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Story: The Circular Ruins
Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Date: 1940
Kind: Theology, Philosophy, and Literature
Genre: Fiction

What are the Circular Ruins? There really is no other question here.

Most prominently, the figures, images, and premises presented in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story ‘Las Ruinas Circulares’ can be read, figuratively, as an allegory to the evolution of Consciousness. More precisely, and this is my account, the History of Western Consciousness. Nonetheless, the available interpretations of this story are as multiple as the literary, philosophical, and theological references it contains. Its contents and their sequence point to myriad references ranging from Antiquity to Modern cosmovisions. The most crucial are perhaps those allowing the interested reader to trace a conceptual lineage of models of Knowledge and Belief (Philosophical and Theological) across Western History. Starting perhaps from Late Antiquity, its later use in Catholicism and its Pagan mirrors, and its evolution throughout the Enlightenment to Modernity. Here I am less interested in tracing this genealogy myself, as for this would require a thorough turn into the cul-de-sac of interpretation and adjudication, rather, I prompt we dive right into the night of this unanimous dreamer with intentions of finding nothing in particular; for ultimately, we’ve been called upon to experience two of the most treacherous unknowns: the intimacy of humankind in the obscurity of its religious existence,  met by the light we place upon the deep. 

This paper is composed of fragments expanding on particular passages from the story. These passages, I perceive, point to different orderings of Self and Universe, Matter and Idea, Positionality and Movement, and what else, we shall evaluate the mode of creation our dream-creator devises at each stage. For this, I will be making considerable use of another chunk of text that is contemporary to this story, Bertrand Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy (1945) and relating the contents of the story to the contents of the History of Western thought. 

note: with ‘Western Thought/Consciousness’ here, I am referring to it in its original sense, as the evolution of European universality as a discriminate system, I am not integrating its alterations upon the clashing with the Americas and the subsequent syncretism. Although they may certainly apply. I want to advert that it is a conscious decision to abstain from building metaphorical references linking the contents of this story to historiographic accounts of colonial syncretism, or to Borges’ condition as a cross-continental Hispanic literate, or the political context in which the story was written. 

…

NIGHT 1. COSMOS
SUBJECTS: UNIVERSE & SELF; ANATOMY, COSMOGRAPHY & MAGIC; THE DAWN OF THE METAPHORIC BEING; ASTROLOGY

“Nadie lo vio desembarcar en la unánime noche, nadie vio la canoa de bambú sumiéndose en el fango sagrado, pero a los pocos días nadie ignoraba que el hombre taciturno venía del Sur”

(…) 

Al principio, los sueños eran caóticos; poco después, fueron de naturaleza dialéctica. El forastero se soñaba en el centro de un anfiteatro circular que era de algún modo el templo incendiado

(…)

El hombre les dictaba lecciones de anatomía, de cosmografía, de magia”

The articulation: anatomy, cosmography, and magic is not random. It rather refers to a very particular cosmic epistemology which interpolated, perhaps as ‘a technoscientific paradigm,’ between late antiquity and the Medieval period; where it gradually faded away to the rise of Christianity’s monolithic universe. Nonetheless, its planetary observations—inner interferences about the Self, World, and Sky, were to remain close to the core of the ‘systems of Belief’ that would succeed it; not only in the subliminal imaginary and the evolution of iconography, but materially present in ever-returning idealism. To be precise, this particular cosmovision conceives the existence of a macrocosmos and a microcosmos (the human Self) to be inherently connected or belonging to a celestial, singular system; whose relations can be grasped through the observation, study, and calculus of the celestial bodies (planets; stars) that appear in the Celestial sphere (The Sky), for their movement had effect on the movement that happens in our material world (though, this study is more Metaphorical than Physical). To put it simply: the parts of ourselves are connected to the parts of our universe. 

Astrology, as we now refer to this epistemology, belongs to the scientific paradigm established for the time that concerns this particular passage, one in which cosmology was evolving less substantial and more structural. Some might argue, it had provided the structural basis (structural thinking) for Catholic/Christian theology that would later regard it as pagan. (Notwithstanding, Christians and Pagan, as we shall learn later, would often come to find common ground in the theological and scientific study of interplanetary phenomena). In some way, the metaphorical potential of Antique cosmic imagination and its imagery permeated not only iconographically throughout the dark ages, but also provided support for Theology to never abandon fully the Scientific inquiry. Aby Warburg, who died in 1919 leaving incomplete what would have been one of the greatest achievements in Art History, had devoted his life to tracing the subliminal lineage of celestial iconography from Antiquity to Late Rennaissance. One of the few matured and recorded projects that have been recently translated is his research on the sphaera; which could be understood as the study of the iconographic transmission of the study of the Skies. His historizing is somewhat entangled and academically obscure, nonetheless, invested and genealogical, and for the better part, the sphaera facilitated an iconographic study of Cosmography and its influence in the systems of Belief that would dominate until the Enlightenment. 

In a general sense, he conceived Astrology as a sort of relativism that evolved from the detachment of Magic and structural cosmology. To better understand this notion, he provides a very clear definition of the technoscientific explanation of Magic in this early paradigm: “Magic is, in the sense of late Antiquity, simply applied cosmology. This is, the application of an Identity principle between subject and world that leads to the practice of manipulation—the idea of the microcosmos.” The paramount representation of this is embodied in the icon of the Zodiac Man. Which is, in some way, a visual representation of Self and Universe. What the Zodiac paradigm conveys is that each organ is connected to a zodiac sign; and thus, the radiance of astral bodies influences our respective organs. 

The difference between Astrology and Applied Cosmology can be understood by analyzing the misleading relation between metaphor and designation. The astrological doctrine fails, according to Warburg, for it abandons the metaphoric being to the designation sense. (69) He used the sociological term, Loi de participation (which in psychology comes about simply as the ‘social manifestation of reality;’ in sociology as that the study of consciousness chiefly requires that it be studied situated in its particular social matrix) to describe the way astrology marks a detachment from the metaphoric Being and establishes itself as a social consciousness, which manifests effects on its own but is abandoned by the course of the theological project of Being—becoming, at its best, conscious of itself as a partial knowledge. 

Unsatisfied with his original creation, our dreamer-creator abandoned his initial projects, and proceeded to dream of other deities, which were multiple nonetheless, or at least they seemed, for he could not avoid himself from the irrevocable presence of their bodies, which were all he knew. Hesitant to detach his imaginary from the natural cosmos and its bodies as a separate consciousness, he was to become pagan in his own universe. He dreamt a Man and his pulsing heart, and rather than teaching anatomy, he embarked on the anatomical task of constructing this Man which would be made of matter (heart; lungs; skeleton; eyelids; hair), but that would also be made of something else, of something deposit between the heart, the symbol of a planet, and another unpronounced chief organ: “luego retomó el corazón, invocó el nombre de un planeta y emprendió la visión de otro de los órganos principales.”

NIGHT 2. GENESIS
SUBJECTS: THE CREATED WORLD; SOUL & MATTER; PLOTINUS & THE GNOSTICS; THE PLANETS’ BURDEN 

“Comprendió que el empeño de modelar la materia incoherente y vertiginosa de que se componen los sueños es el más arduo que puede acometer un varón, aunque penetre todos los enigmas del orden superior y del inferior 

(…) 

Juró olvidar la enorme alucinación que lo había desviado al principio.

(…) 

Luego, en la tarde, se purificó en las aguas del río, adoró los dioses planetarios, pronunció las sílabas lícitas de un nombre poderoso y durmió. Casi inmediatamente, soñó con un corazón que latía.

(…)

Deliberadamente no soñó durante una noche: luego retomó el corazón, invocó el nombre de un planeta y emprendió la visión de otro de los órganos principales. Antes de un año llegó al esqueleto, a los párpados. El pelo innumerable fue tal vez la tarea más difícil. Soñó un hombre íntegro, un mancebo, pero éste no se incorporaba ni hablaba ni podía abrir los ojos. Noche tras noche, el hombre lo soñaba dormido.

En las cosmogonías gnósticas, los demiurgos amasan un rojo Adán que no logra ponerse de pie; tan inhábil y rudo y elemental como ese Adán de polvo era el Adán de sueño que las noches del mago habían fabricado.”

demiurge (/ˈdɛmi.ɜːrdʒ/):  an artisan-like figure responsible for fashioning and maintaining the physical universe. Corresponding to Platonic, Neopythagorean, Middle Platonic, and Neoplatonic Philosophy; adopted by the Gnostics. 

Plotinus (CE 204-270), the last of the Great philosophers of Antiquity, or at least in the account of Philosophy Historian Bertrand Russell, is described as not particularly akin either to astrologers nor magicians. Moreover, although with a considerable degree of streaming influence, Plotinus’ doctrines would oppose that of the preceding Gnostics. It would do so in a way that is relevant to grasp the events described in the above passages as imagined by our dream-creator. Let us detain ourselves here to consider the modes of creation at play in this passage; for it makes apparent references to an evolution (shift) in the paradigms of cosmic Genesis.

For as the astrologers and magicians, it concerned the problem of Sin and ‘free will.’ For Plotinus thought of Sin as a consequence of free will. Nonetheless, he did not oppose either the scientific capacities of astrology nor he was free from superstition in his philosophy, rather, he simply regarded them (the astrologers and magicians) as determinists; as if, for instance, the metaphysical truth of the astrological system rendered human incapable of Free Will, and thus, of Sin. 

For as the Gnostics, Plotinus would have rejected some of the most fundamental components of their doctrine. For the most part, in two main respects: 

1.) The Gnostics believed that the material world was created by a dark deity named Ialdabaoth (a platonic Demiurge). Often presented as a lion-headed snake. What is important to understand about Ialdabaoth is that was born from Sophia (Wisdom, the lowest ranked divinity), in a rebellious attempt to make a copy of herself; Ialdabaoth is thus born as an imperfect, copy of a conspiring deity. In short, the Gnostic Genesis implies that Ialdabaoth first produced Matter; he brought Adam into existence by breathing into him his own Soul, he then created the Serpent (Ophiomorphos), often referred to as the Serpent of Knowledge, which was to become the embodiment and origin of all Evil. Thus, while matter preceded evilness, the creation of the material world results from the device of a macabre lower entity, and in a sense that Knowledge, Evil, and Soul seem to articulate an original trinity. 

Although not free of difficulties, Plotinus rejected this idea. He firmly believed that Matter was created by the Soul, and that Soul descended from a Divine memory. The Soul was, in his sense, immortal in its transmission. Sticking to his Platonic foundations, he conceived that Soul had no material body-form nor it was matter, it was Essence, and Essence, like Platonic ideas, is eternal. He thus believed that when the soul leaves a body it necessarily enters another body. And a Soul was subject to the Good and the Evil (Sin) and carried the burden of its past life into the next. Thus, the evolution of human Being across the centuries is the evolution of Soul, tracing all its way back: The soul creates the material world (the visible world) from the memory of the divine.  

2.) The Gnostics rejected the idea that the Sun, the Moon and the Stars were associated to some sort of positive divinity; since they thought they resulted (as the rest of the cosmos) from evilness. Whereas Plotinus firmly believed that the celestial bodies not only resembled, but were themselves God-like. Before Beauty and its inspiration came to be demonized by the Church in the years that succeeded Plotinus, it had played an important role for the late-ancient philosophers, him in particular, to articulate a version of the cosmos in which heavenly bodies inspired a supreme Beauty; and Beauty, as it streams from the Divine, was fundamental in the organization of reality. 

Nonetheless, something that Plotinus and the later Gnostics find a common ground in their versions of genesis is that they both consider the universe, or the material world, as a copy of an original. For Plotinus, this is as beautiful as it can be, since the Original is eternal in its beauty. For the Gnostics, genesis was a mistake. 

We can make better sense of this by Plotinus’ own explanation: 

This All that has emerged into life is no amorphous structure—like those lesser forms within it which are born night and day out of the lavishness of its vitality—the Universe is a life organized, effective, complex, all-comprehensive displaying and unfathomable wisdom. How, then, can anyone deny that it is a clear image, beautifully formed, of the Intellectual Divinities? No doubt it is a copy, not original; but that is its very nature; it cannot be at once symbol and reality.

(…) Such a reproduction there must necessarily be—though not by deliberation and contrivance—for the Intellectual could not be the last of things, but must have a double Act, one within itself, and one outgoing; there must, then, be something later than the Divine; for only the thing with which all power ends fails to pass downwards something of itself. 

Plotinus, Tractate on the Gnostics (II, 9, 8) 

At this point of the story, we are dealing with a sort of genesis in which our dream-creator has partaken from his planetary Gods and moved forward to dream of a new Being, a copy of himself nonetheless. As we will see in the following two sections, he creates him in his image, and in a mirror version of its own environment, following the instructions of a strange deity. 

NIGHT 4. COPY
SUBJECT: IMPRESSION & IDEA; PROJECTION; FLESH & IMAGE  

“al cerrar los ojos pensaba: Ahora estaré con mi hijo. O, más raramente: El hijo que he engendrado me espera y no existirá si no voy. 
(…)
Una vez le ordenó que embanderara una cumbre lejana. Al otro día, flameaba la bandera en la cumbre.
(…)
Comprendió con cierta amargura que su hijo estaba listo para nacer – y tal vez impaciente.
(…)
Antes (para que no supiera nunca que era un fantasma, para que se creyera un hombre como los otros) le infundió el olvido total de sus años de aprendizaje.”

