Thankfully in the earth’s atmosphere

Dieter Roelstraete

…In the evaporation era

The distinguished French art critic Yves Michaud is the author of a concerned study about contemporary art’s service record; it bears the not very flattering title of L’art à l’état gazeux. Art in its gaseous state, art and the art world as a gas pocket - the ominous title of the book alone evokes a finely woven web of art-historical associations. The most obvious references, Marcel Duchamp’s Eau & Gaz à tous les étages and Air de Paris and Lucy Lippard’s instant classic Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, converge in Michaud’s alarming diagnosis of the ‘evaporation’ of contemporary art. But what for Lippard was still a  liberation from the doctrinal, paternalistic shakkels of an art production obsessed with phallic objects (‘matter’) – the dematerialization or ‘evaporation’ of the object as an ideal-type path to a higher state of enlightenment, a spiritually richer form of art production – Michaud now sees as a dramatic loss of the (literally) ‘accepted’ values of art as an involvement – in terms of the content - with a tangible, identifiable reality. For him the ‘gaseous’ state with which he identifies the ‘art of today’, indicates the irreversible erosion of everything that makes art intrinsically – and tangibly! - substantial. In L’art à l’état gazeux Michaud diagnozes the unbearable lightness of contemporary art fairly literally as a spectacle of luminous effects, smokescreens and signals, mirages, banks of cloud, castles in the air, trompe-l’oeils, toxic trails of mist and airs. According to Michaud, the terra firma has slipped from under art’s feet, all too often art has its cocksure head in the clouds, pulls the wool over our eyes, sells us hot air – or has even become ‘air’. The art world is one large gas pocket which envelops the global aerobic realm of contemporary art! And the French art critic takes a dim view of anyone who may still have his doubts about this.

These and other similar doleful tirades about the state of the art are – fortunately! – not applicable to Honoré d’O. For him this so-called ‘état gazeux’ - and in this he proves in a sense to be an excellent pupil of Lucy Lippard, who in the dematerializastion of the artwork and the evaporation of the art practice discerned the possibility and symbolic promise of ‘glorious new worlds’ – still implies the freedom of a playful, zestful, literally light-footed and light and airy artistic practice which, whenever and wherever ‘necessary’, can have certain images take on a fixed form, that is to say: can have them ‘materialize’ into works of art and artefacts, but in principle never has to do so, never feels obliged to to do so – and so is free. For Honoré δ’O ‘etat gazeux’ simply means that more is possible (‘margin’ or ‘scope’), that all the more oxygen is available for the creative mind and this is all the more likely to lead to potentially good results (‘art’). A castle in the air provides scope for many more ideas than the solid state derivative of wood, stone and steel which may call themselves ‘the real thing’, and that is why Honoré δ’O prefers the ephemeral ideas world of the castle in the air, which is actually a world of fleeting images, to the ‘real world’ of the constant compulsion to ‘make things’ to which art so often condemns itself.2 So as far as he is concerned, images, as the primary building material of works of art, can continue to be just ‘air’ (a gas pocket, cloud or mist of impulses, ideas, trails, shadows, silhouettes) – and there can never be enough air. Because the artist Honoré δ’O feels at home in this dense atmosphere of images which surround our daily reality, in this immaterial realm of gaseous presences which can become ‘art’, which can give rise to a work of art or artistic proposal (‘idea’).

