Scarlett Johansson as Lucy (2014)
I've been told that my post on Heide Hatry's Icons in Ash was unkind and unfair. And, further, that my refusal or inability to recognise their philosophical interest and aesthetic power either perverse or shameful:
"Do you not see how the very materials from which they are composed deconstruct the life and death binary? If only you'd drop your anti-humanistic posturing for a moment, you might learn to appreciate their uncanny, bitter-sweet beauty and significance."
Let me, then, offer a few further remarks on Hatry's ash portraits, attempting to make clear the basis for my criticisms and concerns ...
I: On Faciality
I have written elsewhere on this blog about my Deleuzean dislike of the face: click here and here, for example.
In sum: the face has long held a privileged and determining place within Western metaphysics that I think we need to challenge. For whilst we might fool ourselves that each face is individual and unique, it isn’t. Rather, it’s a type of social machine that overcodes not just the head, but the entire body, ensuring that any asignifying or non-subjective forces and flows arising from the libidinal chaos of the latter are neutralized in advance. The smile and all our other familiar facial expressions are thus merely types of conformity with the dominant reality.
And so, when Heide Hatry insists on the primacy of the face and reconstructs it in all its complexity and vulgarity from ash, I have a problem. Asked if it was necessary to create facial images rather than do something else with the cremains, she replies:
"It's absolutely necessary; and it's necessary that the portrait is as realistic as possible because ... the face is where we understand communication is happening ... for capturing all the subtleties that make us human."
Hatry thus openly subscribes to the ideal moral function of the face; as that which reveals the soul and allows us to comprehend the individual: "Other ways of reading a person are incidental or filtered through this", she says - not incorrectly, but in a manner that suggests she's entirely untroubled by this.
II: Becoming-Imperceptible
For me - again as someone who writes in the shadow of Deleuze - it's crucial to (i) rethink the subject outside of the moral-rational framework provided by classical humanism and (ii) escape the face and find a way of becoming-imperceptible. Thus, rather than drawing faces in the dust and displaying a sentimental attachment to personal identity, artists should be helping us experiment with different modes of constituting the self and new ways of inhabiting the body.
Further, they should be helping us form an understanding of death that is entirely inhuman and faceless and which opens up a radically impersonal way of being linked to cosmic forces: a return to material actuality, as Nietzsche says; i.e. merging with a universe that is supremely indifferent to life. To think death in terms of becoming-imperceptible is ultimately to privilege ashes over the epiphenomenal phoenix that arises from them (despite the beauty of its feathers).
It doesn't mean "returning indistinguishable ashes to the particular" and vainly attempting to keep alive what was "in danger of being lost or forgotten". The idea that art exists in order to secure "the sense of a person, of her or his individuality, to lovingly preserve that quality even in death, in memory, and with it the integrity of the human lineage through generations", is anathema to me.
I think, at heart, most of us - like Sade - desire to be completely forgotten when we die, leaving no visible traces behind of our existence. As Rosi Braidotti puts it, central to posthumanist ethics lies evanescence (not transcendence) and the following paradox: "that while at the conscious level all of us struggle for survival, at some deeper level of our unconscious structures, all we long for is to lie silently and let time wash over us in the perfect stillness of not-life".
To be everywhere and nowhere; everything and nothing; to vanish like Lucy or the Incredible Shrinking Man into the eternal flux of becoming - that's better than ending up ashen-faced, is it not?
Notes
Rosi Braidotti, 'The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible', in Deleuze and Philosophy, ed. Constantin Boundas, (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 133-59. To read this essay online click here.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The University of Minnesota Press, 1987); see chapters 7: 'Year Zero: Faciality' and 10: 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible ...'
Mark Pachter, 'A Conversation with Heide Hatry', in Heide Hatry, Icons in Ash, ed. Gavin Keeney, (Station Hill in association with Ubu Gallery, New York, 2017), pp. 76-91.
Re: Luc Bresson's film, Lucy (2014), of course it's shot through with crackpot science, Hollywood hokum and idealism of the worst kind - what Nietzsche would think of as Platonism for the people. But it at least hints at the form of becoming towards which all other becomings aim - the becoming-imperceptible. It's just unfortunate it ends with an idiotic text message - I am everywhere - which implies omnipresence in terms of personal consciousness, rather than impersonal materiality.
