Psychic Geographical Society Art Bulletins
(Photo: Meryl Gross)
3: Shiny Worlds
Yakov Rabinovich
The Trilobite’s Amusing Dream
Newspaper headlines, machine parts, mass produced objects, media icons, off-the-rack prêt-a-voyer artifacts — from Duchamp’s ready-mades on, the enshrinement of such in a museum causes the uninstructed viewer to bristle at once. How could this painfully ordinary detritus of manufactured culture, these cullings from the garbage heap of the immediately obsolete, possibly be art?
This view misses immediately what is most meaningful in such objects. Though, being infinitely reproducible, they lack all uniqueness in space, they have a counterbalancing specialness in terms of time. Any viewer can place to the decade even a hat or a hubcap. Mass produced products, in their instant obsolescence, are, in the popular phrase “dated.” We should take this label literally: they possess intense temporal identity, an unparalleled historical particularity of which a petrified trilobite could only dream. Instant fossils. Just add money. The same applies to photography, equally reproducible, mechanically produced, and even more poignantly fixed in the moment of its manufacture. Photography cannot be judged by the criteria one applies to paintings, because its goal is different. Photography reveals the poetry of time. Thence the boredom of photos of nebulas: these lack expressive value because the things themselves are, from our point of view timeless. Seen directly through the telescope, we carry in ourselves the dimension of time that gives them interest, and experience through the star-view a sense of thrilling insignificance. We feel our mortality as a celestial phenomenon.
Whereas pre-Renaissance art typically expressed the particular symbolically, through the universal forms provided by mythology and religion, the modern world has discovered an equal gift for raising the particular to the level of the universal. The technique is easily seen in literature where such historical characters as Aristophanes’ Cleon or Socrates, Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Joyce’s Leopold Bloom are clearly contingent characters become mythic figures. The contemporaries who populate Dante’s worlds show the same principle in play, which is what makes the divine poem a comedy.
All art achieves its beauty by a balance of freedom and necessity. In tragedy, the element of necessity is without, and called fate. (In modern tragedy, where fate takes the form of character, it is still beyond the conscious control of the protagonist, and so functionally external to him.) The freedom which is achieved by the hero’s struggle with divine or psychic determinisms exists internally, in the hero’s realization, hard-won resignation and acceptance.
Comedy reverses this relation. Here the hero is “constant as the Northern star,” ever and only more himself, while outward circumstances show a capricious fluidity like that of human consciousness. Thus Fielding’s marvellous insight that “Repetition is the essence of Comedy.” The comic hero’s “true, fix’d and resting quality” offers no tragic interior tension, but rather the only-too-durable optimism of an invincibly shallow protagonist. At last, someone in whom one may have absolute confidence! The security of the comic hero’s inner balance, his unsinkability, yields us our relaxation into laughter. Necessity is incarnate in a fixed figure of fun.
This is why true comedy is never mean, why it is instantly involving but never distressing. The Socrates of Aristophanes is no more the merely historical philosopher than Andy Warhol’s soup can is the item on the supermarket shelf. Both are schematized, made two dimensional, in the direction of the symbolic or archetypal. Were it otherwise, we would have a slander or an infringement of copyright.
In biological rather than literary terms, the necessary and predetermined world is that of nature. The individual rushes about irrelevantly differentiating himself from the species which alone is immortal. There is no comedy in nature — a dismal insight, but at least it raises comdy to the dignity of an unnatural act.
Now Pop art takes its comic heroes from the unnatural natural world of the manufactured. The famous soup can has an air of timeless necessity because of its multiplicity. This is the key to Warhol’s unparalleled fascination with the series and the multiple. One might see it as the out of control fecundity of a fully artificial nature. The strange sexuality of the nature morte (if we want to stress the trace element of Surrealism). One could characterize the Warhol multiples as the species of his interior world. Art does imitate nature, after all.
(Some will here object that whole Warhol “factory” concept was primarily an Apache gesture aimed at what he called “art fantasies,” the exalted notions people have about art and artists. But we should be wary of attributing to Warhol that kind of earnestness. One would be on safer, though no less superficial ground, if one maintained his motivation was to multiply saleable products. Warhol himself claimed this was the case, that he was not engaged in Art but “art business,” yet there is far more humor than truth in his words.)
Remember that nature is, itself, the great exemplar of mass-production, and whether it yields water-lilies or irate badgers, nature produces no “one-offs.” Yet, unlike the creations of nature, those of industry are temporally determinate. Today’s duck is the same as the one we see on the wall of an Egyptian tomb, but the Campbell’s concoction is best enjoyed before the printed date.
