The Metaphysics of Perspective

Or why it is not because they lack technical facility that the painters of medieval icons appear uninterested in getting perspective “right.” Rather because like all artists whose concern is with “noumenal” (as opposed to phenomenal) space, they want to force a visual rupture with mimetic representation.

Semantically important gestures and objects, as a rule, are presented in close-up shots, a departure from the laws of linear perspective. This may be seen in the Archangel Gabriel’s gesture of blessing in icons of the Annunciation, or images of the scroll St John of Damascus holds in medieval Russian O Tebe raduyetsya [In You Rejoices] icons, with the opening words of the hymn in honour of the Mother of God. This emphasis shows that the text of the song composed by St John of Damascus was at the very heart of the icon’s composition. The same may be said of depictions of the outer clothing (the “mantle”) which the prophet Elijah leaves to his disciple Elisha on icons of the Ognennoye vozneseniye Ilyi Proroka [Fiery Ascent of the Prophet Elijah]. The materiality and the miraculous power of the “mantle” turns it into the central device of the composition, uniting heaven and earth.

The Fiery Ascent of the Prophet Elijah (16th century), State Historical Museum, Moscow

[Pavel] Florenskii also linked the absence of shadows in the artistic space of the icon with the system of reverse perspective: “The absence of a definite focus of light, the contradictory nature of illumination in different places of the icon, the effort to bring forward masses which should have been overshadowed–yet again, this is neither coincidence nor a blunder by a naive craftsman, but artistic calculation, which imparts maximum artistic expressiveness.”  Florenskii clearly follows Plato and his symbol of the Cave in the determination of people’s knowledge, since, in his works, light and shade acquire gnoseological meaning in the context of the metaphysics of reverse perspective. Platonic Ideas are “shadows,” “the negative of things,” “intaglio experiences;” a turn towards the light is a transition to a new level of cognition, and symbolizes our drawing closer to the truth. From any viewpoint, therefore, iconic images exclude shadow; when perceiving inscriptions, figures, architecture and landscape depicted on the icon, a turn (which also suggests a mobile gaze) may well convey gnoseological meaning. The icon is a transfigured reality, which knows no shadow.

—Oleg Tarasov, How Divine Images Became Art

Novgorod School, The Raising of Lazarus (c. 1497), State Russian Museum, St Petersburg
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The End of Art

Jackson Pollock, Convergence, 1952

Art originated as a means of representing the sacred. It originated to make visible what cannot be seen, to represent what is unrepresentable.

As long as art served the sacred, it had purpose and vitality.

The modern profanation of life and society left art flailing for a purpose. Oscar Wilde went so far as to declare the uselessness of art to be its distinguishing virtue. He was forced to do so to safeguard art from serving an even viler purpose, the worship of money. But art was not content to be useless and has since been driven to stage its own degradation as its purpose, incorporating into itself everything that was once foreign to it: ugliness, banality, artlessness, blasphemy. 

In this fallen world, the pull of the sacred lingers as an inclination toward the abyss. The closest to sacred art today is art that expresses a longing for self-extinction. What comes to mind is music that inspires trance and abandon.

In visual art, the ecstatic is misidentified as “expressionism,” but the truly ecstatic art is always about the obliteration of the self not its expression.

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Marx as Conservative

Marx’s hatred of modernity is, I think, insufficiently appreciated.

“Everything solid melts into air, everything holy is profaned . . .” he declared in the Communist Manifesto.

No contemporary conservative mindlessly prattling on about the toxicity of “cultural Marxism” can fathom the revulsion against modernity that colors Marx’s writing from beginning to end. 

The idea of a Hegelian Aufhebung that would, like the monster in Alien, burst capitalism from within and usher in a latent communism was just cope. Marx became a revolutionary because he lacked the courage to be a reactionary. He found in Hegel a means to invert pessimism into a synthetic—one might say almost manic—faith in the inevitability of communism and through communism, the restoration of the world.

For Marx the proletariat is the golem, an inert mass with the potential to become an avenging monster when it acquires (class) consciousness and changes from an “in itself” to a “for itself.”