Following the effigy’s instruction, our dream-creator felt sure that his son was ready to be drafted from dream to the material world. And so he had so thoroughly prepared him for the real world by teaching him lessons thought required that, once prepared, forget all he had learned to be born in reality; for no one is born corrupted with the burden of consciousness and History. Yet, the conditions for his son’s being, required too a higher level of secrecy and purity: that he never learns what he truly is; ultimately, a spectre, a ghost, an impression imagined in the dreams of someone else. He must never learn that his existence is not real.

This very idea, that one can exist in the real while being yourself not real, is what returns to inform our magician he was wrong all the way. The phantasmagoric or hauntological assumption that someone can be a ghost, and a ghost can be a Being, as long as it has experience and is perceived by another entity, poses a turning point to a longstanding convention of post-Enlightened Being: do I exist because I can think of myself, or do I exist because someone else is able to perceive me? This is a question from which philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) would reanimate the Descartesian paradigm of existence.
In his seminal work, Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume opens by making a distinction between “impressions” and “ideas.” He thinks an impression is forceful, longstanding, violent, whereas the idea is a lesser, fainting image that lives in the memory and the imagination. He argues a simple idea can be traced to an original impression. According to him, an idea resembles and evolves from an original impression, it is, in a sense, merely a mental reproduction. He then argues that complex ideas do not necessarily rely on an original impression. For one can imagine the complex morphology of a chimera that might be a tiger, a horse, a bull, and a rose, but that is also a statue and also a prophet, without never having truly seen one. His main argument could be understood as trying to debunk the idea of that there is substance to Self, for if we stick to the deductions of his treatise, there is no impression of the Self, therefore, no original idea of Self.

Bear with this notion for it is the turning point of this narrative. The backstab of the story.

What is at stake here, is the question of whether his son is brought into reality as an impression, an idea, or a substance. For Hume, the “Self” is a bundle of perceptions. The implications of this in Metaphysics were important, Russel explains, for they got rid of what remained of “substance” in the discussions over existence, at least in some fields like psychology. In a way, he is approaching a sort of epistemology similar to Haraway’s, for is one primarily concerned with the question of Probability and the relative/subjective nature of Empirical knowledge that presents itself as the opposite. In a section of his Treatise “Of Knowledge and Probability,” he opens up the idea of “uncertain knowledge,” or “probable” knowledge, which is, in the more general sense, almost all sort of knowledge: obtained from the evaluation of “empirical data by interferences that are not demonstrative.” The only sort of knowledge that exists outside this paradigm of demonstrative uncertainty is, according to Hume, that of direct observation, the logical, and the mathematical. We now know these forms of knowledge are, too—even mathematics—only verbal, thus, relative.  At the bottom line is the argument that the Self (or, the knowledge of the Self) has no substantial quality that grants it unicity other than an exterior perception of such. He explains that every time he makes sense of himself, it is more than anything stepping into the perception of the other. He cannot observe himself if it is not through the other’s perception of him. This moves us beyond the Descartes paradigm “I think therefore I am,” to “I am because others think me.”

And so, the dreamed son was born unadvertised and in a remote location from his father-creator, but dwelling in a similar condition: induced by the faraways, without questioning the integrity of its being nor the lineage of its capacities, abiding solely by the omnipotence of their own mind, they are both referred to as Magicians. We are told this happened when two anonymous figures came to inform our dreamer about a faraway magician who lay in higher lands and possessed the quality of being untouchable to fire. 

“lo despertaron dos remeros a medianoche: no pudo ver sus caras, pero le hablaron de un hombre mágico en un templo del Norte, capaz de hollar el fuego y de no quemarse. El mago recordó bruscamente las palabras del dios. Recordó que de todas las criaturas que componen el orbe, el fuego era la única que sabía que su hijo era un fantasma.”

He nonetheless knew that his son now existed not because he thought of it, but because he had though him once to Be in a way; prophetically; and he’d pass from being symbol to being real. But what our dream-maker failed to understand here, is whether the image of his son was of flesh or remained an impression. (And what is this question but the endgame of all religious project: to grasp the dualism between flesh and spirit). This crucial omission is what ends up compromising his own integrity in the self-realization/revelation he suffers in the following and concluding passage. Let us wrap this idea for once: abiding to Hume’s logic, the magician-son existed, either in the material world or in the imagination, as an impression cut to the image of his father. He created him on account that he lacked substance, that he was a transparent impression, a ghost; without realizing, it was this very particular quality that he had passed over to his son. In this sense, the magician’s son is a projection of his father-creator in the full stream of the word.

NIGHT 5. PARALLAX
SUBJECTS: PARTICLE & EVENT; POSITIONALITY; THE QUANTUM 

“El término de sus cavilaciones fue brusco, pero lo prometieron algunos signos. Primero (al cabo de una larga sequía) una remota nube en un cerro, liviana como un pájaro; luego, hacia el Sur, el cielo que tenía el color rosado de la encía de los leopardos; luego las humaredas que herrumbraron el metal de las noches; después la fuga pánica de las bestias. Porque se repitió lo acontecido hace muchos siglos. Las ruinas del santuario del dios del fuego fueron destruidas por el fuego. En un alba sin pájaros el mago vio cernirse contra los muros el incendio concéntrico. Por un instante, pensó refugiarse en las aguas, pero luego comprendió que la muerte venía a coronar su vejez y a absolverlo de sus trabajos. Caminó contra los jirones de fuego. Éstos no mordieron su carne, éstos lo acariciaron y lo inundaron sin calor y sin combustión. Con alivio, con humillación, con terror, comprendió que él también era una apariencia, que otro estaba soñándolo.”

There is a handful of options to get around this. One of them is to convey this as a circular destiny: History. One creates the other, and another, and another, and History repeats itself. The evolution of our subject’s consciousness always comes insufficient to break with the loops of deception; it is an ever-returning dream. Another is to consider this as a multiverse structured in scales. This is, a bigger entity dreams of a smaller one, and the smaller dreams an even smaller one to existence, while anchored to the dream and devotion of the higher one; in the creation of each new universe, the space and time funnels inwards. This ultimately prompts us with the known metaphor: are we perhaps the dream of a God? The third and most nutritive, for as my inquiry goes, is to consider this as two parallel universes: they simultaneously existed all along, and both ‘father’ and ‘son’ were simultaneously dreaming of and creating one another. 

But it is not the idea of the parallel universe that interests me here but the one of parallax perspective. For to regard these as simultaneous realities (or worlds) our imagination demands us to imagine them spatially. This is, each anchored to a situated point in space that is necessarily not the same, and thus, the difference in their positionality blends their perspective with respect to an objective. In Physics, it is a matter of calculus of proximity between two moving positionalities in reference to a concentric point; this is the parallax angle (which by the way, allows us to tie back the problem of perception to the elevated sphere of astral movement from where we had started). The area projected from the parallax angle, which oscillates between their positionalities, in Philosophy, could be referred to as the ‘parallax gap,’ but which only can be considered a gap for it becomes a problem of perception; an epistemological, or in the case of this story, an existential barrier. 

I will explain. If the parallax gap is the grey area between their dreams, our dream-creators are trapped in an existential paradox: they can only exist if they are dreamt by the other, but they can’t both exist. The perception of one only exists in the contradiction of the other one’s perception as a point of view. Given the point of view as a fact, the synthesis of their space as a shared one becomes impossible. If we are to consider these dream-creators as both an entity and a universe, one of them must surrender the singularity of itself (its own perception of Self) to allow for the individuation of the other as a possibility. Which explains why, perhaps, our original magician accepts the faith of his finitude, and descends towards death’s labour, for only then, his son might once exist.

The three of these different final interpretations prompt us to regard them as themes of modern Physics—even if they are of the most longstanding preoccupations of existence.—For instance, we could make sense of them, in the fashion of Metaphor, as subjects derived from the possibilities the Theory of Relativity opened to the Scientific and Philosophical paradigms. For this, the concept of the Interval, rather than the Parallax, would be more sufficient. Or even further, we could embark on a quantum analogy; in which, again, events come to substitute matter as the substance of material reality, or at least for its physical study. And how is this not, ultimately, the nature of the final realization of our dream-creator: none of the supernatural creativities he manifested through the narration were as disruptive of his reality as that which annihilated the premise of him being made of flesh and particles (matter) and not of impressions (or whatever substance dreams are made of)—a bundle of perceptions himself. Only once he is embraced by the fire that he realize the absurdity, or in this case, the relativity of the particular laws of the universe he inhabits and creates. For it was event and no longer particle which constituted, substantially, the subject and matter of his physical reality. Further on, the possibility of him ceasing to exist—for quantum theory does not regard motion as an infinite given. In this sense, the history of Philosophy, just like the history of this narration, points to the notion that, in fact, the most modern ‘problems of perception’ are, in their most evolved form, the most ancient ones.

The very last couple of pages of Russell’s lengthy book on the History of Western Philosophy conclude by introducing some relevant questions to approach what he considered was central to the following philosophical paradigm and its challenges. For the time of its publication, six years after the publication of The Circular Ruins, Quantum Theory had entered Philosophy’s scope of interest, or at least his own as a mathematician. He regards it as chief to the continuity of the Philosophical project of ‘logical analysis,’ which he considered himself part of, and prompted that no Philosophy was yet equipped enough to ground Quantum theory, as we now see, even in mathematical terms sufficient for reason. My question is what if we instead attempted so by even more sophisticated verbal sciences like in Poetry or Literature; such would be the case of Borges. 

Note
This short story by Borges reads for instance as a Theological text. For it explores subjects of Genesis, Being, Godsmanship, Craftmanship, and Belief and organizes them condensedly in an uppermost prose that is altogether poetic, narrative, and philosophical. No spiritual conclusions but a brief recap:

The evolution of stable ideas—which can be now understood as the evolution of consciousness itself—in the stream of its destiny, requires the abandonment of modes of consciousness no longer useful to stabilize sensible realities; materially, delegates them to the palimpsest of History (impressions), this, as the substance of the Material World; for as the Symbolic World, it leaves them dwelling round the ruins of temples erected for the once devoted, once animated, once imagined. 

What is then, the evolution of consciousness if not a cartography of temples sinking back into the stomach of the natural world. Shelters of Belief inhabited by inanimate effigies awaiting to be inhabited themselves, by the air of neurosis, for they can become again the secret of a ritual night. 

Bibliography
Russell, Bertrand. 2004. History of Western philosophy. 1 online resource (xi, 778 pages) vols. Routledge classics. London: Taylor & Francis e-Library. https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=182683.

Warburg, Aby. 2022. Per Monstra Ad Sphaeram. Terror y Armonía En Las Esferas. Edited by Claudia Wedepohl and Davide Stimilli. Translated by Joaquín Chamorro Mielke. Editorial Sexto Piso.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. The Parallax View. Short Circuits. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

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In Plato’s Cave.

“In Plato’s Cave“, Susan Sontag’s opening essay of her book “On Photography” (1977), offers insightful observations on the photographic image and its effects. Primarily dealing with fundamental issues in photographic production and reception, the text introduces a set of radical ideas at the core of her inquiry; photograph-as-deception, photograph-as-desire, photograph-as-environment…among many. Throughout the text, she identifies a series of (apparently) non-changing qualities in the nature of the photographic image with notorious precision, for many of her notions remain prominently active and revisited in the theoretical and philosophical study of aesthetic phenomena in the present day.

The book was published forty-five years after the publication of Walter Benjamin’s “A Short History of Photography” (1931) and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), and only three years prior to the publication of Roland Barthes’ “Camera Lucida” (1980). All of which are considered theoretical landmarks in the critical study of the photographic image, highly regarded in academic circles and obligatory readings for most undergraduate students of artistic disciplines. In retrospection, I allow myself to make the following observation: while not explicitly, all these works recognize the photographic image as the sensual object at the center of the 20th-century milieu.

Unlike Benjamin and Barthes, in “In Plato’s Cave”, Sontag is less concerned about what the photographic image is, but what the photographic image does. For her study does not dwell deeply into the ethics of image-making and the transformative effects photographic reproduction has in all object, but into the effects of image reception in the collective (social) and individual psyche, one might say, she is regarded with “the ethics of seeing”.

Sontag’s critique–along with that of Benjamin and Barthes–asserts to crystalize a particular sensible milieu (of late-Modernity), a period of time in which photographic production and reproduction had taken a central place in the structuring of perceptual reality. Starting somewhere around the World Wars and concluding with Digitalization­–I will argue–, we no longer find ourselves in that epoch, yet, if we are to understand the world through the flow and mediation of signs, the technological developments that characterize the early 21st-century experience have moved photographic production and consumption even forward in the construction of the sensible sphere.