“The one necessary thing.— A person must have one or the other. Either a cheerful disposition by nature, or a disposition made cheerful by art and knowledge.”
ReplyDelete― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
Dear Stephen Alexander,
I read your blog posts about my recent body of work, Icons in Ash, with great interest, and I am delighted that you have taken the time and effort to speak about it as seriously as you have. There is nothing I appreciate more than thoughtful criticism. For me, the more critical, the more impassioned, the more antagonistic, the better. I subject myself and my ideas to the same kinds of scrutiny, and I find it gratifying and instructive to come upon new perspectives from which to see my work afresh, or optimally, even to see it with the eyes of another, as if I were an outsider to it, so I appreciate that you have written about it in a way that doesn’t simply recapitulate my own still-developing and far from fully coherent views about it, in spite of the fact that, in the end, I don’t recognize myself or the work in what you’ve written, which feels a little formulaic, perhaps even facile to me, in its Deleuzian garb. While I am still sorting through aspects of your theoretical armature, and I have welcomed the reminder to look back into Deleuze and Guattari, I wonder whether you’ve really looked at the work itself. I can see that you haven’t felt it, but my general impression is that you’ve taken it as a sort of argument for positions that I don’t actually support instead of as the opportunity for a complex and disconcerting range of experiences. It is visual art, after all, and it is at least potentially fraught with emotion, if for no others then unquestionably for the individuals for whom it was made, however “conceptual” it might also be.
The work of Deleuze and Guattari has always struck me as therapeutic (something it has deeply in common with Icons in Ash), that is, it necessarily exists in the milieu of distress or disease. It can have come into existence and be relevant only amidst what it regards as a culture of disease. At the same time, it is a product of that diseased culture. And the counter-examples to the values of that culture to which it repairs almost invariably, and I’d say programmatically, derive from what that culture accounts as derangements, e.g., mental illness, perversion (masochism), drug use, altered states, etc., even though they frequently come with disclaimers to the effect that “these are just examples, and others, less problematic, could be cited.” The notion that Artaud or even Rimbaud might serve as salutary examples of the good life would no doubt have amused them. They are certainly, at any rate, no models of joy as Nietzsche envisioned it.
For my reply please go to:
Deletehttp://torpedotheark.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/a-letter-to-heide-hatry-parts-i-and-ii.html
To contend that this work is an effort “to have the last word” as against people I loved who have died (or in fact killed themselves), aside from its banality and reductiveness, is wrong-headed, tone-deaf, and remarkably ungenerous for no apparent reason, especially as my own description of the events leading to the decision to embark upon this body of work offers no basis for seeing things that way and many to take a more expansive, or at least a less narrow view. The first thought that came to mind when I read that was: I wonder whether he has ever experienced the death of someone he actually loved. That you insist on the “one final opportunity for recrimination” as which you’ve interpreted the desire, or rather the need, to sustain a relationship with my father and my friend Stefan through the veil of death, reflects, to my mind, a willful misunderstanding. Even the notion of “one final opportunity” is so unresponsive to my actual (and avowed) relationship to the work that it is rather disheartening even to have to address it. My relationship to this work, and to the subjects of this work, is ongoing, developing, and changing, in other words, it is strangely continuous. And I don’t even concur in the notion that its subjects are unable, for their part, to speak (back); they are in me (and many others), and, much as in dreams, in literature, in art, the dead certainly do continue to speak, and not as mere puppets of the living, but from the same uncharted and perhaps unchartable realms from which all worthy thought and all poetry arises, bearing the courageous mark of genuine communication. They even affect the way that “I” speak. The fact that I do not abide the Weltanschauung embodied in your words, “I think, at heart, most of us – like Sade – desire to be completely forgotten when we die, leaving no visible traces behind of our existence,” nor, on a lesser register, believe it to be even remotely factual – it is, rather, I would contend, as rare as the spirit to whom you attribute it – does not, however, prevent me from recognizing in it an aspect of truth, and certainly one that imbues both the (“loathsome”) Freudian understanding of the death drive and the so-called “post-humanist ethics” (doesn’t that very phrase seem to invoke the most problematic sense of “humanism”?) to which you refer: the fact of death exerts an oppressive and defeatist effect upon the most glorious phenomenon of which we are aware, namely, (yes, human) life. And it is obvious that Nietzsche was trying to reconcile these tendencies in his own “life-affirming” Eternal Return of the Same.
