FROM THE NIGHT OF CONSUMERISM TO THE DAWN OF SIMULATION
NIGHT THE CRITIC
FREDDIE FRANCIS’ MOVIE Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) consists of a series of vignettes which describe the lives of characters whose fate (because of their evil deeds) is to share the same railway carriage on a journey to the “other world” of the popular imagination. Richard Prince’s short story entitled “Horror Picture’’ (1980) tells the story of one of the characters from the film, William Night, an art critic. Night, played in the movie by Christopher Lee, is a popular caricature of an art critic; he is vindictive, self-important, arrogant, blinkered and arbitrary in his judgment. He is incapable of seeing outside a given framework and this, finally, is his downfall.
In both the movie and the story, Night’s public humiliation is accomplished through the trickery of an artist he has perpetually and irrationally rejected. The artist presents the work of one of his pupils to Night, who acclaims it mainly to further humiliate the artist. When the “pupil” is introduced publicly it turns out to be a chimpanzee. Night wreaks his vengeance by running the artist down in his car, driving back and forth over the mangled body. The main part of this episode in the movie consists of the dismembered hand of the artist in turn taking its revenge upon Night through a series of apparitions which culminate in the critic’s death. The tale belongs to the realm of nightmare, touching on the primordial fear of unmasking. Night’s mask of superior judgment is torn off. The world that emanates from his words and is acknowledged by his appreciative audience implodes, as the crowd, like the hunting pack of ancient mythology, turns on its master, tearing him to pieces.
For Prince, Night is not just an art critic; he is art criticism itself. Through his role as an art critic, he represents exclusion. One word from Night and the artist’s work would be appreciated; to withhold it is to condemn the artist to oblivion. Night’s words are rapierlike. With them he dissects, disembodies the body of illusion. He is that supreme vacuity behind appearances; he is thus a contemporary custodian of the “other world” of the imagination. The artist, like Orpheus, is prevented from bringing his muse into the light of day. He is doomed to the darkness of nonrecognition, to the night of stylistic oblivion. But out of the darkness of the other-world, his hand reaches forth . . .
Art criticism can perhaps only take one to the threshold of experience, but rather than illuminating, opening up the space of the image, criticism today often “annihilates and annuls” its “essential ambiguity” (Mircea Eliade). The image, the escape from linear analysis, is drawn inexorably into the void of information processing, reducing the visual world to the desert of the known, the representative, and the delineated. Packaged and labeled, the artwork enters the oblivion of an ever-accelerating turnover of images and styles. Critical overview takes the form of perpetual stance-taking and professional possessiveness. Critics’ panels reveal a near-universal inability, even embarrassment, when it comes to discussing specific experiences of artworks. Within the exchange of volleys from predictable positions, the artists’ work is held up as a stereotype of itself, like a heraldic shield in a costume-drama battle. Artists collaborating in these fiascoes either become an embarrassment by referring to actual works or are forced into a complicit expression of the programmatic intention of criticism. With its lines of argument, lines of art history, lines of deviance, and political lines, criticism provides channels in which the experience of art is reduced to a momentary glimmer within the seasonal apparition of the “art movement.” Between the evanescent novelty of the next and the dumping ground of the past, the artwork is greeted in the half-life of its obsolescence. Pragmatized and channeled, art is reduced to lines, and artists are forced into the perpetuation of “lines” of work that are found to be successful. Critical labels incise lines of power and artists take their places in the art-historical queue, waiting for the omnipotent zeitgeist machine to endorse their stylistic variation.
Prince’s isolation of the popular stereotypes of artist and critic in “Horror Picture’’ was not just the rewriting of an old story; it could have been the script for our current story. The dismembered hand and the disembodied voice of sophistry in Prince’s tale heralds the return of the artist and critic to their archetypal roles of chimpanzee and ringmaster in the staging of contemporary art. In the twilight of consumerism we watch in fascinated awe as the mass media renders everything false and the games of simulation are played out. Where nothing is authentic, hyperreality reigns. Where everything is reproduced and nothing is new, nostalgia reenacts past styles. Thus we stage the “great return” to painting as a costume-drama replay of popular art history. The “new painting” becomes twilight reconstruction of the heydays of painting.