The anti-bourgeois, anti-liberal, and ultimately, antimodern orientation of Marxism hidden beneath its revolutionary rhetoric helps explain how communism protected the societies in which it was victorious from the worst consequences of modernity, for ultimately communism quarantined these societies from consumerism’s relentless liquidation of tradition. And this is why even after the dismantling of the old Stalinist systems, the decadent and now economically and culturally senescent West has not lost any of its antipathy for the East.

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Tripping

The derealization of the world becomes acute from the ’60s onward.

Not because of drug use. Drug use is a symptom of a receding world and of a facile (chemical) attempt to reestablish connection with something beyond trite appearance.

The paradox is that scientific “evidence-based” knowledge diminishes rather than increases contact with reality. When physics supplants metaphysics, the world is emptied of meaning, becomes insubstantial. Science zombifies world, turns it into dead minutiae.

Consumerism turns the world into an array of disposable things and images. Disposability contributes to the sense that “nothing is real.”

Photography and photographic media promise a forensic intimacy with reality but transform reality into fleeting images.

The social sciences demythify the world. This demythified world shatters into fragments experienced in bewildering isolation from each other. (Christopher Nolan’s Memento.)

In this shattered world, “identity” becomes a fetish. 

Unable to participate in a shared, consecrated reality, the postmodern subject becomes a consumer of selfhood, buying into one identification after another and declaring the assortment at every possible opportunity in a frenzy of self-reification. But instead of feeling grounded, this overdefined subject suffers from imposter syndrome. 

The derealization of the world and the self are complementary. They are the two sides of the current mass psychosis.

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Theatricalities

Modernism does not eschew theatricality. It is hostile to a certain kind of theatricality, the theatricality of the ancien régime, the theatricality of sentiment and the picturesque. This is at the root of the idea of banishing “illusionism.”

Modernist theatricality is the theatricality of realism.

Realism is deceptive because it poses as something like honesty, as disdain for theatricality. But the real that realism constructs is as much a fiction as the scenic or the picturesque.

So modernist theatricality is a theatricality of honesty, the staging of unstaginess. And yet, it yields very odd, very stilted results. This is already evident in Cezanne, particularly, in his Bathers. Every mark in the painting reveals itself as mark and the surface as remorselessly flat but the bodies and faces of the bathers suffer mutilations prefiguring those that will appear with greater cruelty in Picasso’s Demoiselles.

Postmodernist theatricality is a late-stage inversion of norms. The labored modernist upendings of ancien régime artistic conventions have been academicized to the point where a systemic perversity becomes the deadening norm. So everything formerly bad becomes good in a thoroughly institutionalized way.

Alfred Jarry once observed that an anarchist army could be just as disciplined as any other: The anarchist sergeant just has to bark “Left turn!” and the anarchist soldiers crisply pirouette to the right.

Postmodernist theatricality is the theatricality of a surrender to the imperatives of consumerism staged to look like licentious, anarchic excess, something Deleuze and Guattari in their own frenzied Oedipal effort to bugger Freud failed miserably to understand. The consumer is, indeed, a “desiring machine.” That is what capitalism has reduced him to and like Senatspräsident Schreber this desiring machine can, within the confines of its Matrix-like hallucinatory cocoon, cultivate limitless but inconsequential perversities because its machinic desire is the charge that animates the greater, enclosing machine that is capitalism, of which the hapless schizo consumer is but a dumb cog. In other words, postmodernism is the theatricality of a “counterculture” mesmerized, like the vagabond couple in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, by the coyness of disaffection.

No doubt, there are other types of theatricality. I don’t think theatricality in itself has any bearing on the validity of any type of art.

When he wrote “Art and Objecthood,” Michael Fried was grasping at straws. Yes, Judd’s and Morris’ and most of Smithson’s output was vacuous, but it should have been possible to say this without the tortured invoking of theatricality as the reason for its vacuity. Fried , however, wanted to denounce the banality of formalism’s inevitable progression into “literalism” without abandoning the sterile formalist criteria he inherited from Greenberg, criteria that were sterile not because form is unworthy of care but because Greenberg, in his effort to oppose kitsch with his anemic version of modernism, reduced formalism to a mechanistic “entrenchment” of “competence” that solicited nothing but straining after minute technical innovations.