ReplyDeleteGiven that you disavow, or distrust, (mono-)subjectivity, identity, personhood, this may seem no less odious to you than the caricature of my work that you’ve proposed, but as I see it (and here I cannot help remembering that right at the beginning of Mille plateaux, Deleuze and Guattari offer a rather weak and evasive rationale for signing the work “in their own names”), a theoretical rhizomatism becomes meaningful only after the point at which a vertically oriented/root-tree type of thinking and social organization has blossomed into the many anthropo-centric impediments to growth that the former seeks to undo. In other words, there would be no advanced culture – which is based upon the practice of distinction(s) – to criticize, without the historical “misadventure” of philosophy, capitalism, psychoanalysis, science, art, etc. (And there is no question that these are all for the chosen, or for those who can afford them, in any case.)
For my reply please go to:
Deletehttp://torpedotheark.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/a-letter-to-heide-hatry-parts-i-and-ii.html
On top of that, whatever sort of opposition one might want to level against the subject-object/presence-absence dichotomy (I am reminded that, for Benjamin, the aura of presence was precisely distance), it, too, will be inherently fissured by its origins. When, in this work, I orient myself toward death through the human face, I am not arresting or attempting to reify (preterite) life in an arbitrary position of my choosing, but rather acknowledging a social problematic (more or less as you describe it) and trying to get past it using energies to which it has itself given rise, (among other things). There is conventionally understood identity in this, to be sure, (as there is opacity, the opacity of all human relations, the mask, if you will), as well as the multiplicity that its several viewers bring to it through their divergent memories and feelings, and there is the utter and ineluctable, and I would contend, rather chilling than comforting, vacuity of death as well, both in itself, and in the face of an unknown person of no meaning at all to most of its viewers; and then there is the human potential for empathy, even under these last-noted conditions.
ReplyDeleteNot to be able to look into the face (at least not without revulsion) strikes me as a sign of bad conscience, hypocrisy, or self-distrust; to see them all as the same, seems to be a sign of amazing hubris, the hubris of the tyrant or the general that Deleuze and Guattari deplore. And to “HATE the face” seems at best a bit extreme, almost Judeo-Islamic (though the conception of faciality as coetaneous with the birth of Christ speaks profoundly of the differing theologies of these faiths, as indeed of Protestantism from Catholicism). As D and G remark scornfully in passing, all parent-child bonding or imprinting, and especially in the nursing relationship of mother and child, takes place through the face and its little black holes. There is no point in the odious development of the human race when this was not the case. Please note that all of my subjects were someone’s child and most were someone’s parent. I will merely draw together these few threads from the foregoing to suggest that the rejection of “facialism” may well occlude a certain sexism that the celebration of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s veiled full-body self-examination tends not to allay.
To invoke Nietzsche’s apothegm about masks and the profound spirit in this context – yes the very Nietzsche who was so self-evidently attentive to the character of his own visage, and who may well have loved the camera as it loved him – seems to me to go astray. The profound know better than anyone that hiding in plain sight is quite sufficient to secure their privacy (though one might well ask what is so precious about their privacy in the first place), as virtually no one sees what is in front of their eyes much less what goes infinitely beyond it. And behind a mask there is still an identity, an identity that has chosen a mask; Nietzsche merely says that the profound soul doesn’t reveal itself to all, nor perhaps all of itself to any, but if it had no interest in revelation at all, why the mask, which will always attract attention? And it is no less true to say that the face itself (echoing the spirit of D and G) is in fact a mask, hiding individuality, while life, as you seem quite prepared to acknowledge, serves as the mask of death. And the image of the dead merely confounds the living in a whirl of unfinished conversations anyway. It is the mask of everything left unfinished, every thought unexpressed, every hope extinguished. And, of course, the mask that Nietzsche really wants to talk about is art, which will always be interpreted.