Honoré δ’O is a sort of contemporary Marco Polo (Wallace, Stanley, Livingstone, Baffin), who navigates his way through the mangrove thickets, marshlands, woods and forests, river deltas, tundras, taigas, steppes and savannas of this atmosphere of images, of what we might call a global media sphere. And by ‘media sphere’ I do not of course mean the archipelago of globally operating media conglomerates which decide how the global village presents itself to its inhabitants, but simply the meteorite belt of ‘media’, literally ‘medium’ or ‘means’ and mediating technologies, which make the world visible and rotate in concentric layers round the Earth like an allegorical companion piece to the atmosphere or stratosphere. We might describe this ‘media sphere’, again in analogy with the atmosphere, as a blanket of cloud, and the ice-crystals which constitute these cloud formations the images which ‘populate’ this media sphere. And just as the elements which make up the atmosphere can manifest themselves in different states, from gaseous (oxygen, hydrogen) through liquid (water, rain) to solid (snow, ice), we, too, can visualize the different conditions in which the images that make up the media sphere, manifest themselves. There is the spectral, intangible image which only consists of rays of light and light intensities (for example, the film image, the projected image), and dances gaseous ‘in space’: in a sense it only ‘exists’ when the shafts of light fall on a physical substrate at a specific angle and at the right distance. This  in a nutshell is the principle of Tant Pis, Honoré δ’O’s encyclopaedic work to which this book is devoted.  There are also the generic two-dimensional images, for example of photography, which besiege us every day in their thousands – take, for example, advertising and television images – and form a seemingly endless ‘decor’ that is always around us; we might also call this the ‘media effect’, the media sphere in the narrow sense: the so-called ‘image flow’, the avalanche and tidal wave of images, in which the image proves to be ‘liquid’, difficult to contain or check, and also erratic and powerful. Finally there is the solid, materialized image – for example when it has become a work of art: an image which has been decided upon, which ‘has been’ captured, an image which has become conscious of its own ‘reality value’.
Perhaps this biosphere of visual information and of visual stimuli, the aggregate landscape of images which surrounds us always and everywhere, might also be called ‘image sphere’ or ‘icon sphere’. Except that those decorative neologisms betray a rather one-sided notion of the complexity of the image as a whole – ‘icon’ and ‘image’ are only two ‘subjective’ names for two separate aspects of the one, ‘true’ Image – and they miss the wide reach of the concept of ‘media sphere’. After all this concept has echoes not only of the voice of the image, but also that of the ‘apparatus’ which makes the images possible, which determines, defines, produces and eventually also disseminates the images. So it is this notion of dissemination and fleetingness (‘evaporation’) that is crucially important here: the media sphere is the image flow – that is to say, it is both the images and the flow: both the element from which physics derives its right to exist, and the physics which ‘explains’ the elements; both the ‘what’ and the ‘how’. The flow of images shapes our reality, visualizes and represents it, makes it visible, mediates for it – until it also becomes that reality, converges with it. It is this media sphere, the wild, uncontrollably rampant landscape of images everywhere, which constitute Honoré δ’O’s biotope, literally his ‘hunting ground’ even - and to my mind it is not so ridiculous to present the artist as the man with the butterfly net: armed with almost nothing more than (for example) a sheet of paper on which the spectral image, the gaseous partial body of the media sphere, is briefly ‘captured’ and crystallized out into a clearly recognizable ‘thing’ – and so has the potential to materialize into a work of art.

The moment: realization and crystallization

The image, images are always there, and everywhere. They surround us in their spectral, gaseous state, and it is part of the make-up and one of the essential characteristics of the contemporary image regime that we are often no longer even aware of their presence. Paradoxically enough, the images have therefore become largely ‘invisible’ – they have literally and figuratively ‘evaporated’. They only materialize into ‘objects’ – images of which we have become aware, images which have left the gaseous state and ‘condense’ into visual acts – when we decide they should, when we want them to in a sense. So the contemporary image regime is indeed an attention regime in which our (by definition varying degrees of) alertness helps create the conditions under which the work of art can as it were ‘exist’, can emerge from the media sphere as a gasiform and, if need be just momentaneously, can take on a more solid form in the domino effect of ‘permanent action’.

Old and new fear of the image

The fact that the art world, and more specifically the artwork as a fetish object around which everything in this world revolves, is gradually evaporating and vaporizing, ending up in the primordial soup, in trails of mist and patches of fog of the all-penetrating, total and therefore ‘totalitarian’ contemporary image regime, and that this might be a reason for dismay and panic (as Michaux believes, for example),  in a sense again expresses the deep-rooted fear of our culture of Word and Reason – a culture in which significance is considered higher than the mere sign that this significance can connote, and in which the image is subordinate to its ‘message’ as a sign – of the viral rampant growth of the image.

The ‘artistic’ image, the signal or sign that signifies ‘art’, i.e. is reduced to a work of art, we can just about accept. That then is perhaps the one image ‘it’s OK to like’: yet it is in no way predictable and controllable – we know more or less what we can expect from it –, easy to manage or to market. But ‘the’ generic images which not only populate, imbue and bedevil our daily lives,  but also help shape and determine them and sometimes even make them possible… no, those we continue to reject with the same deep distrust, the same scepticism and the same aristocratic reserve. We continue to fear infection from the rampant, uncontrolled image, sometimes dramatically described as a curse which has to be exorcized, a ferocious stream which has to be dammed up, a mania which has to be repressed, controlled or steered in the right, ‘meaningful’ direction. In principle we immerse ourselves in the flow of images only with great reluctance, only if we really have to – for example, if it can produce ‘art’.

