Art and Presence: Llubljana, May 2016

‘Art and Presence’: Panel with Robert Pfaller, MGML City Museum, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 28th May 2016 Thanks to City Museum and Mateja Bucar and Urska Jurman, Igor Zabel Association, DUM Collective etc. Myself and Robert are going to talk in difference ways perhaps about the autonomy of art, or what makes art different from other types of human activity…. One thing that we may have in common is the resistance to the idea that art, art-making, the reception of art and even writing and speaking about art is all about attributing meaning, or at least certain types of meaning…. Of course many people in the less hundred years or so, from critical theorists to art historians, have spoken a lot about art in terms of its ability both to create and subvert meaning. The reason why is easy to see. Most of the time, our experience of the world is conditioned by norms and habitual modes of signification. We see the red light at the traffic light, and we stop etc. …but art is different It has what we could call an ‘as such’ quality. This is because each genuine work of art is ‘framed’ in some way. In visual art this frame is literal, it is the frame around the painting or image; at other times the frame is provided by an aesthetic context…. In a picture or painting for example, the frame tells us that the depiction inside could, for example, be of something real or equally something imaginary, and the painting itself lacks the resources to be able to settle this question. We are left not knowing. Similarly in other artforms, we see plays within plays, stories within stories, and other types of perceptual phenomena, like music or sculpture, share this same ‘as such’ quality… This quality means that an artwork, in order to be an artwork at all, has a certain type of duplicity; it can always be something other than what it seems to be, and this aspect of art, and the accompanying ability to subvert habitual modes of understanding, has been perhaps the most theorized aspect of the autonomy or difference of art. In Warhol’s famous installation, this type of subversion perhaps reaches a type of logical conclusion. The ‘frame’ that the gallery of artworld context provides makes us look at the everyday item in a different way. Because of this setting, the box becomes a kind of symbol that perhaps subverts the meaning of art itself; because we ask ourselves- can this really be an artwork? And all of this is accurate. But it’s not the whole story. Today I want to talk about how the difference or autonomy inherent in art also lies somewhere else. Something of this difference can be seen in the following quote from Merleau-Ponty “A painting makes its charm dwell from the start in a dreaming eternity, where we many rejoin it centuries later, even without knowing the history of the dress, furnishings, utensils and civilization whose stamp it bears. Writing, on the contrary, relinquishes its most enduring meanings to us only through a precise history that we must have some precise knowledge of” What is Merleau-Ponty speaking of here? Surely something to do with the fact that artworks have a sort of immediate presence that precedes our inevitable attempts at meaningattribution. A painting is not the same thing as a text; it is a perceptual relic, it shows us something about the perceptions of the artist and the historical others who may have perceived the painting too. And it is present to us, because it appeals to many perceptual commonalities that we share with these same historical others… What is an artwork then? We can think of it as a new way of seeing and/or being in the world. Artworks are, each in their own unique way, world-disclosive. Artworks engage our perception but invite as well a self-reflection on the experience of this perception itself: The creative processes embodied in artworks make us reflect on how we feel when we perceive them, and not just what they mean. And they show the complexity of our everyday experience, a complexity we often overlook. Sculpture, for example, introduces us to other aspects of perception, like the haptic, tactile and kinesthetic components of our experience that can reside below the threshold of consciousness. We can call these aspects ‘presence effects’ that exist alongside what meaning the painting communicates or what it represents. Because artworks can both re-present and also (simply) pre-sent Now we can of course talk in relation to this sculpture about what it re-presents, a scene from antiquity involving the Troian priest Lacoon and his sons being attacked by snakes, and what this narrative may mean within the context of say Hellenistic culture… When the sculpture was rediscovered in 1506 near the Coliseum, it caused a sensation. Poets and writers wrote about how the sculpture also presents something, and communicates through a number of perceptual media: viscerally, somatically, kinesthetically, tactilely and above all affectively, embodying a palpable sense of pain, anguish grief and pathos. So palpable in fact, that a contemporary 16th century poet gives, so to speak Lacoon his own voice and agency: “You will say, when you look at me that the stone feels real pain […]” Let us take a closer look know at the way art both communicates both meaning and perceptions, and how this has consequences for other disciplines, like art history, politics and education (which I covered more in detail yesterday). Commentary on these quotes: “art uses perceptions and, by doing so, seizes consciousness at the level of its own externalizing activity. The function of art would thus consist in integrating what is in principle incommunicable—namely, perception—into the communication network” “art irritates communication- and forces it to ask- what does this perception mean?” “The social effect and meaning of the artwork is tied to its role as an ephemeral communicative event, and although it might continue to exist as a physical object, this is no guarantee that it will have any further communicative, and hence social, significance” Let me talk a bit more now about art and perception… An ‘aesthetic’ understanding of the processes of our senses suggests our perception has the character of an activity, which can to be comprehended in terms of a ‘play of forces’. These forces are operative in the relations that mediate our perception and action. In the usual everyday enactment of such exchanges however we do not normally experience these relations. As I mentioned at the outset, we habitually construct automatic modes of recognition and understanding: We recognize objects based our prior learning and we see gestures that communicate an emotion and/or affective state, we interpret the red light as meaning stop, etc. Forces and relations are what enable such recognitions, but in ordinary life they disappear into or behind these recognitions. In art, however, these forces become apparent as such. In aesthetic experience there occurs a reflective return to the concealed relations behind habitual visible or audible productions. And the artist, via his own singular, unique and historically specific methods, takes invariants and commonalities in our perceptive capacities and subjects them to various stylistic and historically contingent alterations. Through music for example, we learn more about our being in the world. Music epitomizes the ubiquity of the acoustic sign, and aspects of