But Prince’s aim in “Horror Picture’’ is not to produce commentary. Nor is he simply admitting his own anxieties as an artist. Neither the figure of the artist nor of the critic provide a point of identification for Prince. His chosen cultural position is that of intermediary. It is in the nature of masking, rather than the particular figure of the mask, that he finds his point of identification and fascination. The fictional scenario is set within a scenario of fictions. In effect the tale restores the narrative image to the realm of the symbolic. Stereotypes become archetypes. The figures of turnover become eternal images. There is a sense of being returned to an original, of the symbol rediscovering its origin. The isolation of the cinematic episode and the resulting focus on the language of dread returns the horror movie to its origin in the gothic short story. Prince’s seemingly narcotic-induced sense of sublimity in the acts of vengeance and hatred rescues horror from special effects and returns it to the opiated consciousness of writers like Edgar Allan Poe.
The dark coexistence of image and symbol, broken and dispersed in the all-illuminated world of consumerism, is resurrected from the white light of cinema. Prince’s literal assimilations of ready-made images is analogous to Poe’s relation to the image. Prince attempts, as Poe did, to restore a beyond ness to the mundane, a sense of eternity to the cliché. Prince even uses a Poelike postscript, apologizing for any subtle inflection upon the veracity of the original story, putting it down to the “sickly physical effects” of narcotic withdrawal.
Like Prince a number of artists, particularly in England and America, self-imposed exiles in the world of images, have in recent years chosen to confront the ready-made image, using it as an entry into the world of night where nothing is new. An imminent, if not immediate, prospect of consumerism seems to herald a new order of consumption which approaches its objects (or symbols) beyond the categorical either/or and new/old of the delineated world of production. Criticism could equivalently be freed from the conditioned reflexes of consumption, from the dominion of the cycles of new and old which draws the image into the inexorable line of history. In a suspension of the capacity to reason at a formal distance from images, criticism could be an accomplice to imagery and could aspire to the same order of description as Prince’s writing.
NO WORLD
“Where everything is permitted nothing is worth doing.” Nietzsche’s classic definition of nihilism is as applicable to the enlarged horizons of contemporary consumer culture as it is to the stylistic heterogeneity of contemporary art. The social gaze is permanently suspended from a realization of its desires in the scan of alternatives; the abundance of regurgitated visuals obscures the exit from the hall of mirrors, and the image is encountered as an ever-diminishing delay in the turnover of its ephemeral apparition. Video playback, live relay, closed-circuit TV—the more all-encompassing the media in everyday life, the more we confront the image as a void. In its ever-presence it is the more absent from life. In its spectacular visibility, it is the more invisible. The command of the image over the gaze, in its provisionality, promises no world of the imagination other than its own “no world” of autonomous self-perpetuation.
Cinema makes the turnover of imagery continuous; yet the continuum of image flow also produces a kind of inertia. The body of cinematic imagery embodies repetition. Types of imagery emerge and are reinforced, producing a frozen quality which renders all imagery familiar. The obsession with the cinematic image in recent art is with the fixity of its stereotypes. The cinematic image represents the fallen image. Like the smoking woman in so many of David Salle’s early paintings, the cinematic image becomes the muse of the image fallen into the truncation and fragmentation of the consumer dreamworld. The image is encountered on a conveyor belt. Like Blanchot’s description of a corpse “that is neither the living person himself nor any sort of reality, neither the same as the one who was alive nor another thing,” the stereotype occupies a space “between here and nowhere.” The media image achieves an autonomy in eclipse, an “at oneness’’ with its own no-world, revealing the desires of the collective unconscious. The moment stilled from a cinematic continuum renders visible what is invisible in the momentum of consumption. In the freeze-frame, the image frozen in its repetition (as in the early film loops of Jack Goldstein and the videos of Dara Birnbaum) becomes a primary object of fascination. The image is arrested within its flow; David Salle’s paintings suggest the space of cinematic dissolves. The space of stillness (painting) is imposed upon the spacelessness of flow (film). The paintings occupy a vantage point caught between images. The images hesitate on the verge of dissolving into one another.