A cogent argument against literalism would have required from Fried a declaration that art is essentially symbolic and cannot be reduced to a dumb thing. Art’s fundamental relationship is with the sacred. Throughout “Art and Objecthood” you can see Fried sidle up to acknowledging that art is spiritual without, however, being able to openly say so.

What stopped him?

I believe it was two things: a formalism fixated on “opticality” that foreclosed any acknowledgment of what in art transcends eye candy, and, related to this, the sheepishness that afflicts any critic who needs to preserve an aura of modern, therefore agnostic, sophistication and eschew vulnerability to “mystical” ideas. And yet we know that at its origin, formalism was expressly formulated by Mallarmé and others as a refuge for what remained of the sacred in a world overwhelmed by crass materialism and the bourgeois instrumentalization (and excrementalization) of everything.

Fried’s problem was that he was trying to stave off the final step in the degeneration of a formalism already desacralized by Greenberg. By the time Fried intervened to arrest its slide into total banality, formalism was beyond redemption, and his only recourse was to propose as alternative to the vacuity of Donald Judd the vacuity of Anthony Caro.

Theatricality is the least of art’s faults. When art loses its once-sacred purpose, it itself becomes an agent of spiritual degradation. This is the truth that Fried could not speak.

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The Sacred and the Readymade

In a desacralized world, the sacred persists, tenuously, as the aesthetic. Therefore, the work of sacralizing the world becomes an effort to aestheticize it. Paradoxically, this is why the banal comes to dominate art from Dada onwards. A great deal of what seems like provocation is a test of art’s sacralizing capability, that is to say, a test of art’s ability to aesthetically redeem the least aesthetically promising material. The artists themselves may not understand what they are doing. Vapid claims of transgression may surround and obscure their efforts. But the appropriation of the banal is a last-resort form of aestheticization, a limit case. The readymade snatches the ordinary out of ordinariness and makes it imperceptibly singular. So the readymade becomes, effectively, the closest postmodern analogue of the sacred object.

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The illuminating Intellect

An awareness that reality embraces innumerable levels of existence was common to all the cultures of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, whether this was expressed in mythological or philosophical form. That the whole of reality should consist of the physical world which can be comprehended by our five senses is a very recent concept, and one which is basically contradicted by any knowledge of oneself. For man readily discovers that the stuff (so to speak) of which his soul is made is different from that of his body, and that for all its ties to the physical world, it possesses qualities that the body does not possess, such as perception, thought, and independent action. Endowed with these faculties, the soul is not, however, the only non-physical condition of human existence. For the soul, with its constant changes, is itself an object of knowledge, and this presupposes that there is something like an inner eye that sees the soul, while itself remaining constant. This is the Intellect in the medieval acceptance of this word. To try and comprehend it would be as hopeless as an attempt to see one’s own faculty of vision. It transcends thought, yet it lends all possible certainty to thought. All rational evidence would be nothing without the truths that are a direct illumination from the Intellect. The medieval philosophers refer to the active intellect intellectus agens in Latin, al-′aql al′fâ′âl (in Arabic), because the Intellect consists, as it were, of the pure act of knowing, and never itself becomes the passive object of perception.

—Titus Burckhardt, “Moorish Culture in Spain”

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Finger-pointing

Maurizio Cattelan, L.O.V.E. (2010)

In the ancient caste systems (which were not exclusive to India), the merchant class always came third, after the priestly class and the warrior class. The merchant class had its place but was not considered fit to rule. The revolutions of the modern era undid this sacred order and brought to power the money worshipers. The cultural consequences did not show themselves immediately because the legacy of the pre-democratic age and its aristocratic standards briefly outlived the demolition of the social hierarchy that produced it. Those consequences are now fully manifest and we are surrounded by the monstrosities that proliferate when money overtakes nobility.

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The Impossibility of a Materialist Art

The progressive antipathy for religiosity shows up in modern art as hatred of “illusionism.” It is a hatred that drives modern art toward abstraction and a fixation on the materiality of the signifier.