temporal succession and causation. It generalizes and formalizes the acoustic gestures and exclamations that derive from the human voice. Dancing and the kinesthetic empathy involved in dance spectatorship put us in touch with aspects of our experience that are normally hidden; it reveals the ways in which we adjust our bodies in response to subtle weight shifts, disequilibria in balance, and frames the reflexive and reactive character of interaction with another human body. Art then, consists of collections of artworks, embodied through all manner of styles, coupled with an enacted engagement of perception in its spectators. Art is not ‘passively received’ in a ‘disinterested’ way. It demands our attention. It shows something to us, rather than speaking something to us. Describing something of this showing, which is resistant to description in language is perhaps the same task as explaining how art has presence. Let us know look at two examples from contemporary art, where I will argue that the specific modes of construction, which rely on technology, produce new forms of presence (and hence new types of meanings as well). They are examples of how art can create new perceptual sensations. This is an image of a corporate air duct in a modern building by Craig Kalpakjian. But it has been digitally altered so that it depicts a series of incompossible shadows and reflections. This means it actually re-presents (if that is the right term) a non-place, a sort of place of no-place. And the peculiar presence that the image maintains over us is to do with the fact that we react to this with a type of bodily response which attempts to resolve the perceptual ambiguities; the presence here consists in the fact that the image catalyzes the production of a space within the body that is without direct perceptual correlation with the non-space that the picture depicts, in a kind of ‘out-of-jointedness’. This is an example of how an image can actually create, through a type of disruption or transformation, a new type of perceptual presence. The same idea applies to this series of images by David Claerbout. The particular perceptual transformation or disruption is somewhat different. Normally we only experience the world from our own unique profile or perspective (this is Phenomenology 101). But what Claerbout does here is present a series of still images shown in succession. Because of this succession we assume that the images are a series of different shots of a football match in Angiers. However, over time we realize that they are in fact a series of profiles of the same moment frozen in time. Again this is only possible with technology, and digital editing. The series represents a series of ‘impossible’ different profiles of the same instant. The image is an elaborate construction, assembled in a studio. The scene is captured from a number of different perspectives, but the people in the scene are actually actors, who are photographed simultaneously, and from different perspectives in a studio, so that they can then be inserted into the final image digitally. This manipulation not only transforms and disrupts our habitual sense of space when viewing images, but in this case our sense of time too. This piece by Anahita Ramzi is a copy of Trisha Brown piece; it re-enacts this in a rooftop setting known for protests against strict Islamic regime (dance and performance had become banned, especially by women). Power of this work- not a direct political act (not a video showing a group of dissidents), but in the subtle way it shifts the very nature of what is allowed to be seen at all, and what is allowed to be heard etc. It enacts a change, not as in the last examples to a particular aspect of perception, but the whole system of laws that govern what comes to be perceivable in the first place- does this through a dance medium- is a fascinating mixture of the communication of both ‘meaning effects’ and ‘presence effects’. It is a political act, as well as being an artwork. This is my last example… Picture of the original, which was destroyed by ISIS in 2015. The other images are the recreation of the arch in Trafalgar Square in London in 2016, and a digital mockup of the setting. I know what you are thinking- this is just a ‘mechanical reproduction in the era of technology’ again (Walter Benjamin). But there is a twist here. This is not the simple reproduction or copy of a two dimensional image, but actually a copy of a whole object achieved through high-tech 3D Printing. The owner of the 3D Printing company went on the BBC News to boast that the company could potentially 3D print copies of anything, from surgical instruments to whole buildings to human tissue. This is obviously a whole new ball game. My current research focuses on what is going astray here. I have no problem with the copy as a kind of symbolic gesture (a defiance against terrorist aggression etc.), but what about the loss of what Benjamin called the ‘aura’ of the building (we could maybe also call this aura another name for its presence). The problem with Benjamin’s definition of aura is that it made an appeal to a certain type of mysticism or religious experience. So- what goes awry here? Well, actually like the Claerbout images we know that we only see this object from one (our own) unique profile and perspective. But we also have an intuitive sense that the building is actually co-present or co-existing for others. That's how we know it is a real building and not just a hallucination of a building! And in the case of the original Palmyra arch, we also know that it was co-present or co-existing for historical others, way back into antiquity. In fact objects like this arch are our only connection to these historical others, in terms of perceptual correlation at least. Art, monuments, and even utensils and items of material culture are unique in this way. They have a quite different type of autonomy. They have historicities that provide us with a kind of temporal orientation in the world; they connect us, and connect us uniquely, to the past, the lives of others, or the historically intersubjective. And in the copy of the arch, this aura, presence, or sense of intersubjective connection is missing. This is why it is important that we prevent the 3D replication of all the artworks in existence! Finally. How does this all of this about the autonomy of art and the mix of perception and communication in art, matter in today’s increasingly globalized and mediatized environments? Guyatri Spivak gives us a partial answer: “Globalisation takes place only in capital and data. Everything else is damage control…. ….[t]he most pernicious presupposition today is that globalization has happily happened in every aspect of our lives. Globalization can never happen to the sensory equipment of the experiencing being except insofar as it was always implicit in its vanishing outlines. Only art and an aesthetic education can continue to prepare us for this” Flows of information and capital can only go so far; they cannot fully colonize all of our perceptual capabilities, including our capability to imagine different perceptual scenes, in different places and times. Or to imagine or reimagine ourselves as other people. If we think about what this means for a second, it means that art, aesthetic experience and aesthetic education have a type of ethical significance. The aesthetic in this sense becomes a zone of the political.