates to the aesthetic can also be applied to the individual-as-a-commodity in their own right, and in turn adds perceived value to what they create simply by virtue of their association with it. In 2013 Kanye West released a limited-run plain white t-shirt that cost $120. The shirt was in no way materially different from many other plain white cotton shirts, but the perceived authenticity and limited availability of this shirt as it related to Kanye West as an ‘authentic’ figure and author of the work imbued it with an additional value. It follows then that the final cornerstone of the aesthetic would seem to be scarcity. In a society driven by mass production scarcity is the single most valuable commodity.

One of the reasons the aesthetic of the new apathy is so difficult to define in its totality is that it is almost all encompassing, and so the only way to examine its function is through the mechanisms that enable it. If you can draw any concrete conclusion from these examinations, the aesthetic of the new apathy is not an aesthetic in the traditional sense but a way of describing the cultural reaction to art produced under a specific set of socio-political conditions. It has a set of guiding principles, primarily a belief in the market’s power to determine value, but this alone is not enough to define it. It is the privatisation of experience that drives the contradictory nature of the aesthetic which in turn feeds the apathy of the general populous. The hyper-commodification we have attained through this process is the basis for the aesthetic but it is the postmodernist mode of thought which sustains it. Therefore, taken simply, the aesthetic can be defined as a series of automated and unconscious processes which govern the individual’s reaction to art. Though I have attempted to understand these processes, it is my belief that this essay cannot in any meaningful way fully describe them as I too am a product of the aesthetic, and so is anything of my own creation. As a secondary consideration it could be argued that it is not possible to logically understand the aesthetic as previously stated, ‘the cultural condition of capitalism is paradoxical’ (Murphy & Fuente 2009: 3), and the aesthetic exists outwith the bounds of logic.

 

Bibliography

Castoriadis, C. (2003). The rising tide of insignificancy, the big sleep. [online] Notbored.org Available at: http://www.notbored.org/RTI.pdf
[Accessed 12 Dec. 2017]

Cochrane, L (2016). Scam or subversion? How a DHL T-shirt became this year’s must-have. [online] theguardian.com. Available at:
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2016/apr/19/dhl-t-shirt-vetements-fashion-paris-catwalk [Accessed 12 Dec. 2017]

Dupuy, J. (2012). L’avenir de l’économie (Translated). Paris, France, p.116-117.

Jameson, F. (2012). Postmodernism or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. New Delhi: Rawat, p.272.

Junk, D. (2010). Postmodernism and the Commodification of Authenticity. [online] Readingsubtly.blogspot.co.uk. Available at: https://readingsubtly.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/postmodernism-and-commodification-of.html [Accessed 10 Dec. 2017].

Kreft, L. (2013). Capitalism and Marxist Aesthetics, Ljublijana, Slovenia. p.5.

Murphy, Peter, & de la Fuente, Eduardo (2009) Aestheticism: the new spirit of capitalism. Copenhagen, Denmark, p.3.

Marx, K. (1867). Capital: Critique of Political Economy. Hamburg, Germany, p.493.

Shorten, R. (2012). Modernism and Totalitarianism. Birmingham, UK, p.26.
 

 

 

Subverting the Pomegranate—Is The Colour of Pomegranates actually a subversive film?

Devon Yagian-Boutelle

The Colour of Pomegranates is a most memorable artifact in the history of global cinema perhaps most obviously for its unconventional style, which was (and is) a dramatic departure from the cinematic norms of storytelling in almost any artistic school or locale of film production one might have found in the world at the time. It is a film that most certainly would never have been made in the “Hollywood” system or arguably any mainstream studios in the Western markets. Yet what might seem equally unlikely was the fact that this film was entirely funded by the Soviet state system (as all films were in the USSR), a film that does not at all fit into the conventions of Socialist Realism. In the years after its release, the film’s director Sergei Parajanov would come under the scrutiny of the KGB and end up spending several years in prison for charges of homosexuality. Charges, however, most current scholars, and friends and colleagues around him at the time, say were really a pretext and simply the easiest and quickest manner to remove him from the cinematic scene. An examination of the KGB case reports on him from the period support this conclusion as the texts seem most concerned with Parajanov’s perceived anti-Soviet behavior, contact with foreigners from the West, and having had a “negative influence on the fostering of young creative workers” (Steffen 2013: 186-187). In the decades since the film’s release The Colour of Pomegranates has also been incorporated into the milieu of the Armenian nationalist identity, as a masterpiece of Armenian national art. The film is indeed full of symbolism associated with Armenian culture, its subject, Sayat Nova, is the most revered classical poet and minstrel and the pomegranate is as equally ingrained into the Armenian cultural psyche as is the apricot, both of which are probably only surpassed by the image of Mt. Ararat. Ask anyone today on the streets in Yerevan (capital of Armenia) or a diaspora in LA or Paris: ‘What is the greatest Armenian film ever made?’ Chances are they will say The Colour of Pomegranates (whether or not they have actually seen it).

The documented subversiveness of the director, the overtly nationalist symbolism, subject, and appeal of the film, would all seem to beg the question how could such a film have been made in the Soviet film industry that had a state monopoly on production, distribution and exhibition, a bureaucratized system of control that enforced an aesthetic-ideological orthodoxy (Steffen, 2013: 10). Could a film with a subversive anti-Soviet message, or a bourgeois-nationalist narrative, have somehow slipped through the proverbial crack of the State Committee of Cinematography? History would support an answer that was a resounding—No. Perhaps it would be valuable to take a step back and ask: is The Colour of Pomegranates actually a subversive film? If so, how?

Those close to him generally considered Parajanov, as not having been interested in politics (Steffen, 2013: 81). Despite this his film Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1965) became associated with the Ukrainian nationalist movement. Ironically, this is the film that garnered him fame in the USSR and recognition in the West. It was the popularity and success of the film, not only amongst film critics and the general public, but also from the perspective of the Soviet authorities, which allowed him to go on to make The Colour of Pomegranates. So how did these paradoxical outcomes arise from the creation of that film?

I believe it becomes quite clear in reading accounts from friends, personal letters, and interviews with Parajanov, that the man was a narcissist. I would argue that it is his imbued sense of auteurship, the quest to realize his personal artistic vision, which motivated him above all else. His association with nationalist politics in the Ukraine is really a matter of chance. When asked by the Goskino in Moscow to have Shadows dubbed in Russian for Union-wide distribution, he claims to have had to fight to retain its original Ukrainian soundtrack, for the sake of the film’s artistic integrity and ethnographic authenticity of the subject (Steffen, 2013: 61). Although Steffen asserts in his own examination of the records there was not much resistance from Moscow on releasing it in Ukrainian. In any case, this was an anecdote that Parajanov often recalled both privately and publicly, including at the premiere of Shadows in Kiev. While once again recounting the tale of how he fought for the film to retain its original language, the Ukrainian intellectual and emerging nationalist and Soviet dissident Ivan Dziuba grabbed the microphone from Parajanov and began to decry the crackdown on the intelligentsia in Kiev by the authorities, calling on people to take the to the streets and protest, which in fact many people did. This event and the film’s embrace by the Ukrainian nationalist movement did more to situate Parajanov in relation to dissident politics than anything he ever produced artistically. His friendships with the people involved in the Ukrainian nationalist movement, I believe, would affect not only how the authorities of the era, but also in hindsight how people in the West and post-Soviet Armenia often read The Colour of Pomegranates. Simply put, his work was mischaracterized by ideologues on all sides, and appropriated to suit their own varying agendas—whether that led to the director’s persecution or canonization.

As for the nationalist characterization of The Colour of Pomegranates this is really misconstrued, and indicative of a post-Soviet reading of the film. In reality the film’s treatment of ethno-national cultures is very much in line with the Soviet ideology of the 1960s, as was similarly the case with Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. At that time, there was an official policy to showcase the different national cultures of the USSR and celebrate the diversity and brotherhood of nations. The films subject, Sayat Nova, was an 18th century poet and minstrel known to all the peoples of the Caucasus, he was an ethnic Armenian born in Tbilisi that wrote the majority of his songs and poems in Azeri-Turkish, but many others in Armenian and Georgian. In the first Russian language publication of Sayat Nova’s poetry the Georgian scholar Ioseb Grishahvili offers us a glimpse into the standard Soviet perception of the poet, writing he “is synonymous of friendship, a banner of internationalism and brotherhood between the peoples of Transcaucasia.” (Steffan 2013: 122). These three republics consequently began life in the Soviet Union as a single Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. Only a few years before the release of Parajanov’s film, the USSR had celebrated the 250th anniversary of Sayat Nova’s birth. Thus, we can further conclude there was nothing subversive in creating a film about a regionally specific, multicultural historical icon.