In present day, almost all personal device that enables social interaction must possess the capacity to produce, or at least, process (photographic) images. This is something of paramount importance to keep in consideration as we are revisiting the writing of a 20th-century theorist who had just started to notice photography’s shift from the occasional to the ordinary. In this sense, to photograph is no longer a duty reserved for the photographer but a matter of all-usage for all users; an ordinary obsession to turn reality into souvenir. In this respect, the ethics of seeing that Sontag problematizes in photography have not changed in principle but have since become more complex.

Ever since the publication of the essay, the photographic image underwent two paramount shifts in its natural and technical condition; first, the coming of digital photography, and second, the broader “universal” process of Digitalization and the Internet. Digitalization is, so far, the technological shift most characteristic of the early 21st century, for it has rearticulated entirely the modes of value production and abstraction; allowing for the acceleration of both. Posing drastic changes in the modes of production and circulation of images, as much as how these shaped the sensible and economic reality of an ever-more “interconnected” world.

The breaking point had occurred two years prior to the publication of “On Photography”, with the invention of the self-contained (portable) digital camera by Steven Sasson in 1975, which set loose the photograph from its medium specificity of film (chemical gelatine silver process) and printmaking (analog process of reproduction), allowing the photograph to emerge and move more easily. Screen and photographs were about to come together as a medium of their own. The digital turn in display technology of the late 2000’s and early 2000’s sophisticated screen and camera into a single compact carriable device, advancing the photograph to an ever more ubiquitous presence.

Comparable to her metaphorical observation: “photographs have become part of the furniture of the environment”[1], today one might assertedly claim that the screen is part of the “furniture environment” (if not the environment itself), furthermore, one can understand the device screen-camera as the threshold that immerses a person into its–digital–environment.

Moving towards Computational Photography, the digital photograph opens an interesting derivate to Sontag’s observations on the camera as a device that captures (1.) absence (pseudo-presence), and (2.) disappearance.[2] Both motifs of the non-being, or the already-gone. The paradoxical intervention that all light-capturing devices exercise on time: in its effort to capture reality, a photograph can only capture what is no longer real. Each record–Sontag is clear about this–does not capture reality but only an interpretation of it. Computational photography, one of the latest developments in digital photography (all smarthphones are equipped with this technology), operates in the exact same principle of pseudo-presence and interpretation.

It is a computational (programmed) process of composition similar to that of compression, it works the following way: to create a single photograph, the digital camera captures multiple frames in less than a second, the apparatus layers the frames on top of one another, and accommodates/combines/suppress the pixels from the multiple layers into one in order to compose what would be, according to its machine’s aesthetic criteria, the best possible image.

The conceived photograph is a made-up composition resulting from the machine’s own aesthetic determination, the moment-in-time that the camera captured never really occurred, it is an interpretation.–Yet how come can it be real still? What’s the substance that grants a moment its realness in a digital condition? To solve these questions seems an irrelevant project to me, although, I recognize that Sontag seems to have assertedly opened the way into this inquiry years prior to computational cameras having begun to capture non-existent moments.

“All photographs testify to time’s relentless melt”[3],

accounting for the all-evanescent objects in time, I wonder yet if there is a difference between the objects-in-time and the objects-of-time, a question that Sontag does not seem to entertain; such distinction, I think, would have been an insightful philosophical entry as we dwell deep into the photographs transgressive relation to time.

About Truth

Sontag, like many of her peers, was invested in the hopeless quest for truth. She brings forward her intention and its impossible conclusion as the starting point, “In Plato’s Cave“, the opening words into her inquiry, serve first as an indexical-literary reference to an originary problem underlying all aesthetic investigation: the confliction of image-reality. Secondly, a suggestive lead: that perceptual reality is the ever-resulting unbalance between truth and deception. Recurrent notions in her essay and overall work: deception, interpretation, transfixiation, illusion, transparency, epiphany–all terms of transformative revelation; they imply the truth-behind something, she uses these to describe the photograph’s epistemology and its limits.

So far, the advent of computational photography, along with more recent generative technology for image-making (AI Art, deep-fake, to same a few)–all used as technologies of deception with positive or negative effects–defines a time in which truth seems to have taken a backseat to other forms of illumination and seduction, the condition many have described as Post-truth. “In Plato’s Cave,” we are reminded that this condition of deceit is not a temporary phenomena but more of an ontological preoccupation, for which she goes all the way back to one of the very first philosophical questions: what’s real? So radical is her motive, that many of her arguments apply not exclusively to photography but to all image-making technology, and that is, to my own judgment, what makes her writing so competitive against time’s relentless melt.

Notes

[1] Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” in On Photography, 2019. P. 23

[2] Sontag. P.16

[3] Sontag. P.16

Today the world is pierced, like an Emmentaler cheese, with artificial cavities where humankind has deposited its most destructive capacity and its surplus. In this essay, I am interested in two particular types of holes: clandestine mass graves and mines, both products of two main lethal enterprises, war and extractivisim respectively. These excavations are the axis of this exercise, in which I attempt to revisit, invert, and rephrase, as many others have done before me, what does it mean to live in Plato’s cave–or the longstanding question of reality being composed by images. I am concerned with the sort of images that are kept within the dark confinements of dismal holes, and what can we learn about the reality hidden underneath them.

On Caves

We begin our inquiry into the unearth already inside an originary space for human claustrophilic immersion: the cave. It is believed that caves contain, what some call, the cradle of humanity: parietal rock paintings, most commonly regarded as “prehistoric art”. Based on the assumption that the origin of technic and language marks the origin of humankind, images and tools are both technologies considered the most primitive evidence of human activity. We may–or not–agree that either cave paintings or the most ancient excavated tools can account for the first signs of our presence. The first “signs” of human signs are kept underneath the surface of Earth’s matter, and it is our exploration of the depths of such matter that has led us to multiple miraculous discoveries of the first pasts, as well as to the most disastrous ones.

Caves are dark places inhabited by different sorts of creatures. Humans are a kind of animal with physically limited sensing capacities that rely heavily on a narrowed, short-sighted vision to operate in their environment. Otherwise unexplorable, the intervened caves testify that the invention of devices of light strictly precedes the invention of the painted images they contain. Primordially managers of light and its energy, these creatures achieved to extend their natural visual capacity with devices powerful enough to turn the world to its negative, illumination technology created darkness and vice-versa. It was in such obscurity that the human created its first dimension.

Plato’s allegory of the cave is an interesting reflection on the human condition being grounded in aesthetic phenomena, that all we can sense is all we can know, and that there is much more to what we are able to sense. While Plato never thought about these radical creatures that invented themselves by creating images in dark spaces, he was aware, though, that humankind found itself in obscurity, and that reality was just as far as its perception could break through the total confinement of darkness.

A material interpretation of Plato’s allegory of the cave would find at its core the idea that perceptual reality is the product of a negotiation between light and obscurity. The resulting images, byproducts of a lighting device, are what constitute the subject’s reality. Sontag picked up on Plato’s allegory to address the seemingly unchanging condition that reality is, for a human, an illusion composed by a set or sequence of images; that we make sense of the world, for the most part, through the material or immaterial object that is the image. In this sense, reality is not the antonym of illusion, rather illusion is a component of reality.

 San José

It was on August 2010 that the mine of San José collapsed in Caldera, Chile. Trapping 33 miners inside and were alive. By the end of the month their rescue had become an international effort in which multiple private and governmental enterprises contributed with financial and technological support to carry out the most ambitious rescue yet. Its live stream was one of the most televised events in history. The miners were rescued alive. The criminal case concluded with no imputations to anyone. Sebastian Piñera, then president of Chile, had in his hands the perfect card that would lead to his reelection years later.

There is something so grotesque about this case being a story with successful conclusion. Photographs and videos surely did not contribute to the mobilization of consciousness against the necro-industry of mining, rather they served as examples of what can be achieved when human intelligence and resources are organized rightly into a project bounded by universal moral conventions. I do not think that Piñera was aware of what was at stake here, but he surely understood right the specificity of that moment and the moral impulse, as Sontag would put it, that the photographs and videos of the successful rescue would drive, politically and socially, the scenario of demise that images constitute. 

Dark Epiphany.  On The Aesthetics of Disappearance

Sometime last year I encountered a photograph that moved me deeply. It was posted on Twitter by a mother that had for years looked for his son underneath the soil of northern Mexico. She was part of the collective “Madres Buscadoras” (Seeking Mothers), an informally articulated organization of mothers that look for the corpses of their disappeared sons by carrying out the most thorough forensic investigation–among many other grotesque tasks the State refuses to do–of exploring, digging, archiving, and chemically testing the human remains they unearth from every pit they come across. She was announcing with strange excitement that her search had finally concluded. It was a photograph of a half-unburied, mid-sized human skull; she wrote: “I have found him, I recognized him instantly for the shape of his jaw, this is my boy”.  The photograph was in itself powerful enough to ruin one’s day, but I was most deprived by my inability to comprehend the type of sign the boy’s skull had transformed into.

Photographs and bones are both objects whose most tragic function is when they serve as evidence of horror. For our kind, bones had always meant a confirmation of death, if we’re lucky, they are processed in ritual. Burial practices mark a moment of reconciliation with the fact of our discontinuity, such realization is an originary human condition. Whenever we find death without procession it means tragedy, testifying either an accident or a sinister dispositive. In fact, each civilization has evolved its own ways of turning corpses into dispositives of different sorts; and ever since we have cameras, we no longer have to imagine the type of grammar that sophisticated violence articulates, it has been recorded, revealed.

In some way, photographs have turned horror incomprehensible. Because photographs are not bound to linguistic grammar, the dictionary is often not enough for us to put into words certain things when images speak their most extreme language, and that amplitude–that which exceeds our comprehension–is the quality that makes art simultaneously beautiful and horrific. This obscenity, which Susan Sontag had recognized to be mediated by the taboo and the moral, has only proliferated with the increasing production and reproduction of images in what she calls the modern world. She argued that the omnipresence of photographs had created the conditions for a “negative epiphany”, a moment of anaesthezia that characterizes our experience of the world. She used the concept to explain the contradictory nature of images that simultaneously make us feel while making us numb. She was concerned about the sensible dimensions of horror, worried that it had exceeded us.

In a present governed by the digital image, a world that Sontag did not live enough to experience, the recognition she makes seems more like a prediction. In some respect, there is nothing novel or interesting in finding bones by the side of the road, but for these mothers, seeking after these tragic images has become their only possibility of reconciliation with reality; a reality the remaining world agrees to overlook with fear and silence.

I can’t escape the concept of epiphany to make sense of this sort of reversed burial, of what sort of light comes out of the holes that mothers open to find death and hopefully, peace. At a stage in which one can acknowledge death but not reconcile with her until she reveals herself physically, first as evidence, then as photograph, for some unfortunate others death and peace become indivisible in a sudden moment of dark epiphany.

One night in the year 1507, in the Basin of Mexico surrounding the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, the last pre-columbian New Fire Ceremony was celebrated. Occurring only every fifty-two years, it marks the reset of the xiuhmolpilli (Calendar Round), one of the most important events in Aztec cosmology[1]. The ceremony recreated the originary moment in which light was first created in darkness giving origin to time. The ritual involved the whole city (the largest of Mesoamerica[2]) strict participation, the procedure was: all fire illumination in the city was to be extinguished, letting the night sky submerge the city into its total darkness. Meanwhile, the priests walked up to Huixachtlan to conceive the ceremony with a human sacrifice, at midnight, the offering would take place in a high-ground platform Temple, a fire was lit from the chest of the sacrificed warrior, and from this very flame, the priests would then light up the fire of the Temple’s torch. This fire was to be seen from the far-out, all-obscured city, indicating the successful reset of the calendar. This exercise was neither a simulation nor a commemoration, for them, it was an actual event of cosmic transition (recreation), in which the city, and their whole world, was suspended in a spatio-temporal void[3]–under the all-washing sky of Night, the darkest night, the threshold that opened into an original state of creation

One year later, by the other side of the Atlantic, Michelangelo had begun to paint the ceilings of the Sixtine Chapel to illustrate a story that unfolded from a similar origin: the creation of light out of total darkness. Commissioned by Pope Julius II, the frescos of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling (1508 – 1512) narrate the Biblical creation according to the Book of Genesis. The work is divided into multiple scenes that adhere to the architecture of the vaulted ceiling, yet the architectonic elements that appear to support the structure and its images are painted (virtual architecture). In each scene, a light-blue sky fills the background or hosts the scene (virtual sky). In fact, it is believed that prior to Michelangelo’s work, the Chapel’s ceilings were painted of a blue sky with golden stars[4] (refer to figure 3.); (a paradoxical sky: a sky that is Day and Night at the same time). Under that sky that covers the chapel, another religious event of paramount transition takes place: the papal conclave.

Liminality in religious architecture conveys more than the conception of a ceremonial space of temporal occupation (an inhabitable building which hosts events of spiritual transition guided by the highest-ranked priests); the ceremonial temple, strictly, a space for divine transition and transformation, opens for its participants a threshold into a state of spatio-temporal void, in such dimension, the space is turned negative against the totality of its surrounding environment, defining the spatio-temporal specificity in which the religious event takes place. Happening in a rigorously calculated time and space, upon entering the ceremonial building the participants are allowed into a space charged with divine qualities, in this respect, each temple can be understood as threshold architecture; a space of liminal suspension.