Jean Cocteau saw cinema as a process of watching death. From a vantage point close to this, the image can be seen today as a seal upon the other world of the imagination: it excludes rather than invites. Images are encountered as terminuses. Like flotsam and jetsam abandoned on the shore, cut off from their origins by consumerism’s constant exchange, they also lack the luster of the new which resonates with the idea of autopian tomorrow. Increasingly adrift from recognizable roots and purposes, the image appears in its fragmentation as already old. In an attitude to the image close to what Georges Bataille describes as “morose delectation,” the stereotypical is approached today as a graveyard of representation. The fascinated lingering attachment to the image in its state of disappearance belongs neither to its history nor to an interest in its future destiny but to what Salle has described as “nostalgia for the present.” In an atmosphere of cultural overflow—of images and of words—Salle’s description of his work is apt: “If world is in painting and you are imposing other worlds on top of world in painting, that is perhaps Surrealism. But if there is literally no world in the painting, but there are just ‘worlds,’ and you are superimposing that in a way that becomes the painting, that’s conceptually different. My work is about ‘no world’ in painting.”1
The Surrealists’ exquisite corpse, like Bataille’s “morose delectation,” is a juncture of cross-purposes which is always a surprise, involving the spontaneous creation of a third meaning from the divided purposes of the found. The ’”third meaning” which absorbs and obliterates its origin in the magical act of juxtaposition is absent in Salle’s paintings. Banal images remain banal. He desists from the creation of a new image, preferring to hesitate on the threshold of the image, reflecting the “between vision,” the either/or of the consumer scan. By a kind of mutual cancellation of the images and spaces superimposed, pictorial space—caught between representations—becomes a space between spaces. But there is never spatial ambiguity; only the anonymous spatial indifference of mediation pervades the paintings. In Salle’s painting, vision reflects upon its fallen (divided) state. His split between canvases, his space between images, calls attention to the threshold of perception, like a bar across the unified vision of painting.
The no-world of the image is where we can neither go back nor move forward. It can neither provide a utopian vista nor a regression to an original paradise. Cut off from its symbolic past, the image has no future, either. In the twilight of consumerism, this sense of “no future’’ has been described as apocalyptic. Apocalypse means both the end and the revelation, and if we seem poised between two eras, then the loss of meaning for the image is also its liberation of the image from linear narrative and historical readings of it. The image radiates a new order of visibility. At the moment of its fractured eclipse, it fulfills itself.
THE CORPSE OF THE IMAGE
Salle’s “nostalgia for the present” suggests that consumption so permeates the present as a kind of zone of distance that we now see images of our present in the same terms with which we approach images of the past. Fascination for imagery is all that is left. This lingering attachment to the consumer’s indifferent gaze can also become a dreadful confrontation with the void within the image. And the image, resurrected from the invisibility of consumer detachment, can be restored to a new spectacularity in which the stereotypical and archetypal image are disconcertingly continuous. Troy Brauntuch’s work, for example, explores a point of connection between two voids. He too puts vision on the threshold of the visible, but unlike Salle’s his images are threatened with extinction. The space both inside and outside the frame enters into a mutual implosion. Like ghostly shadows, Brauntuch’s images are caught in their half-life, revealing their appearance at the point of their disappearance. The unambiguous images of Fascist and revolutionary propaganda of the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s are represented as mysterious and ambiguous. They hover between the known and unknown. The works are openings upon a regression. They are half-forgotten memories of something still present which connect to historical visions of the future. They are like reveries in which we try to achieve the bliss of the ever-presence of the dream image and to overcome the pastness of the dream or the nightmare. Through Brauntuch’s use of familiar images, the stereotype loses its fixity as a sense of the imaginary is inscribed upon it, which in turn restores a sense of magic to the image. Unlike the fascination of media experience, in which the loss of time is always felt as a waste of time, Brauntuch returns us to the fascinated self-absorption of childhood reverie, where the real and imaginary are interchangeable.