This is not to say that The Colour of Pomegranates was not a subversive film or that Sergei Parajanov was not subverting the status quo of Soviet artistic production. However, I believe the notion that he had a dissident political ideology, which informed his work, or which was expressed through the symbolism in his films, is unfounded. To locate the subversiveness in this film requires a different analytical lens than that of Soviet dissident or ethno-nationalist. The subversiveness of this film lies instead in the highly personal themes relating to Parajanov’s inner subjectivity. The Colour of Pomegranates is essentially an autobiographical work, disguised in poetic-cinematic visions of the life of Sayat Nova. Parajanov is associated and self-identified as being part of the poetic school of Soviet cinema and he saw parallels between himself and the 18^th century troubadour. Their life stories shared similar hardships, banishment, and tragedy, the loss of great loves, both poets were Armenians born in Tbilisi in a Georgian state, surrounded by the multiculturalism of the Caucasus.

In the Socialist Realist environment that still predominated the bureaucracy of the Soviet film industry apparatus this type of introspective reflection without obvious connections to party doctrine was quite radical, and unprecedented. I suspect one reason that Parajanov was able to get away with as much as he did was simply the fact that the Goskino review board were so distracted by the overwhelming visual style and atypical approach to narrative that they generally did not understand what they were watching. For example, allusions to Parajanov’s own sexuality seem apparent throughout the film. As seen through the sexual awakening of the young Sayat Nova, in a scene where he rushes between two opposite facing windows on the roof of a bathhouse first peering into watch the King and other men bathing and then over to the other to see the nude torso of a female. The following shot shows the boy, center frame, contemplatively gazing to one side then shifting his head to the other, seemingly torn between the two windows. Parajanov never really hid his sexuality and it was common knowledge that he was bisexual, but as Steffen claims had a preference for men. Homosexuality was illegal in the Soviet Union at the time, so obviously a sensualized homoerotic gaze would not have been sanctioned had it actually been understood for what it was.

The subjectivity and artistic license Parajanov took with the legend of Sayat Nova was problematic for officials in Moscow and Armenia. However circumstances allowed for him to carry on with the production. The Armenfilm studios (the state studio of Armenia) would not step on Parajanov’s toes; prior to his arrival they had been severely criticized by Moscow for lack of organization and inability to reach the production quotas. They saw his arrival and the production of this film as an opportunity to show Moscow it could produce an international success, which would in turn bring increased funding for the studio (Steffan, 2013: 117). This gave Parajanov an amount of freedom and control over his productions that was not typical at all for most directors in the USSR at the time. For example, despite it being one point of major contention, at least initially, Parajanov enlisted Sofiko Chiaureli the Georgian actress to play not only the Princess Anna (first and greatest love and muse of Sayat Nova) but also Sayat Nova himself, as a young man (The World is a Window). The Colour of Pomegranates was exploring ideas of gender performativity in front of a Soviet audience, depicting an androgynous version of Sayat Nova, a far cry from the hyper-masculine supermen of the Stalinist era.

Parajanov’s unapologetic problematization of notions of authenticity and his reinterpretation of canonized popular myths, was an affront to what was essentially the policy of Soviet film and art, in general. Narratives should be simple enough to be understood by citizens from any background or region in the union, yet The Colour of Pomegranates is a film-poem about a poet (Steffan, 2013: 114). Rather than a historically accurate biopic, Parajanov said he was going to show the life of Sayat Nova as imagined by Sayat Nova himself. Although referring to his previous film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors it is equally applicable to the film on which this paper focuses, David A. Cook asserts that Parajanov’s style of filmmaking:

destabilize[s] the viewer perceptually, and therefore psychologically, in order to present a tale that operates not at the level of narrative but of myth, a tale that is an archetype of life itself: youth passes from innocence to experience solitude and death in a recurring cycle, eons upon eons. (Steffan, 2013: 62)

This was especially subversive given that what the officials had requested time and time again, and what was part of their criticism as early as the script phase, was a film that would introduce Sayat Nova to the Soviet masses and educate them about his life.

Conclusion

The Colour of Pomegranates was not subversive to Communist political doctrine in that it had a precise political ideology that was dissident: its ethno-national focus was in keeping with the doctrine of the time concerning the promotion of the non-Russian republics’ cultural accomplishments. Its reading as an exclusively Armenian film or Sayat Nova being the exclusive cultural property of any one of the three Caucasian nations is really a more modern post-Soviet reading. It is subversive to the aesthetics and structure of narrative film that was status quo in the USSR, as it also would have been in the West, although perhaps it could have existed outside the mainstream in the realm of independent art-house cinema. It is obviously its locale of production within the Soviet ideological space and state film industry that makes it radical and something more than just another state funded production. More significantly, it was a statement of artistic freedom and subjective expression in opposition to the standards of the system in which its creator lived and produced art. If Sergei Parajanov had not produced this film in the Soviet Union would The Colour of Pomegranates have been lost to time as just another obscure art film? Perhaps for the Western viewer it is in part the exotic imagery and his otherness as a perceived dissident artist from behind the “iron curtain” that drew their attention. Perhaps, not surprisingly, it is only in his later years, after his third imprisonment, that he more openly expressed antagonism towards the Soviet system. “I worked and suffered under three despots. The despots were in the Kremlin […] The Soviet films of that era, and not only mine, are like a cardiogram of terror. They are cardiograms of fear, the fear of losing your film, the fear of starving. You feared for your work” (Holloway, 1988). This quote is revealing for what it tells us about what he considered most important, it was not the sanctioned ideological message, but rather his vision, his personal poetry, his life story.

 

Bibliography

Ardzagang Armenian TV (2017) Sergei Parajanov Documentary, Director unknown, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yyy5gClt0Po&t=2973s

Bird, Daniel dir. (2011) The World is a Window: Making the Colour of Pomegranates, Cave Canem Films.

Christie, Ian (2010) ‘Out of the Shadows,’ Sight & Sound, March, pp. 24-27.

Holloway, Ron (1988) ‘Sergei Parajanov interview,‘ Menggang, http://www.menggang.com/movie/russia/paradjanov/e-paradjanov-b.html

Lehmann, Maike (2015) ‘Apricot Socialism: The National Past, the Soviet Project, and the Imagining of Community in Late Soviet Armenia,’ Slavic Review, 74 (1), pp. 9-31.

Pfeifer, Moritz (2015) Life History of a Fruit: Symbol and Tradition in Parajanov’s Caucasian Trilogy [online] Available at: https://eefb.org/archive/october-2015/pomegranates-in-parajanovs-caucasian-trilogy/

Steffen, James (2013) The Cinema of Sergei Parjanov, University of Wisconsin Press.

 

 

 

How can collective anonymity alter the de facto system of contemporary art commerce which is predicated on perverted adulation of individualized authorship?

Mikhail Sokovikov & Miguel Gomez

The Author arises from the polymorphous field of discourse as a means to confer authority and value on a discreet share or text, and is concurrently projected back onto the text as its sole and unique source. (Thoburn, 2011: 121)

In the Western canon, material and metaphysical value extracted from various forms of art including images, art-objects, moving images, performances and literary works has been almost always explicitly linked to and dependant on an institutional assessment and registration of the author and author’s historical, political, social, and psychological persuasions. In the current commercial system, recognizable authorship is undoubtedly desired over obscure anonymity, all while author’s egotism, agency and biography are put ahead of the Idea in the Platonic sense. Art-world’s obsession with the author and aforementioned authorial attributes further inflates author’s subjectivity and ego, which eventually balloons and overshadows the objectivity and the Idea itself, or in other words, the excessive adulation of the author by the current global financial support system becomes the primary attribute and function that derives from an artwork a material value first, and a possible metaphysical value second.

Can collective anonymity of what Marx referred to as communal being provide an alternative to individualized authorship by dissolving author’s identity and its attributes while pursuing a multifaceted purpose of delivering a more engaging, enlightened and objective discourse? This essay is about the complex relationship between anonymity and authorship in artistic practices and how alternative modes of approaching art production, exhibition and interaction can offer an institutional critique, that can potentially disrupt the established system which operates on propped up flattery of the artist-figure.

