art without boundaries

Shitao: The brush is for saving things from chaos.

All the heaped-up knowledge of modern science, all the energy of modern commerce, all the depth and spirituality of modern thought cannot reproduce so much as the handwork of an ignorant, superstitious Berkshire peasant of the 14 th century.
---William Morris.

That's too extreme, of course. But: handwork.

Christine wanted to talk about art (artefacts) in terms of the question: national or universal. Who do great works belong to? But, for me, this misses the point of how culture is related to consumption in late capitalism, how these 'things' are themselves staged as the spectacular, how they become things isolated from any living culture and practices. And yet, at the same time, they're supposed to be an antidote to the crassness of popular culture and a world governed by technology and utilitarian values. Wonderfully free from instrumentality of the market, from the authority of the political and the religious-art for art's sake or something that can exist in the mind alone. But isn't that itself synonymous with the mindset of modernity, one that is inextricably linked with capitalism? Why this need to shore up the fragments? Why now? Isn't this just another sign of worldlessness ?(Hannah)

Fragmentation as a way of subversion. But isn't that what you're doing yourself, taking quotes out of context, adding to the already disappearing world? Franzen: who reads linearly any more?

To be an escape artists without talent contradicts the meaning of art, installs things that are ugly as equal with anything beautiful and smashes up those structures of conformity from which alone art can emerge.
--P. Rieff.

Smash! Yes, how important that was for the century! (the Russians, the 'cultural revolution', the taleban). As if to say: in an age of the proliferation of the image the only response could be to destroy it. Isn't ridicule another form of this? Doesn't late capitalism itself encourage this flippant attitude to the image: the shock of the new? What does it mean to say something is an 'iconic image' today?

[Art without boundaries. Need to go back to Ouspensky/Lossky here. Blunt.]

The image without boundaries:

In fact, the necessity of postulating that an image referred to any original would be taken to be largely due to an anachronistic lack of culture and concealed metaphysical obscurity; it is precisely the image released by contemporary techniques that liberates itself...Today, the image covers the surface of the earth only insofar ..as it expands without restriction or reference.


Now appearances are volatile. Technological innovation has made it easy to separate the apparent from the existent. And this is precisely what the present system's mythology continually needs to exploit. It turns appearances into refractions, like mirages: refractions not of light but appetite, in fact a single appetite, the appetite for more.


In the televisual order, the principal caesura between the image and reality has disappeared: the time of representation. Around the clock, 24/7, not a particular time set apart for the staging.

The unending flow of time: the irreality thus competes with the temporality of reality.

The space that instantaneously crosses the televisual flow of images gives not a single possible world but rather discord-a blur.

Is this a natural consequence of the dissolution of boundaries? Who or what can govern such a de-contextualised image but the gaze of the viewer!

A "viewer": this is defined as the one who, under the most neutral names of "spectator" or "consumer" undergoes, governs, and defines the image-all under the pretexts of access to information, the opening of the world, and "connecting"..the sole pleasure of seeing, to succumb without limit or restriction to the fascination of the libido vivendi, the pleasure of seeing without being seen. [bloggers, anons, voyeurs]


Augustine: curiositas: the "lust of the eyes" . Illich: the restraint of the gaze. Right-looking.

The image is nothing in itself (nihilism) and can only be validated by the viewers, the consensus of desire. If one abolishes reality does one abolish appearance as well?

It is better to appear than be, since to be is not to appear. An idol: the image of desire. Ex-posure, just express yourself. One must live life aesthetically. From now on, as Roth says, there is only the surface. (the Eloi).

Every perception of the world is reduced to to an expression of the monad itself...the libido vivendi, which satisfies itself with the solitary pleasure of the screen, does away with love by forbidding sight of the other face-invisible and real...We live in a relation through what we see to what we don't see.

(quotations from John Berger and Jean-Luc Marion).