Our childhood fascinates us because it is the moment of fascination itself, and this golden age seems bathed in a light that is splendid because it is unrevealed. But the fact is that this light is alien to revelation, has nothing to reveal, is pure reflection: a ray that is still only the radiance of an image. Perhaps the power of the maternal figure derives its brilliance from the very power of its fascination, and one could say that if the Mother exerts this fascinating attraction, it is because she appears when the child lives completely under the gaze of fascination, and so concentrates in herself all the powers of enchantment. It is because the child is fascinated that the mother is fascinating.
—Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus
John Wilkins’ series of watercolors “Ovaltinies,” 1981–83, based on the Ovaltine brand label, also seems to recover the magic an image regains when the stereotype loses its fixity. The upward view of the image distorts the Ovaltine Maid into an archetypal mother and seems to simulate the vantage point of the fascinated child. Wilkins’ images are the product of a slow, contemplative process. In a strange alchemy of the photographic process, pools of watercolor are applied and dried, building up in the layers of translucent stains a chimeric version of the stereotypical image. When the psychoanalyst’s inkblots are forced into illusionistic representation, the figure of oedipal repression emerges out of the “free” unconscious. Here the Mother, represented by the Ovaltine Maid, is bloated, made egglike, engulfed in an ectoplasm of watercolor stains. In the development of the series (which grows progressively darker) she is extinguished in a final gleam from an ocean of blackness. We see the same sort of magic that occurs when watching a photograph appear, then disappear into itself in the developing tray. The image seems to be underwater, irretrievably distant. This view of arcadia—the peasant girl, mother nature, abundance—belongs to an earlier culture, to a myth of unspoiled origins. The nostalgia of the Ovaltine image is reinvested by Wilkins with its own forgotten symbolism. The image is returned to the style of genre painting.
DEATH MASK
Fascination attaches itself to the stereotype like a death mask. Unlike facial gestures, the tribal mask represents the world of the dead inscribed on the living. The mask offers a sacred, inviolable protection for the wearer, not because we fear the uncovering of what is masked (the human face) but because of the void behind the mask. To tear off the mask one must attack a god at the same time as one reveals the human. Just as ancient tribes protected the mythology of the mask, so the artists in question protect the magical properties of the illusion of the image without being taken in by it. Rather than decodifying the image, their fascination seeks that other presence behind the mask—one that speaks through cultural appearances.
In Jan Wandja’s drawn and painted confrontations with found photographic images, the figure of the mask is ever-present. Her painting of Sebastian Coe (from her “Stations of the Cross’’ series. 1982–present), at the moment of his triumph in the 1500 meters at the 1980 Olympic Games, suspends the image like a mask of terror within a pointillist implosion, from which the Union Jack emanates and into which the face dissolves. The face becomes a haloed mask. In other works from the same series the face dissolves into a teeming crowd of spectators. In conversation with the artist:
It’s not so difficult to see a time in which we will be running for our lives. . . . I think there were over twenty thousand who ran in the last London marathon. It might be an instinctive response to living under threat. Living under pressure, people go into rigorous, grueling training so that the body’s threshold of endurance can withstand the pressures of life lived under threat. They’re not running anywhere; it’s a triumph of the will.”