By looking at a number of theoretical texts, I will attempt to defuse the topic and expose this polarized relationship between anonymity and individualism to be a political one. It is a conflicting dynamic, one that is directly linked to the relationship between Platonic objectivity and Cartesian subjectivity. This essay will also attempt to examine principal motivations behind collective anonymity and the general intellect (Marx) by looking at the artistic practices of Luther Blissett Project and Public Ad Campaign and how by utilizing guerrilla strategies, public interventions and media manipulations these obscure but effective collectives were able to shift the focus away from self-centeredness of the individual author and toward the Platonic sense of Idea through collective anonymity and communal engagement of the general intellect. By looking at writings by Marx, Barthes, Foucault, Vassiliou, Thoburn and Bordiga I hope to present the reader with a valuable case for an alternative to the existing system which puts the author and not the Idea as the central figure in art. Although, from this discussion a larger inquiry forms in regard to prevalence of subjectivity over objectivity in the current system of art commerce, I will adhere to my primary topic of how collective anonymity can present an alternative to the self-driving vehicle of individualized authorship where the artist is still at the core of existence. It is worth briefly mentioning at this point, that the basis of my argument here is to equate the notion of discourse to that of Ideas and Forms and that in the Platonic sense, Ideas or Forms exist independently of the author’s subjective sense perception, which is the basis of Descartes’ infamous proposition: cogito ergo sum.

Historical Context of Authorship

The invention of authorship as a term is a relatively modern innovation first used in 1710 (Ede, 1985: 1) and according to Marx, it is an intellectual device to lift material value from an individual and then market it to a buyer as with any other consumer and commercial product in a capitalist economy. This extraction of value was established through the conception of copyright laws that legitimized ownership of personal intellectual property, as well as the invention of the modern printing press. The latter further enabled mass production, marketing, distribution and sales of literary and visual work in edition form for profit.

We must also acknowledge the philosophical shift that occurred during the Renaissance, prior to the rise of modern capitalism of the 18^th century, which had a profound effect on common consciousness. The new epoch consolidated the notion of existence and redirected it toward the self and the ego. Descartes’ cogito ergo sum was instrumental in rerouting consciousness away from the dogmatic approach of the medieval period and inward, toward the privileging of the enlightened individual which fuelled the new age of egocentrism and subjectivity through individualized and overemphasized sense perception. During the 18th century, authorship, by the use of identifiable signatures became the primary function of the newly developed art market, which quickly absorbed artistic aura and agency as the new vehicle of cultural commodity. Eagleton reflects on societal transformation from the social into the solitary by asserting that this privileging of the individual reflected the values of a political system that subordinated the sociality of human life to solitary individual enterprise. The somewhat murky history of authorship is comprised of a number of simultaneous philosophical and ideological movements which Roland Barthes further summed up in 1968 with The Death of the Author,

The author is a modern figure, produced no doubt by our society insofar as, at the end of the middle ages, with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, or, to put it more nobly, of the “human person’. (Barthes, 1968: 2)

Philosophical Context and the Cult of Personality

The relationship between newly invented authorship and anonymity became more politicized and polarized with Marx in the 19th century and Foucault and Barthes in the 20^th century. Marx further confirmed the newly minted authorial practice in the press media as a bourgeois device for lifting material value, this time through self-serving advertising:

So long as the press was anonymous it appeared as the organ of a public opinion without a number or name; it was the third power of state. With the signature of each article a newspaper became merely a collection of journalistic contributions by more or less well-known individuals. Every article sank to the level of an advertisement. (Marx, 1973: 134)

It must also be mentioned here, that although The Communist Manifesto is universally attributed to Marx and Friedrich Engels, the first edition of the seminal work, however, was published namelessly to possibly avoid the very thing that is to become of the authors themselves; their own indoctrination into the cult of personality. He acknowledged the authorial perversion that eventually steers the artist-figure toward the glamourizing celebrity status of the cult of personality. For Marx, the cult of personality was simply an extension of the privileged individual, which in itself perpetuates the capitalist structure of identity (Thoburn, 2011: 121). This critique of excessive adulation will be echoed in Italy by the Luther Blissett Project about one hundred and fifty years later. The rivalry between individual authorship and collective anonymity was carried out as further condemnation by the Italian communist and a strong opponent to the cult of personality, Amadeo Bordiga, who proclaimed:

It is the attribute of the bourgeois world that all commodities bear their maker’s name, all ideas are followed by their author’s signature, every party is defined by their leader…Work such as ours can only succeed by being hard and laborious and unaided by bourgeois publicity techniques, by the bile tendency to admire and adulate men. (Bordiga, quoted in Camatte, 176)

While Foucault sides with Marx and Bordiga who both exalted their condemnation of the capitalist system and new methods of economic exploitation, Foucault also questioned how polymorphous discourse influenced the role of the author or as he would call it the author-function. He is explicit in claiming that Ideas and discourse were not always a commodity to be mined for material value by private enterprise. In his 1969 essay What is an Author? Foucault declares:

In our culture—undoubtedly in others as well—discourse was not originally a thing, a product, or possession, but an action situated in a bipolar field of sacred and profane, lawful and unlawful, religious and blasphemous. It was a gesture charged with risk long before it became a profession caught in a circuit of property values. (Foucault, 1969: 124)

Foucault sides with Barthes by further destruction of the author in lieu of unidentified polymorphous discourse. His critique expands the author-function by explaining the intrinsic benefits of author’s annihilation and ultimate erasure in a literary work, as well as the irrefutable impact of anonymity. Foucault (1969) states,

What gives books like those which have no other pretension than to be anonymous so many marks of singularity and individual interpretation are not signs of a style, nor the mark of a singular or individual interpretation, but the rage to apply the eraser by which one meticulously effaces all that could refer to a written individuality.

Nevertheless, anonymous art, though to some, may seem to exist on the fringes of the mainstream culture has always provided an alternative to self-centred authorship which as we have already stated is a relatively new invention. Luther Blissett Project was an autonomous art collective that existed during the mid-1990’s across multiple European countries. LBP’s multinational projects directly critiqued and subverted capitalist politics of the post-soviet era of the mid 1990’s. LBP’s primary objective was to detach and remove singularity of the author by “creating a “con-dividual” shared by many, and fragmented, a “dividual” composed of multiple situations and personalities simultaneously” (Blissett, 1997: 43-44). LBP implemented new media guerrilla techniques that often interrupted and provoked authorities through public pranks and interventions. The loosely formed collective existed anonymously without a figure head, or rather, the Luther Blissett was a multinational composite of hundreds of participants across multiple countries with several socio-political goals. As Thoburn states in To Conquer the Anonymous:

Through the skilful orchestration of hoaxes, pranks, pranks, and fakes, Luther Blissett’s practice was characterized by scandalous disruption of mass media across the platforms of television, newspaper, radio, and Internet. (Thoburn, 2011: 130)

Another example of collective anonymous action is the Public Ad Campaign whose guerrilla tactics include the New York Street Ad Takeover of 2009 and 2010. During a May morning in 2009, PAC mobilized dozens of artists and volunteers to wipe out and replace 20,000 sqft of illegal street-level advertisements with artwork by more than a hundred international participants. Within a span of about eight hours 120 street-level billboards mostly in Manhattan and North Brooklyn were wiped out and replaced with ephemeral artwork (whether or not the work that replaced advertisement constitutes as artwork in the full sense of its meaning is beyond the scope of this essay). As a result, more than five artist/volunteers were arrested, but the city began to closely monitor NPA’s illegal operation which have gone unnoticed by New York City for decades. It could be argued however, that this public intervention dethroned the professional artwork created by graphic designers as work for hire in lieu of self-serving needs of each of the NYSAT participating artists, however in this example I am simply alluding to the overall impact of the communal being enacted anonymously and collectively.

Institutional System of the Identified Author

To continue, we need to acknowledge that there is a widely accepted system which depends on institutional and academic reliability on author’s identity and this system provides for a systemic and economically productive operation. Within this system, an identified author still plays a vital role in the contemporary art world and is considered central to the idea of art, only followed by other author-specific attributes like biography, themes and agency (Vassiliou, 2017: 5). Although anonymous art production can, as we shall see, provide challenges to art institutions, it is hard to deny today’s continuous praise of the author. The author is the driver of corporate profits through dissemination of intellectual property. As Vassiliou (2017) further points out,

Detailed authorship and extensive cataloguing is still preserved as the centre of museography and increasingly globalized contemporary art. Museums and various institutions are forming vast electronic databases, accumulating more and more registers and names, and there is a growing mass of contemporary artwork that bears some kind of signature.

The Author is celebrated, as s/he is compensated.

Death of the Author, published in 1967 by Roland Barthes is more dead as a concept today than ever before, because it is still all about the perverted adulation of the author-figure. While the art market swells up past $45billion in annual sales according to TEFAF Annual Global Report, the art-world professionals continue to perfect the skill of extracting material value from the work of art through pump and dump of individual talent; young, old and dead. We are constantly confronted with inflated auction prices of artists of the past, as well as those of the contemporary scene that further reinforce this exhausting process. This celebrity-driven recognition model is paralyzing the potential for objectivity by further embedding material value into the author-function (Foucault, 1969: 6) which is pinned to the author rather than to the Idea in itself.

