Artist, toddler / video monitor, mirror

Jacques Lacan's investigation of the mirror's role in developing and structuring the individual's ego starting in infancy - reportedly one of his major contributions to the field of psychoanalysis - brings to mind Rosalind Krauss' seminal essay of 1976, Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism (October 1, Spring 1976). In this text Krauss discusses, among other artists' works, Centers, a video by Vito Acconci.

"... by its very mise-en-scene, Centers typifies the structural characteristics of the video medium. For Centers was made by Acconci's using the video monitor as a mirror. As we look at the artist sighting along his outstretched arm and forefinger towards the center of the screen we are watching, what we see is a sustained tautology: a line of sight that begins at Acconci's plane of vision and ends at the eyes of his projected double. In that image of self-regard is configured a narcissism so endemic to works of video that I find myself wanting to generalize it as the condition of the entire genre."

Acconci commented on his work: "pointing at my own image on the video monitor: my attempt is to keep my finger constantly in the center of the screen—I keep narrowing my focus into my finger. The result [the TV image] turns the activity around: a pointing away from myself, at an outside viewer." (Body as Place-Moving in on Myself, Performing Myself, Avalanche 6, Fall 1972.

Acconci indeed points away from himself, but towards the monitor which shows his own pointing at the monitor. A loop, in a sense. So he points back at the image of the artist himself, who, ultimately, is that "outside viewer". This work, like a mirror - or two mirrors facing each-other - thus performs in a sort of claustrophobic closed-circuitry.

For Lacan, the Mirror stage, which starts in early childhood, extends that initial period and persists throughout one's entire life:

"As Lacan further develops the mirror stage concept, the stress falls less on its historical value and ever more on its structural value. "Historical value" refers to the mental development of the child and "structural value" to the libidinal relationship with the body image [...] "the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship". The dual relationship (relation duelle) refers not only to the relation between the Ego and the body, which is always characterized by illusions of similarity and reciprocity, but also to the relation between the Imaginary and the Real. The visual identity given from the mirror supplies imaginary "wholeness" to the experience of a fragmentary real." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_stage)

These observations, in particular the "relation between the Imaginary and the Real" give us a foretaste, in a sense, of more contemporary and art-themed discussions such as Hal Foster's Obscene, Abject, Traumatic, which also uses other Lacan texts such The Split Between the Eye and the Gaze.

Another interesting idea of Lacan's is the contrast between the image the infant sees in the mirror which is, in a sense, complete - this would be a strictly visual perception of the self and the body - and the lack of coordination of his/her body on a motor level, thus leading to a sense of fragmentation of the body. From Merleau-Ponty's point of view, for instance, how would this fragmentation be approached?

Interpreting “Eye and Mind” by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“Human creations are derived from a natural information process.” (122)

Sometimes we have to experiment with our artwork and ‘throw our net out to sea’ in order to get somewhere, and we won’t always know where that will take us. We have to trust our vision and our soul.

We must resort back to all our bodies of artwork in order to decipher our current vision and movement in our art practice.  We need a visionary map in order to achieve. That requires thinking and foresight.

This vision is already inside us.  We see with beauty in nature and art. Ex, light, quality, texture, depth, space. Because this is in our very being, “the world is made of the very stuff of the body” (125).

“What interests me in all (photographs) paintings is likeness-that is: something that makes me uncover the external world a little” (126).

We learn by seeing. (127) Photography celebrates visibility. “The mind goes out through the eyes to wander among objects” (127). We photograph because we have seen, and we are shaping light, because something has ‘emblazoned’ upon our soul. We interrogate our subject with our ‘gaze.’ Example: a Mountain. (128)

“The artists role is to project what is making itself seen within himself’ (129). We need to convey what we are thinking from our ‘gaze,’ aka the subject matter, to the viewer. That is our vision. That is our goal. Many things look at me instead of me looking at them, catching my eye, as a photographer.

“I think that the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not want to penetrate it….I expect to be inwardly submerged. Perhaps I paint to break out” (129). We are engulfed and surrounded by the universe, we make art to express ourselves and process how we interact with the universe. (That being everyone and everything in it in which we interact with).