The following analysis opens an investigation into two religious centres of liminal transition, The Temple of Huixachtlan, in which the New Fire Ceremony took place, and the Sistine Chapel, primarily, focusing on the image of “God Separating Light From Darkness” painted by Michelangelo (c. 15012), and the representation of the Last New Fire Ceremony according to the Codex Borbonicus (c. 1507). Fundamental to their religious practices, both civilizations created images that illustrated their relationship with the sky as a divine territory. I explore the religious imagery produced in such devotion, in two ceremonial centres in which that imagery was conceived, finding “contrasting similarities” shared by Catholic and Aztec cosmology and iconography.

The Temple of Huixachtlan was the ceremonial centre where the sacrifice and burning of the New Fire took place, it remains underneath an unknown location at the heights of the Basin of Mexico, yet to be re-discovered. The only evidence we have about its existence and the ceremony is found in the Codex Borbonicus, on which we base our image-architecture analysis.

Description of the space: an upper-front view of an open-air platform standing at a higher height from its ground, accessed by the front up a brief stair. The dimensions are not particularly rectangular but appear to follow an order of 90º angles. In the middle, the burning torch is being lit up by 4 dressed-up priests. The torch is decorated with 3 circles. A rectangular arch suspended above the entrance decorated with 3 icons of the cardinal points (Aztec quincunx) representing space and time. Following the sacrifice–which is not present in the image–the scene depicts the moment in which the light breaks through the darkness and (re)sets the motion of time.

“God Separating Light From Darkness” is the first of the nine panels in the Genesis chronology, it depicts God’s first act of creation: Light. The scene is placed above the viewer’s head, with God floating inside a rectangular image separating light from darkness with his hands, his body breaks a diagonal division between shadows to what appears to be illuminated clouds. At the center, the movement of his clothes traces an undefined circle, found inbetween two well-defined circles outside of the scene. The image of the conception is supported by 4 men who sit at the capital of painted columns. Next to it, the scene of another sacrificial burnt offering: The Binding of Isaac.

Both images share a few iconic similarities, for they represent the same moment, the image of the conception is layered behind a series of layers of ornamented architectural structures and 4 men, and both contain three sequential circles organized in horizontal sequence  Yet, their differences are more insightful to for the purpose of our analysis.

In both, Mesoamerican and Catholic cosmology, darkness is understood as the liminal condition precursive to all being, before time and space: a total state of non-being; and light, its ontological counterpart, as the original force conceived out of this non-state, the first force of formation for all transformation. “God Separating Light From Darkness” illustrates a powerful image, the starting point of Catholic cosmology, the first light, the first day; from the same principle, but in contrasting manner to Aztec cosmology, which finds its origin in the first night. This is an ontological distinction of importance to understand each of these civilizations’ relation to the sky as divine territory.

In the Genesis frescoes, the sky is depicted as present, as the medium of light, while in the New Centre Ceremony illustration, the sky is absent, and light is presented as the interruption of (dark) sky. Conversely, the architecture of both ceremonial centers is covered by an all-washing sky, in the Sistine Chapel, the light of Day is depicted (the sky is virtually present and serves to cover the sacred space from the actual sky), in Huitzilopochtli, the darkness of Night is enacted (the open-air temple only becomes sacred once the sky falls upon it).

A third distinction is that in the Genesis fresco is that the deity is present at the moment of conception, whereas in The New Fire Ceremony depiction, the deity is absent, or rather abstracted; the divine force is represented by fire. This leads us to our next difference, in Genesis, light seems to be more of an abstract force, it precedes the sun and the day, while in the New Fire Ceremony, light had always been a material force, for them, the first material: fire.

Overall, both images contain a narration of their original moment, the first narration, embodied in their ceremonial temples, these images decorate the successful transition of a religious event to future generations, in record, the moment is safeguarded in the collective memory of such civilization (transmission of religious values). Painted during the same period of time–yet apparently, under a different sky, these civilizations had not yet come in contact by the time they created these images, but still contain striking iconographic similarities, to that, one might want to provide an archetypal explanation of the ‘nature’ of human world-making; to me, it is more insightful to explore by difference than by similarity, for studying the difference in the representation of light, deity, and the human figure in each, allows us into a more complex understanding of each culture’s history of cosmovision, the architecture of their world, the architecture of their sky.

Bibliography

Farah, Kirby, and Susan Toby Evans. “The Aztec New Fire Ceremony and the Illumination of the Night.” In Night and darkness in ancient Mesoamerica, 238–58. Louisville, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/j.ctv21v2b70.

Miller, Mary Ellen. The art of Mesoamerica: from Olmec to Aztec. 4th ed. World of art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2006. http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy0709/2006900518.html.

Zappella, Christine. “Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.” Smarthistory, August 9, 2015. https://smarthistory.org/michelangelo-ceiling-of-the-sistine-chapel/.

[1] Kirby Farah and Susan Toby Evans, “The Aztec New Fire Ceremony and the Illumination of the Night,” in Night and darkness in ancient Mesoamerica, 1 online resource (xvii, 351 pages) : color illustrations, maps vols. (Louisville, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 2021), 238–58, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/j.ctv21v2b70. p.254

[2] Mary Ellen Miller, The art of Mesoamerica: from Olmec to Aztec, 4th ed, World of art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006), http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy0709/2006900518.html.

[3] Farah and Toby Evans, “The Aztec New Fire Ceremony and the Illumination of the Night.” p.254

[4] Christine Zappella, “Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, https://smarthistory.org/michelangelo-ceiling-of-the-sistine-chapel/.

Preliminary Snapshots and Materials

Robbie Barrat’s AI mechanisms:
CycleGAN
Pix2PixHD network
GitHub: https://github.com/robbiebarrat

On Barrat and Cosmotechnics.

Advances in technics and aesthetics in contemporary Digital Art are frequently discussed in relation to Cybernetics, Art History, and Politics. In this comprehension, I will be looking into Robbie Barrat’s work, a computational artist whose technicity consists mainly in the training of neural networks to create visual representations (image-painting), what is commonly regarded as Generative Art, or GAN Art (Generative Adversarial Network). The relevance of his work lies in the technical specificity he has developed for his computer to become a creative subject. In part, his works can be as a useful visual reference that points to where technology and applied data science in the Arts might be heading towards; but also, how the mentioned can serve as tools for research in aesthetics and language, by providing insights that otherwise would be difficult to achieve solely by using the logic specific to the human brain. I regard the computer as a ‘creative subject’ in Barrat’s process because the computer is not merely a tool, as in any GAN conclusion, the artist must allow the machine for a certain level of creative determination, it is within this unexpectancy that the magic of art occurs. The visual compositions then result from his collaboration with a machine, lighting up a way to look into the processes individuation of each, the artist, and its technical object as they involve in technical reciprocity in order to create a work of art. Furthermore, I attempt to make sense of this reciprocity in the domain of cosmotechnics, as developed by Yuk Hui, to run a semiotic analysis of digital contemporary art and its condition in the markets by making an example out of Barrat’s disruptions. I hereby break with the homogenous technologism that narrows our general understanding of the human-machine relation in respect to art.

I came across Barrat’s work just in 2018 on Twitter, he was training a neural network that created ‘its own’ classical paintings, namely Landscapes and Nude Portraits. I was moved by the way his work was contrasting–or bridging–which such clarity some of the notions concerning techno-aesthetics, which at that time, were heavily influenced by the training of neural networks–the AI aesthetics ongoing configuration–, against the aesthetic logic models established in classical painting and in West’s Fine Arts in general. What called my attention initially was encountering a GAN that was not built upon a sea of innumerable metadata, instead, it was trained on a very specific set of imagery (data) that belonged in very defined aesthetic categories, for an example a classical oil, or a piece of haute-couture. Artifacts that are designed with a high degree of technical craftship would then train the network so it can imagine possibilities on its own. The images that result from running the GAN are eerie but feel familiar nonetheless, because they were brought to existence using elements of

composition–such as certain colors and dimensions– that we’ve longtime understood, and usually conceive as natural forms in the realm of Fine Arts. The base of such weirdness characteristic to a GAN piece is the degree to which the produced image blurs, moves across, or neutralizes the lines of aesthetic delimitation between the abstract, the figurative, and the concrete, essential in the eyes of the human to understand an artistic composition. In other words, it can provide refreshing insights outside of the methodological frameworks by which we understand form and representation in the Fine Arts. A heavily human-influenced computer, an AI, as much as it is working in a closed system of references, has total disregard of broader categorical developments important for the history and ontology of the visual.

In his relatively short career, Barrat has gained considerable recognition, usually attributed to his young age, his artworks are both challenging but visually/conceptually relevant for the people. When he got out of Highschool he had an internship at NVIDIA, where he had access to great computational power, the things that he learned and tested there, I suppose, would be crucial for the further development of his own creative language. He got particular attention from the broader public with his project ‘Neural Network Balenciaga’, which consisted in feeding the algorithm with images of Balenciaga runways to train the AI to create its own interpretation of a Balenciaga runway. This quickly captured the attention of the luxury retail giant SSENSE’s board of content creators, who later promoted the work by publishing an interview with him titled ‘Do Androids Dream of Balenciaga SS29?’. He was 18 when his artwork was the first that was uploaded to the NFT platform SuperRare ‘Nude Portrait #1’ on April 2018. Later that year Christie’s held their first ‘Tech Summit’, its theme was the blockchain, and they distributed onee piece of Barrat’s collection of Nudes in 200 fragments as NFTs. The next edition of the Christie’s ‘Tech Summit’ in 2019 theme was Generative Art. There is a lot to unpack regarding the Market interest in Barrat’s work and in GAN in general. For instance, we could locate it within the artificial hype that Christie’s and SuperRare were pushing to promote the newly created NFT economy as a financially stable system. In this sense, Christie’s intervention in the blockchain economy was a statement in an effort to convince the public and collectors that NFT art was more than a pyramid scheme of speculative collectibles and that it was, indeed, an actual Art movement, and therefore a matter of technical and aesthetic seriousness.

Attracting the attention of these industry giants has rendered much of the writing done about his work for journalistic and marketing purposes, telling us more about the Art industry’s relation and future plans with Digital Art than of the implications of his technics in Art-research creation. While Christie’s and other giants in the crypto marketing complex make a case example of Barrat’s work in their effort to accommodate Digital Art into the logistics of the Art Market by pushing the narrative that blockchain technology is the pathway into building a decentralized infrastructure of wealth distribution to benefit creators, other texts, such as SSENSE’s interview, try to explore the potential of GAN use in other sectors of creative industries like in Fashion’s processes of design and creative direction. At the same time, they used his work as a proxy to promote Balenciaga, which is one of SSENSE’s bestselling brands. I do not doubt SSENSE’s good intentions in promoting the work of a young talented artist exploring the limits of fashion design with technology, it should be addressed though, that the interest of such a big retailing corporation in computer-generated art can only underlie in the utility that such Art can have to maximize profits.

Furthermore, none of those conversations are able to detach from the idealization of AI technology as a tool for the production of symbolic and capital value. We can observe, in a broader discussion, that much of the questions asked in regard to the relation of technology-art, are placed upon the technical objects that such relation produces; the apparatus, if it is the piece or a mechanism, is judged by its capacity to produce, reproduce, reveal, reorganize a certain set of values. With machine learning this conversation gets interesting, as it supposes that such processes can be automated and optimized with enough computational power beyond the limitations of the human condition.

It is this possibility of an automated reproduction of value that is at stake in the imaginary of Christie’s, SuperRare, and other platforms trying to knot a system in which blockchain technology and GAN ‘advances’ the conditions for production and commerce of works of art. It is value the central axis of their approach. Moreover, what is an NFT if not a resignification of the symbolic and capital value of a digital (object) asset? On the other hand, in SSENSE’s interview, Arabelle Sicardi approaches Barrat’s work from the perspective of ‘Creative Direction’, discussing the possibilities of AI applied to Fashion design, they draw the idea of AI as a tool for creating new things. First, we need to understand Creative Direction as a practice component of the larger process of Merchandising. Creative direction is the axis that conducts the processes of thinking, designing, producing, marketing, and ultimately selling a product. Creative direction is defined by productivity.

I consider these approaches a misunderstanding of the actual reconfiguration of value implicit in Barrat’s work, which lies in the process of individuation of its algorithm, and not on the technical application of such as a ‘machine that produces art’. As Barrat makes a selection of artworks that already underwent a process of curation and archive, he becomes a mediator of aesthetic value that will be suitable for the machine he has designed. Barrat’s preference to explore these notions through the use of Fine Arts is not independent of the discipline of selecting, organizing, and maintaining artifacts in an effort to consolidate a collective memory, which was the prime interest of the museums curating and preserving these pieces in the first place, understanding the role that Museography had–or intended to have– of mapping the history of the human intellect and creativity from the West’s perspective. The computer (machine) when is fed with such curated imagery, has the task to make a reinterpretation of such aesthetic values that had been previously carefully selected but it does so by neutralizing the symbolic and working solely on the aesthetic composition. What we have is then an abstract compression of fragments of a mediated collective memory, a technical reimagination of the Nude and the Landscape as categorical visual form.

