Michael Phillipson is a writer, critic, artist and musician. He has written books and essays on art, sociology and visual culture including: ‘In Modernity's Wake: The Ameurunculus Letters’ (Routledge, 1989) [which is available on Google Books here], ‘Painting, Language and Modernity’ (Routledge, 1985), ‘Ars Universitas: Jon Thompson's Ricinullus Fragments’ (John Hansard Gallery, 1985), ‘Seeing becoming drawing: the interplay of eyes, hands and surfaces in the drawings of Pierre Bonnard’ (with Chris Fisher) in the collection ‘Interpreting visual culture: explorations in the hermeneutics of the visual’ (Routledge, 1999) edited by Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell, ‘Everyday Life, Technoscience and Cultural Analysis: A One-Sided Conversation’ in ‘Cultural Reproduction’ (Routledge, 1993) edited by Chris Jenks, ‘Managing 'tradition': the plight of aesthetic practices and their analysis in a technoscientific culture’ in ‘Visual Culture’ (Routledge, 1995) [available on Google Books here] also edited by Chris Jenks. Michael also exhibits art work as part of the London Group (click here to see his work on the London Group webpage).
After The Disaster
Michael Phillipson
Obviously no art without survival… but might we need art to survive?
And might our survival of the disasters that never cease be disastrous for art? Can art live on in spite of and after the disaster? Doubtless its fate, like that of all of us, is bound up with disaster. And by no means as a matter of scale; for the disaster is always measureless…
But our relation to every disaster is always belated and always dependent upon representation. For is not the disaster the abolition of all relating? In its aftermath we try to make sense of it, to incorporate ‘it’ (lacking any identity the ‘it’ seems to overplay ‘its’ availability to us) into our commonsense. We represent it, just as we do with everything else, art included. Thus condemned to be too late to do anything about it beforehand, our belated representation already seems to have implications for whether and how art might make towards the disaster. Under representation’s rule disaster, survival and art seem inextricably interwoven.
Andrew Warstat’s sequence of hung photo-objects suspend us in the midst of these questions. Held up by the particularity of their gestures they invite us, perhaps, to make our own ways, with art’s help, out of representation. Drawing us into the disaster’s aftermath they confront us with the question of its terms for the possibility of survival, and especially of art’s survival.
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Disasters without end. So many – (un)natural, (a)social, (im)personal.
Shaping the texture of the ordinary, uncertain fixtures in the continuity of our everyday life, they are the extreme in our midst.
Dis-aster – the absence of any star, sun, or light, of any possibility of enlightenment about this absence. Absolutely light-free, a disaster interrupts endlessly all attempts at understanding, at clarifying it in the light of day, through the eyes of both technoscience and ordinary perception. As the unanticipatable, the disaster is that about which we, its survivors, can only try to be wise afterwards.
And within our structures (‘society’, ‘culture’) for survival, for living on after each disaster, we have our emergency committees, our relief funds, our armies, our police, our clear-up operations, our monitoring systems, and our surveillance equipment. We have The Law. But even when our recording machines do gather representing signs (invariably visual and acoustic) of a specific disaster’s interruptive movement and effects, the disaster already seems to have withdrawn from our attempts to represent it, to give it an identity and a boundary. The dark unbecoming that passes through us withholds itself from representation. Coming from ‘outside’ and lacking anything like an ‘as such’, an ‘in-itself’, the disaster will not be had, refuses to be gathered in. As the out-of-control it renders all forms of power irrelevant. It will not be brought into and positioned by language.
And what of we late-moderns who try (pretend?) to live on as if disaster were not a defining feature of our life?
Condemned since long before Rimbaud to be ‘absolutely modern’, we take our survival to be dependent upon our grasp of the (our ?) present. To this end our entire productive effort, our technosciences and the knowledges they produce and sustain, work endlessly and with tremendous ingenuity to multiply and complexify our representing machinery. We believe in, we live, survive, by this project for representing our and things’ presence back to ourselves. We have convinced ourselves that this representing work is what life is and should be: proliferating representation without end.