In a 2013 interview with Channel 4, ahead of his retrospective at the National Galleries of Scotland, Scottish artist, Peter Doig proclaimed: “There is no such thing as a contemporary masterpiece. It can’t be decided within your own time really. It’s all kind of marketing really.” Meanwhile, Jesse Darling, another contemporary artist/journalist bravely expressed her contempt for the art world’s ability to commodify the uncommodifiable avant-gardiness six years ago, only to end up as the victim of her very own diagnosis by being featured on the cover of the latest issue of ArtForum with two concurrent exhibitions in commercial galleries in New York City and London. In an article from 2012 about the fake Damien Hirst she succinctly writes,

As the art market sets crunchily to work figuring out how to sell the unsaleable, the best or cutest or savviest of the new generation are called to join in the carousel, or production-line, churning out their visionary, uncommodifiable commodities, which have acquired in the meantime a price tag in accordance to their very resistance to commodity status, their rareness, their avant-gardiness. Avant-garde simply means as-yet-unsold (though-we’re-working-on-it); “outsider” art denotes that-for-which-we-can-see-no-buyer. I’m not talking about discrete objects, but about processes and concepts – and if it sounds abstract, it is. For the art game, after all, is the slipperiest and most opaque of markets, all smoke and mirrors and business cards and canapés and champagne, and the emperor’s new clothes paraded through the Whitney. (Darling, 2012: 1)

Nonetheless, this is not to say, that the infamous Lascaux Cave Paintings dating back to the Old Stone Age some 17,000 years ago are less valuable, than a new Banksy scribbling on a South Brooklyn wall, if the value we are talking about here is not purely material (Though some would claim Banksy as an anonymous person(s), for the sake of argument I will declare him as an identifiable artist, because of his explicit brand name identity, that ultimately determines the value of his work in the very marketplace he often critiques). If we consider those Lascaux Cave Paintings to be the oldest examples of visual art, then there is a lot to be said about author’s anonymity or rather whether author’s ego, agency and biography are necessary attributes for extracting the intrinsic truth value out of a work of art that is predicated on an Idea and not artist’s biography. Perhaps there are other elements attributed to a work of art that supersede individualized accents. The central inquiry here is how much influence does the artist have in relation to an Idea or another way of putting it, whether artistic authorship is an arbitrary variable in the transcendence of an Idea.

In conclusion I would like to come back to the underlying inquiry that was first established and then abandoned in hopes of ascertaining that individualized authorship is not the only viable system of assigning metaphysical purpose to art. Based on my analysis of the autonomous and anonymous-author model, as well as unloading the historical and philosophical context of authorship and anonymity, it is my claim, that more focus should be channelled to alternative artist models, that challenge and reject adulation of the individualized author-figure. While the current MFA program at Glasgow School of Art is described by some as the Research Driven Studio Practice, I wonder if at some point in the future it could be redefined as Anonymously Driven Hybrid Practice. Or perhaps, the only viable way for collective anonymity to exist is in the actual shadows of institutionalized establishment, no different in existence, than crude and feral vandalism.

Lastly, it is worth noting the blatant hypocrisy by some of aforementioned authors that often goes unnoticed when considering their written work. While Barthes proclaimed The Death of The Author, by authoring the essay he ultimately gave into the very thesis he was arguing against.

Bibliography

1. Barthes, Roland, 1968, “The Death of the Author”.
2. Darling, Jesse. November 19, 2012, “Being Damien Hirst”, The New Inquiry, https://thenewinquiry.com/being-damien-hirst/
3. Descartes, Rene. 1637. “Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences” pp. 19–20. 1641 (1911). Meditations On First Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 14–17.
4. Deseriis, Marco, 2011, “Lots of Money Because I am Many: The Luther Blissett Project and the Multiple-Use Name Strategy”, Cultural Activism.
5. Ede, Lisa, November, 1985, “The Concept of Authorship: An Historical Perspective”, Speeches/Conferences Papers.
6. Foucault, Michel, 1969, “What is an Author?”
7. Gallix, Andrew, “In theory: The Death of the Author”, https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/jan/13/death-of-the-author
8. Plato, “The Republic”, http://www.idph.net/conteudos/ebooks/republic.pdf
9. Thoburn, Nicholas, Spring 2011, “To Conquer the Anonymous: Authorship and Myth in the Wu Ming Foundation”, Cultural Critique, Vol. 78.
10. Vassiliou, Konstantinos, 2017, “Anonymous Art Reconsidered: Anonymity and the Contemporary Art Institution”, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture.
11. Wrigley, Richard, 1983, “Censorship and Anonymity in Eighteenth-Century French Art Criticism”, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2.

Representing the Unrepresentable: Barnett Newman and the Impossible Image

 

     
Barnett Newman, Stations of the Cross Station 12, 1966 (x2)

Patrick Sturgess

In his 2008 work, ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, Jacques Rancière devotes a chapter to what he calls the ‘Intolerable Image’. Part of the essay discusses whether the Holocaust is representable. I would like to posit that both the Holocaust and the dropping of the Atom bomb made the representation of mankind, in the style of the time (which in America was primarily the form of Social Realism pursued by Ben Shahn, and Thomas Hart Benton among others) ‘impossible’ to Barnett Newman. In the face of such horror, it would be a falsehood to portray humanity without the figures being warped and twisted, in the manner of Francis Bacon. Newman’s choice to paint large colour-field paintings can be seen as an attempt to transcend the horror of the death camps by attaining a new form of universal image. In his 1948 text ‘The Sublime is Now’, Newman espouses the need for a radically new form of representation, one that is universal and ahistorical, located in a new primitive space: “The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history” (Landau: 2005 p.139). The weight of history, which had just come crashing down upon European civilisation, was to be exorcised from his paintings. Newman, who was himself Jewish, was responding to the death of civilisation. Newman’s painting can be seen as the natural progression from Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus: as the ‘angel of history’ turns its back, all past representation must be done away with.   The void, or seeming emptiness of his paintings, can be seen as Newman’s reduction of “art to an absurdity … in a didactic revelation of ultimate Thule” (Hess: 1969 p.42). Newman’s paintings can thus be seen as a both legitimate and effective response to the Holocaust, intolerable and impossible as it is to represent: “Representation is not the act of producing a visible form, but the act of offering an equivalent” (Rancière: 2009 p.93).

The Impossible Image: The Difficulty of Representing the Holocaust

The abject horror of WWII, exemplified in the dropping of the atom bombs, and most particularly, in the systematic genocide of both the Jews and Romani of Europe, created a complex paradigm which still exists today. The horror was so great that even when confronted with photographic evidence, people could still not believe in its reality. Even though we are often presented with photographic or other forms of documentary evidence, our brains struggle with the incomprehensibility of it. The scale and bureaucratic efficiency of such inhuman atrocities are incomprehensible and thus unimaginable, lending to a sense of the unreal. It is possible that “at the heart of the Shoah there is something unrepresentable—something that cannot structurally be fixed in an image” (Rancière: 2009 p.89), that the true horror of the death camps is not representable. Images cannot come from the inside of the gas chambers themselves, so what we are left with are images of the before and of the after: “The gas chambers are an event that in itself constitutes a kind of aporia, an unshatterable reality that pierces and problematizes the status of the image and jeopardizes any thinking about images” (Wacjman: 2001 in Rancière: 2009 p.89).

In 1947, in Betty Parson’s Gallery, at 15 East 57th Street, Manhattan, one of the first exhibitions to feature many of the most well-known Abstract Expressionists took place. Barnett Newman was among those involved in the exhibition titled ‘The Ideographic Picture’, this form of art, Newman claimed, would be a “carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable” (Landau: 2005 p.136). Newman, along with the other Abstract Expressionists, (most of whom were Jewish) clearly felt the weight of the impossible image, incepted with the gas chambers. In the centre of the Nazi death camps was a great, unknowable horror, on such a scale that no images could ever come from it. Newman was certainly aware of the camps and had seen the photographs. They had undoubtedly had an effect on the way he thought about painting. He stated that “no painting exists (that is better surrealism) than the photographs of German atrocities” (Newman: 1990 p.95). The pre-war surrealism had failed and a new radically different art was necessary to transcend the failed, European-led model.