But art can never become totally materialist, can never be reduced to objecthood, because if it is, it ceases to have a symbolic function and without symbolic function, it ceases to be distinguishable as art.

So an art that seeks to eradicate all illusionism must eventually eradicate itself. And we get very close to this with the readymade. But not quite, because the readymade, whether considered as art or antiart, still invokes the symbolic. Duchamp’s urinal is no longer just a urinal once it is “nominated” as art. This nomination bears uncanny resemblance to the consecration of the profane object, which likewise may retain the external appearance of a quite ordinary object (stone, tree, pool, bread, wine, etc.) and yet be imbued with unearthly power. It is only in an art history dissociated from the larger history of human ritual that the invention of the readymade is assigned such disproportionate significance. The readymade is a parody of the consecrated object.

The readymade shares with the “literal” minimalist object the sleight of hand of invoking the metaphysical while pretending to abolish it. So Fried’s rejection of literalism in “Art and Objecthood” was well-founded. The idea that wants to come to the surface in that tortured and verbose essay is that art is art only to the extent that it serves a metaphysical purpose. Art is the transfiguration of matter into symbol. And this and this alone is the reason why art cannot be reduced to a dumb, profane object without ceasing to be art. Fried could not bring himself to state this and in failing to state it he revealed why formalism, which for a period served as a bulwark against the banalization of art, finally failed at its task and left the field to be trampled by the postmodernist hordes.

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Primitivism’s Shortcoming

Paul Gauguin, Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), 1888

The energy of the sacred is dissipated when the sacred is aestheticized and becomes mere object of beauty or “expressiveness.” This is why moderns could not derive more than shallow inspiration from “primitive” (i.e. sacred) art.

The sacred is a revelation of an absolute truth and an absolute reality.

Modern art, despite being sensitive to (and envious of) the power of the sacred object, is too preoccupied with subjective feeling and the expression of individual vision to be satisfied with the seemingly passive (and repetitive) affirmation of eternal truths. So while it may emulate the superficial mannerisms of sacred art, modern art cannot achieve the tranquil and implacable conviction in the reality of the unseen that is the foundation of sacred art. 

Gauguin might have admired the piety of Breton peasants but he could not become one of them; he could not enclose himself in the tight confines of their faith and their world. To do so, he would have had to forfeit his precious modern “creativity.” He would have had to withdraw not merely from France but from modern art altogether, indeed, from art itself given the impiety of the concept when art is no longer understood as sacred service.

All of which is to say that modernism, despite its anxieties about modernity, could not overcome what was modern in itself. The concept of and practice of submission, so fundamental to Islam but underpinning all sacred traditions, is alien to modernism. The modernist ethos is Promethean; its restlessness is satanic. 

No authentic spirituality comes from rebellion because sacred inspiration is available only to those who have achieved receptiveness through the practice of humility. The modernist artist aspires not to worship but to emulate God’s creative power. Thus, even when he wants to be “spiritual,” he is aligned with tendencies that are anti-spiritual. Instead of reinventing the sacred, modernist art itself became one of the symptoms of its abolition, one of the indicators of modern “disenchantment.”

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Birth of the Cool

One can grant that formalism once served a purpose as a stopgap against the crass instrumentalization of art in the service of adorability. Where formalism failed is where all modern antimodern ideologies fail, in the inability to oppose banality in any but modern terms. Since banality is the product of the desacralization of the world, it cannot be adequately opposed without an affirmation of the sacred. But modernists for the most part preferred a strictly aesthetic opposition lest they come off as reactionaries.

Banality, however, has democratic appeal while aestheticism carries the stigma of elitism. This meant that formalism, understood as an aesthetic rejection of the banal, was tenable only as long as there was self-consciously aristocratic or, at least, pseudo-aristocratic sponsorship of art. Around the mid-twentieth century the fashion-conscious decided to go slumming. Banality packaged as irony, the hot new commodity of the postmodern era, became the thing. At that point, formalism lost its luster, and the aestheticized banal debuted as the birth of the cool.

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The Birth of Formalism

Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way. It is superbly sterile, and the note of its pleasure is sterility. If the contemplation of a work of art is followed by activity of any kind, the work is either of a very second-rate order, or the spectator has failed to realise the complete artistic impression.

