![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
'That sounds like something to take me on beyond Gombrich,' I thought, running across a very brief description of this book. Well, yes, in a sense... I should probably attempt to describe its attitude to art, instead of just running away screaming. The formless, or informe, as described by Georges Bataille around 1930, is not a concept, and god forbid it should be a theme; it is instead a process, a means of attacking how we mean things. There is art which is about formlessness, but that's not what's being done here; once the art is about something, it is not performing the operation of the informe.
Sorry, this description is still part of the running away screaming: I did not finish the book. It is structured as a dictionary; I read about a third of the entries with full attention and a third of them skimming. I'm glad to have read as much of it as I did, because it's nice to have something in my head in this territory more specific than 'many people have found modern art pretentious and navel-gazey', but I don't feel a need to fill in the details. I would happily have wandered about the exhibition this book is based on. I may come back to read something about modern art some other time that is not about Georges Bataille.
Unlike in Gombrich, little mention is made here of what it's like for anybody in particular to look at art. Much mention is made of Freud, without any discussion of the idea that Freud's saying something might not make it true. Art is on a vertical axis, don't you know; partly because of gallery walls but also because the human body is erect, unlike the animal body, whose field of view is horizontal, and we are forever chained to our own feet, which are in the mud. Form is what can support things vertically against gravity, so the art of the informe horizontalises. Throwing paint down at a canvas such that it does not drip, as Jackson Pollock did, is significantly different from throwing it across at a wall. And text is a horizontal medium because it is read primarily at tables, as I read in a book held vertically on my lap...
Some of what's in here strikes me as more than arbitrary, although that doesn't. The idea that by depicting the violence of a slaughterhouse you're implicitly claiming that the violence isn't all that shocking, isn't all that repressed, because after all, it's hanging on this here gallery wall... So, in Eli Lotar's photo series, the slaughterhouse is presented merely as a line of leg bones in a large dark street, making banality and indifference sinister. Whether or not I think it works (I don't find the images particularly effective, but I'm eighty years on) that seems to me a transparent rationale for the images which are in the book.
There is also much abstract conceptual play which I like, without finding it to provide transparent anything, and some which I find entertaining in a, 'Why would anyone think that?' sort of way. The chapter on Entropy had both. It imagined a sandpit with black sand in one half and white in the other, and a child whose running in circles destroys that clear division and then can't recreate it just by turning around and running back the other way. Thence, entropy erases the distinction between figure and ground in art. Thence, the mimicry of leaves by an insect is a form of psychosis in which the insect loses its own sense of boundedness. (Which I simultaneously stared at incredulously thinking, 'Your metaphors are now attacking your reality,' and tossed about happily in my head seeing if it would become an idea for a story. Metaphors are fun to literalize). On to the idea that in falling from Grace we have become inaccurate copies of God, and the fact (which I have not sourced) that a praying mantis plays dead to escape predators, but that when its head is cut off it continues the behaviours of life for long enough that, while dead, it may play dead... Heading to the final paragraph, which describes the ambition to present sight as itself an artwork in the absence of the see-er. Only it took me a while to click to that, because what it says is, 'The entropic, simulacral move, however, is to float the field of seeing in the absence of a subject.' A phrasing which does not come down very hard on the matter of whether the move has actually been made, or whether it has succeeded.
I have less sympathy for the conceptual tile-sliding that leads gold and God to equal shit (because the sacred and the excremental are alike in their otherness). But it is true, I have thought less about the artistic properties of shit than the artistic properties of mirrors and simulacra, interesting things can probably be said about that fact.
Only that the purpose of the whole movement of this book is to lower, to attack, not just to tell stories about shit but to perceive shit as storiless. it's all artists opposing each other, 'attacking the castle of Modernism at the point it seemed strongest', etc, while walking a sort of 'don't think of a pink elephant' tightrope away from the things it seems intuitive to me that art would wish to have: theme, metaphor, meaning, beauty. Art becomes text describing the interpretive grid in which it is seen. When Bataille says that his aesthetic rivals aim at transcendence, it's an accusation. Now, this book does a lot of finding sex in the concept of rhythm, penises in photos of heads, shit in gold. But even if I thought its idea of the fundamental was a true one and not just another set of metaphors switched in to replace those which shine, I would be unsympathetic to its project. To quote, referring to the collages of an artist whose name I didn't note down:
“It is thus hardly surprising that this suppression of glue – the gluey reverse side of the figure that sticks it to the paper, the way roots are a hidden aspect of the flower – escaped him.”
