PASSAGES

Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods. (An October Book). Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2004.  xv + 455 pp.  $35.00  ISBN:0-262-06242-9

PROLOGUE

I select these artists and not others because they focus crucial topoi of modernist art: primitivism, purity, technology, mental illness, complications of masculinity and femininity, cracks in the symbolic order.  Many other figures could be discussed equally as well … Yet my figures also permit insights into the intersections of modernism and psychoanalysis that others do not; and some simply intrigue me in ways that I cannot fully explain.

Prosthetic Gods, note 1, page 341.

Thus the scene is set, as a self-fulfilling investigation into the notion of the ‘self’ and the persistence of ideals of ‘origin,’ Hal Foster identifies those artists which will permit the insights he seeks.  Through his ‘psychoanalytical’ approach Foster seeks out the subconscious desires and suppressions within modernist art.  Foster is defensive about both his method, and his selection of artists, and rightly so.  Here are the usual suspects of modernism, Gauguin, Kirchner, Marinetti, Klee, Ernst, et alia, et cetera, couched in the most conventional of psychoanalytical terms.  Indeed Foster seems unwilling to take risks in terms of his approach or his carefully defined terrain.

Foster’s theorising is good and bad.  It is good because there is not enough of it today, and  his annoyance with this situation is endearing, explaining part of his motivation for writing is “out of pique with all the phobias about theoretical work …” (p.xiv).   Yet, it is also bad, since it is limiting theory, Foster is scotomised by his own schemas, for all the irony that might entail.  His inability to see, through the scales, can make his work read as deterministic.   There is something incredibly retentive in his construction of analytical schema, with an apparent need to explain the factors which produce the apotropaic works he traverses.  Somehow Jay Appleton came to mind, with his quest to find an explanation of why humans prefer park-like landscapes. Appleton’s theorising led him to the reduction of the “experience” of landscape into notions of “prospect / refuge” or “habitat”, such that “… aesthetic pleasure in landscape derives from the observer experiencing an environment favourable to the satisfaction of his biological needs.”  And therefore, because “the ability to see without being seen is an intermediate step in the satisfaction of these needs, the capacity of an environment to ensure the achievement of this becomes a more immediate source of aesthetic satisfaction.”[1]  Thus sociobiologically, he suggests, this is why humans prefer picturesque type landscapes.  Yet all humans don’t, and they haven’t always.  In Medieval times no-one wanted to go and sit in the trees and admire the view.  Therefore such theorising undoes itself, and Foster also falls into the trap of seeking a much too transparent connection between representation and subjectivity.

ACT ONE: ON THE DISSECTING TABLE

Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, (III, ii, 350)

The dissecting table is a place of potential fruitful encounters, of surrealistic syntheses, where such chance meetings might issue forth something of beauty.   And Foster’s familiarity with the terrain of modern art allows for some clever juxtapositions, such as the move from the Medusas of Canova and Caravaggio, with all of their attendant phallic paraphernalia, in a master stroke to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty.  Yet, Foster is also very familiar with his analytical devices, overfamiliar, such that he seems to have become blind to them.  Thus he cannot see that his dissecting table is also a place where things are dismembered, probed, and there is a clinical after taste, a bad taste, through the removal of entrails that this entails, and ultimately all that such analyses offer is offal.  

However, modernity is the culture of spectatorship, the society of the spectacle, and is much enamoured with the dissecting table and its compulsive beauty of death and decay.   While Foster traverses this domain, he also transgresses, voyaging through a voyeuristic realm which resonates with the escalating interest in ‘outsider art’ and ‘outsider music.’    The clash of aesthetics and ethics is troublesome, particularly in the domain of surrealism.  The pervasive perversion and seductive subversion that is exhibited is indeed the very stuff of this repulsive attraction.    The sub-rosa glow creates the very (an)aesthetic that allows us to suspend our scruples and indulge the other parts of our selves, delighting in the undoing of the moral order at Maldoror, smelling the monstrous flowers of the torture garden.  At the same time this very numbing can have regrettable consequences, after all, when better than while anaesthetised to pluck out one’s heart?