My image of Sebastian, of the crucifix, came from this atmosphere. The expression of agony mixed up with the ecstasy of triumph in Sebastian Coe’s face made it the most publicized image of the 1980 Olympics. It struck a chord in people because of the way that the image echoes the crucifixion. The most powerful image in Christian culture is the crucifix. It is the focal image. . . . Throughout history and art history, the crucifixion has expressed a moment of defeat (death) and triumph (eternal life). It’s a very ambiguous moment. “My God, Why hast thou forsaken me?” represents a crucial moment of humanity. This is what inspired Barnett Newman’s “Stations of the Cross”. . . . Using the face of the athlete is to focus on a facial expression that reveals the divide between agony and ecstasy—of life and death in the image. The expression on the face of the sportsman is an uncontrolled moment within the total control and discipline of the body.
[With the pointillist technique] I’m emphasizing what’s usually below the threshold of vision when we look at a photograph. It obviously relates to the dot structure of blown-up images. Blowing up is like atomization. I use a very restricting palette—just the colors used for screening color photographs (the primaries and black). [The pointillists] were at the beginning of a culture of mechanical reproduction. I feel I am at the end of it. . . . My use of pointillism is closer to the electronic image—the TV screen.2
Wandja’s masked faces of sports heroes (the Christ figures of the people’s religion) are threatened by the void; they are threatened with disintegration into that other space of the fragmented brush marks, the teeming crowd or the “white noise’’ of TV. The mask floats between worlds—between Blanchot’s “here and nowhere.” The stereotype is the corpse of the image. These fixed images of turnover, like masks, bear only a shadow of their former cultural life. The consumer-culture “nowhere’’ is the oblivion of cultural turnover. An aura of cultural decay emanates from the corpse of the image. The mask is always the death mask. But to the fascinated gaze of these artists, the image is a center and a void at the same time. The desire to see the final glow of the image through a confrontation with the image-as-mask is a desire for intimacy with the icon. A similar attitude to the image is decreed in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, as cited by Blanchot:
The deceased, during a period of indecision, when he continues to die, sees himself confronted with the primordial light, then with the peaceful deities, then with the terrifying figures of the angry deities. If he lacks strength to recognize himself in these images, if he does not see in them the projection of his own horrified soul. . . —if he seeks to flee them—he will give them reality and density and thus fall back into the errors of existence.”
Escape is not beyond the image but through it. Self-perception is a recognition of others in the self. This is what is revealed to the artist in taking possession of the otherness of the image—not a distanced passion for the image but a more thorough integration with the processes of simulation: “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true’’ (Ecclesiastes as quoted by Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, 1983).
THE ABYSS AND THE TURNING
The work of these artists/image collectors implies its own terminal status. These cul-de-sacs of the photographic image are encountered tangentially to their mainstream “meaning.” The continuity of symbolism is encountered as a jolt within the indifferent discontinuity of consumerism. Their images seem out of the way, half hidden, like shadows in our all-available culture of surveillance.
The confrontation with the abyss in the image is arrived at by an exaggerated identification and alignment with the processes of mediation. By complicity with the media, by adopting the ultrapassivity of the consumer vantage point, the artists are brought closer to the abyss of meaning, but at the same time closer to what Heidegger, in What Are Poets For? (1950), called the “turning” in the poetry of “the world’s night.” This poetry is essentially religious, occurring in a world in which not only have the gods and the God fled, but the divine radiance has been extinguished by history. The world’s night is a destitute time. In it, the poet’s role is reversed: it is to seek out the crystalline myth, the embedded symbol in the buried and half-forgotten “tracks of the old wine gods.” Like Heidegger’s poets, whose duty is to seek out pleasure in the ruins of destitution, these artists seek pleasure, and resurrection, in the fallen image—just as the poets’ role was also to force a reawakening through the confrontation with the abyss of meaning. The artists discover desire in the worn cliché, forgotten truths in the disinterred stereotype, and perhaps most important, make visible an endangered collective experience.