In cosmotechnics, Yuk Hui would regard Barrat’s AI within the realm of techno-organicism. The process of individuation of such machine is its becoming organic, yet it can never become an organism of its own. Hui holds that the technical objects first became organic with Cybernetics, since it is the relation of information feedback that allows the machine out of the mechanical condition and sets it to a recursive logic. The recursive expansion of the digital (through operations of feedback), overcomes the dualist logic of antithesis between the organism and machine that prevailed in general ontology, he states ‘the becoming organic of machines is in the process of producing a new totality through exponentially stronger connectivity and algorithms.’ Having algorithm technology in mind, he opens the question of what is the role of art in this epoch of organic machines? This question is of paramount importance for the art market circuit of production-commerce, as it is a central inquiry for philosophers and critics working across semiotics, technics, and aesthetics, an ultimately, it poses a challange for the artists that see no intersection of art and technology, but regard it as the same technē (the Greek work which mean both art and technic). I consider Barrat on the latter, as he is clear that his GAN is not a creative individual of its own, but a medium whose mode of existence is transformative interoperation between computational power (technic) and aesthetic values (wich are indeed technic as well as they are materialized through pixel organization, the prime matter of such art).

As we move back and forward between value (re)configuration and algorithmic creation, we find ourselves in the field of the technical specificity of digital matter, it is important here to lay out the constitutes of matter for as GAN art goes and how it gets its form. In his book ‘On Mode of Existence of Technical Object’, a fundamental piece of work for Hui’s thought and mine, Gilbert Simondon writes:

‘Matter is matter because it contains a positive property that allows it to be modeled. To be modeled is not to undergo arbitrary displacements but to organize matter’s plasticity according to definite forces that stabilize the deformation. The technical operation is a mediation between an inter-elementary ensemble and an intra-elementary ensemble. The pure form already contains actions, and the raw material is the capacity of becoming; the actions contained in the form encounter the becoming of the matter and modulate it. In order for the matter to be able to be modulated in its becoming, it must have a deformable reality.’

Now, I want to apply this to the condition of AI and GAN generated art. It is important because such art’s plasticity consists of one of the prime matter/substances of our time: digital data. In the realm of the visual, it is almost always materialized by pixels, just as everything we encounter at the light of the screens that surrounds us. Digital matter is a compound of several other technical processes occurring simultaneously. In the case of algorithmic configuration and creation, the ‘deformable reality’ (of a matter) is given when such matter is digitalized, a work of art can be modified and turned into a new composition when its image is digitalized. But it is not only a matter of bringing things into the digital realm, it is mostly about the (coding) mechanisms that are collectively designed and optimized that allow the evolution of technology in respect of contemporary digital art.

On a final note, I want to focus more specifically on the last crucial component of the process of individuation of a GAN algorithm, which is its Open-source nature: the track of possibility for such technology to evolve. What cosmotechnics provides is a theoretical framework by which we can conceive this art as an effect of individuation that is not individual (as authorship), but is a result of psychic and collective effects of the technological, the natural, and the social. Both Hui, and Simondon, regard the struggle for reappropriation of technology. And this is particularly important in the nature in which GAN art is created. GAN art is able to exist and expand through a collective network of sharing technicity and advancing on it. Barrat shares his codes as a fundamental component of his work, as his work is based on prior codes that were shared online and allowed him to advance on them. The piece becomes meaningful as it exposes its processes of individuation. It sums to the struggle of accessibility, contributing to the annihilation of the paradigm of the computational technical object as a black box, the technical and theoretical mechanisms are revealed and put up for use and optimization. Therefore, the transparency of processes is not only a gesture, it is an actual component of the work. 

Yuk Hui does not address Rabbat’s work directly, but in his chapter ‘The Status of Machine Intelligence Today’, while talking about Art and Automation, he brings up the piece ‘Edmond de Belamy’ (2018), an AI-generated portrait that ‘broke’ the internet when it sold as the most expensive AI-generated piece to date *at Christie’s*, it was authored by a marketing collective. The piece was created using a code written and uploaded (as Open Source) by Robbie Barrat, naturally causing controversy in the media regarding authorship and authenticity. In this sense, Robbie’s work embodies the succession of Open Source in a fundamental contradiction, as Open Source breaks with conditions of impossibility by destroying the functionality of ownership and allowing accessibility and potency, it easily becomes an artifact for speculative capitalism, reinforcing the abstraction of value and the skepticism of machine-human relations. Nevertheless, what concerns us is something far beyond the matter of ‘authorship’, and we disregard the conditions of the Art Market system, instead, we are following a line of work that concerns the actual relation of technical processes applied to art. If Walter Benjamin opened the question of how mechanical technology transforms art, Hui reverses it by asking, how art transforms technology? My own is: how can we use technology applied to Art creation as a method to study the history of human aesthetic sensitivity?

The human, before knowing it is human is a beast. Yet it is a beast conscious of the death it has brought upon the multiple beasts that surround, threaten and help its own existence and the ones it protects, these radical creatures bear terrified at what they no longer are, and for whatever reasons, have chosen to depict these different beings (animals) in the most grandiose and advanced way available to them.

For instance, this contraposes the general notion that these pictorial practices were ritualistic, as for hunting as commonly argued. Let me stress again the idea that for this sensible exercise (image-making), hunting precedes the pictorial practice and not the other way around. That is to say, there is no way to prove these images are created as the means for achieving an undisclosed capacity, but given that the images can’t be created without a total investment of human will upon the beast’s body, we are certain that they can only come from–as a result of–hunting.

Margolles and SEMEFO

Teresa Margolles is a Mexican conceptual artist; with 30 years of trajectory, she has become one of the most recognized and discussed artists in the panorama of Mexican contemporary art. Born Culiacan Rosales, the biggest city in the state of Sinaloa, and one of the most important points for drug trafficking and therefore, an area whose population and economic infrastructure have been subject to conditions of extreme violence midst cartel wars and the failed “administration” of these by the State. This geographical space of constant violent contestation has determined her entire artistic practice, which she has focused solely on explicitly denouncing and exploring the aesthetics and sociocultural implications of death, tragedy, and trauma resulting from the failed neoliberal policies of a narco-state–whose gore economics reduces bodies to mere currency and surplus.

Her earliest work, which Cuauhtémoc Medina’s–notorious curator and longtime supporter of Margolles–regard in his text “Zones of Tolerance”, refers to a series of controversial ready-mades consisting of residual forensic matter. The work was made as part of the “SEMEFO” art group (short for “Servicio Médico Forense”: Mexico’s National Institute of Forensic Science). Violence and criminality were not new topics in Mexican art, yet the introduction of forensic matter as a potential art object into institutional circles of exhibitions was, so to speak, a radical motif; highly criticized as acclaimed, it turned the conversation into an ethical controversy between the spectator, the institution, and the artist. It sought to bring into question the corruption of the multiple systems that allow this art to exist.[1]

To my understanding, Margolles’ concept is very clear: to depict necropolitics as an established system of governance in Mexico. Defining Necropolitics, as Achille Mbembe conceptualized it, conveys the exercise of control over mortality as the deployment of power in means of doing polities.[2] Philosopher Sayak Valencia has addressed Mexico’s own ‘Economy of Death,’ in which the extreme violence on the everyday basis oppressing the populations becomes not only ordinary but necessary for the organization and functionality of the colonial and postcolonial capitalism; murder becomes then systematic murder under this model of gore capitalism.[3]

Margolles’ work needs to be conceived within this realm to fully understand her controversial discourse. Margolles and SEMEFO work on what I define as the “poetics of brutality”. The poetics of brutality is what artists create when they frame or recontextualize real violence to present it as an aesthetic object for critical analysis. This object exists to document and denounce. The poetics of brutality convey the crude or explicit depiction of wrongful suffering.

Bringing the politics of mortality to the field of artistic representation naturally conveys a call for awareness that Margolles has been careful to maintain. However, the discursiveness of these artworks is always backed by a poetic approach to the art-object. SEMEFO, and the criticism made around it insists that these practices are based on an investigation of violent death and the aesthetic process that unfolds from it, the ‘life of the corpse’, or the ‘sociocultural implication of the corpse’ SEMEFO claims to study, are mere “intellectual rhetoric” that backs up the representational labour of conceptual art. This is completely identifiable and canonic in the art produced within Mexico’s artistic circle at that time and until today. [4]

It is not my attempt to swamp my critique under the never-ending debate that measures the ethical conflicts in the production and marketability of this kind of art. Rather, I aim to analyze the context (zone) in which Margolles’ art is allowed to exist (tolerance), with the hopes of arriving at new grounds in our understanding of Art and Violence: a twofold business.

Zones of Tolerance

What are these ‘zones’ that Medina proposes? Where are they and what is tolerated within them, I consider it to be just a matter of interpretation by the reader, they are cognitive processes to interpret Margolles’ art.

The first zone that comes to our mind when we encounter a Margolles’ artwork is situated specifically in the place where murder was committed, where the ‘life of the corpse’ begins, the matter is ‘rescued’ by the artist that will keep it safe from oblivion, this forensic matter will undergo a set of procedures so it can become a medium of its own, and ultimately serve as public evidence that this object is a result of systematic murder tolerated and perpetuated in specific areas.

The second act of tolerance also happens in our imaginary: it is our denial to solve the mystery of these procedures, because it is precisely in this grey area in which the magic of art happens. How does Margolles is able to (il)legally retrieve gallons of water from autopsy rooms, chemically treat it so it is safe to interact with it, smuggle it into Venice or New York, and get away with everything? This is a question we all ask to ourselves but have no actual intention of solving, since it entails the use of illegal and unethical operations, to which we as spectators, and the Art Institutions comply. Medina addresses the irony of these transnational operations very well, and it is what I think he ultimately refers to as a Zones of Tolerance. The fact that official art institutions and the Mexican government recognize and promote Margolles’ art implies not only the evidence that the legal, social and forensic system is broken, but that she also corrupts these systems so that her art can exist. In Medina’s words: ‘The space of tolerance Margolles’ art occupies is a gift of inefficiency and institutional complicity.’ (p.48).

I’d like to wrap up this review with a very personal thought, in which I conceive that Margolles’ forensic art gains most of its meaning from being an experience of ethical tension: the Zone of Tolerance is everything between the viewer and the artwork. The Zone of Tolerance in not only a delimited physical area of permissiveness, but a state of mind in which the viewer is allowed to experience violence from the safety of a gallery room. The spectator feels uncomfortable of what they encounter but to some degree tolerates and accepts the violence presented as something out of their reach, unsolvable, unfixable. At the same time, implies that the action of viewing is an individual contribution since it raises individual and collective awareness of the subject in question. This momentum is a zone of tolerance perse. The viewer has no option but to move on to the next piece to be captivated by a different aesthetic narrative, distracting themselves from the tragedy just witnessed.

Medina is clever to address these tensions and contradictions between art, spectator, and institution, but he is not concerned of ethical implications as much as he is with poetic interpretations. For him, the concept of ‘Zone of Tolerance’ is a political statement to validate her art within his textual analysis in the means of producing meaning for the artworks; we shall take into consideration, always, that the majority of contemporary conceptual artworks are composed by both, the material object, and the textual discourse that validates them as manifestations of intellect and sensitivity. Margolles’ “conceptualism” does not really depend much on these textual analyses, but it will remain at the forefront of the conversation that regards aesthetics, ethics and political allowance, which art critics, historians, and curators focus the most.

Bibliography

Emmelhainz, Irmgard. 2019. ‘La crítica y la revolución cultural en México.’ Campo de Relámpago. From http://campoderelampagos.org/critica-y-reviews/19/12/2019

Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics” 15 (1): 11–40. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11.

Medina, Cuauhtémoc. 2001. “Zones of Tolerance: Teresa Margolles, SEMEFO and Beyond.” Parachute, no. 104 (October): 31–52. https://search-ebscohost-com.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aft&AN=504977388&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Valencia, Sayak, and Olga Arnaiz Zhuravleva. 2019. “Necropolitics, Postmortem/Transmortem Politics, and Transfeminisms in the Sexual Economies of Death.” Tsq: Transgender Studies Quarterly 6 (2): 180–93. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-7348468.

[1] Cuauhtemoc Medina, ‘Zones of Tolerance’, 34

[2] Achile Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, 12

[3] Sayak Valencia, ‘Necropolitics, Postmortem/ Transmortem Politics, and Transfeminisms in the Sexual Economies of Death’, 182

[4] Irmgard Emmelhainz, ‘La crítica y la revolución cultural en México’

There is a common interest that prevails among historians, critics, and the people to reach a consensus of what ‘Latin American conceptualism’ is in general terms. Not only in the plastic arts we find these attempts to conceive Latin America as a unified culture, “Latin” music and literature are also often overlooked as a broad aesthetic category. It is first necessary to point that Latin American Conceptualism is not–and has never been–an “Art movement” of its own, with a specific set of values and technics respective to a local time-space specificity. The term is rather useful to contextualize the historical motives and conditions that turned conceptual art–once a desperate counter-cultural act of emergency–into a dominant form of discourse in contemporary art in Latin America. Furthermore, most of the art that is subject to critique under the concept of “Latin American Conceptualism” in Academia and the industry is naturally political and critical to the systems of power; it aligns itself in a social utility. Some of the streams of conceptualism–whose artworks won’t be discussed here–have taken completely divergent paths to that of social realism.