ACT TWO: THROUGH THE WINDOW

Running through Foster’s work is the constant concern with the play of optics, the visible and the invisible, presenting, for example the iconic conical Lacanian can anecdote, which diagrams the way in which both the subject and the object are seer and seen.  The notion of windows and transparency is part of the “crucial topoi” of modernist art, and modernism in general.  The interiority and exteriority of the public and private realms, so embedded in the work of Loos, and in the writings of Walter Benjamin, resonating on levels which are at once spatial, social and psychic.  The window is in essence an opening out of the interiorisation which came about through the mass-produced book.  For Baudelaire, the window defined the spaces in which “life is lived, life is dreamed, life is suffered.”[2]

However, the symbolic currency of transparency within modernity allies optics with objectivity, and windows are associated with the detached ocularcentrism founded on the reception of linear perspective as a “natural” rather than constructed phenomenon. The very exposure brought about through extreme transparency threatens the sanctity of the individual.  Kandinsky famously painted out the extensive street-facing windows in his dwelling at the Bauhaus, as he did not want people “staring” at him.  This notion of exposure and the oppression of subjectivity in modernity is transposed into the domain of analysis, and it seems that Foster’s work suffers from this tell tale mode. 

Exposure through transparency not only threatens to erode the individual’s domain, but also that of the mystical.   Following the conventions of modernity, Foster also overlooks mystical dimensions to the works he discusses, where the Other is only okay if it is a primitive god, an ancient deity.  Essentially, mythology is admissible, but theology is not.   The limitations of Foster’s terrain are thrown into sharp relief at such times.  How much more radical it would be, for example, to interface Marcel Duchamp’s Etant donnés with Jean-Luc Marion’s Etant Donné, to look beyond the orchestration of Cartesian castration, and into the invisible.  The perspectival games of Duchamp offer a possibility of looking towards a sublimity of sorts, perhaps to contemplate Pascal rather than Descartes, and ponder that “melancholy geometry.” It is here, after all, where “The perceptible mark, the tangible sign of divine omnipotence is that the imagination gets lost in the thought of the infinite: the impossibility of perceiving the infinite dynamics of nature occasions a ‘properly’ sublime sensation.”[3]

ACT THREE: ON THE COUCH

Through the construction of his corpus, “my modernists”, “my artists”, Foster creates a flavour of modernism which is long since passed.  The question has to be asked, and who better to ask it than Hélène Cixous: “Where is She?”[4]  Are there no Prosthetic Goddesses?  However “desperate” these male artists might be, this is still an extension of the modernist masculinist discourse.  While on one hand Foster claims to be “complicating” the dominant discourse of the masculine, he is also complicit.   Why not Leonora Carrington instead of, as well as, Max Ernst?  Where is Frida Kahlo?  And what of Hannah Höch, one of the very earliest Dadaists, whose alarming montages are every bit as relevant to any arguments about technology, primitivism and sexuality as motivations for the transgressions of art?  (One needs only to call to mind the image of “Beautiful Girl” (1920) with its juxtaposition of technology, consumerism, and the feline feminine, or “Monument 1,” (1924) (see below) where the primitive African mask is hybridised with the “modern” German female.)  

As equally powerful apotropaic topoi, Höch’s work has the potential to radically extend the scope beyond Foster’s usual suspects.   So, is Foster, as Cixous teases, “afraid of us”?  It is true that many of the male artists are far from heroic, and we sense the pathos of the prosthesis, yet, the work remains a product of a one point perspective which offers no new viewpoints.  And not only does Foster turn away from women artists, but also theorists.  While one would imagine that any book that seeks to extend ideas on psychoanalysis into the domain of art would acknowledge the work of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, they are notably absent.  Hélène Cixous manages a fleeting appearance, but there is so much that could be gained from the connections to the work on the psychoanalytical by all of these writers.