Otto Dix

In the face of such failure, Newman retreated into an ever more mystical and spiritual abstraction, which will be dissected more below. It was of course possible for an artist to have moved in the opposite direction. Francis Bacon’s work, for instance, also seems to respond the abject horror of the holocaust. However, instead of abstraction, Bacon warps his human forms and, in doing so, manages to paint their twisted souls. Otto Dix, post WWI, also painted extremely warped faces, but his were more literal representations of the war-wounded. These differing approaches, even among two painters working with seemingly similarly aesthetic practices and visual concerns, can be seen as the difference between the sickness in Europe following both World Wars. Although Europe following WWI had experienced being decimated physically, it was post-WWII that Europe truly lost its soul. Both Bacon and, in his own way, Newman were responding to this “destruction of experience” (Agamben: 1993). While Bacon chose to interact with art history through exhuming and interacting with established artists, such as his Screaming Velasquez Popes, Newman chose to forge an entirely new art. This was an art free from European history and the “poverty of experience” (Benjamin: 1933) that it had left behind: “We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting” (Landau: 2005 p.139).

Diego Velasquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X 1650 & Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X ,1953

Newman Transcends the Angel of History

When Walter Benjamin was close to his end, he wrote a short piece, now part of his collected writings in Illuminations, about a prized possession of his. The possession in question was Angelus Novus, a monoprint by Paul Klee, himself a Jewish artist who had been labeled a ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis. Benjamin posits that this painting represents the “angel of history” (Benjamin: 1968 p.257). The Angel, for Benjamin, has the long view over the horror that is consuming Europe: “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet” (Benjamin: 1968 p.257). There is a sense in Benjamin’s reflections of the hopelessness of his situation, represented so symbolically in the Angel’s attempt to “stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed” (Benjamin: 1968 p.257). However, the Angel is powerless against the tide of history, which only moves in one direction, even as it threatens his own destruction, even more pertinent as it is the interpretation of Benjamin, a Jewish man, trying desperately to escape his own destruction: “But a storm is blowing from paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward” (Benjamin: 1968 p.257-258).

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920

This weight of history and hopelessness is exactly what Barnett Newman, in his post WWII work, is attempting to subvert. While Klee’s angel was looking backwards at all of the horror that he had been unable to reverse, Newman and the other abstract expressionists were trying to transcend this “storm called progress” (Benjamin: 1968 p.258). Benjamin interpreted the Holocaust through Klee’s painting as “the anti-revelation” (Raphael: 2009 p106), and it is thus significant that Newman can be seen to be representing it “through the very absence of representation” (Raphael: 2009 p.106). The aesthetic approach of abstract expressionism would be one that could transcend Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’ in order to forge a new separate history. This approach allowed for a look forward into the future, opposed to the Angel’s backwards facing stance: “The brutality of World War II has demonstrated to Newman and his contemporaries that modern and primitive experience … were essentially the same” (Rushing: 1958 In. Landau: 2005 p.434). The form that they created transcended “memory, history, or geometry” (Rothko: 1949 p119) in favour of a kind of primitive simplicity that the colour field created: “They start with the chaos of pure fantasy and feeling, with nothing that has any physical, visual or mathematical counterpart and they bring out of this chaos of emotion images which give these intangibles reality” (Hess: 1969 p.37). The escape from the Angel of History entails the forging of a new primal start, where everything is taken at its base, and the plain colour-field image of Newman embodies a true universal, an image which is “the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history” (Landau: 2005 p.139).

Barnett Newman, Pagan Void, 1946

Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948

A New Spiritualism

The paintings of Barnett Newman represent a singularly abstracted take on the image, in that they seem to eschew any relation to the physical world. However, in doing so, through a combination of scale, colour, and Newman’s choice of titles, they instead make contact with the spiritual world. After the final corruption of the old pictorial language, signified by the aforementioned ‘destruction of experience’ (Agamben: 1993) Newman’s language would be new, focused initially on representations of universality. His 1946 painting, Pagan Void, Newman seems to “overtly suggest fertilization of the egg and penetration of the tissue” (Hess: 1969 p.27). Though this may arguably be seen as representative of the rebirth to come, strictly speaking, his paintings of the early 1940’s do not fully cut away from established styles, echoing “the aesthetic of the recent past” (Hess: 1969 p.27). It was not until his first painting from his Onement series that his now familiar zip would appear.

This new ‘metaphysical’ style of painting breaks with the material world and acts as “a supplement for what was lacking in reality” (Jachec: 2000 p.143). This ‘lacking’, as described by Nancy Jachec, is the impossible image; the ‘intolerable image’ as described by Rancière. If the Holocaust is unrepresentable, then Newman’s paintings, which exist in the realm of the metaphysical, are engaged in the “act of offering an equivalent” (Rancière: 2009 p.93). As the photographs of skeletal corpses appeared, signaling the end of modern civilisation, the figure had become unpaintable. As a result, Newman’s rejection of the figure within his work renews “the ancient trope of divine withdrawal and the abstraction of the figure from the image” (Raphael: 2009 p.106). The angels, having been defeated by the tide of history, withdraw, and we are left with nothing. Newman, and the other Abstract Expressionists start with the void, and from that attempt to “bring out from the non-real, from the chaos of ecstasy, something that evokes a memory of the emotion of an experienced moment of total reality” (Newman: 1947 In. Hess: 1969 p.37). Newman firmly believed that he was working within the “reality of transcendental experience” (Hess: 1969 p.37). In both the seeming simplicity of his paintings and their great scale, Newman’s works achieve a kind of sublime visual image. Consider the paraphrased quote below by Edmund Burke on the nature of the Sublime:

If the object is both simple and vast, the eye (and therefore the mind) does not arrive readily at its bounds, and has no rest, since the image is everywhere the same. Hence the impression of an ‘artificial infinite’ is created by a large and unified object which throws the retina into tension and impresses itself so vividly on the mind that an idea of the sublime is suggested.” (Burke in Monk: 1960 in Hess: 1969 p.38)

This effect is most certainly present in Newman’s work. When one looks at his 1951 work Cathedra, the Sublime, as described by Burke, cannot help but be felt. Both the immense scale of the work and the deep blues, that seem to move and melt into one another, leave the viewer visually overwhelmed. The image is cut vertically by an off-white line about a third across the painting. This ‘zip’, as Newman referred to them, gives the “impression of motion” and serves to accentuate the deepness of the colours on either side. This off-white line responds in kind to the ever-deepening blues, giving it “a ghostly, half-seen quality” (Hess: 1969 p.44).

Barnett Newman, Cathedra, 1951

Newman’s work also bears relation to both the Sacred and Ritual. In his 1966 exhibition, Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani, Newman’s fourteen black and white paintings represent a religious ritual. Apart from the obvious connotation that the title suggests, the paintings also seem to represent a reference to the impossible image. The use of Crucifixion as an analogy for Holocaust memory was also used in the postwar period by Marc Chagall, whose painting ‘White Crucifixion’ Newman was almost certainly aware of. Harold Rosenberg, referring to Chagall’s work, wrote that “the crucified one is a Jew, not the Son of God, but the human victim of violence” (Rosenberg: 1945 pp.26-33). This connection to his own Jewishness, and to the destruction of his fellow Jews in such recent memory, made the move towards a metaphysical abstraction inevitable for Newman: “Every Jew has a holocaust within him; in his innermost heart he has gone up in smoke or been starved to death” (Kuspit: 1992). In the aftermath of WWII, Newman found himself unable to paint “flowers, figures, etc” (Newman: 1966). Along with the other Abstract Expressionists, many of whom were also Jewish, he tried to forge a new language, uncorrupted by the history that had led to the destruction of their people.

Irving Penn, Portrait of Newman, 1966

Barnett Newman was engaged in a form of representation, which deals with the universal. His work can be seen as a direct response to the horrors that made up the Holocaust. An image “is a complex set of relations between the visible and the invisible, the visible and speech, the said and the unsaid” (Rancière: 2009 p.93). Newman’s art works within this paradigm, being so reduced that it functions as an outright rejection of the established order, which culminated in and ended with the Nazi death camps. This “repudiation of the visual image” (Raphael: 2009 p.106) by Newman and the other abstract expressionists is their great reaction to the “mechanization and massification of human existence” (Jachec: 2000 p.30). With this mechanisation and massification of the final solution, the evils of industrialisation were revealed, as people became not just the workers on the assembly line, but the numbered ‘Homo Sacer’ (Agamben: 1995). History is made up of that which can be recorded. As the Holocaust, as previously examined, cannot be comprehensively recorded or represented, the only visual response is that which clears the slate of representation; which shows the disruption and destruction of a people and their history through a stark separation from the existent artistic tradition, ruptured from all previous attempts at capturing reality. The Angel of History is no more and the spiritual void left behind is all that can consume the canvas. Through the forging of a new metaphysical representation of a pure image, Newman was trying to break free from the weight of the ‘destruction of experience’, (Agamben: 1993) and form a new, untainted, experience, starting with the void, seeking to find something beyond the borders of the known world (Ultima) Thule.