Andy was Cool
When the manufactured is taken up by art in place of the organic, and the strip mall is rendered as an impressionist landscape, then a cool irony replaces the inhuman coldness of nature. Here we may appreciated the affectless, unengaged, deliberately shallow “cool” of Andy Warhol’s public persona. It is an extension of his subject matter. His impenetrability is that of comedy’s fixedly grinning mask. Warhol was indeed “a fellow of infinite jest.”
This, of course, falls far short of exhausting Warhol’s depth. His distance obliquely hints at his neurotic guardedness and dread of intimacy, which gave a wistfulness to his silk-screened treatments of unattainably glamorous people like Marilyn, that archetype of emotional and erotic largesse. With similar reticence, he never discussed the painterly and selective treatment of his mass produced subjects that made them nearly abstractions, achieving aesthetic sublimity in the midst of triviality. Though he was very fond of referring to this or that individual as “a beauty,” and he had a special interest in the Hollywood and social icons of female loveliness, he never discussed aesthetic beauty, of which he was an indisputable if not consistent master. Even in conversation, he was scrupulous to note the beautiful only in the particular.
In the landscape of Pop art, the element of the eternal and necessary is parodied by the temporary and selected. The counterbalancing element of freedom finds its place (as in all comedy) on the periphery. In literature, this is the plot; in art, what frames the composition is quite literally, a frame. The composition itself, the arrangement of the images, their texture and treatment, even the simple act of placing the work in a gallery, in these we see the freedom of an art which raises the object from a merely true reproduction to a beautiful one — albeit beautiful in its absurdity. But despite the clues, clear as road signs, how few have gotten Duchamp’s clearly labeled jokes. Though some of them, like R. Mutt’s porcelain, are perhaps more a dig at the idea of the enshrined art object, the full development of Pop is already there in germ, and the entire comedy is hinted at in Duchamp’s mysterious grin. Oracular Marcel! Propounder of eternity’s own riddles. Everyone hears his laughter, and none are angrier than those who can’t figure out how to share it.
Perhaps the most valuable spiritual knowledge to be drawn from Pop art is the potential beauty of the artificial world. Once one has grasped this, the neon sign in a pizza parlor may disclose in its play of gas, glass and electrified pastel color, the exuberance which is beauty. The Pop artists have performed for us the same service as Van Gogh, before whom no one saw the majesty in that common weed, the sunflower. How one wishes that one’s friends, who trundle off to Zen centers and spiritual retreats in hopes of gaining a glimpse of the Real, would make the less troublesome trip to the Whitney or the Modern, and learn there to see the splendors hidden on every supermarket shelf, uncritically dismissed.
Artificial Paradise
Anarchism, Communism, the whole stuffed tumbril of left political “isms,” now amount to Luddism — the doctrine that all who work should wage war against labor-saving machinery. These systems date from the nineteenth century, and represent different strategies for arresting or directing the tide of industrialization. Today they’re as implausible as a stove-pipe hat. Technology, mass-production, popular culture, these make up the world we actually inhabit. To this practical consideration I can add the moral one that this world, of packaged meat and recorded music, is as far-reaching and factual as gravity. And like gravity, it may at times be good or bad, but it can never be good or evil.
You choose to be a tourist or a pilgrim, a colonialist or an ethnographer, a stupid consumer or a canny shopper, but you really can’t blame the plane that flew you to this pass. Access to everything is, if anything, liberating, a new age of exploration, not a closing of the map — for the individual there is always another terra incognita (unless you’re a know-it-all). The Leftist criticism that access flattens and homogenizes all real differences is a half-truth: the differences it annihilates are not the only real ones — unless we confine ourselves to what flatters a nineteenth-century sense of the picturesque, and automatically invalidate anything that has ever appeared on TV. Our dismay at the very real, and quite global, death of traditional cultures should not blind us to the traditional arts now being born. As Napoleon said when taken to task for his want of illustrious ancestors, “I am an ancestor.”