There is a sense of déjà-vu with this work, and some of it literally has been seen before, as a group of essays which are primarily re-publications and re-workings of pieces already in publication, dating from 1991 through to 2003.  Foster’s tried and true is now tired and needing something new.  The theme of the psychoanalytical and the social could lead him to, for example, Damien Hirst, with his shocking toxic sampling of the pharmaceutical, the psychological and the surgical.  And Christine Borland arguably offers much more to rub oneself up against in terms of the production of apotropaic pieces.  Indeed there is connection begging to be made between the image of Katharina Detzel ‘with a stuffed dummy of her own making’ (fig. 5.1, p. 192, see below) and Christine Borland’s Phantom Twins, from the 1997 Turner Prize shortlist (see bottom image).

Paradoxically, Foster’s work, while seeking to reveal the construction of the self within the modern art discourses of technology and primitivism, is in itself a terrain of omissions and elisions.  The question, Where is She?, with reference to the feminine, (and perhaps even, Where is He?),  serve to highlight some of the limitations of the map that Foster continues to follow.  There is a sense that much is repressed in Foster’s work.  A complementary supplement is awaited with anticipation …

A version of this review appeared in the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 6(3), Fall 2005

[1] Jay Appleton,.  The Experience of Landscape.  Chichester, England:  John Wiley & Sons, 1975, p.73

[2] Charles Baudelaire, Poesie e prose, cited in Renzo Dubbini, Geography of the Gaze: Urban and Rural Vision in Early Modern Europe,  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002,, p.206.

[3] Louis Marin, ‘On the Sublime, Infinity, Je Ne Sais Quoi,‘ in Denis Hollier (ed) A New History of French Literature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989, p.344.

[4] Hélène Cixous, “The Newly Born Woman”, in Susan Sellers (ed.), The Hélène Cixous Reader (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 36-55 (37).

The Scene and the Unseen:

Regarding Representation

Painters see gardens as an issue of values, of colour, light and perspective.  This is their right.  But there is another way to make gardens which, for the sake of clarity I would call the gardener’s way.  This is difficult to explain in words, because it is something very closely linked to the earth, to water, to the sap of plants, to the air, to sunlight, to blowflies and worms … something non-verbal and unreasonable. … It cannot be defined by arguments, or by a ruler and compass.  Seen in ground-plan and section form, one of these gardens is very little.  I should like to avoid the obligation of drawing it or tracing it out, even with a reed, scratching the earth among manure and flies.  Drawn on paper, the garden is an X-ray: the lips, the smile, the clear gaze, the skin, its tepidity, all of this is missing.

Rubió i Tudurí [1]

‘Representation’ presupposes the visual.[2]  And the visual presupposes the visible.  Representation is therefore at once problematic for a compelling conception of landscape. Yet, the predilection for seductive representation remains a driving force in contemporary landscape architecture education and practice.  This visuality is subsequently translated into form, and the impoverished experience of landscape is reinforced, on and on.  Authentic landscape experience is not solely the visual.   Aesthetics is not simply about what is seen.  Aesthesis originally referred to a taking in of the world, a phenomenological in-breath, a sensational experience.

I. The Mirror and the Screen

The primacy of the visual, and the falling away of the extravisual, is an eighteenth-century legacy.  Perhaps the most effective evocation of this is the Claude Glass, a small, polished convex mirror used to transmute the environment into landscape, into scenery.  The convexity forces the landscape into a repoussoir or framed composition, while the dark colour of the speculum produces a reduced spectrum, mimicking the sepia tones of the paintings of Claude Lorraine.  The expansiveness of the landscape, in time and space, is reduced to something to be held in the hand. The detachment from the landscape thus occurs not solely through these transmutations and reductions, but also through the mode of looking, where the glass was held out in front of the viewer, in order to view the landscape over their shoulder, behind them. 