Barnett Newman, Station One, 1958

Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis,  1950-51

 

Bibliography

Agamben, G. (1993) Infancy and History. Translated by Liz Heron. London & New York: Verso.

Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Benjamin, W. (1933) Experience and Poverty. in (1999) Benjamin, Selected Writings: Vol. 2 (1927-1934). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 731-736.

Benjamin, W. (1968) Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books.

Hess, T. B. (1969) Barnett Newman. New York: Walker & Company.

Jachec, N. (2000) The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kuspit, D. (1992) Natan Nuchi. New York: Klarfield Perry Gallery.

Landau, E. G. ed (2005) Reading Abstract Expressionism. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

Newman, B. (1990) Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews. Edited by John P. O’Neill. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Rancière, J. (2009) The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliot. London: Verso.

Raphael, M. (2009) Judaism and the Visual Image: A Jewish Theology of Art. London & New York: Continuum.

Rothko, M. (1949) Statement of His Attitude in Painting. in, The Tigers Eye, no.6.

To What Extent Can We Really Understand a Non-Human Perspective?

Sofia Kyriakopoulou

 

Although the question of whether we (humans) can understand a non human perspective, has been historically the subject of considerable debate and research, up until now there is no conclusive supportive evidence to demonstrate that this is indeed a real possibility. Focusing on non human animals and inquiring on the nature of their mental states is a practical version of the classic problem of other minds i.e. how to know the mind of someone other than oneself. This seems particularly difficult to ascertain, especially if one considers how difficult it is to even be certain of ones own mental states. The question is one of philosophy and of science, this essay will limit itself to philosophical arguments. This essay will address the issue by evaluating the similarity between oneself and the other, making this a case of comparing animal to human minds. Beginning with an examination of historically influential views on animal thought and reason and then surveying contemporary philosophical views, the essay will present arguments against and arguments in support of animal mind capabilities framed as (i) a problem of animal thought and reason, (ii) a problem of animal consciousness.

Despite the lack of consensus on the inner workings of animal minds, attempting to do so provides insights that enrich our understanding of what it means to be human, and consider the implications of emerging evidence that humans can be understood as one species among many and do not necessarily deserve the special status that they so far enjoy. Looking at ancient literature could be deemed anachronistic, however it is useful to un- derstand the origins of the idea that humans are endowed with distinctly human mental capacities, such as self consciousness and so deserve a moral status that animals do not (human exceptionalism). Aristotle is a philosopher that denies reason (logos) to animals, a conclusion that is based on their absence of speech (Lurz, 2009). However, this reading excludes memory and emotions from its scope, which one might consider quite relevant to the notion of mind. Consequently, the discussion can open towards what we understand by mind. In a broader sense mind is similar to what Aristotle would call soul or psyche. In this sense, human soul is understood as intellection or thinking, the capacity of understanding and reasoning (Barnes, 1991). In modern terms, following John Locke’s notion of mind, a wider array of mental activities can be included, such as perception, sensation, representation, desire, imagination, memory, emotions, allowing for an expansion of a narrowly defined concept of mind which is based on the faculty of reasoning only (Mesaroș, 2013). Does the lack of thinking or logos entail the absolute denial of an animal mind? According to Aristotle, animals have sensory perception, desires, memory, imagination, and even emotions (Sorabji, 1995). Wouldn’t it follow then that in the sense of a broader definition of mind, animals can become candidates to the status of beings that bear a mind?

In the 17th century, Descartes (1596-1650) famously argued that animals are like automatons or machines; they act in sophisticated ways, but they do not feel pain (Regan and Singer, 1976). Descartes maintained that animals are living organic creatures but they cannot reason; only humans are conscious, have minds and souls and therefore only humans deserve moral consideration. (Panaman, 2008). Descartes gave two arguments in support of his denial of animal thought and reason, known as the language-test argument and the action-test argument (Radner & Radner, 1989). It should be noted that Descartes does not deny organism consciousness, percep- tual consciousness, access consciousness or phenomenal consciousness to animals. He denies the capacity for self-conscious reflective receipt or awareness of one’s inner states which, he maintains, belongs uniquely to humans and their rational souls (Thomas, 2006). In the vein of Descarte’s arguments a more modern interpretation offered by Davidson (1982), proposes that language is necessary in all propositional attitudes and goes further to maintain that even belief depends on having the concept of objective truth which comes only with language. But how can one tell when a creature has propositional attitudes? What sort of empirical evidence is relevant in view of a language barrier between humans and animals? Descarte’s view seems to be mostly useful in absolving us from moral responsibility towards animals.

On the other hand, Montaigne (1533-1592) in his essay An Apology for Raymond Sebond reflects on the interactions with an animal intimately familiar to him: “When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?” (Screech, 1982: 17). Montaigne continues by putting forward the question: “Why should it be a defect in the beasts not in us which stops all communication between us? We can only guess whose fault it is that we cannot understand each other: for we do not understand them any more than they understand us. They may reckon us to be brute beasts for the same reason that we reckon them to be so” (Screech, 1982: 18). Hence, Montaigne presents a relationship with nature in which human reason must come to terms with its own limits. The perceptions of animals suggests that the human intellect is only one among many possible others, that remain inaccessible to us. He points out that certain gestures of animals could be construed as a form of speaking which would indicate a form of intelligence, albeit unknown to us. “Montaigne thereby posits a border between human beings and animals, one that is not traversable by human language and reason (Melehy, 2005: 271). Consequently, Montaigne identifies some sort of interspecies equality which can be seen as laying the ground for the development of a non human centric outlook: “We ought to note the parity there is between us. We have some modest understanding of what they mean: they have the same of us, in about equal measure” (Screech, 1982: 16).

David Hume (1711-1776) takes an even bolder stance by maintaining that animals not only possess thought but possess reason too. He develops an argument from analogy by comparing how humans make causal inferences with how animals make such inferences.He brings humans into the realm of nature, understanding their reason as a kind of Instinct, contrary to the Cartesian view according to which only humans possess the unique ability to reason. Hume uses a type of thought that is understood as Belief, which he defines as a “lively idea” or “image” caused by or associated with a prior sensory experience. He defines Reason as a mere disposition or instinct to create associations among ideas on the basis of past experience. By following Hume’s argument and definitions, one can find evident similarities in the ways that animals and humans act and therefore attribute them an ability for thought and reason (Boyle, 2013). A well-known problem with Hume’s argument is the fact that Belief does not appear to be definable in terms of vivid ideas presented to consciousness. Additionally, there is an issue with how incontestable his analogical proof is, since similar types of behaviours can often be caused by very different types of processes, by those of machines even. The ways that human beings behave in the presence of vivid ideas to their consciousness, is not in itself a fact that can provide incontestable proof that these objects act as a result of vivid ideas presented to their consciousness (Searle, 1994).

In more contemporary discussions on the topic we can find intentional systems theory (Dennett, 1987), according to which our concepts of intentional states are theoretical concepts whose identity and existence are determined by a common-sense psychological theory or folk-psychology. Subjects, on the assumption that they are rational, tend to believe what they perceive, draw obvious logical inferences and act so as to satisfy their desires. Furthermore, all that is required for a creature to have intentional states is for its behaviours to be well predicted and explained by the principles of folk psychology. Intentional state concepts only refer to abstract entities that are constructs for predicting and explaining various behaviours. Consequently, the fact that much of animal behaviour is usefully predicted and explained from the intentional stance, one could deem animals to be genuine thinkers and reasoners. Nonetheless, arguments against deny that our intentional state concepts are theoretical concepts (Searle, 1983) and critique intentional systems theory’s instrumentalism, arguing that on such an interpretation even thermostats would have beliefs and desires (Braddon-Mitchell & Jackson 2007).

Common-sense Functionalism is another theory which also maintains that our intentional state concepts are theoretical and determined by our folk psychology but takes a realist interpreta- tion that explain intentional states as a variety of discrete internal states in the mind that play the causal roles and have the internal structures that our intentional state concepts describe (Fodor 1987, 1991). Common sense functionalism is often taken to support the view that thinking in- volves an internal language or language of thought (Fodor, 1975). It is then argued that since an- imal behaviour is successfully predicted and explained by our folk psychology, it is possible that animals actually have such internal states (Fodor, 1987; Stich, 1979; Carruthers, 2004). Critiques consider intentional ascriptions to animals to have become a far more speculative practice than it actually is (Stalnaker, 1999). Moreover, based on Evan’s (1982) generality constraint principle, critiques point out that few animals have the sorts of structured representational states as described by folk psychology.

