On The Image
Renata Adler, from screenprinted zine Summer 2019.
It’s 1969. The brilliant intellect, writer and infamous critic, Renata Adler, writes how over the course of “two and a half years... five days out of seven”, she’s watched soap operas “nearly always when I thought I should be doing other things”. She admits almost shamefully, almost—before qualifying that soap operas were a critical reflection of a new mediated America—that “I saw the characters in them more often than my friends, I knew their relationships, the towns.” We have all succumbed to addictions that were too comforting for criticality. Mine was a depressive lull in any ambition whatsoever in my early 20s when I would sleep in till 11am and awake to find myself downstairs slouched in front of Days of our Lives which, interestingly enough, was one of Renata Adler’s soap addictions in the late 60s. Christmas week 2018 I found myself reflecting on why Netflix serial dramas, a timely replacement for Days of our Lives, are so much closer to the intimacy we experience in real life. Maybe more so. The all-access serial drama, where life unfolds and doubles over on a flat screen that compresses the gaze so tight that diamonds grow in our eyes make the people we see walking and driving parallel on the commute home into pulp, with no existence outside of our narrow searchlight gaze. My latest Netflix binge is the German drama, Dark (2018), with its Heideggerian temporal simultaneity of past, present and future against the heavy palette and textures of an Anselm Kiefer. In other words, it’s German to the primordial bone. In the first few episodes we get to know the characters generationally as children, as adults, as parents, and as grandparents, as they travel back and forth through time from 2019 to 1986—the most ’80s of years—via flashback and time travel, meeting themselves and relevant others in the then and now of a small town in the middle of nowhere, where and when nobody in this temporal and geographic enclave seemingly leaves home because they have bonded in this “festering wound” of a place where relationships become traumas because of the incestuous nature of time travel. The best writers and critics are time travellers. In ’69 Renata Adler observed while ‘couching’ her potato actuality that “Perhaps they [soap operas] are what personal life was like, before the violent, flash discontinuities of media news and personal air travel came along.” 50 years on our mediated lives are more mediated than ever as we try desperately to make flesh and sense of our digital lives through our continuous and persistent presence on social media where we double down on our identity. But we know this and have accepted this virtual and violently narcissistic fate. What I am interested in here is not what social media is doing to our real lives but what the image, shared on social media, is doing to our art lives, as artists, writers or just lovers of art. Appetite for the real is my real question against this mirror reality that we proliferate all to generously in how we are engaging with art exclusively in the virtual field. Photogenic art, that’s where we’re at; we judge and experience everything now through the one mediated filter, the mobile phone. I am near the end of my commute and the audiobook On Photography (1977) by that other giant intellect, Susan Sontag. As I listen and dodgem Sontag hits home on something time and again in her time-travelling theories that reiterate the contemporary sensibility and relationship to images in their proliferation, their dissemination, and how images are becoming more and more less and less as the image field becomes increasingly homogeneous and flat and there is neither the feel of a ripple or splash in the real world of art. There’s a flattening of cultural experience but not of cultural capital. Whatever criticisms are lobbed at social media it seems we are in it for the long haul as artists, especially artists. When you bring up the Instagram experience of art most artists smile and admit it’s an unavoidable means to an end… but to what end? There is a serious yearning and want in artists’ participation on social media. Looking from the outside-in as a writer on art, an activity that necessitates a deeper engagement and criticality than other observers of art, including artists, I see social media having wide-ranging effects on the mentality of the artist and the physical nature of the art scene, which we do not give near the same attention or energy to as we do to composing the building blocks of our promotional hashtags on Instagram. The art scene has transitioned online. We do not have the appetite for going to galleries anymore, and when we do we manage our experiences with a phone and a photograph. Images are posted on the night or next day following the forced sociability of the opening. Why bother, eh! Install shots manage art better than in person, where and when we conceptually and emotionally stagger between thing and thought and time. We do not re-experience art as shock or new when the clinking wine glasses have long staggered home and we return to the gallery for a “proper look”. “Art is a self-consciousness act” Sontag claims across the sound and time waves. How self-conscious is Instagram? Is this the new consciousness? A digital consciousness? An art consciousness? Cigars drawn, Yosemite Sam shoots Sigmund Freud. If the art