But the disaster as contingent necessity, the accident that had to happen but always on its own alien terms, disposes of our present in no time at all. Our being-there, our being right here in this our very own, our only, place, is deleted at a stroke. The disaster does not take place – it abolishes it. It erases, makes a cut in, the time-space of our continuity, our getting by.
- Certainly there is something disastrous about us -
Whatever its apparent ‘scale’, supposedly micro or macro, it remains unmeasurable, unknowable. We are left in its afterwards to scratch around for the salvageable (survivors, things), for fragments, for evidence that might enable us to restore continuity, to get back to normal, to representation: to go on as if nothing has happened. And in a sense we are absolutely right. For Nothing has happened, precisely the Nothing that we cannot accommodate as a knowable something, the no-thing that is the outside of all our systems of representation. It will not be composed within the reassuring terms of our everyday knowledge.
But what about poor weak art? Caught up along with everything else in the struggle to survive, making-for-art knows that it must try to hold to its difference in the face, the teeth, of those predatory institutions of representation responsible for preserving its public life (but only on their own terms). At every outing it risks hybridisation. Reliant on powerful others (the full range of mediating interests) for its exposure and representation, it is constantly courted and tempted by values (entertainment, celebrity, information, newsworthiness, knowledge, heritage, education, money…) that are its anathema. For it too would offer itself as the other of representation though on utterly different terms to the disaster’s abolition.
Making-for-art seeks to end with something that performs an offer of otherness. It does not represent some prior ‘presence’ but puts forth a singular X that is precisely not-knowledge. It seeks to make and to offer a site on which something is played out which is irreconcilable with the taken for granted assumptions of everyday life. In effect it makes towards the very outside from where the disaster seemed to issue, but not in order to make the latter meaningful, to domesticate it through the typicalities of routine knowledge. No, rather it suspends culture’s languages in order precisely to find the singular terms of its own emergence into and relation with language (both everyday language and the languages of art). It wants to do this in spite of and aside from representation’s inordinate power. It moves, turns, back and forth across culture’s (language’s) thresholds to expose its debts to its origins, its emergence as a strange combination, an inter-relating, of the possibly sharable with the not-yet-sharable rooted particularities of its embodied becoming. It wants to translate these latter into its one inflected language – a language sufficient to and exhausted by the occasion of its singular performance. It hopes, too, that what results from these sorties over the edges of representation will be a performance that hovers between an already familiar language and that which pre-figures but always defeats language as its confounding other. Its entire project is the avoidance of representation. It represents no prior presence. Nor can anything else represent, stand in for, the gesture which it offers to us. Rather on each occasion of making it aims to be a beginning-anew that turns again and again (the poetics of its movement…) through the uniqueness of its circumstances. Out of this movement it seeks to give, to open up, a possibility of sharing. It wants to draw others into its unique out-take on language. This is what it tries to offer.
But its offer always operates under the rule of a risk that its something-for-nothing will be missed, dismissed, or fail to seduce others into following its versings. And when makers find themselves in thrall to the disaster’s strangeness and upheld, like all of us, in its aftermath, this risk is compounded by the very obtuseness of its inert resistance to all attempts to gather it within accessible ‘language’, within existing knowledge frames. That is why we must take as much care as he has in their making when we approach Andrew Warstat’s objects. And we may need to begin by recognising the challenge he is taking on.
Realising that the disaster recedes from all efforts to draw it into a relation he approaches its effects through a tactic of indirection. It is a tactic that has to work its way through and out of a multiple responsibility: to art and its perceivable needs, to the fragments left behind by disasters, and to the demands made on him by his chosen materials, media and circumstances. He has seen that if anything is to be recovered for art from his explorations of the unexplorable, he must stalk it in the most oblique circuitous ways, approach its region (from which every disaster has already disappeared) at unexpected tangents, to try to catch its decay unawares. Yet the upshots of his making, the gestures borne by his compound objects, have not only to make their oblique journey explicit but also to establish their own reserve, to try to survive through an ambiguity that resists all attempts to reduce it to ‘evidence’, to meaning. In their absolute singularity his things hope to preserve an irresolvable doubleness that positions itself as the other of commonsense: to offer neither the worldlessness of the disaster nor the world of everyday life, but, rather, the intertwining of these as an elsewhere that art tries to inflect in the face of the all-too-worldly.