Another type of argument can be found in Biological Naturalism (Searle, 1983, 1992). Here, our concepts of intentional states are concepts of experienced subjective states caused by low-level biochemical states of the brain that result from causal structures, not from functional or causal roles. The conclusions of his argument is that animals have intentional states. First, because many animals have perceptual organs, similar to human organs and as such one can assume, that they operate according to similar physiological principles. Extrapolating from the human case, if the stimulation of our perceptual organs leads to certain physiological processes, which cause us to have certain perceptual experiences, it follows, from the principle of similar cause-similar effect, that the stimulation of perceptual organs in animals leads to similar physio- logical processes with similar perceptual experiences. But one might question, how is it possible to determine that the brain states of animals are relevantly similar to human?

Focusing specifically on the issue of consciousness, arguments are developed from inner- sense theories (a subcategory of higher order theories of consciousness), according to which higher-order awareness is a perceptual awareness directed inwardly toward the mind, not outwardly toward the world and mental-state concepts do not require the capacity for higher order thought (Lycan, 1996; Armstrong, 1997). As such, the mental states of animals are deemed conscious just in case they are higher-order aware of them by means of an inner perception. If higher-order awareness does not require higher-order thought one could deduce that many animals have such an awareness of their own mental states. Arguments against perceptual account of higher-order awareness can be found in such works as those of Rosenthal (1986) and Lurz (2003).

To overcome inner sense theories problems, higher-order thought Theories were devel- oped (Rosenthal,1986). Here, a mental state is conscious just in case one has the higher-order thought that one is in such a mental state. Animals have conscious mental states, provided they are capable of higher-order thoughts about themselves as having mental states. Are animals capa- ble of such higher-order thought? This, it has been argued, would require a concept of ‘I’ that is impossible without language. Arguments supporting that animals do not possess higher order thoughts can be found in Dennett (1991); Quine (1995); Davidson (1985); Bermúdez (2003); and Povinelli (2007). Objections have been raised against such arguments, in favour of animals possessing higher order thought capabilities by Parker et al. (1994); Clayton et al. (2003); Gennaro (2004); Lurz (2006); Proust (2009).

In an attempt to overcome the stalemate in the higher order theories field, first-order theories, are proposed, where conscious mental states make one conscious of the external environment (Evans, 1982). Mental states are not conscious because one is higher-order aware of them but because the states themselves make one aware of the external world. Unconscious men- tal states, affect one’s behaviour but do not make one conscious of their environment. First-order theorists argue that there are animals that form beliefs about their environment based on their perceptional states and bodily sensations and, therefore, can be thought to enjoy conscious per- ceptual states and bodily sensations (Evans, 1982). First-order theories, do not require higher-order awareness for consciousness, and seem to provide a more plausible account of animal consciousness than higher-order theories. However, they too encounter problems (Lurz, 2004, 2006), in response to which hybrid views are developed (Tye, 1997; Dretske, 2000). Here, beliefs and desires are conscious in virtue of having higher-order thoughts about them, while perceptual states and bodily sensations are conscious in virtue of their capacity to impact one’s belief-forming system. However, this was in turn critiqued in that to possess conscious perceptions and bodily sensations, an animal would have to be capable of higher-order thought (Lurz, 2010).

To a large extent the inner workings of non human animals remains a mystery. Through time, many philosophers have argued that consciousness is inherently private, and by consequence one’s own experience is unknowable to others. Language allows humans to cross this gap by communicating their experience to others while animals are not recognised as possessing this ability. However, despite the controversy, it remains a matter of common sense to most people that some animals do have conscious experiences. Most people, if asked why they think familiar animals are conscious, would point to similarities between the behaviour of those animals and human behaviour. Such similarity arguments, are inherently limited in that they are open to critique addressing the disanalogy between animals and humans and arguing that the similarities don’t entail the conclusion that both are sentient. The quest of deriving epistimological conclusions about animal minds and animal consciousness is a particularly difficult one. In absence of an entire theory that can explain the full extent of similarities and disimilarities between human and non human animals, one might at least recognise that perhaps the groundwork has been laid for addressing at least some of the questions about animal minds and animal consciousness. On the other hand, one might conclude that philosophy is still much too far from providing conclusions on matters such as animal consciousness. The arguments on both sides are by no means exhausted. In the meantime, one might use these debates and efforts to rethink the impact of humans’ activities and attempt to re-evaluate their relationships with the rest of the non human animals, on a basis that would appreciate both human and non human life.

 

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How can we contextualise craftivism before and after Betsy Greer for other practitioners?

Yi-An Shiau

Craftivism has been an activate part of people’s lives for more than ten years: although the term might not be familiar to everyone, some activities have attracted attention and even affected the world to some degree. For instance, the PussyHats Project on the day of the presidential inauguration in the United States was part of this growing popular phenomenon. For George McKay craftivism’s activities act as a bridge that links the gap between art, life, politics and activism (Ratto & Boler, 2014). Betsy Greer gave this kind of activism a formal description and attempted to redefine and critique it to find the value and importance of this movement (Pohl, 2011). As her open-ended definition and description of craftivism suggests, several practitioners can develop their activities in many ways, however, the categories and difference within these practices remain unclear. The backgrounds of various practices and Betsy Greer’s idea of craftivism are worthwhile to explore further to contextualise craftivism. After offering some historical context with the Arts & Crafts movement and the Bauhaus, this essay discusses the different practices of craftivists in the contemporary world and contextualises the development of craftivism after the third-wave feminism, Betsy Greer and other different issues. Firstly, there will be an introduction to the craft movement’s background which links to social concerns; secondly, Betsy Greer’s description of craftivism is clarified at this stage and thirdly, I will briefly contrast Betsy Greer and other craftivists’ practices to explain the development as a whole.

William Morris (1878) Peacock and Dragon

To begin with, it is possible to trace the element of craftivism back to the Arts & Crafts movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—here John Ruskin and William Morris could be regarded as the main influence on the movement. From a theoretical perspective, Ruskin’s social critique and his ideology could be seen as the first bridge bonding social movements and craft. With industrialization, the division of labour could deprive people of creativity, and lower the quality of what was produced and numerous social problems emerged. Ruskin’s position focused on the effects of industrial society on human nature and morality: part of this consideration, advocated a return to the pre-industrial medieval idea of craftsmens’ guilds as the way out of these confines. Ruskin’s ideas had a significant influence on William Morris and others and gave a tremendous impetus to the Arts & Crafts movement that stimulated reflection on the current state of art after the industrial revolution, especially the relations between people and objects, people and production, and life and aesthetics. William Morris gave the underlying relations of labour to art a higher status through his creative craft works and proposed the concept of equality of work for men and women (Metcalf, 1999). Nevertheless, the industrial revolution and the first World War were the obstacles which interrupted the craft movement. Those social issues, the disappearing humanity of work and the manifestos of craftsman’s status and gender equality, were ignored at the time.

Anni Albers’ (1937)  Black Mountain College weaving studio

Since industrial development has confirmed that machines could produce products of very high quality, the Arts & Crafts movement was therefore regarded as meaningless resistance. Although in the twenty-first century, craft still stands on the opposite side of the machine industry, among the remnants of the Arts & Crafts movement after World War One, Bauhaus was one of the most eye-catching, and it can also be considered as the first link between craftsmanship and the conception and the style of modernity (Metcalf, 1999). In the Bauhaus, modernity was defined as geometry, ornamentation, and high-level abstraction, but it was difficult for modernity to include an overview comprising of one style (Metcalf, 1999). Another flaw was that, in the development of Bauhaus, there was no apparent mention of labour’s working conditions and status that William Morris had cared about, indicating a slight break between craft and social issues.

Through the series of modernism, postmodernism, and many other different ideological trends and influences, the trend now is to link craft to the commodities of the ‘creative industries’; moreover, the innovation of craft became more linked to the relationship with fashion and a well-designed product rather than social issues. Possibly this indicates that the only way for a resurgence of craft is to be wholly commodified (Bratich & Brush, 2011). To contextualse craftivism as a widespread culture phenomenon, it is necessary to turn our attention to the more radicalised sectors of the craft field. Aside from economically oriented craft products, another intensive approach has been trying to prove the relevance of craft, in terms of the connections of humans, labour and society that commodification cannot provide.