gallery isn’t a place we experience art in the flesh anymore, then what has the art gallery become, a showroom, a stage that facilitates the proliferation of more images? Galleries are not the end all of art, far from it. As witnesses to the shift from offline to online, from DIY to FYI, Instagram cannot be waived off as a harmless supplement to real art in the gallery. It’s way too pervasive, too convincing, too manipulative, too easy. Instagram does not excite physical appetite, it diminishes it. (I still want the fragmented experience of art where we confront art askew; or to use a word from Dostoyevsky, catercorner.) Contemporary art is difficult to manage in person. It’s not sociable, even when it tries in theory and practice. We always miss something in art in person. We are bad witnesses on the move in physical space. Art spread eagles itself across our vision to evade and elude our conviction to unify. We want metaphor, we get metonymy. We are intellectually agasp in front of art. We cannot hold art in our eyes’ grasp. Our blind spots dilate in our capacity to take everything in but not in any great detail. Art is bigger than the breadth of our eyes, grander than the small stories we shape the world with. We fill in where memory fails us; we gossip-in the details. We leave the gallery with traces of our experience; ontology is hauntology as Bennington said of Derrida’s deconstruction. We bring those images that we tried and failed to grasp in the physical setting into the real world; images that break down as new senses, new sentences form reflective facets on real experience. Diamonds in our eyes again. Images are starry in our memory, never still. The photograph, the image, the pic, is deconstructing our art scene in its stillness; we don’t live in the world (Dasein in Heideggerian). Instagram is just another institution of self, with its protective propaganda, distant and distracted and without instinct: “man has no instincts, he makes institutions” (Deleuze). From the dashboard Sontag’s says something about the lack of participation in the act of photography. It begs the question what does participation mean right now in the art scene if the art scene has migrated online to leave the physical setting of art to breathe in the fresh air of non-participation in this institution of self where no physical community can mingle, shoulder to shoulder in the accidents and errors of physical sociability. Are we participating when we go to a gallery to feel the air between art, us, and its context? Are we participating when we post an image or validate other images online? Are we participating when we divulge something personal about our other lives as artists? Are we participating when we theorise about participation in practice? What are we contributing? What are we sacrificing? Meaning of words change as the world turns on its vertical axis. It always goes back to the vertical: hierarchy, inequality, envy. Is the physical setting just an institution of display that has had its time and we are prolonging its execution, as new ways of experiencing art, claimed as secondary, are in virtuality, primary? The gallery is a Procrustean bed for the artist to lie in and get waterboarded by the ebb and flow of the economy? I know from talking and listening to artists that the pure experience of the studio and the desire and want dreamt up in the space of art-making never lives up to its display in the gallery. The paradox is, without the gallery, without the physical setting and the gaze of the public sphere, no matter how small that gaze is, the artist has no real desire to exist in process in perpetuity. Does an image posted of our work on social media at least momentarily pause the destructive force of process without end? Sontag says “porn”. Innocence is defined here on the basis of what we are exposed to through images rather than experience, and how that first shock image can never be re-experienced. Art that shocks only shocks once. Not cheap shocks, but shock in terms of a shockingly new physical perspective on the world, askew, catercorner, us and it. I remember an art history lecturer who filled his teaching time by inserting a clunky VHS tape of Robert Hughes’ art series The Shock of the New and sitting back while Hughes did his thing. It worked, it really did, because we had to sit through Hughes week after week, and some of those that did would go on to be artists and all of those that slept, well. The memory that stayed with me is Hughes’ verbal musculature overlaid on the image of a vertiginous Eiffel Tower, his symbol for burgeoning modernism against his believable narrative of Parisians climbing up the Tower for the first time in the late 1800s and seeing the city for the first time as a patchwork, what Jacques Lacan would call a quilt, something metaphoric and manageable. Life and art has become about distance rather than integration and participation; no more nudging opinions in the public sphere. We can look at Instagram as a platform for the artist to play or propagandise, a tool to expand the singularity of their vision or to distract from their black hole style. Susan Sontag wrote On Photography in 1977. As I arrive home to people who are not cardboard cut-outs, her words from the car stereo speak volumes, then and now:
Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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