How does he go about this singular inflection?
At the very moment of their being taken, ‘news’ photographs are already remnants of yesterday’s news, discards consigning themselves to the wasted meanings of the day. Seeking to record a disaster’s aftermath, in that same moment they participate in, supplement, the ruination which they depict. As waste matter they are victims of the disaster of representation itself (a disaster which we have as yet, perhaps, failed to recognise…). But approaching them from the obliquity of art’s site Andrew offers art’s inflection as one possible path to survival. To survive on art’s terms, however, they have to submit to art’s transformative requirements. To participate in art’s making towards otherness they have first of all to be withdrawn from their role in the daily cycle of news production and destruction, from the indifference of the mundane narratives of reporting and evidence. To have any chance of redemption and living on they have to be turned out of themselves and drawn into the unhomely region of art. Withdrawing them from their normal death – the unnoticeability of their conventional passing away – and thus to save them from themselves, Andrew decides to wound them. He attacks them with a controlled violence just sufficient to call forth art’s clinical response.
Through the application of a very specific kind of plastic surgery the afflicted photos undergo a peculiar face-drop-and-lift. The once flat two-dimensional news images are subjected to cycles of cropping, enlargement, crumpling, crushing, flattening, and re-photographing, at the end of which they emerge almost beyond recognition but on the way to possible survival in the care of art. The ‘almost’ is important here for part of Andrew’s tactic is to perform a gesture which turns inside out the art-historical/curatorial task of old-master restoration. He has seen that these aftermath images invariably show peripheral figures moving within the ruins. Seemingly incidental to the images’ depiction of ruination itself, such figures, in their very anonymity, become, perhaps, icons of the general loss of subjectivity that is among the effects, however temporary, of the disaster’s abolition of meaning. What Andrew seeks to restore, to make a ‘place’ for (in art alone?) is this asubjective experience (or perhaps rather the outside of experience) entailed by the disastrous cut. For the interruption of all continuity displaces our habitual conventions of recognition and order. An absence is substituted that reduces all, whether participants or spectators, to peripherality. He thus wounds the images in order that we might catch glimpses, through their very fixed and restored disfiguring, of our own ruined subjectivity.
But the end result of this process of perverse restoration is a paradoxical restitution of the very process and medium (photography) whose products he has been at such pains to distress, the medium whose daily task is to be an unquestioning participant in the disaster of representation. For what he offers us are very peculiar objects indeed. Having stopped his disfigurement just before the images’ complete collapse he then gives them the chance of a new life as perfect photographs again. The smooth surfaces of his immaculate prints lack the least hint of distress – they return as serene renderings of a process of disintegrating affliction. At various immeasurable depths behind the perfect surfaces (a photograph’s machined equivalent of a painting’s ‘picture plane’) different ‘planes’ compete for our attention. Each one, as a machined chemical chiaroscuro, forms a temporary but disappearing, and thus ambiguous, ground zero (a ground that is no ground at all). Thus the craquelure effect of the crumpling process often seems to generate a fractured network of broken ‘lines’, whites and blacks that almost appear to be some kind of near-translucent wrapping behind which the images’ remnants lie trapped. And because of the scale of the enlargement, the dot matrix ink marks of the ‘original’ prints take on a ‘life’ of their own, setting up ambiguous textured ‘screens’ through which the figures emerge and disappear. The wounding and enlarging processes abolish the possibility of spectators finding a ‘correct’ viewing position, a spot and distance from which everything would fall into place, into the coherent relations of a singular focussed image. Everything is necessarily simultaneously in and out of focus. Our gaze is being seduced into a restless movement between dissolves in which very little can be simply named or given an identity. Even when something seems to emerge more clearly, such as, say, the pointing arm (in ‘X’) in front of a doorless car, it merges with its surroundings, its underside falling away into a grey amorphous void (though one textured by dot prints). The whole recedes again behind the craquelure tracery. Here everything is either disintegrating or receding into unknowing. Even the signs of crumpling are interspersed with bright white patches that, having caught the light in the exposure, either burn a hole in the image or just return us to the ‘ground’ of the photographic paper itself.