A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse. All this is I fear very obscure. But the subject is a long one.

—Oscar Wilde, Letter to Bernulf Clegg

What hides under Wilde’s assertion that art is useless and “superbly sterile” ?

Well, for one thing, a hint of his sexual orientation. But that is a trivial thing. 

In the late 19th century, aestheticism and “art for art’s sake” become a means to defend art against its crude bourgeois instrumentalization. The declaration of art’s uselessness flies in the face of the prevailing utilitarianism. But this defense is already a compromise. From service to the sacred, for which no space remained in the modern world, art retreats into “uselessness,” so as to at least resist the grosser demands of middle class taste. Because the sacred has been dispossessed of value, its vestigial presence in art can only be upheld by a fetishization of art’s uselessness, i.e. its material uselessness.

Clive Bell’s theory of significant form was more perspicacious than Wilde’s. Bell understood that form has metaphysical significance:

Significant form stands charged with the power to provoke aesthetic emotion in anyone capable of feeling it. The ideas of men go buzz and die like gnats; men change their institutions and their customs as they change their coats; the intellectual triumphs of one age are the follies of another; only great art remains stable and unobscure. Great art remains stable and unobscure because the feelings that it awakens are independent of time and place, because its kingdom is not of this world. To those who have and hold a sense of the significance of form what does it matter whether the forms that move them were created in Paris the day before yesterday or in Babylon fifty centuries ago? The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy. 

In Bell’s words, there is an indication that in its infancy, formalism was not the sterile thing it became after Clement Greenberg got a hold of it. Greenberg advanced formalism by reformulating it as a technocratic procedure for “entrenching” each art medium in its “area of competency.” Rigorous formal autocritique was supposed to safeguard art from assimilation into kitsch. In actuality, this microscopic narrowing of focus ensured the complete desacralization of abstraction and, inevitably, its banalization.  This is evident in the utter vacuity of Frank Stella’s postminimalist output, the precursor of most contemporary abstraction.

Nothing hastened the transformation of abstraction itself into kitsch than Greenberg’s effort to remove from abstraction any suggestion of something beyond form.

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The New Coke

Andy Warhol, Green Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962

Duchamp had shown the way, but his readymades remained for a long time quarantined within the ambit of Dada. With Warhol, the integration of the artist into the market becomes overt: “Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art.” From this point on, the untenable model of the avant-garde artist operating on or outside the margins of society survives only in fantasy. The critics, rightly fearing that in the age of Pop, their hieratic expertise was becoming irrelevant, did their best to ironicize Warhol’s perfectly explicit celebration of crass consumerism. Intuitively grasping the logic of commodity fetishism, Warhol produced work whose allure proceeded directly from its vacuity. Precisely because nothing dumber could be imagined, his deadpan appropriations instantly became a gift to hip snobbery.

Photography had threatened to make even the most uncommon objects common, at least as representations. Warhol turned this photographic devaluation of the uncommon on its head. He was able to turn the most debased photographic representations into objects of uncommon consumption. Cans of soup, bottles of Coke, the over-familiar image of Marilyn, all these and others became superlative luxury items via the magic of Factory recycling as provocative art.

Warhol was famous for saying that he made a painting of Coca-Cola bottles because the popular drink was something that he and the queen could equally enjoy. He left unsaid that after the transformation of Coke into Coke Art, only royalty could afford what he was selling. High and low, art and groceries, remained as far apart as ever but the cultural elite could now enjoy a new commodity called irony. 

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Readymade Form

Duchamp’s readymade brings into view an overlooked implication of the formalist orientation toward pure form: the possibility, henceforth, of apprehending all objects, including the objects of mass production, as pure form. This happened around the same time that the Futurists were proposing that the acme of modern beauty is the machine. For the Futurists this mostly meant the displacement of traditional subject matter by depictions of force and speed. Duchamp took the decisive step of replacing depiction by appropriation. In so doing, he forced upon “fine” art a confrontation with its own redundancy as source of formal invention. The readymade proves to have the same formal capability as anything labored over in an art studio. The nominative authority of the artist displayed by the readymade is in itself of trivial importance. A greater significance of the readymade is its revelation of the unintended consequences of the modernist fixation on form.