All avant-gardes imply their own finality in the representation of ultimates. This generation of artists implies finality by representing their threatened self-extinction in their fascinated absorption of and assimilation within the labyrinthine complexity of contemporary consumer culture. In a world in which the all-vengeful god has been technologically created in the bomb and the all-seeing god is ever-present in the third eye of media surveillance, the hallowed realm of art confronts a loss of sovereignty, a powerlessness in the face of a world whose absolutes are tied up in the technologically simulated. The choice confronting contemporary artists seems to be between participating in art’s nostalgic period-revivals, its fin de siècle turnover of authentic experiences and mythic micro-histories, or confronting the abyss to which technological fragmentation commits everything and everyone through his or her ever greater isolation.
In this situation it is through the inevitable technological accident that we understand the limits of technology. “At the end of the nineteenth century, museums exhibited machines; at the end of the twentieth century, I think we must grant the formative dimension of the accident its rightful place in a new museum. They ought to exhibit . . . train derailments, pollution, collapsing buildings, etc. I believe that the accident is to the social sciences what sin is to human nature. It is a certain relation to death, that is, the revelation of the identity of the object’’ (Paul Virilio, interviewed by Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War, 1983).
The accident’s potential for revealing the imperfect in the seemingly perfect, the disjunction in the seemingly continuous, is evident in Sherrie Levine’s derailment of the image. Within the hyperacceleration of imagery, the interruption, the arrest of consumption becomes more startling than the flow. By introducing a radical break Levine brings us to the brink of an abyss. The shock waves that reverberate to the very core of our esthetic habits in an encounter with Levine’s work—After Alexander Rodchenko, 1984; After Egon Schiele, 1984; After Edward Weston, 1981; After Piet Mondrian, 1983; After Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1982; After Walker Evans, 1981; After J.M.W Turner, 1984—threaten us with a sense of loss as big as the loss of the ground we stand on. The result is not so much an unmasking of historical issues of authenticity or aura as a registration of the void behind the mask. Introducing uncertainty about authorship and identity into the context of carefully chosen “found” esthetic encounters, the image hesitates in the void of its own inauthenticity, suspended from the lines of identification and alignment that constitute its channeling. Her works in the context of the rituals of the art-world’s seasonal conferring of originality and authenticity are like slips within the mechanical cycle of turnover. They are like Virilio’s accidents or stoppages which arrest the flow of images long enough to reflect the vacuity underpinning the experience of art as a smooth continuum.
In The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954), Mircea Eliade suggests a “rediscovery of a whole mythology, if not theology, still concealed in the most ordinary, everyday life of contemporary man; it will depend upon himself whether he can make his way back to the source and rediscover the profound meaning of all these faded images and damaged myths. . . . It depends upon modern man to ‘re-awaken’ the inestimable treasure of images that he bears within him and to re-awaken the images so as to contemplate them in their pristine purity and assimilate their message.”
THE PARADISE OF THE IMAGE/THE ARTIFICIAL PARADISE
What have I wanted until today? For what was I toiling? Oh, now I recognize the garden outside time, where time rests. Christened realm, serene Arcadia! . . . I have found the land of repose. . . . Here, the carefree gesture plucks, without pursuing, the moment; unwearyingly minute repeats minute; hour repeats hour; and today echoes yesterday.
—André Gide, Amyntas (1925)
Before gaining entry into the garden, Gide expresses a feeling of being excluded by the walls which confine paradise to the artificial microcosm of the garden: “Earthen walls! hateful walls! my ceaseless desire besieges you. Be sure I will succeed at last in entering. Sunk in the earth-wall a little door is concealed. We shall arrive in front of that little low door, to which a child will have the key. We shall stoop; we shall make ourselves small to enter.” An oasis of stillness for Gide, the cultivated garden projects him beyond his sense of self-identity and purpose, beyond the accustomed parameters of his life, into a paradise of timeless reverie. “I went forward, not doubting that the things I saw were real but doubting whether it was really I who was seeing them—so completely had I merged with them.”