What, then, might these objects be leaving us with? Perhaps with shadows of shadows? With photography haunting itself with the spectral appearance of its own past, with what it has always taken for granted about itself: its supposed ability to capture ‘things’ as they are; its ludic claim to a cryogenics of presence?
Certainly Andrew hints that, when it is probed and turned through itself – exposed – the photograph leaves us only ghosts and disappearance, anonymous insubstantiality. And in exposing photography while simultaneously preserving it, his photographs suggest too that the remnants which thus constitute every photograph can be traced back to, are always all that’s left of, an unknown unknowable disaster. As the very condition of its survival a photograph is condemned to cling to the dying moment of its exposure. And this precarious half-life is accentuated in the exhibition by his decision to hang the photographs unbacked, unframed, unprotected. They thus appear in their flimsy thinness to be already at the threshold of an imminent victimhood. It is as if they are half aware that, in their frailty, they are necessarily accidents waiting to happen and as if, too, they need this visible frailty as an echoing reminder of their own origins. For they seem, courtesy of art’s risk, to have survived, for the time being at least, the perennial fate – instant waste – of the newspapers from which they were saved. Still in need, as their current environment makes clear, of some kind of institutional care and protection, we can see that it would take very little, almost nothing, to blow them away. And in this state they seem to act as a kind of warning, reminding us just how permanently but unknowably close they, we, and art may be to the inexorable disaster to come.
Art’s custodians aided by the rhetorics of professional aestheticians work endlessly to persuade us of art’s power; their project is to align it with institutions of power and to affix the value of art’s supposed power to the body politic. The entire rhetoric of ‘old masters’ and the arts’ cooptation into the heritage, entertainment and education industries is dedicated to this end. But it may just be that the strange turns, circlings and detours that have endlessly reconstituted the arts’ paths under modernity are performing a very different gesture. Might it not be that makers’ ways of moving towards art seek to set before us things that try to show art as having no option but to try ceaselessly to drift out of culture? Or, at the very least, to try to survive, cling on, at culture’s always uncertain and fraying edges? They have sought and still seek to embrace and explore such movement because they take art’s ‘good’ to lie precisely in its possibility of displaying that which is other to what is. This other is nothing other than the undoing of all those interests and practices constituting the ordinary exercise of power in the culture. Perhaps art, for makers, celebrates then, not the measurable strengths of power (the technical impetus-to-control over ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ forces (energies/resources)) but, rather, the possibility of becoming-other to these very processes. Making hopes that the giving-up which it entails (the fall away from ‘work’ for example) will leave traces of its necessary undoing. Far from being drawn into and placed within culture according to its possession of a power that can be reconciled with and put to work in support of power’s routine processes, making seeks to show only the difference that its so weak cata-force (an unforcing at best…) might make to the possibility of our survival.
This other towards which art-things want to draw us is precisely the irreconcilable. It is the not-yet that cannot be made meaningful according to the meanings through which we routinely assemble our everyday relations to ‘our’ world. Its very point is to try to find ways of avoiding representation and thus servitude to others’ interests. This is why the issue of its terms of survival, how it can cling on, live on, haunt the making of art. And this is an ever more urgent and fraught task given the proliferation and complexity of the powers of representation. Risking immediate relegation to waste (as the unwanted – that which no-one ordered…) it knows that it is almost helpless to withstand the alternative (co-optation according to the power-broking interests of others). All it can hope to do is to try to find ways of secreting within its offerings traces of an otherness, an encrypted difference, which might just leave the languages of control and knowledge non-plussed.
Caught up in the in-between and permeated by the conflicting demands, making, responsible firstly and finally to art, can only survive by accepting this precariousness. Necessarily denied an unequivocal region, a cultural space, within which it can perform its gestures towards otherness, it knows only that it has to try to survive aside from any givens other than those marked by lack. Andrew’s sequence of photo-objects and the terms on which they are offered to us draw us inexorably into making’s region and, specifically, into the unavoidable risks of making now. They confront us with one maker’s challenging responses to the challenges to art (and living) posed by the intimate ties, the inseparable coalescence, of disaster and representation. They seem to propose that our responses, where and how we position ourselves in relation to their gestures, will be critical constituents of their possibilities, of the terms on which they might just be able to survive.