The Claude Glass was a compositional application of  convex, black mirrors, which had a dark history extending back into antiquity.  Mirrors of polished coal or obsidian, or with black tains, produced images that were indistinct, enigmatic and shadowy.   Used as sites for divination, a place for sigilistic vigils, the glasses were seen as being haunted by a metaphysical presence.  These spectral manifestations were evicted through the adoption of the black glass by the followers of the Picturesque.  Instead the glass became a tool for viewing the landscape, an optical device, instrumental in the editing of the world.

There are uncanny echoes between the Claude Glass and the virtual world as experienced through the interface of the computer, most distinctively a laptop.    Like the entrapment within the scotomatous scopic realm of the Claude Glass, valorized within the picturesque’s reign, the current passion for seeing the landscape in the screen of a computer forces the continuation of ocularcentrism.  Within landscape architecture programmes, “visualisation” is one of the commonly taught courses.   (There is even a “Claude Glass” function on Photoshop). While animated ‘fly-throughs’ and ‘drive-bys’ might be accompanied by a pulsating sound track, the question of a re-presentation of phenomenological richness remains.

The Claude Glass as ‘mirror’, and the laptop as ‘screen’, embody two recurrent tropes of representation that are conceived of as ‘black boxes,’ in the sense of over-looking the intricate nature of the body in the world.  The presence of other dimensions, beyond a simple flattening of three or four dimensions upon a screen or mirror, is a consuming problem. The mirror induces paradoxes of recognition and illusion, for example in Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage.  The screen similarly embodies conflicting theories of representation, from the veiling of being hidden by a screen, to the revealing of being screened, or projected. The challenge, in critical practice, is to revive the darkness of the mirror and screen, as sites of revelation and obscuration. 

Image: In which Narcissus and Echo are threatened by a Claude Glass and a Laptop causing them to ponder further upon the nature of representation.

Collage: J. Bowring, based on Claude Lorraine’s Landscape with Narcissus and Echo, 1644

II.  The Tinder Box, the Smelling Salts, and the Blindfold

Through reinforcing the predilection for visuality, the discussion of representation is a disabling topic.   On one hand the challenge must become a phenomenological one, to redirect the experience of landscape beyond the visual into multi-sensory responses.  Yet, even phenomenology cannot fully answer the question of what it is to engage with the landscape, it becomes a metaphysical question, one that seeks dimensions beyond the realm of the senses, into the intellect, and beyond.  It is here that the mirror begins to look back at us, and this gaze is one that is not about visuality, but an engagement with landscape in its fullest and most truly sublime sense.

While the Claude Glass and the computer screen might represent two black-box tropes, or devices for representation, the proposal is to add three further metaphorical aids to the landscape architect’s toolkit for re-presenting the landscape as an experiential sensorium, for the re-claiming of landscape architecture as a critical practice:

Tinder Box, for fires within.

A small box which holds all of the essentials required for starting a fire.

Fire as an aesthetic object, opens landscape experience out onto a different plane.  The failure of the visual to re-present fire, as with other ethereal phenomena, has obscurred this play of passion within the imagination of the landscape.  Landscape architects do not often play with fire, yet, metaphorically, metaphysically, it is a profound fund of experience.  Lightning as celestial fire brings to mind landscapes such as Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field in New Mexico, USA, a place that is in most frequently encountered as flattened out onto the pages of a book, represented without all of those aspects which are its phenomenological breathing, becoming a mere X-ray of experience.

Smelling Salts, to bring us to our senses.

An aromatic preparation of carbonate of ammonia, used as a restorative when feeling faint.  