But fortunately this does not apply to everyone: there are also those who are enthusiastic about wanting to venture into this image flow, even if in practice many of them just sit timidly paddling on the bank – which is of course quite understandable. And finally there are also those who fully embrace the image regime, floating and bobbing along on the stream of images. They are critically but nevertheless genuinely ‘interested’ in this biotope of rampant, uncontrolled image mania, in the ‘media sphere’ which surrounds us ethereally – and not only because they are constantly on the lookout for that one image or that one sequence of images which could conceivably be ‘domesticated’ into a work of art. They are interested above all in the possibilities – in the possibilities of the images, of the world which they represent and the world which together they shape, visibly and invisibly;  they are mindful of what is (still) to be learnt and (still) to be discovered. And so they are also interested in how ‘it’ can be otherwise – in the ‘other’ worlds which these representations can call forth. People have long referred to politics as the ‘art of the possible’; I am more inclined to call art rather than politics the ‘art of the possible’. 

And it is this artistry that Honoré δ’O practises, like an ear lobe ‘with a listening ear’ on the bosom of things and images: he is receptive, generously and genuinely open to the image, to its possibilities – and that is by definition always a great deal, a labyrinthian multitude of major and minor possibilities – and to what the image promises, however meagre and rarefied (‘airy’) that promise may be, however lacking in substance and however momentaneous (ephemeral). The media sphere is a colourful landscape full of relief and nuance, highs, lows and troughs, fluctuations in temperature and changing intensities, a landscape in which the images that accost us may be gaseous or liquid, and sometimes solid in form  – and that is the way the artist likes it.

Philosophy of the post-it: on the little reminders 

As we know, Honoré δ’O is no enthusiast of the fetishizing of the art object as the exclusive end result of a teleological, consecrating process of product development. The process is closer to his heart than the fetish of the product, mainly because he – rightly – believes that the richness of the experience of this process as a complex ‘procession’ of impulses and intuitions can never be expressed totally satisfactorily in one single act of canonization through materialization or objectification. Too many of his views are lost in the hierarchical  revaluation of the product (object) at the expense of the process (project), too many rigid savings are made and there is too much rigorous reorganization – too much is literally and figuratively ‘forgotten’. The work of art as an object – or: as merchandise – ‘forgets’ the procession of conditions, preliminary ideas and first steps which have helped make it possible, which have prompted it.

It is no coincidence that I am reminded here of a famous passage from the ill-fated correspondence between two celebrities from the Frankfurter Schule, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, both fond art theoreticians who, despite their deep attachment to their artwork as a ‘thing’, as an autonomous, exhaustively self-explanatory and legitimizing  artefact, continued to harp on about the work of art being so much more than just an object or economic product, and they did so precisely in that tendency to objectify the great danger of an almost existential reduction school – of what their kindred-spirit-willy-nilly Martin Heidegger called the ‘forgetfulness of being’. Thus on February 29th 1940 Adorno wrote to Benjamin, barely a few months before the latter, provoked by the Nazi witch-hunt, took his life on the Franco-Spanish border : “all reification [Marxist jargon for ‘fetishizing’] is a forgetting: objects become purely thing-like the moment they are retained for us without the continued presence of their other aspects: when something of them has been forgotten.” The “continued presence of their other aspects” – by this we understand not so much their ‘aura’ or their ‘halo’ (that is after all precisely what Benjamin had so zealously argued against), as their ‘atmosphere’: the environment of the art which helps make the work of art possible as an object/product.