While the insistence on consolidating a Latinamerican type of art corresponds for the most part to flattering postcolonial perspectives the West has set on Latin America’s history and populations, there is in fact a material ‘common ground’ in which most of these conceptual artworks were created: the unconformity in the political and the social dimensions of economic, political and military oppression. The ambition to trace the genealogy of Latin American conceptualism as an artistic movement of its own begins then with the premise that most of the conceptual art that brought international attention to Latin America is linked to contexts of oppression. Broadly speaking one can identify that from 1950-70, Latin American populations underwent similar processes of urbanization[i], economic reformism, the growth of mass media, and the clashing political ideologies of liberal capitalism with Marxist-Leninist communism. Within Latin American regimes of violence, conceptual art became a sensible effective resource to counter the hegemonic official rhetorics of modernity and progress.

In this sense, people identify some similarities in the tactics across the continent and in the problems that art addresses. The social interventions and demonstrations that required collective work occurred in Mexico’s by ‘Los Grupos’[ii], in Argentina stands out ‘Tucumán Arde’ in 1968, and later on in Chile’s ‘Escena de Avanzada’ during Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973). Urban interventions in the city’s visual mechanisms and public infrastructure such as boards, counteracting propagandistic symbols scattered around the city and altering street signalization.

This type of interventionist and uncomfortable-ish art has been cataloged by many as Guerrilla Art. In the West, around the 60s activism and art practice were merging strongly and one of the most relevant shapes it took was the Guerrilla Art movements, as it became a situationist and immediate form of protest against the global powers and modern Imperialisms. While I wouldn’t affirm that the interventions held by Tucumán Arde and Grupo Pentagono were thought out in this fashion, it does follow the same logic of immediacy, public visibility, strategic location, low budget, and the disregard for traditional technic-aesthetic canons.

These particular logistics of production are basic to understanding the shift from the modernist vanguards in painting and sculpture –figurative, abstract, concrete art prominently present in the continent[iii]– towards a more idea-based artistic approach. In some way, art needed to be responsive and needed to have the capacity to grow collective sensibility by unconventional means of representation, this means, art needed to detach from its premises of elitist, high-culture and find ground in the popular. The idea required to be liberated from the traditional craftsmanship of fine art as so it can reproduce itself to the masses without depending on financial aid from the sponsoring State.[iv] Art then needed to be relatively quick to produce and clear enough for the interpretation of the general population, i.e. a painting can take a lot of time to make, and its reproduction is thought to weaken the value of its specificity, on the other hand, a print that is meant to circulate across localities is cheaper and easier to produce and can carry out concrete ideas without the need of complex interpretation.

In this sense, a lot of artists opted for the ‘appropriation’ of circulating media by making use of the existing structures of mass communications. Notably in this matter is Grupo Suma in Mexico, who printed on newspapers and official documents stained signs and crude images of the social reality. In the aspect of material circulation of the works of art (ideas), some artists printed (literally) their ideas into the material commodity flux of the market by altering products of everyday use with messages of social and political critique. The point of this was to create a circuit of ideology that does not depend on a centralizing system of control. The market, according to its liberal principles, is supposed to function this way, self regulative and independent of the State’s intervention. The Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles subverts this notion ironically by printing messages in two of the most celebrated commodities, paper bills, and Coca-cola bottles, putting them back in circulation and therefore creating a work of art that mediates itself, and which accomplishes its meaning when the inadvertent audience (that who holds the bottle) is met by a message that turns its ordinary consumption practice into a transgressive individual reflection.[v]

These particular types of artworks were not only expanding the desire to hack the existing infrastructures of monetary and commodity value for the sake of art, but they were also challenging the idealism of what objects can or cannot be considered as art. A matter that, lucky enough for them, is up only for the artists and the institution to decide.

The action of interfering (or not) an object as means to conceive it and present it like a work of art is what is now generally known as the ready-made. Discovered by Duchamp back in the 40’s, highly developed by Latin American conceptual artists in the last period of the XX century. We could say these were the baby steps for what Latin American artists would later evolve the ready-made practice.

This art, meant to “destroy the idealistic separation between the piece and its reality”[vi] , social realism, critique to the system and the local authorities through the recontextualización of ordinary objects became an easy, fashionable way to create value for the audience, the artists, and the Institutions that sponsored these artworks. As the techniques and possibilities of conceptual representation evolved and were accepted in institutions (for example, Mexican Collectives and the Instituto Di Tella in Argentina relations with the American art institutions are known), they become much more challenging and controversial for the public that experiences them.

What we know today as ‘contemporary art’ is the consolidation of various conceptual currents in a post-modernist framework, these work on the idea behind the object, in which this artistic object can be an installation or a ready-made sculpture, it does not matter as long as the idea behind the piece is powerful.

Even if the early stages of conceptualism were grounded outdoors from the mediation of public institutions and the State, Conceptualism gained its worldwide legitimacy due to the acceptance and accommodation into Art Institutions (mostly international), the expansion–or the creation–of the ‘Art Industry’ as a global network of Museums, fairs, curators, intellectuals, merchants, and the growing market demand for art sales. We shall not understand Latin Conceptualism out of this context. While it is true that some of the early art was meant to be revolutionary and to “fight against economic dependency”,[vii] because of these artists’ close links with the Western growing international art system, these movements were swallowed as “artistic peripheries” of a specific geopolitical region: Latin America. This consolidates what Joaquín Barriendos suggests as the ‘geoasthetic region’.[viii] In the eyes of the West, Latin America can be understood as a geoasthetic region that produces political art. This art not only sells well, it also fits the strategic plans of museums to incorporate art from all around the world.

The following generation of artists (around the 90s – till today), usually referred to as neo-conceptualist were already designing artwork whose value and function was to be measured in the parameters of international art exhibition. In the case of Mexico, Miguel Calderón, Yoshua Okón[ix], Gabriel Orozco, Cruzvillegas, Teresa Margolles, Lozano-Hemmer, Aldo Chaparro, and so on, are celebrated as leading contemporary artists, not only by fair’s curators but by the Governmental State and its international affairs institutions.[x] This period marks when conceptualism stops being a ‘tactic for thriving on adversity’ and becomes a culturally necessary discourse accommodated by the State.[xi] As of now, Conceptual art remains critical and political, but it has lost, in its majority, its radical drive against the systems of power. If it produces enjoyment (like Orozco) or shame (as Margolles), it stimulates only the emotions of the viewer without threatening any order or making those in power to feel uncomfortable.

The institutional allowance and marketability for Conceptualism and neo-Conceptualism opened up divergent paths for the art practice in which it has become more difficult to trace conceptualism as a single movement. Even if the insistence on understanding Latin America’s cultural productions in a universalistic-homogenous manner prevails, there is not a single substantial ideology that unites these practices across diverse contexts, therefore they better be understood as phenomena, rather than as a movement or a geoaesthetic category.

Notes

[i] Mari Carmen, “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity.” p.58

[ii] Ruben Galllos, “The Mexican Pentagon.” p.167

[iii] Concrete art was particularly dominant in Brazil, in which influenced by modernist ideals of functionality, technological determinism were copped by visual artists, architects and technocrats politicians. This was countered by an emerrging art movement named as ‘Neoconcretism’ lead by Lygia Clark, they broke with idealist premise that form follows function. The main ideological ruptures of this movement are addressed  in Lygia’s manifesto ‘We Refuse’, 1966.

[iv] Camnitzer, “Tucumán arde”. p.66

[v] dos Anjos, “Cildo Meireles”. 2017

[vi] As pointed out in the manifesto of Tucumán Arde. Camnitzer, “Tucumán arde”. p.66

[vii] Camnitzer, “Tucumán arde.”

[viii] Joaquín Barriendos, “Geopolitics of Global Art.” p.98, 10

[ix] Calderon and Okón produced the polemic installation ‘A propósito’ in 1997, constructed of stolen stereos in Mexico City. The work of art was later exhibited abroad in “Lifting. Theft in Art” 2007-2008 curated by Atopia Projects. Tania Ragasol “A propósito”.

[x] Biennales and International contests are regularly financed/sponsored by the state. In the case of México, it is by The National Council For Culture And The Arts (CONACULTA), The Institute of Fine Arts (INBA), The Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE), The National University of Mexico (UNAM), Patronato Del Arte Contemporaneo (PAC) as noted in the official announcements, see for example: e-flux, “Teresa Margolles at 53rd Venice Biennale”, 2009.

[xi] The most noticeable example of this is in recent times is the mega-project of reconstructing the park Chapultepec in Mexico City. Multimillionaire project of urban infrastructure granted to the conceptual artist Gabriel Orozco. Sparkinlg a lot of discontent and debate within the scene. See in cited works Minera, “Chapultepec o el precio de la desolación”, 2021

WORKS CITED

Barriendos, Joaquín. “Geopolitics of Global Art: The Reinvention of Latin America as a Geoaesthetic Region.” In The global art world: audiences, markets, and museums, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2009, pp. 98-114.

Camnitzer, Luis. “Tucumán arde: Politics in Art.” In Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007, pp. 60-72.

Dos Angos, Moacir “”Cildo Meireles. Inserciones en Circuitos Ideológicos.” DAROS, 2017. https://www.daros-latinamerica.net/es/ensayo/cildo-meireles-inserciones-en-circuitos-ideol%C3%B3gicos

Gallo, Rubén (2007) “Adventures in collectivism during the 1970’s” In Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945, Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette (eds.), 165-190, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.

Minera, María. “Chapultepec o el precio de la desolación: carta a Gabriel Orozco.” NEXOS, January 2021. https://cultura.nexos.com.mx/chapultepec-o-el-precio-de-la-desolacion-carta-a-gabriel-orozco/

n.d. “Teresa Margolles at 53rd Venice Biennale” e-flux, 2009. https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/38082/teresa-margolles-at-53rd-venice-biennale/

Ragasol, Tania “A Propósito.” CÓDIGO DF. https://www.yoshuaokon.com/assets/02okon_tania46.pdf

Ramírez, Mari Carmen. “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity: Conceptualism in Latin America, 1960-1980.” In Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 53-71.

Context

In this review of the work of Teresa Margolles and Doris Salcedo, I attempt to provide the reader with a grounded historic-political context for the works discussed first as I open debate regarding the State and its corresponding Cultural Institutions that facilitate this art to be of international relevance. As much as Salcedo and Margolles promote a critical and radical vision towards the failed politics of the State, the same state has officialized their discourses through its Cultural-Institutional arm to represent their countries in the highest competitions and exhibitions, such as Biennials and Museums in the West.

For if we go into the higher interests of our administrations, producing competent art at a global level has been paramount, since Modernization, to present a nation as a universal power among other nations.[i]

In Latin America, art has exponentially developed a highly political character throughout the 20th century, and although its authoritarian governments have been known for suppressing intellectual criticism against them (especially coming from the arts), as Latin American countries in its entirety have been subjected to the same hegemonic project of globalization, in turn, has also given rise to global programs of art circulation. For Margolles and Salcedo, who became internationally known in the late ’90s creating neo-conceptual art and ready-mades within a well established global network of art, the development of the free art market, the increasingly powerful curatorial/intellectual context in contemporary art, and the funding of art institutions in favor of private and state interests was opening up several channels for artistic experimentation and political critique in which powerful and intriguing art (mostly conceptual) was demanded.

It is precisely in this internationalist context of critique and multiculturalism that the work of Margolles and Salcedo has been highly acclaimed for one clear reason, they have radicalized the practice of conceptual art, as they have been concerned that the tragic narrative of violence and decomposition they work with, is traced to the very specific raw material of the trauma; I explain: they use real matter left of the story they present, forensic material, corpse remains, weapons, abandoned belonging by victims of violence, and so on. While this narrative may seem familiar to some, it is very controversial when it is elevated to broader diverse audiences, as people naturally question the ethic of their work. A lot of debate and discontent has arisen in the general public and the critics regarding the moral, the corruption, and the actual quality of their works. The critiques, in my opinion, are often valid, still, there is something undeniable of their practices that deserves acknowledgment and admiration, both have developed creative and powerful languages of social realism that set a high bar for Latin American critical art.