‘Vision is an ongoing birth.” We are constantly learning, evolving, experiencing, and seeing.

“The mirror emerges because I am a visible see-er, the mirror translates and reproduces that reflexivity” (129). This should be every photographers national anthem.

I can invest my psychic energy into other bodies I see, ie: through my photography. Hence my body (of work) ‘can include elements drawn from the body of another.”

Refer to page 7 of “Steal Like an Artist.”

“Mirrors are instruments of a universal magic that converts things into spectacle, spectacle into things, myself into another, and another into myself. Artists have often mused upon mirrors…” (130).

As artists we ‘so often chose to draw ourselves,’ or photograph ourselves, a vision of ourselves.

It is best to think of light as illusion and perception made by contact that reflects and acts upon the eyes projecting a likeness of ones own essence and existence, weaving the connection between imaginary and real.

Vision is a thinking that decodes signs given to our brains within the body, from light casting upon our eyes the visible world and then transferring to our brains.

‘Photography causes us to see empty space where there is none,’ objectifying space in ways which we see fit as the artist representing an extension of ourselves within our work.

First we need to have a vision of space, to conceive an idea for a concept to convey onto that space. Orientation, polarity, envelopment, remain ominously present within space, and yet space remains absolutely within itself, a vantage point of it’s own (134).

“There is no vision without thought: but it is not enough to think in order to see. Vision is a conditioned thought, incited to think by the body” (135-136).

The soul thinks according to the body, which is the soul’s native space, where vision naturally occurs because the soul is capable, thinking according to our body, and this is encoded into our inner workings and comes without our trying or reflecting.. It is incited to think by the body (136). And the body is made up of the universe and vise versa, so therefore we are in space and space is in us.

The world is around me, not in front of me.  My vision of the world is a space starting from me as the degree zero of spatiality. I live in space and I am immersed in it. My vision shows more than myself, it shows how space and light speaks to me (138). When our vision becomes ‘gesture,’ we think or act in photographing and create.

‘In a sense everything that may have been said and will be said has always been and henceforth shall be,’ it is our job to to use our art work to interpret our space from a different perspective and show the space of the world in a different light. (139). We need to transform our art and become what follows in that process, and to begin we just need to start doing.

To make great work, we also need a broad understanding of history and practices before us.

Depth: We are constantly seeking depth all through life in all aspects of life. We use color to understand depth and give dimension to things. We are surrounded in space which radiates around us in planes that cannot be assigned to the ‘physical-optical’ relation with the world. The world does not stand before me as a representation, rather I give birth to the representation of the space of my inner self and make visible to the world.

Depth, color, form, line, movement, contour, physiognomy are part of our being.

Art is the ‘voice of light,’ and once it is present it awakens the powers dormant in our selves and expressed through vision (142). Depth, space, and color are the result, the radiation of the visible.

The secret to photographing ‘is to discover in each object the particular way in which a certain flexuous line, which is so to speak, its generating axis, is directed through its whole extent,’ what I refer to as composition, perspective, and depth. (142).

The lines render visible, they are the blueprint of our work, and when a network of lines becomes entangled that becomes a representation of ourselves.

“It is the artist who is truthful, while the photograph lies: for in reality, time never stops. The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith” (145).

“We must understand the eye as the window of the soul, which show us the infinite variety of creation” (146). It is up to our vision to shape light and space how we see fit. Everything that is visual functions as a dimension in our space.

“The world will always be yet to be painted (photographed), even if it lasts a million years, it will end without being completed” (148). “If no work is ever absolutely completed, still, each creatin changes, alters, deepens, confirms, exalts, re-creates, or creates by anticipation all the others” (149).

Questions?

What would vision be without (movement) doing?

How do we envision beyond what we can see?

Are humans stationary? Are we just recreating what is already created?

"The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness"

When I read this quote attributed to Cezanne, I couldn't help thinking of something Jackson Pollock told the artist Hans Hofmann who was visiting his studio one day. Upon seeing Pollock's work Hofmann asked, "do you work from nature?" Pollock’s answer was, "I am nature." Hofmann replied, "but if you work by heart, you will repeat yourself." To which Pollock did not reply at all.