And does not Honoré δ’O’s ‘plastic’ procedure partly set out to reverse this “forgetting” of those “other aspects” – the richness of the image and its reality, its embedment in the image flow? Does Honoré δ’O not want to remind us in his artistic practice of what so often remains ‘outside the image’ when we look at the work of art as a  thing  – of what went before, of the many trials and errors which shaped the road to the work of art, of the quest for the ‘art-making’ itself? If all the commodification, objectivization or fetishizing Verdinglichung is indeed “a forgetting”, the forgetting of the preconditions of the artwork which themselves help make the art possible, then ‘its’ spectral tactic of condensation, deliquescence, dissolution and (de)materialization is indeed one of ‘remembering’. He wants to show ‘everything’, recollect everything, even the phantoms, the contours and the shadows, the blanket of cloud, the atmosphere of the images. Every track, every route, every brainwave and every idea, even the less successful ones, every ‘attempt’, every path to somewhere or nowhere – and why not? Here again the law of generosity, abundance, complexity and irreducible richness, which so deeply characterize Honoré δ’O’s work and artistic execution, applies: you can never really justify just showing the artwork as a product or object, lifting it out of the context of its ‘environment’, the Great Chain of Being of the quest of art, and in so doing ‘forgetting’ that environment. The environment of the art, its media sphere, also has its rights – and the right to remembrance is just one of them.

This is of course never the monumental Remembering of the memory, the ceremonious commemoration – that would only lead to more canonizing and consecrating, and Honoré δ’O is anxious to spare the work of art, and art in general, that ridiculous fate. That is what monuments, memorials and keepsakes are for, and monuments are just about the last thing we can expect of Honoré δ’O, notwithstanding his well documented passion for grand, room-size assemblages which may well give the impression of monumentality, but perhaps should be understood more as ‘landscapes’, as a landscape of restless mental activity even. No, it is more a small, virtually casuistic remembering, trial and error, always on the road, a brief moment of enlightenment, like the mnemonic of a hastily scribbled note (“this I mustn’t forget”) or a barely legible Morse code. The fact that in the visual and at the same time sensory enjoyment of the work of  Honoré δ’O as this landscape of unbridled mental activity, as this trail of visual thought complete with false scents, ghost villages and secret passages – the fact that I often think back to that small but ingenious invention called post-it, has not only to do with the fact that the occasional trace of this sort of (scribbled) memo aesthetic appears in his work, but also with the fact that the post-it is the modest but oh-so-efficient instrument par excellence of these ‘little’ recollections, the momentaneous visualization and retention of the ‘environment aspects’ of daily life. Post-its form the basis of the most futile ‘image flow’: sudden bright ideas, aha experiences, shopping lists, to-dos, as quickly erased as printed records, quotes, paraphrases, alternatives, dreams, possibilities (“and another thing…”). They are the most unremitting bearers of ideas, like footsteps in this process of becoming art, of the printing of images which briefly drop from the ‘media sphere’ to become ‘possible’.

1.
The question is, of course, whether Michaud was aware of this specific association, but the ‘evaporation’ syndrome of contemporary art diagnosed by him is wonderfully mirrored symbolically in a fundamental characteristic of that contemporary art production and its analogous ‘art world’, namely the enmeshment of modern-day exhibition practices (biennials, triennials, quadrennials) and cheap, intensive air traffic. Successful curators and internationally-operating networkers of the allied superstar-curator type have often been described rather condescendingly as ‘frequent flyers’, but these days many artists, too, spend more and more of their time in airports and aeroplanes. The frenetic artistic activity on these long transatlantic or intercontinental flights – needless to say, more intellectually than practically productive in nature – in a sense shapes this process of ‘evaporation’: a great deal of art does indeed take ‘place’, is conceived at a great height, in the air and in ethereal spheres where the oxygen content is low.

2.
Of course this is not to say that Honoré δ’O ‘does not like things’, quite the reverse in fact. Indeed, his work and working method betray a great affinity with and love of things as more than mere objects or potential works of art, as irreducibly rich vehicles of ideas.

3.
The main reason for choosing the comparison with Marco Polo is because this Venetian merchant was so important in opening up the Orient as that endlessly fascinating, mysterious ‘realm of symbols’ (cf. Roland Barthes’ characterization of Japan as the empire des signes), with which Honoré δ’O is now smitten. His fascination with contemporary China in particular has of course to do with the appropriated Chinese culture of the image and with the visual quality of a language which has remained loyal to the ‘mimetic’ stimulus of the ideograph.

4.
This also happens to be the British artist Steve McQueen’s description of artistry; he is not very fond of the obvious comparison with the model of the ‘hard’, exact sciences (cf. infra) either, and sees more point in the whimsical metaphor of the amateur entomologist – ‘amateur’ of course being the operative word here! With thanks to Ann Demeester, who kindly pointed out this chance convergence of artists’ images.

bps 22, Charleroi, La Quête

biennale de Busan

Mur

Licht

Bulbiculture, Nantes