As for the institutions, if we dare to look closely, the state is very much concerned with art (if it’s a tool or a threat) as an apparatus that consolidates ideology and culture. In this sense, Slavoj Žižek points out to us at the beginning of his book “The Parallax View” that there is an established and conflicted trinity between elites (the groups in power), brutal violence (as a way of governing/sustaining power), and the fine arts (as the aesthetic-sensitive representation of these).[ii] I will emphasize later on this matter. So, while in the spheres of the ‘high culture’ history is commonly delighted as an aesthetic experience, the real tragedy, that of war, that of fear, reaches its highest peak when it is converted into art. In literature, the plastic, scenic and cinematographic arts the narrative of human suffering is treated until it becomes a phenomenal representation-interpretation of tragedy, this not only for the privileged few but for the masses in general; as most of the art produced in the XX century and so forth is meant to reach mass audiences. To produce and perform art at the scale Margolles and Doris do requires mediation, funding, and permission from corresponding powers, mostly art institutions.

While artists work on what is relevant to their reality and collective history, the institutions in charge of generating and managing culture indeed depend on the artists. In that sense, it seems that the artistic narrative that triumphs is the one that is in accordance with the desires of the institutions and those of the popular audience, even if these desires constantly clash. However, when the discourse of art is conflictive, cynical, and puts at risk the legitimacy of the state and its institutions, does the exhibition space–commonly institutional and linked to the State– not serve as a “tolerance zone” for protest and radicalisms?

Long before museums became zones of tolerance, Latin American artists already had a history of assuming important roles in interpreting the tragic events that mark their populations as narratives of cultural value, of utmost relevance not only to the elites, but their discourse has been consolidated with a higher social purpose. In literature and the visual arts, there is a large repertoire of oppositional theory and art in Latin America. As far as the visual arts are concerned, conceptual art established itself as an effective apparatus of ideology around the world (conceptualism)[iii], in Latin America, there are important avant-garde conceptual art interventions that could be understood under the main purpose of social realism.

What is in the essence of much of Latin American conceptualism is the pain and tragedy that governs our societies and writes our history, failed states, war, political conflict, corruption and drug trafficking have become the conditioning factor of the various realities experienced in Latin America. For some time now, several artists have been denouncing various problems in the lower and higher fields of culture.

A bit of history…

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the wounds of colonization– to say it in a romantic manner– continued to fester on a continental level, creating new forms of precariousness and violence. The anguish in the aftermath of colonization and independence wars on the continent and its peoples were already illustrated by modernist painters prior to conceptualism, such as those of the Muralist movement present in Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, and Uruguay.[iv] Telling the complicated ‘Latin experience’ was a good rhetorical resource for art during the first half of the century. However, these artists, mostly charged with leftist political ideology, held a positive and hopeful view towards the partidocracy and the State (with Marxist values). Therefore art was not used as a radical protest against the oppression of the nation-state, nor did it highlight the atrocities of the nation-state towards its populations in the present.

A few years later the fever of Modernity in Latin America had died down and what remained was the apex of American imperialism and predatory globalization that centered Latin America once again as the strategic playground for Western powers and local rulers. Interest in the continent’s southern hemisphere’s natural resources and labor force became the catalyst for an endless series of violent conflicts and systematic oppression. Many genocides, displacements, civil wars, coups d’états’, dictatorships, and political persecutions occurred openly perpetuated and financed by the global powers.

It is in this context that the artist with its creativity, intellect and sensitivity becomes a suitable mediator of social discontent, and art, as the state censors and suppresses it, gains rhetorical power and legitimacy.[v] And so denouncement became inevitable, the artist acquires, almost unwittingly, a social responsibility to act against silence. As Margolles rightly said: ‘What else can we talk about?[vi] However, the tactics to convert art into protest were diverse in the localities and evolved over time.

Dating from the late ‘60s deeply political avant-garde art movements in Argentina (Tucumán Arde and the Comité Coordinador de la Imaginación Revolucionaria, 1968), in Mexico, almost simultaneously, as social decay and state oppression became increasingly shocking, to counter the officialist rhetorics of progress, a lot art was produced collectively with the social focus of denouncing systematic violence (Los Grupos). If anything, conceptualism in Latin America was guided by its commitment to developing a social realism of impact, well described by artist Juan Pablo Renzi, ‘we aspire to turn each piece of reality into an art object that turns upon the consciousness of the world, revealing the intimate contradictions of this class society.‘[vii]

In the last period of the twentieth-century geopolitical conflicts had multiplied and intertwined with a larger systematic problem that had developed particularly in Colombia and Mexico: drug trafficking (narcotráfico). The state conveniently ceases to be the main apparent enemy to its people, and by the 1980s organized crime (the cartels) had become extensive organizations of war and government to which the state supposedly fought against as a matter of national security. The reality is much more complicated. In Mexico on the one hand the cartels were organized into the first continental infrastructure for drug trafficking (mainly cocaine) to the United States, led by Felix Gallardo (aka El Jefe de Jefes) starting in Colombia, Felix established the first distribution network that made the Cali Cartel and the Medellin Cartel (led by Pablo Escobar), as well as the united cartels in northern Mexico extremely powerful and wealthy. In Colombia, this was unleashed alongside a ‘civil war’ considerably more violent than Mexico’s situation at the time, as armed insurgent groups and self-defense groups had been fighting for years for the political power and territory control. ‘Las FARC’ (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), which was financed by massive kidnappings, displacements, and drug trafficking,[viii] sustained a civil war against the consolidated right-wing paramilitary groups such as the ‘AUD’ (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) led by the very powerful Carlos Castaño Gill, financed by displacements and sale of land to particulars, land rights, transnational corporations (such as Chiquita Brands)[ix] and also drug trafficking. In Colombia, the paramilitary groups, in particular the AUD, were for many years the unofficial armed wing of the state. There are countless deaths that this armed conflict left and the damage it caused is irreparable. It is in this niche of this ‘irreparability’ that Salcedo’s art is born.

Colombia’s civil war could be a more complex and political conflict than the case of the drug violence on Mexico’s northern border, yet they have parallel motives and in their essence are the same: Conflict between armed groups for power over land and resources, as well as for the drug trafficking routes that finance their activities. These armies of organized crime (call them cartels, paramilitaries, self-defense groups, insurgent groups) defend not only political management interests, but also financial interests for transnationals, therefore they are not alien to the national economy, they are elemental to it, and are closely linked to the government, or are the government itself. Inside these forms of government–commonly denounced as ‘narcogobierno‘, ‘narco-paramilitarismo‘, ‘FARCgobierno’–the more the state colludes, the more difficult it becomes to pinpoint the ultimate culprits of the atrocities committed, the more difficult it becomes to conceive of justice and thus the more impossible it becomes to restore the social fabric.

Margolles and Salcedo

It is in this context of systematic violence and despair that Margolles and Salcedo, almost simultaneously begin to produce art to counteract the silence and the impunity left by these ‘civil’ wars. However, something remarkable of their art is that this would not only function as local-social interventions, but as an amplification of the local conflict to the highest spheres of culture (the international). For their art, it would already be part of an international contemporary art circuit in an expanding market, following this, the logistics of its production and exhibition would become more costly and complex, requiring also a certain degree of complicity from cultural-state institutions.[x]

This is a bit more evident in the case of Margolles, as she requires noticeable illegality to be able to smuggle forensic remains transnationally, such as her intervention in the Venice Biennial and the multiple pieces mentioned by Cuauhtémoc Medina in his promotional essay “Zones of Tolerance“. In the case of Doris, it does not requires much to figure out about the permission and collaboration of the State to carry out her performances/installations. For example, the one she carried out in the Palace of Justice in Bogota in 2002, entitled “Empty Chairs of the Palace of Justice”, a consensual performance-intervention that lasted 53 hours. Yet the most notable collaboration of the Colombian government with Doris would take place recently, in 2016, when the weapons surrendered by FARC from the Peace treaty were disposed at Doris’ will to create a piece of work to conmemorate the end of this civil war.

This decision was probably made anticipating that Doris would make the weapons a monument to the resolution of the conflict. However, Doris chose to melt down the weapons and use the iron to collectively create, together with women victims of the conflict, a piece composed of cocked plates that would form the floor of the what now is the art gallery ‘FRAGMENTOS’, intended to exhibit political and socially useful art.[xi]

There is a substantial concept underlying ‘FRAGMENTOS’ which is also present in most of Margolles’ art, that of ‘anti-monumentality‘. While a monument is meant to be a proud commemoration, most monuments also sing songs of war and pain. They still have the common purpose of remembering and being an ideological maintenance apparatus. A peace monument would be meaningless to a deeply wounded people who could never recover what has been taken from them during the civil wars of drug trafficking and paramilitarism as in the case of Mexico and Colombia. An anti-monument, would rather be an act of collective memory that pays homage to no one, on the contrary, it is a lament.

In respect of  ‘Fragmentos‘, which as I mentioned, was created with the fusion of 60 tons of weapons surrendered by the FARC in the peace agreement of 2016, Salcedo tells us that she was not interested in building a vertical monument (obelisk) of victory, since no one is a winner in a war, she seeks a horizontal monument, which does not oversee the people but instead remains below them.[xii] The iron of the melted weapons would be treated with hammers by several women victims of the war until it becomes plates that would form the floor of the gallery. The argument that Salcedo clearly explains is that these plates are fragments of memory and trauma, this is the fixed interpretation of the work.

For these pieces, the viewer is supposed to look at them with a disconcerted sadness, contrary to the way an honorary monument is to be observed, the anti-monument is then an aesthetic object-experience that projects pain, and triggers the viewer to mourn for a pain that surely did not experience. This mourning projected by these works specifically narrates the tragedy of forced displacement. What are the unoccupied and deranged ‘furniture’ presented in ‘Unland’ (1995-98)[xiii] if not fragments of something that was lost? The issue of forced displacement is also addressed by Margolles in many of her works, the most specific perhaps being her sculpture ‘La promesa‘ (The Promise) composed of the remains of an abandoned house in Ciudad Juárez. Here she was in charge of directing the demolition of an abandoned house, one of the 120’000 abandoned houses in the city due to forced migration as a result of drug war violence.[xiv] The house, which is a lost memory, a broken promise, is recontextualized to become a sculpture, and therefore embodies many memories–conceptually of course–reduced to a wall of dust.

‘Fragmentos‘ and ‘The Promise‘, as their names suggest, are works composed of fragments of memory and broken promises (Margolles refers to them as ‘compacted memory‘), an odd figure: the fragmentation of mind (immaterial) put together by the fragmented–now compacted–residual matter of tragedy (material). A light breaks through such fragmentation, opening way for a reversed journey, one which begins in the viewer’s eyes, leading the way of a vortex that never ends but leaves one wandering a low-resolution territory: between remembering tragedy and the tragedy of remembering.

Acknowledging the creative effort that Salcedo and Margolles have developed to denounce the consequential violence of failed states, I want to wrap up this analysis by raising awareness in the reader that political art is never to be interpreted as separated (or dismissing) from the Institution that hosts it, and the financial and political logistics that it implies. At a time when there is no room for the political persecution of artists (at least in the West, at least apparently), it would seem that freedom of expression does not represent any kind of threat to the State; on the contrary, these expressions are at work in consolidating its ever-deceptive historical narratives and adorning the decaying project of “social reconciliation”.

Notes

[i] Briefly mentioned in Barriendos, “Geopolitics of Global Art.” p.110

[ii] Žižek, “The Parallax View.” p.3

[iii] Gallo, “Adventures in collectivism during the 1970’s.” p.161

[iv] Anreus, “Siqueiros’ travels and “alternative muralism” in Argentina and Cuba.” p. 243

[v] Camnizter “Tucumán arde.”

[vi] Emblematic title for her contribution to the Mexican Pavillion in the 53^rd Venice Biennale.

[vii] Renzi is cited by Luis Camnitzer in “Tucumán arde: Politics in Art.” p.62.

[viii] El Tiempo, “Las FARC y el Narcotráfico.” 2000

[ix] In 2007 Chiquita Brands plead guilty before the U.S. Department of Justice for “Making Payments to a Designated Terrorist Organization” (financing paramilitary groups in Colombia). Chiquita Brands agreed to pay a $25 Million fine. U.S Department of Justice, “Chiquita Brands.” 2007.

[x] Medina, “Zones of Tolerance.” p.48

[xi] This gallery is located in the address Cra. 7 #6-16, Bogotá, Colombia. For more info, visit  https://www.plataformaarquitectura.cl/cl/919532/fragmentos-nil-contra-monumento-granada-garces-arquitectos

[xii] Mentioned by Salcedo in the video “Fragmentos” produced by Mimbre, 2018

[xiii] Salcedo, ““Interview with Charles Merewether.” 1998

[xiv] Addressed by Margolles in the video interview about her piece “La Promesa” by Periscopio Muac, 2015

WORKS CITED

Anreus, Alejandro. (2012). Chapter 9, Siqueiros’ travels and “alternative muralism” in Argentina and Cuba. In A. Anreus, L. Folgarait, & R. A. Greeley (Eds.), Mexican muralism: A critical history (p. 243). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Barriendos, Joaquín. “Geopolitics of Global Art: The Reinvention of Latin America as a Geoaesthetic Region.” In The global art world: audiences, markets, and museums, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2009, pp. 98-114.

Camnitzer, Luis. “Tucumán arde: Politics in Art.” In Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007, pp. 60-72.

Carvajal González, Johanna. 2018. “El Relato de Guerra: Cómo El Arte Transmite La Memoria Del Conflicto En Colombia.” Amerika, no. 18 (June). OpenEdition. doi:10.4000/amerika.10198.