For my reply please go to:
Deletehttp://torpedotheark.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/a-letter-to-heide-hatry-parts-iii-v.html
ReplyDeleteFor me, the use of death material in portraiture – and as I do see it, “quite unproblematically,” the image of the face is merely the apposite form to receive this utterly specific material, at least given my rather divergent sense of its place and meaning in the history and even the present of art – asserts that death is insuperable, even essential, while it is the most ordinary fact of our lives, and I have portrayed this residue of the once living as utterly ordinary. (That they are Bodies without Organs and assemblages (they are not “paintings” but rather closer to micro-mosaics) I will merely mention, and though I wouldn’t rule out the notion that individuality is itself a mode of death, death to the richness of multifarious potential, the necessary loss of opportunity that living requires, all of which plays some role in it, this is hardly at the forefront of this work.) The ash portrait is therefore also inherently fissured: it is the stuff of the living – it has lived – and it is dead, though it continues to live for those who care about it; it actually exemplifies the sense of person as stuff that you (and your Sade) seem to advocate, while remaining attuned to the fact that the (human) world and its relationships persists though the individual has died. Perhaps the principal difference between it and some other modality of the dead object is that it has been ennobled by art, and hence demands the attention of the living in a way that mute or invisible death practices do not. I well understand that I cannot change death or the simple fact of it, and I have no notion of doing that, but I am trying to change how we, or at least some few of us, engage it and sense it in ourselves.
So, while I did choose the face because it says individuality, because it is how we engage other people, however and necessarily imperfectly or narrowly, I never had the idea for this work in the first place in order to talk about death or individuality, but rather to address a need of my own. It wasn’t as if I had some ashes and wondered: what can I do with these? I had death and despair, and my own psyche – I want to say my body-psyche – came to my aid in telling me what to do with them (the despair and death, I mean). Though I am hardly “thanatologically obsessed” – I dare say I know no one as interested in life as I am, unless we are to say that those are identical – I have come, particularly through the practice this body of work has imposed upon me, to understand how to live with it. The obscenity as which I might once have seen it, the solecism against what I hold sacrosanct, has indeed now been integrated, if not into the timeless indifference of being. If there is a sense in which I think that the “Sadean” desire of which you speak is commonplace, it is that the general, unreflective run of common opinion and practice during the last century or so has gradually nudged death out of consciousness to the extent that our social being has been deeply compromised, and in my view, it is rather by re-vivifying death and the dead that we stand a chance of undoing that obvious damage. In this view, however, it is the living about whom I’m thinking, as I have been throughout the many years during which this work has been developing. It was always made for the living, however selfish or clingy that might seem.
For my reply please go to:
Deletehttp://torpedotheark.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/a-letter-to-heide-hatry-parts-iii-v.html
I do not intend to freeze the dead in a permanent subordination to my (or their loved ones’) picture of them, as I think would be obvious from even a cursory reading of my introduction. And I have no notion of “transforming an object into a subject.” When I say that I am creating art-subjects, I mean that the art entity I aspire to make has its own (mysterious, ineffable) source of power, of communication, of influence, and that whatever my intention is has no sway over it. On the other hand, it does mean that we can communicate in some sense as equals, that my memories, my needs, my purposes are not its purpose: I want to keep a dialogue alive with people who, like almost all of us, died (or will die) without having expressed or revealed themselves, and even if that revelation can, perforce, come only from the examination of my own memory and feelings, it is one that I leave as open as the fact of personhood allows. They are not (“new”) identities that I am “imposing,” but rather continuities within an otherwise fractured chain of life, efforts to not simply abandon the emotional investment of a lifetime nor the gift of the other.
ReplyDeleteAs I see it, if, as you seem to contend, the “goal” or “desire” of life (or at least of death/dying) is to merge back into material indifference, we might as well be dead already. It is the improbable activation/animation of these compounds that makes them interesting (to, I might note, the only creatures of whom we are aware capable of being interested in that fact), and if interesting is uninteresting to you, then I suppose I am, perforce, a humanist.
For my reply please go to:
Deletehttp://torpedotheark.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/a-letter-to-heide-hatry-parts-iii-v.html