To fill this chasm, some scholars have made efforts to contextualise the situation of craft in the complex ideological tends of the past decades. Maria Elena Buszek’s (2011) writing compensates for a lack of thoughtful and theoretical writing on the subject of craft and contemporary art in an anthology that incorporates hypothetical expositions, contextual analyses, individual reflections, and transcripts of meetings, arranged into four topical segments. The primary section abridged the chronicle of the foundation of the speciality and identified pioneer’s points of view and postmodernist theory (Simpson, 2012). The enumerating of examples show how people deal with the constantly changing context from the traditional studio craft community to a different understanding of modernism and conceptual craft which indirectly triggered thinking from a more personal aspect back to a broader social one.

Betsy Greer

The most interesting section is the third part in the anthology, documenting contributors in the more radicalised sectors of ‘Craftivist history’. Betsy Greer’s exuberant and sincere clarification of the organ of craft pursues activism and its connections to challenge the Iraq War with her stitchery works. Other practitioners such as Kirsty Robertson who knits in public spaces to protest on specific issues are also mentioned. Moreover, in the anthology, there is also references to explain the connection between traditional female craftwork and the 1970s women’s movement as Robertson indicates that some writers—such as Rozsika Parker—and activities in the second wave of feminism were against the division of craft and ‘high’ art (Simpson, 2012). The illustration of other contributors, galleries and museums provides evidence of the fact that there are political engaged curatorial approaches, such as exhibitions of Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch’s works, which give people a broader understanding of craftwork in the contemporary world before the term ‘Craftivism’ become more popular in public. From Simpson’s (2012) review, it is apparent that embodiments of Craftivism already existed before Betsy Greer’s integration of the idea. Indeed, not only those previous investigations but also Betsy Greer herself claimed that she is not the first person—but one of her friends in her knitting community—to put two words ‘craft’ and ‘activism’ together as part of a new vocabulary and thinking (craftivism.com, 2014). In one of Greer’s publications, she mentions the original meaning of Craftivism for her and expresses her attitude toward other people who want to use this new word.

The stimulation of Greer’s thinking about a kind of quiet activism and how craft could be a part of protest was the silent but mighty political puppets paraded down a street in New York City (Greer, 2014). Craftivism was not officially discussed until she published the concept in a research proposal in 2002. To her, with the term ‘Craftivism’, artists seem able to create or craft something that was motivated by social and political perspectives. The reason is that the fundamental part of Craftivism is to create some things that trigger people to ask questions and be aware of something. Reading through Greer’s publications, interviews, website and other texts about her narration and explanation of Craftivism, some keywords and points that she uses frequently are apparent. A mini investigation for this essay traced Greer’s different attempts to give the proper definition and the value of this unique word.

Using a term frequency-inverse document frequency, we can say that some forms of vocabulary and terminology appear in Greer’s narration about Craftivism more frequently than others. The highest frequency word category is such as ‘political,’ ‘social,’ ‘justice,’ ‘cultural’ and ‘historical’. The second high-frequency category is comparative words and terms; for instance, ‘better place,’ ‘stronger’ and ‘more infinite’. Greer also uses ‘creativity’ and ‘creative production’ many times to indicate attributes of the craft work used in Craftivism. She also emphasises those words like ‘personal’ and ‘your’. According to the frequency, particular political causes in life and creative craft works are the most important elements in Craftivism and related practices. Moreover, Betsy Greer uses fifty-eight words in 2006, forty-five words in 2007 and twenty-six words in 2009. The shorter sentence she uses to identify Craftivism, are more specific indicating that she knows how and what to explain.

Aside from the original idea and definition, in Craftivism (Greer, 2014), there are many chapters about Greer’s interview with other Craftivists and their practices which are helpful to understand the spread of this kind of activism in many different areas with divergent methods. Greer tries to contextualise craftivism from a personal aspect to a more political degree involving a more comprehensive community involvement. In fact, she tends to distinguish these differences in her definition of Craftivism over the years. Similarly, some studies also categorise Craftivists’ practices by the different degrees of personal to public concern. Indeed, it would be hard to tell the methodology and content of Craftivism’s embodiments from a single aspect. As knitting and other forms of craft could offer unlimited and subversive possibilities, the modus of radicalised craft is regarded as the providing the logic of an influential political tool (Bratich & Brush, 2011).

What supports these activities is a critique of diverse causes and ideologies such as the postindustrial world, modernism and global capitalism to approach the initial central idea towards everyday life, job and the surroundings (Pohl, 2011). From pure craft work to Craftivists’ work, there are a lot of layers of political engagement. Different from the placid individual craftsmen who work for their personal hobby or daily use, the activities of Craftivism are more like a social movement which takes forms of direct actions (Bratich & Brush, 2011). For Sarah Corbett who established the Craft Collective, organization—which will inevitably be discussed while talking about craftivism in the UK—consists of people from different living conditions, social and cultural backgrounds around the globe. Although having a separate appeal, the common thread is that they all fight for human rights injustices, environmentalism and feminism and motivate the public to be a part in activism with a tender and positive way instead of bullying (Corbett & Housley, 2011).

Before investigating a broader layer of political engagement, it is essential to look at the practices of Craftivism in their personal aspect that is usually a smaller but important element. Kristen (2011) points out that most of those embodiments are created independently and solitarily. As the developing technology and industrialisation makes people’s life more convenient in many ways, the global community has been helpful to crafters to get together as a group and work on political issues; however, the mass- produced product has a tremendous negative and overwhelming influence toward the individuals. Betsy Greer argues that some Craftivists fought to bring the attention back to the personal and daily aspect, and emphasise the political value of every single person in the world (craftivism.com, 2014). On the popular online craft community, Etsy.com, there is an amount of craftsmen who intend to show their work with specific political or environmental concern in their names. From this perspective, the promoted idea that personal creativity could improve the world reveals Craftivism is the activism that allows people to voice their own opinions toward their causes, and actively supports people instead of banners.

Moving from personal to a more public scale of Craftivism, some craftivists’ protests challenge capitalism, cultural violence, war and environmental issue through having their events in public space. Jane Jacobs is a well-known pioneer who utilises open spaces in cities to bring out the concern of characteristics of general area which is different from buildings with the specific use of business and economy. Her projects invited individuals and groups to knit on certain grounded objects in parks. The action was to remind people that unlike permanent constructions, public spaces are changeable and flexible (Bratich & Brush, 2011). Another example is the thread in nontraditional spaces, or ‘yarn bombing’. The project began in Texas by Magda Sayeg and opened a new dialogue among pedestrians, art in public space and city appearance. A similar project appeared in London later on. Craftivists knitted and let the fabric cover trees, statues and post boxes to change the face of their city. Instead of a bully-type political protest, Craftivists in these activities prefer a more Situationist approach to make the world change from public space with their smiles and words on craft works (Pohl, 2011). Marianne Jørgensen’s tank blanket is another remarkable piece represents the gathering power from citizens to argue a common political cause. While her country has been involved in the Iraq war with America, she began to knit a pink cover and wrap a real military tank. With the information of her progressive work shared through the Internet, many people came and worked with her to complete those pink squares which form the tank’s cover. The work is regarded as a symbol against the pointless war by softening the hard material with soft pint blanket which symbolises home and family.

Moving from personal or specific causes to a broader aspect, Craftivism works as a procedure of collective empowerment: the stereotype of seeing craft as women’s work and a hobby has been a cause that Craftivists focused on. The PussyHat Project in 2017 has emerged as a remarkable emblem of Women’s marches that grew with such momentum through the collective vision to against Donald Trump’s unsuitable language and behaviour. Besides the success of attracting people’s attention around the globe, the event did not gain universal agreement. A denigration and criticism claimed that feminists should reject knitting and other traditional women crafts which symbolise the oppression of the old society instead of liberation. However, the criticism was unable to admit different feminine art forms and to engage various methods of women’s ability to make craft as political tools of empowerment. The argument made the Project more valuable because it led people to rethink about feminism with another aspect.

Conclusion

To sum up, Craftivism is a bridge that links between art, life, others and politics. Derived from Arts & Crafts movement, Craftivism has been regarded as the radicalised craft’s resurgence, although there was a gap made by World Wars and different ideological trends. From Betsy Greer, Craftivism started to have its official definition. Craftivists they highlight the dialogues of different causes through their creative thinking and creative craft pieces to bring up people’s awareness and make the world a better place. Acording to those practices mentioned in this essay, there is apparently neither a fixed form nor a scale restriction of Craftivist’s works. The common element is there must be a personal concern or social causes in their practices such as anti-war, gender equivalence, environmental care and so on. As Betsy Greer’s advice for those who want to start as a Craftivist, Craftivism is all about exploring both craft and activism at one’s own pace and one’s concern.

 

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