We know that Pollock was prone to fits of anger (as was Gauguin, according to Merleau-Ponty) and bursts of megalomania. But his lack of response to Hofmann had perhaps less to do with feeling belittled and not knowing what to reply (or being rude or condescending) than simply enacting his own statement. If Pollock, or the modernist painter, is indeed nature (or its consciousness) then there is no need to prove anything or engage in debate.

"I am nature", like Gauguin's claim that "the landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness", bears crucial implications for the conception of the artist - a self-defining artist - and his/her relation to the world.

Merleau-Ponty's Essays on Paintings: Cezannes Doubt....

Merleau-Ponty's Essays on Paintings: Cezannes Doubt....

In Merleau-Ponty's "Essays on Paintings: Cezanne's Doubt" raises several questions for me on different topics throughout the essay. Merleau-Ponty quotes Paul Cezanne numerous times mainly on Cezanne’s belief of creating art “through nature.” On page 67 at the bottom of the page Cezanne states “The landscape thinks itself in me,” he would say, “and I am its consciousness.” I can read this statement in several ways…. The first way I can attempt to decipher the meaning is if Cezanne has a Schizoid personality (as he was believed to have had) this statement would make a lot sense to someone who lives mostly in their own world of a head and intently isolated from people.  One is bound to go crazy if they avoid people and have limited access to socializing.  On the other hand, if you were to interpret this quote through the mind of an artist creating a landscape, then it might make more sense because an artist has total control over what he creates. The artist’s creativity comes from within what the artists creates, therefore the artist is always the consciousness of the art. 

Cezanne was believed to be one of the first modern artists due to his multiple perspectives opposed to painting a scene with a straight on perspective. If a person is sitting in a chair looking at an object such as I am looking at my computer as I write this blog, I can sit up straight and see the top edge of my computer or move a little to the right or left and see the outside edge of my computer. If Cezanne is "painting" through nature, maybe what he was implying was that his perspective was the "natural" and more realistic style to paint scenes because when a person is viewing something they can move and look at the object in multiple perspectives. The viewer's feet are not glued to the ground in terms of limiting their viewing perspective and more traditional scenes before Cezanne. 

Ponty discusses the “lived perspective” through Cezanne's painting style. Cezanne's still life of the cherries and what I think are peaches are painted with two different perspectives. The cherries and the plate the cherries sit up on are painted as if you were closer to the table looking down at the cherries and the plate and the peaches are painted as if you were standing further away looking at the side of the peaches and the plate. Was Cezanne actually painting "through nature" or was he a crazy schizoid trying to make sense of his insane world?

 “…Everything comes to us from nature; we exist through it; nothing else is worth remembering,” said Cezanne. There is beauty in this statement. I do think people are happiest when in nature. I can recall some of the happier events in my life occurred in natural spaces. Possibly in the time of Cezannes life in the 1800’s technology is becoming more prevalent with the invention of electric inventions. People could have possibly been becoming less involved with nature due to technology. Cezanne did move out to the country in the middle of nature partly to be closer to the outdoors. Possibly the statement has to do more with trusting our natural instincts.

There is a famous quote from a philosopher... and I know this is pathetic, but I couldn’t recall the philosopher’s name (and I searched Google, I promise). I do recall the gist of a quote from the philosopher: “No idea is original and comes from an outer source and that it is basically impossible to come up with an original idea.” Merleau-Ponty touches upon a similar statement on page 69 in the second paragraph… “There is thus no art for pleasure’s sake alone. One can invent pleasurable objects by linking old ideas in a new way and by presenting forms that have been seen before.” Of course he was referring to Cezanne’s truly unique style of breaking the norm from traditional artists through Cezanne’s “lived perspective” art style.  A few months ago the Artist Klemens Torggler reinvented the door (see image below). Much like Cezzane, Torggler truly invented a new style of something incredibly traditional. As for the purpose and the function of Torggler's door in comparison to the traditional door, I am unsure. The door is much quieter then your normal door when opening and closing. These minor changes in the practical use of a door are not necessarily revolutionary. The design Troggler created is revolutionary. Is it possible to create something no one can identify with and yet is also revolutionary?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/10/klemens-torggler-evolution-door_n_4762261.html