Religious dogmas are even sillier now than the political ones. The “religions of the book” came into being in the first wave of modernism, the rise of cities and international trade around the beginning of the Common Era. Though religious experience is a human given, its domestication within a creed and a church was only possible in the context of a walkable localized life that no longer exists. The industrialized world, which gave us the means to be as individual as we dare, and especially via the Internet to gratify our every taste, has atomized us. Communal experience, even so common a one as shared public transportation is, proportional to auto travel, as rare as a quilting bee. We have lost the art of community life, and attempts to revive it on scheduled days in a house of worship do nothing to mitigate our selfishness — see how pastors are treated! If we are authentically religious we must be hermits and wanderers, traveling far as grail knights to find our fellowship.
One cannot be an anarchist or a Sufi today. Nor for that matter, can one be (except by accident) a recognized artist in any field. There is no longer any cultural establishment, nor any avante-garde. Not only is no one minding the store, the store closed its doors a hundred years ago. The twentieth-century art market was the final clearance sale.
But if you can’t be politically engaged or spiritually committed or acclaimed for your art, how can an earnest twenty-something hope to be taken seriously?
Being taken seriously is still being “taken.”
Hopefully this has helped to clear the air of the second-hand smoke left by the Luddite panic-reaction to our first glimpse of modernity’s “dark satanic mills.” But when the smoke clears, what if there’s nothing left? Not the worst outcome. Jackson Bentley asks T. E. Lawrence in the famous film,
“What is it that attracts you personally to the desert?”
“It’s clean.”
And our desert turns out to be richly symboled. The world we actually and deliberately inhabit is mainly made of telephone conversations, movies, long novels and manufactured things. An artificial paradise, yes, but not an unnatural one: no man-made substance comes into being outside of nature.
As paradises go, ours is an uncommonly real one. Actual as fabric, malleable as metal, pleasing as plastic. It is a realm of intelligible emblems, where sound perfectly echoes sense, where the name and the thing are perfectly one, where the physical thing is the archetype, as in Kleenex, Xerox and Coca-Cola. To find our way through this dense forest of meanings, we need at least philosophy, and ideally theology. And we must read what physically lies before us, however fine the print, not dismiss the poem because it takes the form of a label or a slogan (“Raid Kills Bugs Dead.”)
Nothing has been lost, but all has transmigrated. As Whitman said of the Classical Muse,
I say I see, my friends, if you
do not, the illustrious emigré, (having it is true in her day, although the
same, changed, journey'd considerable,)
Making directly for this rendezvous, vigorously clearing a path
for herself, striding through the confusion,
By thud of machinery and shrill steam-whistle undismay'd,
Bluff'd not a bit by drain-pipe, gasometers, artificial
fertilizers,
Smiling and pleas'd with palpable intent to stay,
She's here, install'd amid the kitchen ware!
The Heaven of Glass
We have access now to all recorded time and more of space than we can imagine the measurements of. Through lenses we see and record what is, to the naked mortal eye, invisible: we peer through a Gnostic stargate. The universal culture and limitless knowledge of which the Enlightenment dreamed has been realized. Words and particularly images are the fabric of our existence. Even money has become, as it were, spiritualized into pure concept, no longer metal but mental, globally and instantly catalyzing every kind of exchange. Even buildings, the archetypes of solidity, are now more the creations of mind than of mortar, feats of pure engineering and design, visibly dematerialized by their ever greater incorporation of glass.
Glass is as close as a physical thing can come to being light itself. And gloss, the effulgence of glass, is likewise an emblem of transfiguration, of all things made new.
Red steak, shrink-wrapped to glitter with intrinsic numinosity, labeled with wistful hint of time’s passage (the sell-by date.)
Kleenex boxes in infinite patterned variety to coordinate Zen-precise with any decor.
Advertising itself, which amplifies reality to the power of ten, revealing the intrinsic shininess of any activity, however mundane.
Lawn flamingos, eternal as Egyptian hieroglyphs, more than mortal in their pinkness, durability and obedience (so long as your command is “stay!”)
Anti-perspirant, transmuting man’s mortal condition (people stink); and scented! (so you can stink wierder.)
That modern Flora, “the lady in the tutt-frutti hat,” Carmen Miranda, her countless echo-avatars, the Land O Lakes Girls, the Sunmaid Raisin Girl, all the way back to the Mucha Maiden proclaiming Chocolate Ideal.
All the Pop artists are prophets of this living polytheism, but none more so than James Rosenquist, the wall-dog and public heterosexual, who outdid in exuberance (exuberance is beauty) the brilliant but faintly dismal Warhol, art-god and fey illustrator of ladies shoes.
Yet the antipode and dark twin of exultant Pop is not Warhol but Minimalism. But that is a tale for another night.
