It's not surprising you know that that this is what she's doing, and you
can understand that in some ways what she was doing in the nineteen seventies and
what she was doing back then is what would lead to things like cutting and
self harm in the modern world, because cutting and self harm is also a
desire to participate. It's a desire to re engage the world, right,
to reawaken our engagement with the world. It's just a just a very deluded
and deranged version which enters into this this sato masochistic paradigm that appears at the
beginning of the modern age. Right, It's like all I can understand the
world to be is either a world of power in which I, you know,
inflict pain and violence and torture, or I am the recipient of violence
and pain and torture. And if I can do that to myself, then
I am in like in control of the nihilism that I mean that I'm living
in, of the kind of dark world that I'm engaged with. This is
Jonathan Pechel. Welcome to the Symbolic World. Hello, do all of you
welcome to this symbolic world. Today we're going to talk about art. I
was really surprised to notice how many people watch my video on El Greco and
and you are all. So I thought we will push it a little further
and we'll look at contemporary artists like Marina and Brownvich of Pizza the Gate Fame
and a few other contemporary artists, and we'll look at how much of contemporary
art or some contemporary artists yearning from a participation, look at how they come
close to it and also how they struggle to the breakthrough. And so as
you notice a lot of things that have been going on in this cinemolic world.
We have a new website that you get it signed up to. There's
a new community, a bunch of guests here for people who sign up.
And as you can see, I have behind me the beautiful mosaic that was
made by my caring assistant David and was designed by Heatherer Pollington. And so
I'm surrounded by one of different people really excited to carry on with this syntebolic
world as we reach new levels. So what we're going to look at is
the question of contemporary art and how it moves into extremes and moves towards participation.
But first, what I wanted you to think about is many of the
modern artists were in some ways in the what I call pendulum, a pendulum
of the incarnation, you could call it, where on the one hand,
the art tends to move up towards ideal shapes, towards idealism, towards you
know, and it also tends to move down towards e hither popular or art
or common art or everyday representations. This pendulum happens in any way. Sometimes
it's almost contradictory, but nonetheless the pendulum is there. And so here we're
looking at an artist named Brancuzzi. Many of you will know him. And
what's interesting about these artists is that if you look at what they're doing,
some of it, you know, it's not a problem in itself. And
so brand Cuzzi, one of the things he was described to do with something
like there's still the essence out of the art. So many iconographers artists like
Aiden Hart, who has written much about iconography, has even suggested the possibility
that, you know, there's something akin to icons in some of the modern
movements. But if you look at the way that the face is simplified,
this desire to kind of of find the basic geometry of the face and to
represent it. Is something that Aiden sees happening in icons If you look at
the difference between Roman and art and Christian medieval art or iconographic art, you
get a sense that the iconographic art is more distilled. It doesn't tend to
show a lot of the excesses of the material world. It tends to,
let say, rectify or simplify the forms. Now this wasn't necessarily done with
the same drive as the modern artist that is really trying to almost reduce to
an essence. But nonetheless there is something that you might want to see as
a kin. Now this is true, but it's interesting to think about how
there is a in terms of moving towards an art. Of course, with
participation you have a basic issue which is going to be in some ways the
development of the personal style. And so as Brancuzzi or other artists want to
do this distilling, they also at the same time end up creating things that
are so you know, particular to themselves that they They're personality is impregnated completely
on it, and so it doesn't have a kind of universal appeal communal appeal
that the traditional arts would have like images and icons, they do distill the
forms, but they do that in a way that is also calling to participation
in a community, whereas Brankuzi is creating objects of contemplation, objects of aesthetic
pleasure that would be in people's houses or in buildings, but don't necessarily have
so much of that capacity to participate in a community. Another example is,
of course Kandinsky. Now many people have pointed Kandinsky out to me, saying,
you know, isn't Kandinsky something akin to what you're trying to do?
Right He's trying to find the meaning in colors. Kandinski created this whole theory
of color symbolism where each color represented certain moods, certain states of human existence.