The Poetics of Space

Bachelard's text, The Poetics of Space was a really nice, intimate reading.  I've never thought about or hear the proverb, "Men can do everything except build a bird's nest."  I think that is a really nice way to set up the reading, by putting us as an outsider to nests.  I love that nests can immediately take people back to their childhood or "to the childhoods we should have had".  It is fascinating to me to think about ideal childhoods and what things represent a perfect childhood.  I think everyone has had an experience where they watched or had to move a nest to another location, but I have never just thought of it as a "thing".  The love the part where Bachelard talks about hearing a woodpecker that's annoying so he "naturalizes" the sound and transports himself to a garden in order to be calm and give himself a new perspective. I am definitely going to use that method when I hear crows in the future. To think about other spaces as nests or eggs is a very transformative process for the human consciousness.  "For, Quasimodo...the cathedral" was every place at once for him, including the universe. For some reason this reading kept reminding me of being outside other people's homes on Halloween where I grew up. Where I grew up on the east coast it would have been cold at Halloween and the homes were always glowing and warm and you could tell from the windows and front door. The sense of loyalty in returning to the same place day after day is amazing, I love home and everything it entails. I've moved so many times my whole life so home has always had the possibility of leaving any minute for me, but I think it makes me value it that much more. I definitely identify with past homes being, "the great image of lost intimacy". On a side note, I've been reading a lot of parenting books because I am a nanny, and they all say never to put children in the corner.

A place between nest and corner, curve and angle

Gaston Bachelard's poetics of space, in contrast to some of the previous readings in our course, seems constantly on a cusp. Cusp is defined as "a pointed end or part where two curves meet" but here it would be more appropriate to say "where a curve and an angle meet" or where poetry and philosophy, dream and thought, nest and corner meet (or fail to do so, but remain within a "reasonable" vicinity of one and other).

I enjoyed Bachelard's abundance of poetic images. For instance, in the beginning of the text, he says "how psychology would deepen if we could know the psychology of each muscle". This finds an echo further on (p. 101) when he quotes Jules Michelet on how birds (humans in fact) use their breasts to shape the grass that will go into building the nest. Bachelard notes: "what an incredible inversion of images! Here we have the breast created by the embryo". Other images include "well-being takes us back to the primitiveness of refuge" or  "what a quantity of animal beings there are in the being of a man" - there's almost a sense of some shamanistic relation to the being.

Bachelard's comments on Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris" and how Quasimodo assumed "the contorted forms of his numerous hiding places in the corners of this complex structure" brought to mind two of Thomas Pynchon's novels which address the interrelationship of space and spaces' inhabitants with structures that are, like the cathedral, both complex and full of hidden corners.

The first is "Against the Day", set in the late 1800's. One of the characters is lead by a bell hop through the corridors of a very old hotel (how old, no one really knows), the structure of which seems to have a logic of its own - hallways ending abruptly or seemingly nowhere, an elevator following, at times, a horizontal or even diagonal course. Perhaps Pynchon here found some inspiration from "Alice in Wonderland", in which Alice's psycho-physical journey is one, essentially, through altered and shifting space. In another novel by Pynchon, "Inherent Vice", the author speaks of an off-the-grid casino in a forgotten section of Vegas, with chandeliers, cigarette-hole ridden rugs (almost like scars) and various anachronistic fixtures that seem packed with an overbearing presence, while an oddball collection of characters convene there and gamble.

In both of Pynchon's accounts what may strike us is a sense that the architecture, the physical space is not static or predefined. It is a poetic structure, and as such it is in flux, ultimately unreliable, not to be trusted at face value - a mostly uncharted, irrational and digressive territory. It appears, on the one hand, as the sum of experiences and lives of both past and present dwellers (tolerated guests, really). On the other, it performs as a slightly oppressive force, perceived, at best, unconsciously but never fully acknowledged - an inner realm with a volition of its own. Unlike Bachelard's nests, these spaces are not really homes, nor are they welcoming places of "well-being" - they appear more like the corners that he evokes, collecting dust and mirroring the psyche of their dwellers. They are places of hiding, perhaps of loss.