On the one hand, to see collage as the suppression of glue is genuinely interesting to me. I have not thought much about what you could do with glue in collages. On the other hand, that's because I have tended to be distracted by looking at them.
The one sentence version of this post would be, 'You know, I really like form.”
Sorry, this description is still part of the running away screaming: I did not finish the book. It is structured as a dictionary; I read about a third of the entries with full attention and a third of them skimming. I'm glad to have read as much of it as I did, because it's nice to have something in my head in this territory more specific than 'many people have found modern art pretentious and navel-gazey', but I don't feel a need to fill in the details. I would happily have wandered about the exhibition this book is based on. I may come back to read something about modern art some other time that is not about Georges Bataille.
Unlike in Gombrich, little mention is made here of what it's like for anybody in particular to look at art. Much mention is made of Freud, without any discussion of the idea that Freud's saying something might not make it true. Art is on a vertical axis, don't you know; partly because of gallery walls but also because the human body is erect, unlike the animal body, whose field of view is horizontal, and we are forever chained to our own feet, which are in the mud. Form is what can support things vertically against gravity, so the art of the informe horizontalises. Throwing paint down at a canvas such that it does not drip, as Jackson Pollock did, is significantly different from throwing it across at a wall. And text is a horizontal medium because it is read primarily at tables, as I read in a book held vertically on my lap...
Some of what's in here strikes me as more than arbitrary, although that doesn't. The idea that by depicting the violence of a slaughterhouse you're implicitly claiming that the violence isn't all that shocking, isn't all that repressed, because after all, it's hanging on this here gallery wall... So, in Eli Lotar's photo series, the slaughterhouse is presented merely as a line of leg bones in a large dark street, making banality and indifference sinister. Whether or not I think it works (I don't find the images particularly effective, but I'm eighty years on) that seems to me a transparent rationale for the images which are in the book.
There is also much abstract conceptual play which I like, without finding it to provide transparent anything, and some which I find entertaining in a, 'Why would anyone think that?' sort of way. The chapter on Entropy had both. It imagined a sandpit with black sand in one half and white in the other, and a child whose running in circles destroys that clear division and then can't recreate it just by turning around and running back the other way. Thence, entropy erases the distinction between figure and ground in art. Thence, the mimicry of leaves by an insect is a form of psychosis in which the insect loses its own sense of boundedness. (Which I simultaneously stared at incredulously thinking, 'Your metaphors are now attacking your reality,' and tossed about happily in my head seeing if it would become an idea for a story. Metaphors are fun to literalize). On to the idea that in falling from Grace we have become inaccurate copies of God, and the fact (which I have not sourced) that a praying mantis plays dead to escape predators, but that when its head is cut off it continues the behaviours of life for long enough that, while dead, it may play dead... Heading to the final paragraph, which describes the ambition to present sight as itself an artwork in the absence of the see-er. Only it took me a while to click to that, because what it says is, 'The entropic, simulacral move, however, is to float the field of seeing in the absence of a subject.' A phrasing which does not come down very hard on the matter of whether the move has actually been made, or whether it has succeeded.
I have less sympathy for the conceptual tile-sliding that leads gold and God to equal shit (because the sacred and the excremental are alike in their otherness). But it is true, I have thought less about the artistic properties of shit than the artistic properties of mirrors and simulacra, interesting things can probably be said about that fact.
Only that the purpose of the whole movement of this book is to lower, to attack, not just to tell stories about shit but to perceive shit as storiless. it's all artists opposing each other, 'attacking the castle of Modernism at the point it seemed strongest', etc, while walking a sort of 'don't think of a pink elephant' tightrope away from the things it seems intuitive to me that art would wish to have: theme, metaphor, meaning, beauty. Art becomes text describing the interpretive grid in which it is seen. When Bataille says that his aesthetic rivals aim at transcendence, it's an accusation. Now, this book does a lot of finding sex in the concept of rhythm, penises in photos of heads, shit in gold. But even if I thought its idea of the fundamental was a true one and not just another set of metaphors switched in to replace those which shine, I would be unsympathetic to its project. To quote, referring to the collages of an artist whose name I didn't note down:
“It is thus hardly surprising that this suppression of glue – the gluey reverse side of the figure that sticks it to the paper, the way roots are a hidden aspect of the flower – escaped him.”
On the one hand, to see collage as the suppression of glue is genuinely interesting to me. I have not thought much about what you could do with glue in collages. On the other hand, that's because I have tended to be distracted by looking at them.
The one sentence version of this post would be, 'You know, I really like form.”
