On Sculpture
It seems to be that one of the defining characteristics in the dialectic of avant garde art history is a response of aggression, in its various forms, to the supposedly subversive psychologies made manifest in avant grade art circles. Examples are extensive; suffice it to recall the riots and fist fights that accounted for the public reaction to the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring, Dame Edith Sitwell’s response to the publication of William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch, Louis Leroy’s review of the first Impressionist exhibition, hostile public reaction to Fluxus “happenings”, or, more recently, the attack on Duchamp's Fountain by a man in Paris or a similar attack on a Clifford Still painting in Denver, Colorado, earlier this year. Of all the questions asked about the validity of contemporary art in reference to its own history - or lack thereof – it is surprising that little attention has been paid to the question of why polemic cultural currents have faced such hostility.
For a relatively simple answer to this question we can turn to psychoanalysis. In his paper on Fetishism, Freud discusses the traumatic effects experienced by a child when he discovers the mother’s lack of phallus. Trauma occurs, according to Freud, when the child expects to see phallus but instead is confronted by a “lack” and sees castration as a reified threat to his physical self. It is this confrontation of absence in the place of the phallic signifier that resonates with the issue of the avant garde. Is it not, in a similar way, the fact that a classically minded art going public would visit an art gallery and expect to see, as experience and history has taught them, great works of classical art executed by great craftsmen in a tradition that has its roots in hundreds of years of art history, but instead, standing in its place, objects which embody the absolute antithesis or “lack” of these qualities. This amorphous distortion of Art (with an intentionally capitalised “a”) appears as a de-ontologised form of “Art proper”, a stain on the background of its own history, a traumatic kernel that needs to be removed to allow for the re-establishment of the status quo. An attempted resolution of this deadlock is clearly in order and history has taught us that such a resolution is usually reached by the distancing of time: The Rites of Spring, The Naked Lunch, Impressionism, Fluxus, Duchamp and Abstract Expressionism are now all accepted parts of the wider cultural edifice. These artefacts of art history still exist in the same form as they did at their conception, these are still the same material objects as they were before, only now they have been stripped of their traumatic distortion; time and cultural criticism have helped us understand these things to have been anamorphic phenomena that, when observed from a different angle, or to use the relevant Lacanian vernacular, looked at “awry”, appear to be equally as acceptable as the “Art proper” that preceded them.
For a suitably Lacanian metaphor for this issue we need look no further than Holbein’s The Ambassadors. The painting depicts two wealthy young 16th century ambassadors surrounded by all the trappings of the Renaissance man: scientific and musical instruments, globes, oriental rugs, religious paraphernalia etc - an aesthetically pleasing painting in its symmetry, detail, and use of complementary colour. On the bottom of the painting there is what appears to be an aesthetic protuberance, a smudge on the canvas that seems totally out of place amidst the milieu of the rest of the painting. This “smudge” is, however, intentional and, when looked at from the left of the painting, is a perfectly rendered image of a human skull. Aside from the plurality of conjectures as to Holbein’s motives for doing this, the painting serves as an eloquent visualisation of the antagonism inherent in the reception of the avant garde. As watery and undergraduate a metaphor as it might seem, its importance cannot be overlooked. Does this anamorphic stain at the bottom of Holbein’s painting not function, on a phenomenological level, in the same way as the avant garde does on the background on the established cultural edifice: as a stain, a traumatic protuberance that doesn’t seem to fit, that constitutes a lack of symbolic mandate in the face of what Lacan called “The Big Other”; the organised, socio-symbolic community called society? We should then approach this anamorphic kernel (which could be called the avant garde) in the same way that we would decipher the same “smudge” at the bottom of The Ambassadors; by looking “awry” or from a fresh perspective so that its traumatic qualities are rendered into their own verisimilitude. We could pursue this metaphor ad nauseam, and certainly, for more radically progressive thinkers, the fact that, when looked at from this new perspective, the old aesthetic framework of The Ambassadors is reduced to the same discordant smudge as the skull was originally, could point to the formulation of a new Aesthetics of modern art, and I certainly believe that there is a call for braving the hypothesis that classical notions of aesthetics and culture should be rendered outside of the field of Art, but such a discussion is, for the time being, beyond the scope of this commentary.
In relation to sculpture and more specifically to Ryocihi Kurokawa’s sculptures, which I certainly believe them to be, we need to return again to the stain. If we once again look awry at this stain, as it exists on an established cultural or artistic apparatus, we can see it as an intrusion of one “unwanted/ outside” phenomenon into the field of another. In literal terms, the cosmetic aesthetic of the abstracted stain on Holbein’s canvas is an intrusion onto the figurative “background” – that which lies behind the stain - of the painting. This notion of intrusion on space is a key concept in understanding the politico-cultural implications of the avant garde. To this end we can find a correlative reasoning in Paul Hegarty’s writing on noise music. For Hegarty, the resistance with which Futurist experimental music was met in the early 1900s can be understood as a resistance to the sounds birthed in the industrial revolution, sounds that were signifiers of the working classes put to work in the new factories. Established musical forms were housed and played out in the comforts of lavish theatres shut away from the noises of the streets and the factories; spatially confined areas of high culture that perpetuated the literal and cultural separation of the upper and lower classes. These “spaces” of high culture (theatres, opera houses, lounges and so on) were secure and well-established safe houses for “Art proper” and the introduction of the dissonant machinic noises produced by Luigi Russulo and his ilk functioned in exactly the same way as the stain that appears on Holbein’s canvas. The transference of this logic can be made in regard to Kurokawa’s work, which is ostensibly that of the filmic medium - it is, after all, as a sum of its parts, a work of film. Kurokawa’s work functions as an intrusion of the filmic medium into the metaphysical “space” of sculpture: a stain when it is thrust into the apparatus of the ontology of sculpture, but a stain that we must once again view from a different perspective.
As many of Kurokawa’s works exist in what could be described as the “virtual space” – in his use of computer generated three-dimensional objects – we can understand this intrusion into the “sculptural space” as being two fold: firstly, the intrusion of the filmic medium into the sculptural medium and secondly as the intrusion of “virtual space” into the space of material reality. Even this latter, seemingly simple observation opens up a wealth of interpretation: a very convincing argument could certainly be made to suggest that material reality is in itself part of a subjectivity and therefore by its own definition a man made “virtual space” lacking in discernable objective reality. As undeveloped as this point has to be here, I think it illustrates the necessity to question our understanding of the status quo: Kurokawa’s films should certainly not be dismissed as “not sculpture” just because they are films, rather, I’m tempted to claim, as “un-sculpture” in the same way that we might think about the notion of “un-dead” – pandering to the qualities of “alive-ness” but entering into what Slavoj Žižek might call a “third infinite category” – neither alive nor dead but somewhere between the two. This is important because, as our acceptance of Stravinsky, Burroughs, The Impressionists has shown, there really is no such thing as “Art proper”, it is merely an abstracted metaphysical safe house that protects us from the intrusions of objects that challenge our symbolic universe, and we need only look “awry” at these objects to see that they mean us all the harm in the world, and that is exactly what is needed.