Reverie’s intermingling of the imaginary and the real finds its universal archetype in the garden, with its fusion of nature and culture. Gide’s description of entering the garden emphasizes the point that’ only the child is admitted to the world where the imaginary is made real. In recent years, in photography in particular, there has been a convergence of involvements in the process of simulation of child’s play and the miniaturized worlds. In her photographs, for example, Laurie Simmons walks a tightrope between the boundaries of the childhood world and the adult world, as well as between the make-believe world and the real world. In one image a “drowned” baby doll confronts the depth of a “real” swimming pool. The doll is choreographed like a movie-still stereotype: she lies on top of the water, is visibly wet, and floats like a dead body. The miniaturized world threatens to become too real. The dramatic image of death, which is intensified by its total artificiality and absence of life, paradoxically brings the doll alive in its simulated death.
Like Simmons, James Casebere approaches the staging of the real as a game to be played within the conventions of photographic representation. Nursery bricks and toys, the simple forms of childhood construction, become Casebere’s entry into the paradise of the image through the intermingling of the imaginary and the real. Like Gide’s entry into the garden, his photographs are regressions into the forgotten intensity of the imaginary realities of play. Casebere’s forms suggest vistas of architectural ruins or caverns; but there is, too, an almost womblike intimacy in the shallow spaces of his images. The photograph becomes a space for reverie, a dreamworld, with Casebere showing a playful acceptance of its limits rather than a fascinated attachment to them. In The Poetics of Space (1961) Gaston Bachelard writes of the infinite potentials embedded in miniature worlds. “Miniature is an exercise that has metaphysical freshness; it allows us to be world-conscious at slight risk. And how restful this exercise on a dominated world can be! For miniature rests us without ever putting us to sleep. Here the imagination is both vigilant and content.” And later, commenting on the child’s perspective: “The man with the magnifying glass quite simply bars the everyday world. He is a fresh eye before a new object. The botanist’s magnifying glass is youth recaptured. It gives him back the enlarging gaze of a child. With the glass in his hand, he returns to the garden where the child sees everything huge.” Similarly, in Casebere’s miniature worlds photography becomes the “enlarging gaze of a child.” His images seem to hover between science-fiction hugeness and the minutiae of organic interiors, between biological microphotography and spectacular cinematography. Like recent technological advances in electronically simulated images in video games and in computers, simulated photographic space has been taken far beyond the “set-up” and “prop” stage. A new meaning has been given to Bachelard’s observation that “the narrow gate of the miniscule opens up an entire new world.”
Perhaps we now have a first glimpse of the world of electronic simulation in the works of these artists and in the model of computer games. The electronically simulated image is opened up to manipulation and modulation by the consumer. Players become consumers of the circumscribed world of the game, but also part-producers. The interplay of real and imaginary in the unreality of the electronic image, the dissolution of the boundary between the creator and the consumer of the simulated image, both suggest the imminent technological realization of prototypes of worlds, something which has already invaded the sacred space of child’s play. Like reverie these worlds offer up the choice of a dreamworld or a nightmare.
THRESHOLD TO THE DAWN
The video game is played in isolation; only the operator and the machine are involved. Inevitably, as consumerism becomes more an activity performed in isolation, we lose a sense of a universal reality and get lost in the fictions created by the games we play. To compensate for this loss of a shared reality, the player finds compensation in the codes of the game. In the face of a fragmented cultural experience which allows for infinite differentiation, we take solace in the rules and repetition of a dominant code. Repetition and rules offer us the security of a childhood repeated story—a necessary security for the survival of a shared reality.