And then he created this almost symbolic language of colors in his paintings,
where he brought all these colors together, you know, contrasting with each other
and uh and and existing together in order to bring about this kind of symbolic
language of color. And so there is something interesting about that once again in
the way that my friend Aiden Hart points out that there's something of that in
color in in icons, where in icons, certain colors has certain certain importance
in certain representations. For example, we represent the veil of the virgin with
a royal color. You know, we use gold, we use white,
we use dark black and darkness to manifest certain characteristics. And so it's not
as typified as in Kandinsky, and it's not as typified as sometimes people want
to think. But there is definitely a basic symbolism of color that exists in
the icons. Now, once again the issue with Kandinsky, and this of
course happens also with people like Pete Montreal. Pete Montreal is a is an
artist who was trying to do something similar. He was a theosophist and so,
you know, a kind of spiritualist in the in the the early sense
that you know, something akin to what a new ager would be today.
Uh. And he tried to create these simple images of proportions, mathematical proportions
and and and uh, primal colors in order to create this kind of spiritual
experience of the painting. Now, one of the issues with with both of
these is that, for example, with Kandinski, you have the problem that
his forms and his colors create a very idiosyncratic language. And so in the
desire to actually create something which would be universal devoid of cultural uh, you
know, cultural hooks, that it's not this or that person, it's not
this or that scene, it's an it's a universal language. What ends up
happening is rather the opposite, is that Kendinski creates a language which is completely
aosyncratic to himself, and that you know, unless you read his book on
color, you would struggle to find any meaning in his paintings. Even in
terms of impressions. The impressions that his paintings create on the viewer are not
really exactly what he would think they are doing with his whole very complex theory
of color. Now, the same happens with Pete Montias. That you know,
although his mathematical proportions they are universal, they are very much once again
void of the capacity to participate. And so these images you look at them,
but what are they doing? What is happening with these images? And
what's important to understand in terms of the pendulum is to understand how in the
early modern age, and this is something which will be real repeeded early Modernism,
not modern age, to say, at the beginning of the twentieth century,
something which will be repeated over and over is that you end up having
movements of artists that represent things that look very similar to each other, but
for app completely opposite reasons. This happened especially in Russia. So in Russia
you had two movements. You had a movement that you could call supremacism.
You see this in Malevich, of course, Malevich, who was kind of
continuing Kandinsky's line of representing these pure mathematical forms, these pure shapes, these
pure colors on canvases in order to create a supreme you know, kind of
platonic experience of the forms in the paintings. And so there was almost like
a spiritualism which is devoid of body. And you see that of course in
Montly as well. You know, it's trying to create these pure patterns,
pure patterns that are that are spiritual, but that don't land, that don't
incarnate in the world the way patterns actually usually incarnate in the world. Right.
You don't perceive mathematical proportions. You perceive them, you know, if
you look at the Golden Mean, for example, you know, the Golden
Mean appears as different proportions, the proportions of the body, the proportions of
buildings, you know, that are participated in you enter into the building,
and the fact that your body is made of certain proportions connects with the proportions
of the church, and so there might be a little bit of that in
the painting, but the painting is something that you stand in front of and
you look at that weird activity of just visual experience is something which is not
integrated with other aspects of reality. So now, what it's interesting about Russian
supremacism is that it gives birth to a movement that is its opposite, which
is called constructivism. And the constructivists are also using these geometric shapes, but
they're using them in an almost reductionist manner, in a Marxist way. So
on the one hand, you have this kind of idealism, this this high
spiritualism in these supremacists, and now this this landed very very practical use in
constructivism. Now you look at this, and you would you might think,
okay, so what's the difference, right, what's the difference between this,
which is constructivism and this, which is supremacism. And that's my point.
My point is that you know, these extremes manifest manifest themselves in a very
surprising way where people on the one hand, someone who wants to create idealistic
spiritual forms, and the other person who wants to create Marxists working class,
you know, Reductionist objects that are made of real things, you know,
that are that are completely material in there for even the reason of their being,
will end up making something similar. And so for the same reason,
what you end up seeing is the constructivists end up using the tools of modernism
and the design tools of simple geometric forms in order to create propaganda, whereas
something like creating propaganda out of a out of abstract geometric forms is something that
the supremacist like Malevich would have found completely abhorrent and the total opposite of what
it is they're trying to do. Now, this of course will continue on
into the modern age, and when you get to the nineteen sixties and seventies,
you have the exact same problem. In the United States and in Europe
as well. You end up having two movements, one which is called conceptual
art and the other which is called minimalism. And what happens is you have
these two extremes, and so conceptual art, you know, this is you
know, this is supposed to be very smart. So Joseph Kosuth know,
he puts a chair in the gallery and then puts a picture of the chair
and then puts a definition of the chair to kind of help you understand that,
you know, how these objects are actually ideas and that the idea is
what is more important than the physical instantiation of the object. And so,
you know, it's super interesting because this is a very very boring thing.