In certain ways, corners seem to be a variation of the childhood fort ("a piece of furniture constitutes a barrier" (p.137). Somehow, corners also conjure, in my mind, the image of a napping figure, someone whom you didn't know was in the room until you saw an arm, or heard their body shift. Corners also remind me of these patchworks of cardboard boxes in the street in which there is someone sleeping. All you see is a leg, or you hear snoring.

Nests seem to relate to a primordial sense of home, of nurturing, while the corner is more of a sense of retreat, removal and isolation - regression or death perhaps? While Hughes' little girl discovers she is herself, Milosz's "corner dreamer" seems to dwindle, shrink into a state of complacent depression. On p. 141, discussing the Lithuanian writer's work, Bachelard writes: "exchanges of animal and human life are frequent in Milosz's novels". I can't help but hear this song in my head "Spiders and Flies" (2001) by Mercury Rev:

"Pharaohs and kings

Favorite queens

Buried with their precious rings

When they lived they loved complete

But in their tombs, I hear them scream

Spiders and flies

Live and die

Six legs to stand on and two wings to fly

I can't remember and I can't decide

What was the season

and the color of your eyes"

Loosely related to these architectural "corners" I mentioned above, or spaces with seemingly internal lives - but with less angst - is David Byrne's musical / architectural project "Playing the Building", at the Battery Maritime Building in New York (2008), and Hayao Miyazaki's film, "Howl's Moving Castle" (2005), pictured below.

At the end of our reading (p. 145-146), Bachelard contrasts the rhetorician or the intellectualist philosopher on one hand, with the daring poet who "brings earth and sky together" (p. 147) on the other. In this, I'm reminded of the French art philosopher, Jacques Ranciere, and his self-proclaimed endeavor to bring together poetry and philosophical thought, though I found some of his work obscure and pedantic - unlike Bachelard's. Perhaps this poetic dimension to work that leans primarily towards philosophy is a trait of Gilles Deleuze's work as well.

It seems that Bachelard manifests the opposition between ‘innovative’ and ‘representational’ thought. While his writing is charged with poetic images and style - we could say they are non-linear - he nevertheless offers a philosophical investigation into the nature of human spaces. He does so, however, without withdrawing himself, his experience, perception, imagination from that enterprise (in this, it is more of the "innovative" type and less "representational"). The result is an investigation that feels intimate, poetic - one that mirrors the author's own uncertainties and digressions, in a way that reminds us perhaps of Paul Valery's quoted by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in "The Phenomenology of Perception" (p. 207).

I'll close with a signature - Bachelard's (or at least one that wikipedia attributes to him). This may be a way to connect back to the hand, the body through the writer's hand. Bachelard started out as a postmaster. As such, he must have seen a lot of letters, and so, in those days, a lot of handwriting. Today, the "space of handwriting" if we can call it so, has shrunk, obviously, at the "hand" of the keyboard. The standard length of any handwritten text today may be less than a paragraph, or the length allowed by the size of a post-it. Handwriting activates a different space - that of the analog - than the keyboard's. The hand moves along the surface connecting to the paper in a much more immediate and physically tangible manner. The hand can be shaky or assertive.

Bien cordialement,

Wassily Kandinsky and the Russian Avant-garde

Thinking in retrospective of Kandinsky's work I recently saw in an exhibition on the Russian Avant-garde and its significance in respect to the principles described in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art.  It is hard to ignore the powerful presence of these paintings in the exhibition rooms, recalling the notion of the rhythms of colors and shapes described by Kandinsky as part of his emerging style. The significance of these rhythms, although probably perceived at various degrees by viewers (I am assuming), it is only interpreted and fully understood by an educated audience, that Kandinsky himself place at the top of the"pyramid"of knowledge.

Kandinsky wrote Concerning the Spiritual in Art in explanation of the principles of his notion of nonobjective painting. The book, almost a manifesto reclaiming spirituality and Kandinsky's personal escape from the oppression of materialism (both in art and spirituality), clearly advocates the importance of an "internal spiritual truth"expressed in art with compositions of colors and abstract forms. 