Inventory and repetition take on a new order of meaning. The computerized identity symbols on all products, the pixels of electronic simulation, the revivals of artistic styles in art—all attest to a desire to occupy a shared terrain within a culture in which consumerism, rather than establishing sameness for the masses, has alienated the individual in solitude. Repetition through cloning belongs equally to a new imaginary order of the real. Unlike their zombielike predecessors, the clones of current science fiction belong, like the characters in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), to a higher order. Like fallen angels, the simulacra clones of today represent a transcendental dimension of the “real”—a ghostly interface between truth and fiction, the “real” and its shadow, the alien and the familiar.
As simulation, the clone is “more real than the real” (Baudrillard), dissolving the past and future into an eternal present. In Tom Otterness’ reliefs the orderly lines of repeated miniature worker/clones seem to enact an eternal ritual. Work, represented as a half-forgotten collective purpose, mirrors the ghostly absence of labor in the automated factory. Genesis, reproduction, and evolution—the great labors of man; these epic themes of public sculpture are resurrected in his Disneyland projections of heroism in the sculptural tradition from Ghiberti to Rodin. Figures merge with their tasks and with one another. Otterness simulates a world in which everything is reduced to identity. The figures seem frozen in the glue of their animation.
Otterness’ crowds occupy a threshold space. The figure of the child in the cupid of rococo art is a transitional figure between the “other” world of the image and the (adult) spectator. Like angels these cupids are messengers between worlds and serve as transition figures between the world of illusion (painting) and reality. Their playfulness and capriciousness reflect upon the nature of illusionism; but they are inescapably sinister. It is the same quality that Otterness exploits in his corporative reworking of this older religious image. Outwardly public sculptures for a sci-fi world of simulation, Otterness’ figures belong to the private space of reverie. These apparitions pose the threat of the imaginary spilling over into the real—of the dream exceeding its limits.
A direct assimilation of technological repetition is present in the work of Steve Miller. The merger of computer graphic devices with the cubist break-up of space in his paintings constitutes a merger of sensuous and personalized associations (painting) with the anonymous, objective signs of everyday life. The painted geometric overlay of computer graphics arrests the mutation of the electronic game from the gaze of esthetic indifference and offers it up as an imaginary space for contemplation and reverie. It is the politics of the void, the stage-managed hyperreality of politics which fascinates Miller.
Repetition is put to the service of another interest in the work of Edward Allington. His works are accumulations of mass-produced replicas and joke-shop simulacra. A wave composed of identically painted wooden fish plays on the rhythm of duplication; it is frozen in its movement. Exploiting the staged theatricality of rococo’s “fallen Classicism” Allington resurrects its images of excessive superabundance in a literal overflowing of the image.
THE LIGHT OF THE IMAGINARY
It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor of parody It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real itself to create a hyperreal.
—Jean Baudrillard
The edge of reality in contemporary culture has been dissolved in a hybrid of truth and fiction. For Baudrillard (in “The Precession of Simulacra’’), the twin concepts of hyperreality and simulation are the factors that distinguish our culture from any link with the past:
Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America, which is Disneyland. . . . Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real.
Video, computer technology, and the world of advertising have all had an impact in the creation of these fictive worlds of simulation where fiction confronts fiction in a battle over “reality.” Art has become an interesting lens on the realities/fictions of image culture. The limits of the image are taken for granted in a game played within the artificial worlds of illusionism. Art becomes a new kind of image reverie within the self-enclosed world of the game. The artists under discussion have repositioned themselves in relation to the presence of image culture, confronting its enclosed worlds and escaping the great narrative of history. In a world in perpetual flight from reality, in a choice of abyss between the symbolic and the real end of history or between a living unreality and a real death, we are inevitably on the side of the survivors. The survival of the imaginary in the reduced circumstances of technological culture is what is at stake.
—Rosetta Brooks is the editor of ZG magazine and a critic living in New York.
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NOTES
1. David Salle, from an unpublished interview with Barry Blinderman, October 1981.
2. “Extract from an Interview with British artist Jan Wandja,” ZG_ no. 12, Fall 1984, p. 4.