Gallo, Rubén. “Adventures in collectivism during the 1970’s.” In Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2007, pp. 165-190.

Medina, Cuauhtémoc. “Zones de Tolérance: Teresa Margolles, Semefo and Beyond.” Parachute 104, 2001. pp. 33-52.

Merewether, Charles. “Interview with Charles Merewether (1998).” In Doris Salcedo, London: Phaidon Press, 2000, pp. 134-145.

Periscopio MUAC, “Entrevista: La Promesa, Teresa Margolles.” Youtube video, 4:16. 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRUOPcPJKuM&ab_channel=PeriscopioMUAC

Pinilla, Gloria. “‘Fragmentos’: la obra que se construye con las armas que entregó Farc.” Filmed in 2018 by Mimbre, Bogotá, Colombia. Youtube video, 7:02. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKwFSW45tbk&ab_channel=Mimbre

Ramírez, Mari Carmen. “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity: Conceptualism in Latin America, 1960-1980.” In Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 53-71.

Redaccion El Tiempo. “LAS FARC Y EL NARCOTRÁFICO.” El Tiempo. November 30, 2000. Accessed May 04, 2021. https://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/MAM-1289863.

Simona, Pezzano. 2009. «Teresa Margolles at 53rd Venice Biennale». e-flux. mayo 17. https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/38082/teresa-margolles-at-53rd-venice-biennale/.

Teresa Margolles at 53rd Venice Biennale». https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/38082/teresa-margolles-at-53rd-venice-biennale/.

U.S. Department of Justice. “Chiquita Brands International Pleads Guilty to Making Payments to a Designated Terrorist Organization And Agrees to Pay $25 Million Fine.” News release, March 19, 2007. Accessed May 4, 2021. https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2007/March/07_nsd_161.html.

Verdad Abierta. “¿Qué Empresas Bananeras Podrían Responder Por Crímenes De Lesa Humanidad?” VerdadAbierta.com. June 3, 2017. Accessed May 04, 2021. https://verdadabierta.com/que-empresas-bananeras-podrian-responder-por-crimenes-de-lesa-humanidad/.

Žižek, Slavoj. “The Parallax View.” Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2006.

Violence (On Benjamin and Arendt):

In Western historical thought, violence is generally regarded as a manifestation of power with severity, such relation of forces and its resulting harm can only be measured in the dimension of the moral. This means, violence is most of the time condemned, but it is considered either bad or necessary as it relates to principles of justice. For some thinkers, violence is always instrumental, as a means to an ends, while others have suggested that violence can sometimes lack apparent instrumental reason, which would be, pure rage.

The materialist approach of Walter Benjamin (1921) considers violence as a product of history. He regards it in relation to law and justice, distinguishing between 3 forms of violence. First, law-instating violence, which means the creation of power through law. For example, at the conclusion of a revolution, new laws are set and power relations are reconfigured, if I understand correctly, for him, the creation of law is itself the creation of violence since it establishes that everything outside that frame will be definitely violent. Second, law-preserving violence, as a means of control, is maintained by institutions and forces like the military and police. And third, what he calls divine violence (law-destroying), which could be conceived as pure destruction without instrumentality or means that can be understood in a political dimension, it, therefore, exists outside of the logic of legality. 

There is a lot of debate of what ‘divine violence’ actually means, for me, he is trying to make sense in a theological reason of violence as a manifestation of force that is total, pure, and irrational, just “as-God’s-will”. 

In modern terms, I like to think of divine violence as when the hooligans or sports fanatics flip cars on the streets for celebration. Another example can be found in Drill rap or any gang-related music, which are violent statements that often materialize into real violence. The same way one hooligan gang agrees on an encounter with a rival team gang only for the sake of violence and virility, in music, the cult and exercise of violence becomes a liberating force while it calls for a radical organization of power that cannot be contained within the margins of legality, it is just self-expression, and persues no political project to turn the illegal into legal, since in such contexts illegality has proven a more natural system of power and self-governance.

 ‘Power is indeed of the essence of all government, but violence is not. Violence is by nature instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues. And what needs justification by something else cannot be the essence of anything.’ Arendt, in Crises of the Republic (1972)

Hannah Arendt has a distinct view of violence. While she also holds that violence is instrumental, meaning that it can be justified by ends that relate to politics (Finlay, 2009), but key point is that she opposes the idea of violence as a manifestation of power, for her, violence is the opposite of power. A state of power requires no violence, if we consider power as a collective enterprise, the institution is the political materialization of power, but institutions need to be supported by people, when it lacks the support of the power of the people, it needs to exercise violence. For her then power and violence have a negative relation, absolute power gives no space to violence and vice versa.

Liberal Public Sphere (Jürgen Habermas):

The concept of the ‘liberal public sphere’ is commonly attributed to Jürgen Habermas’ conceptualization of the ‘public sphere’. For him, the ideal scenario for human political organization is allowed by the fact that people have the capacity to get together and exchange views, ideas, and interests in order to achieve deliberatively fair consensus in decision-making (policy making). This logic is what sets the basis for democracy, which is why his conception of public sphere is regarded as ‘liberal’. For Habermas, communicative rationality is essentially democracy. 

Let’s consider that the public sphere Habermas describes has its beginning in a period of time prior to mass media (mass society), thus thinking about ‘collective thought’ was difficult, indeed, there was no need for collective consensus since it was the Kings that ruled through absolute power. It is with the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment that we start to even consider the collective body as a matter of interest for politics, as power was shifted from the sole command of the monarch to a more rational group of leaders (politicians). It is precisely Enlightenment political philosophers that regard the public, it is the main idea that the people replace the king as the source of legitimate authority (Then & Now, 2019) . The elites (newly created bourgeoisie) had to start listening to the people, or at least, control them.

It is this type of sphere of intellectuals, businessmen, and politicians that represent the first public sphere. Now when we talk about the ‘Liberal’ public sphere, we are referring to this specific model of deliberative democracy that Habermas identifies.

Representation:

To bring into the sensible what is not there. Something that is not physically present can thus be represented as a symbol or a sign through the use of language. We make sense of the world through representation, we do so by Language: signs and images is what represent things. 

Stuart Hall (1997) distinguishes 3 dimensions of representation.

First is the reflective: Language reflects directly what the object is. Language as a mirror of reality. Good contemporary examples could be a catalogue, an instructive, or a photograph and its description. Take the following photograph for example: 

Here both the photograph and its description are meant to represent what is there.

Next, the intentional: This is the notion that language expresses solely what the messenger aims to say. ‘Words mean what the author intends they should mean‘, says Hall (p.25)

A good example of this is to look at Facebook’s court defence, in which Zuckerberg argues that his company is a ‘technology company‘ and not a ‘media company’. Facebook operations and its effects are the same regardless of how it is framed, yet there is an intention to shift the perception of people and the law in regard to the social responsibilities of the company by imposing a specific meaning to it.

Third, the constructionist: the idea that meaning–and thus our sense of the world–is entirely constructed in/by language. This means, “meaning” do not exist as a given thing, we construct it by making use of representational systems. For this I like to think also of the legislative system but more profoundly on how it shapes our understanding of morality, civility, and the evil, serving as a moral and disciplinary guide in which the societies organize the material conditions of the world.

Decolonization:

Decoloniality is a school of thought that aims to study and ultimately dismantle the power relations of Coloniality. Coloniality being the power metric of Colonialism, is what allows the material conditions for Modernity (in Europe) and the maintenance of its hegemonic rhetoric. Coloniality is itself a decolonial concept because it makes evident that the colonial rule is one of domination and underdevelopment. 

This acknowledgement is born in the Third World, particularly in Latin America. Walter Mignolo & Catherine E. Walsh Walsh (2018) attribute the introduction of such dichotomy Coloniality/Decoloniality and the junction Coloniality-Modernity to the Peruvian philosopher Aníbal Quijano in the ’90s. His essay ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America‘ (2000) published at the end of the decade, provided a very solid ground for the material and intellectual project of Decoloniality to kickstart in Latin America (Gandarilla Salgado et al., 2021), expanding onto many other regions and intersectional fields of study such as Feminism, Migration Studies, and so on. The goal of Epistemological Decolonization is the destruction of the coloniality of world power (Quijano, 2007), the theory and practice of such a project is what we call ‘Decolonization’.

Nature, Artifice and the Mystery of Design (Notes on Le-Duc and Art Nouveau)

In his “Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle” (1868) great architect and insightful precursor of Art Nouveau style, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, pointed out that style, as a material condition that every human creation possesses, needed to follow the example of nature. He believed that within the universal order (of nature), the principles of human design exist and rather than created, are discovered. Accordingly: geometry, stability (against the force of gravity), and the harmony of proportion. It is from this “great order of nature” that human intelligence, through profound observation, must discover its own principles of creation.

“Architecture is a human creation, Such is our inferiority that, in order to achieve this type of creation, we are obliged to proceed as nature proceeds in the things she creates. We are obliged to employ the same elements and the same logical method as nature; we are obliged to observe the same submission to certain natural laws and to observe the same transitions.”

 There are three fundamental notions that constitute Le-Duc’s understanding of materiality: natural law, imagination, and reason, each of these abstract forces precede any attempt of human material creation. Primarily, reason must necessarily submit to the instruction of nature and to the incontrollable phenomena of imagination in order to proceed, but imagination without reason has no means. He points out, “we are not the masters of our imagination“, but only masters of our consciousness. If art first exists in an embryonic state in the imagination, it is only reason (the deliberated exercise of our consciousness) that will bring it into material reality.

“It is reason that will provide the embryonic work with the necessary organs to survive, with the proper relationships between its various parts (…) Style is the visible sign of the unity and harmony of all the parts that make up the whole work of art. Style originates, therefore, in an intervention of reason“

 Underlying his theory is the long-standing tension between the natural and the technical. The negative relation that defines Nature and artifice against one another has been a primordial conflict for the human, and thus a concern constantly re-emerging throughout the history of art since its very origin. Art Nouveau once recovered this tension and tried to solve it, in architecture, its style imitated the shape and dynamics of nature, for which it considered fundamentally beautiful and functional. Yet, this, rather than suggesting a rejection of technology proposed that the artificial unification of humans’ most advanced techniques and materials with nature’s principles is not only desirable, but indivisible for the task of creating beauty and truth. 

Concerned mostly with architecture, le-Duc affirmed that while it needed to follow nature’s logic model, it must be achieved by making use of modern technologies and materials. Thus emphasizing that nature serves best artificiality and the other way around.

Later in time Art Nouveau (and subsequently, Art Deco) unfolded into multiple disciplines of design, its fascination for nature’s shapes and dynamics resulted to twist (quite literally) the materials and technics of industrial design into a whole new world. Containing the mystery of nature along with the mystery–and thus, the promise–of a future, unleashed a stream of fantasy that better captured, for an instant, the visions, dreams, and impulses of a people of its time; a period of time in which the totalizing forces of industrial capital had shattered and obscured in many ways the capacities of human imagination. Yet, it was this exaggeration of industrial majesty that stapled some of the principles of a design-to-come and the promise of a future that has since been lost.

Throughout the century, other styles–mostly those concerned with the design of the imaginary–emerged and followed to exceed these principles in contrasting ways. It is noticeable that many of the stylistic developments within science fiction streams continue to rely on Nouveau and Deco for the creation of worlds that are either dystopic or hedonistically utopic. In any way, its design achieves to exalt the primitive and mystic conditions of humanity constrained by technology, order, and control. Once again, raising the strain that Nature is negated by artificiality and that the artificial, rather than learning from Nature, can only exploit it for its own sustain. For instance, Sci-fi’s fascination with Art Nouveau style is an aesthetic paradigm that better plasm both, the negation and desire for lost futures, corresponding to the symptoms of a post-industrial society, terrified by, yet eager to explore the limits of technology, imagination and Nature itself.

MIRUEL (Artist’s Blur) 

Miró Ingmar Tiebe (MIRUEL) is a graphic and illustration artist based in Hamburg-Altona and a current graduate student for a Master of Arts in Illustration at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW).

The artist points out to be inspired by Art Nouveau and Art Deco–from which he has learned not only the majesty of shape but also the mysteries it can contain–yet, he emphasizes Nature itself to be his biggest stream of inspiration. 

Taking inspiration from the shapes and dynamics of nature, he weaves a visual language of his own, which I can only describe as one of transformation: imagery composed of alien forms merging in chaos and order; sometimes in an attempt to bring the viewer close to the unknown, into the realm of mystery, other times simply presenting the shape in its original state. Rich and contrasting colours define the limits of each shape and carry the sight of the viewer across the image with no fixed direction. If it’s an unidentifiable machine, a gross organism, an evil stare, an inviting corridor, or a remote scenario, elements that show his devotion to design and Nature are constantly present in his illustration: architecture, engineering, and the dominance with which typography acts to hold them all together. 

In fact, this persistent care for typography that accompanies his work reminds me of an original quality that Art Nouveau found in its lettering, a powerful design with which words alone can contain a whole new world of fantasy.

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