Kandinsky claims that this "internal truth" can be rendered by expressing a detachment of the inner self from the natural world (intended as the world we inhabit). The abstraction of the forms with which the world is perceived is necessary to achieve this separation from nature, and the more abstracted are these forms, the "more likely ... [is] the inner meaning to be pure." He also claimed that a direct effect on emotions can be evoked with abstract forms and colors tight to perceptions of the visual realm. And interpreted this notion through analogies between the activity of painting and composing music, suggesting that compositions of colors have a direct effect on emotion and evoke mental images and feelings in a similar way musical notes do. Composition of colors and shapes can be, therefore, according to Kandinsky, put together and perceived in a similar way a melody is.

Kandinsky's paintings in the Russian Avant-garde exhibition explicitly exemplified this resonance of colors and abstract forms. And the abstract form most used for this series is the theme of the"oval," a shape apparently adopted often by Kandinsky during this time.

The exhibition's flyer describes these variation in compositions of the oval shape as "enclosures of a space with abstract design occupying the interior of that space alongside." Kandinsky in regard had claimed that (from the exhibition's flyer) "creation is free and must remain so, in other words it must not be subject to any pressure, with the sole exception of the pressure brought to bear by one's interior voice. So, I am not afraid when something is reminiscent of a natural shape." 

It was also suggested shamanic rituals to have had a certain influence in pieces such as Composition n: 217 "Grey Oval"; suggesting that the symbolic shape-the oval-at the perimeter of the interior image, is also the shape of the shamanic drum, representing the cosmos. An idea emphasized by the apparent role of oriental and shamanic culture in the construction of notions of avant-garde cosmology in Russia. 

The theosophic thought, overall driving Kandinsky's search for spirituality, is particularly felt in the painting Black Spot-because of its association, the exhibition's flyer suggested, with satanic forces and with the "cosmological effects of the black hole."

Black Spot:

Composition n.217 "Grey Oval" 

Two Ovals

 

White Oval

Objecthood....

As I worked my way through Michael Fried’s Art and Objecthood, I thought he built a strong case for the ascendancy of Literalist or Minimalist art, and it’s rejection of modernist painting and sculpture. The article was written in 1967, and refers heavily to Donald Judd’s  ‘Specific Objects’ from 1965, and Robert Morris’ ‘Notes on Sculpture’. Fried starts out by stating “the enterprise known as Minimal Art is largely ideological-it seeks to declare and occupy a position, one that can be formulated in words and in fact has been so formulated by some of it’s leading practitioners”.

Last semester in 282A, Keith Daly and I presented on Pierre Bourdieu and his theory of artistic field, and Fried seems to be referring to this concept when he says “It’s seriousness is vouched for by the fact that it is in relation both to modernist painting and modernist sculpture that literalist art defines or locates the position it aspires to occupy”.

Fried moves through a series of ideas that describe literalist art, often quoting Judd and Morris.  “A painting is nearly an entity, one thing, and not the indefinable sum of a group of entities and references”,” the shape is the object: at any rate, what secures the wholeness of the object is the singleness of the shape. What is at stake in this conflict is whether the paintings or objects in question are experienced as paintings or as objects, and what decides their identity as ‘painting’ is their confronting of the demand they hold as shapes”.

On page 152-3, Fried introduces his concepts of  ‘presence’ (‘presence can be conferred by size or the look of non-art), and ‘theater’. He asks “what is it about objecthood as projected by the literalists that makes it, if only from the perspective of recent modernist painting, antithetical to art?” At this point, I began wondering if I had misread him, as he seems now to become more subtly critical of the literalists. He says “the literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing other than a plea for a new genre of theater, and theater is now the negation of art. Literalist sensibility is theatrical because, to begin with, it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work”.

I did some searching and found an article by Aaron Davis, “What you See is What you See”. Aaron seems to agree with my new view that Fried is anti-literalist. He says “Fried mounts a critique of Minimalist Art suggesting that it amounts to nothing more than an abstraction of theatricality that marks both the death (or suspension) fo subjectivity as he sees it. Further, he argues that Literalism also provides a nemesis that Modern painting and sculpture must ‘defeat’ so that verisimilitude as he sees it, may prevail”.

In class today, I’d like to see how the rest of the class read the article, and also to dissect what Fried really means by ‘theatricality'.