The potency of smell, and the allied sense of taste, was crystallised in Marcel Proust’s intense recall of memories triggered by a simple cake dipped in tea [3], and Gaston Bachelard’s recollection of how the smell of raisins connected him with a cupboard from his childhood.[4]   At the Hamanako Hanahaku international gardening expo in Japan in 2004, Kuryu Architect  and Associates, Masayuki Kakiuchi and Tadashi Saito designed a pavilion made entirely of cedar scraps within metal cages.  The pavilion became a space which was both peaceful and imbued with the scent of the cedar chips.[5]   Giuseppe Penone’s project Respirare l’Ombra (To Breathe the Shadow) created an aromatic and acoustically profound space through lining gallery walls with cages of bay leaves.  The installation was first installed in a castle in Avignon in 1999, and has been re-exhibited at the Tate Modern (significantly in the Rothko Room, one of the most potent proponents of ‘nothingness’, which is to say, everything), and in Barcelona.  Reviews of the exhibition comment on the effects of the aromatic space upon visitors, instilling a sense of calm and tranquillity, such that ‘viewers’ would simply sit upon the floor of the galleries in silence.[6]

Blindfold, so that we might see.

A strip of dark cloth to be tied tightly around the eyes, thereby excluding the visual domain.

 It is impossible to know just how blinding the visual is until it is removed.  Suddenly the other senses, including the invisible presences beyond surface` phenomena, come forwards.  This is a necessary defence against the hegemony of the visual.  The challenge is to undo the link between the visual and the real, and the visual and ‘truth’.  This is no small task, as the connections between seeing and knowing are entwined in language.  Even the ability to divine messages on other channels is linked with sight, as in clairvoyance, or clear-seeing.  However, the disruption of this connection throws light on how much might be revealed by not seeing.  Democritus, after all, wanted to blind himself, so that he could see, and the painter Gustave Moreau, said “I believe only in what I cannot see.” 

A landscape opens on to the unknown.  It is genuinely the place as an opening to a “taking place” of the unknown.  It is not so much the imitative representation of a given place; it is rather the presentation of the absence of a given presence.   

Jean-Luc Nancy[7]

A version of this paper was recently published in Kerb 14

[1] Rubió i Tudurí quoted in Eduard Bru (1997). Three on the Site / Tres en el Lugar.  Barcelona: Actar, 26-27.  (Rubió i Tudurí’s words are from the 1931 report on the Duchess of Gramont’s garden in Vignoleno, Italy, planned in 1931, and originally published in Arquitectura i Urbanisme, Barcelona).

[2] Although ‘representation’ is a term of many senses (the OED supplies some eight definitions of the word), the common connection is with the sense of an “image, likeness, or reproduction in some manner of a thing.”

[3]  Marcel Proust (1996). Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 1: Swann’s Way.  Trans C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmarton.  (Originally published in French as Á la Recherche du temps perdu, Du côté de chez Swann, in 1913).  New York: Vintage, 51.

[4] Gaston Bachelard. (1958) The Poetics of Space.  Boston: Beacon Press, 13.

[5] See Hamanako Hanahaku, Works of Kuryu’s Team.  (2004).  Japan Architect, 56, Yearbook 2004, 47.

[6] See, for example, David Frankel, ‘Giuseppe Penone’, ArtForum, November 2000.

[7] Jean-Luc Nancy. (2002/2003) Landscape with a Disorienting Change of Scenery.  Pages Paysages,  No.9, 174-181, 178.

The Sound of Shadows: On the Speaking of Things

“To the deep-seeing eye, caves are screams.”[1]

 ”… the Shadow Cave projects both the exteriority of the cosmos out there and affirms the interiority of the mind within.”[2]

 ”…the poetic remaking of the world is not via the silent word, nor even via the materialisation of the spirit in breathing, but consists in the act of sounding.”[3]

“All the being of the world, if it dreams, dreams that it is speaking.”[4]

The Sounds of Shadows drift at the edges of known space.  The penumbral rumble of the most intangible of presences.  To listen, seeing, to challenge one’s self to admit this apprehension, to step to the edge of the ‘rational’ … to hear this surrational susurration.   

Image: J. Bowring, May 2006, Sydney.

[1] Victor Hugo, ‘What the Mouth of the Shadow Says’, in Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response (trans Anne A Davenport).  Fordham University Press, New York, 43.

[2] Eugene Yuejin Wang (2005).  Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China.  University of Washington Press, Seattle, 296.