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Customized Identities

The current fetishization of identity is an attempt to replace by self-nomination what used to be assigned by fate, caste, and tradition. It is a poor replacement, as evidenced by the violence with which self-authored identities need to be relentlessly asserted.

This obsession with identity and identity-based clustering is often interpreted as a new tribalism, but that analogy does not bear examination. In the tribal unit, identity is bestowed by the tribe and requires the subjugation of the individual to whatever shared myth constitutes the group’s symbolic order and rituals that sustain it. In contrast, self-declared, voluntary identities are always staged as resistance to subjugation. Nothing could be more removed from the spirit of tribalism and its reverence for tradition and ancestral authority than this childishness. Tribal societies do not tolerate perpetual adolescence. That’s why they have initiation ordeals. In the premodern tribal context, subjugation is a passage, an opportunity for the unformed subject to gain the form of a worthy member of the tribe. Tribes are not confederations of never-finished, self-assembling subjects all clamoring for recognition. That idea of a made-to-order self only prevails in an environment where consumerism has installed the notion that the self is yet one more customizable consumer good.

The truth is that the contemporary obsession with identity is an indication of its contemporary unachievability. Identity cannot be self-conferred. It has to be imposed by an external agency so as to be experienced as the inescapable contour of one’s being. Identity has to come from the Other. It has to be the consequence of an irrevocable subjugation. But modernity has made subjugation intolerable. It has encouraged and preyed upon the fantasy of heroic self-possession, which consumerism exploits by offering an endless array of purchasable signifiers that promise to give you who you really are, each one of which turns out to be as inadequate as the previous.

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The Readymade as Fetish

Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Shovels, 1965

Let us summarily dismiss the idea propagated by critics eager to pander to the liberal arty farty elite’s democratic pretensions that Duchamp “nominating” a urinal to the status of art object is a gesture of “inclusion.” No. Fountain’s significance is the exact opposite: If it challenges the distinction between art and nonart, it is only to make that distinction explicitly and exclusively institutionally authorized. The seemingly arbitrary inclusion of select ordinary objects into the pantheon of art formalizes the authority of a collaboration between the nominator and the elite institutional framework that ratifies these nominations. There is no dismantling of boundaries, no levelling of “high” and “low.” Instead, the readymade makes flagrant the obduracy of that hierarchy. A urinal is something to piss on. Fountain is a museum piece. You couldn’t find a more brazen demonstration of the cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie than that.

Through its seemingly miraculous ability to author vacancy, the readymade gilds everything it absorbs into itself with an “infrathin” aura that permits the banal to be consumed as the ironic. The readymade is a fetish. It intervenes as the last barrier to the recognition of the insufferable hideousness of an encroaching, engulfing banality. In lieu of a passive surrender to banality, the readymade delivers the spectacle of banality’s active embrace. The readymade is the paradoxical phallicization of flaccidity and impotence.

But the readymade also grudgingly hints at a recognition that the most complex and engaging forms in the modern world are consumer products. In other words, it hints at the untenability of the modern distinction between things of use and things of aesthetic value. But it does so by hiding the usefulness of things like urinals and snow shovels behind or underneath the ritual of their (redundant) art-ification. In theory, the readymade invites a dismissal of the very notion of  art. In practice, it functions as the artistic equivalent of transubtantiation.

Once we understand this, we can appreciate the value of the readymade within the libidinal economy of capitalism. The problem is that the very profusion of the dazzling forms with which capitalism gluts the world renders them invisible. This is what Benjamin was getting at with his notion of aura and its loss through reproducibility. Standardization and mass production rob the object of its quiddity, turn it into something that passes through our hands too quickly, too unobtrusively. The readymade enables a slower mode of consumption, a more deliberate enjoyment of the act of acquisition. It permits an appreciation of the substantiality of the disposable object.

Viewed this way, the readymade is not an attack on art. It is not antiart. It is rather the last artistic means that modernity can muster to stave off disenchantment.

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