[3] Paul Carter (2002), ‘Speaking Volumes: Gaston Bachelard and the Showing of the Word.’  In Leon van Schaik (ed) Poetics in Architecture, Wiley Academy, New York, 13.

[4] Gaston Bachelard (1971 [1960]) The Poetics of Reverie, Beacon Press, Boston, 188.

Melancholic Dispositions: Landscape, Architecture, Photography, Phenomenology

Melancholy is an aesthetic sensibility, a love of loss, of longing.  Within the phenomenology of photography the distance becomes shaped in light and dark, sculpted, palpable.  Infused with the ache of absence, photographs of landscape and architecture are portals to the fugitive moments of melancholy.  The paradox of the desire for distance, for longing, is an echo of the Sublime’s love of awe, a necessary fear.  Photography becomes the liminal zone that is the surface of phenomenological condensation, remembering the root of ‘aesthetic,’ in aisthesis, in the breathing-in of the world.  Photographs are a site of relay between invisible and visible, a ‘crossing of the visible’.  Inherent in the work of Michael Kenna (English, based in USA), Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, based in USA), Patrick Reynolds (New Zealand) and Anne Noble (New Zealand) is a profound sense of the metaphysics of melancholy.  Working in black and white, the images sculpt light and darkness, intuiting senses.  Noble’s photographs are “sliced from blocks of sheer light,” and Kenna’s “insist[] on the existence of a phantom presence within reality.”  The photographer, like the painter, contributes to the phenomenological rendering of the visible, where in the words of Jean-Luc Marion, “He deepens a seam or fault line, in the night of the inapparent, in order to extract, lovingly or more often by force, with strokes and patches of color, blocks of the visible.”  There is a spirituality which saturates these surfaces, as in Noble’s photographs where: “black the extreme absence of light evoking the darkness of suspicion, doubt, despair … white the overwhelming presence of light, announcing revelation, exaltation, bliss”, and that white is apprehended as a “spiritual value.”  In Reynolds’ work, “Vision is burdened with a corporeal melancholy,” and in Kenna’s there is “an aura of intense melancholy,” both hovering within the ether of perception.  Against the grain of technique, Sugimoto’s out-of-focus architectural images and Reynolds’ vignetted shots from a disposable camera, bring form to the foreground.  The reduction of technique is a means of bypassing artificial nostalgia, avoiding the mannered use of introduced sepia tones or distressing of the surface which are often used to, as Noble puts it, “hurry an image into pathos.”  Instead these photographs, these sites, suggest a melancholy topology, inhabiting the zone of the subconscious, calling to mind both the reverie of Bachelard, and the dreamwork of Freud.  In reverie, in dreams, in the liminal zone of the photograph, the double pull of melancholy is felt.  At once pushing and pulling, intimate and immense, a withdrawal from the world of things and presencing of that very world, and within such doubling a realisation of what Bachelard has termed a “penumbral ontology.”  It is within this penumbral place that the phenomenology of melancholy dwells.

References

Bachelard, Gaston. (1969). The Poetics of Space.  New York: Beacon Press.

Jenkinson, Megan.  (1981)  Anne Noble: Landscapes & Portraits.  Art New Zealand, 20: 54-55.

Keith, Sheridan.  (1983).  Anne Noble’s Wanganui.  Art New Zealand, 27: 24-25.

Kenna,  Michael; Bunnell, Peter C.; Bernhard, Ruth.  (2002).  Michael Kenna: A Twenty Year Retrospective.  Tuscon: Nazzraeli Press.

Marion, Jean-Luc.  (2004).  The Crossing of the Visible.  Trans. James K.A. Smith.  (originally in French, La Croisée du Visible, 1996, Presses Universitaires de France).  Stanford: Stanford University Press.

 Paton, Justin; (ed). (2001). Anne Noble: States of Grace.  Dunedin: Dunedin Public Art Gallery; Wellington: Victoria University Press.

Smith, Allan.  (1992). Romanticist and Symbolist Tendencies in Recent New Zealand Photography.  Art New Zealand, 64: 80-84, 111.