It's a very boring statement, and it's also a cold clinical action that you
know, it's supposed to create, just this reflection on on the relationship between
different representations of an idea in the world and different uh, you know,
putting putting out there in terms of the creation of a of an art object,
right, because this is the problem. Now, this chair, you
know, is not is not an actual chair, right, It's not a
it's not a chair that you sit on. It's a fetishized chair that is
used in the gallery in order to to create an artistic experience, I guess.
And so although so again you have this problem of the alienation which the
art object ended up creating in the in the world, and so you and
then you end up having all these tropes of trying to kind of break free,
break through the issue that the gallery space provides, and you know,
the art space provides the most extreme version of this kind of conceptual art that
is trying to be revolutionary. If you remember my last lecture on an El
Greco and Andy Warhol is of course Pierro Manzoni who did the you can read
it for yourself. He created cans of art that contained his own excrement.
We don't even know if they really did, but that was the point.
The point is to have these cans that contained the excrement of the artists and
put them in the gallery. W was kind of taking Duchamp's gesture to an
extreme, but Men's he only did all kinds of things like that, where
he would he would take a vial of glass and fill it with air in
Paris, you know, just have a vile of glass open and Paris close
it and then show it all of the world and call it, you know,
air from Paris or something. And it was this desire to kind of
expose in some ways almost the very mechanisms of art and the very mechanisms of
how of how art is a fetishized representation of something that has lost its purpose.
So it's not clear exactly what his point was in the sense that is
he denouncing it, is he participating it? Maybe he's doing both at the
same time, you know, but he can perceive the problem of participation and
the problem of the space, the art space itself as this strange space where
we put things there in order for us to just look at them, and
they don't have a kind of integration into the world. And so this conceptual
art is this high, high con sexual art. Well at the same time
exist with other artists that are doing what we call minimalist art, and here
we're looking at pure reductionism. So if you look at an abstract painting by
Frank Stella, for example, and so you know, abstract lines on a
on a canvas, and it might make you think that this has more to
do with Malavich. But someone like Frank Stella would be the very opposite of
Malavich. He would say that my paintings are just paint on a surface.
That's all they are. They have no meaning, they have nothing except for
just being paint on a surface. Now, obviously, you know, at
this point, hopefully everybody can understand that this is a of course, a
ridiculous gesture. It's a ridiculous gesture to think that you can have just paint
on a canvas, the whole question of relevance and and and and of wondering
why I would care about paint on a canvas and not care about paint on
a wall, or not care about you know, whatever it is is of
course re engaging and is a kind of strange almost blind spot of an artist
like Frank Stella, where you know, the the putting in the gallery of
this canvas with abstract painted lines on it, cannot avoid entering into the whole
question of meaning, of prestige and of relevance, and the question of culture
and why we would have these objects that we elevate above other objects, and
that we see as being kind of fetishized as as culture objects rather than just
everyday, common day objects. And so you know, you can see how
the pendulum calls its each other, right, the pendulum just just calls one
extreme to the other, and sometimes even in the same object. And so
without the whole structure of art, the whole structure of culture, and this
whole idea of these objects of contemplation and and that are fetishized and put above
common day objects, almost in a religious way, Frank Sella could not be
making his paintings. And so even though he makes a reductionist move, the
very fact that we care about his reductionist move, you know, makes his
art participate in the other extreme all the time. And you see the same
thing with any of the minimalist artists. Here of more examples, Carl Andre
Donald Judd, who created these simple materials. They would just create these forms,
and you know the Donald Juddy's boxes are made out of plywoods, They're
made out of very common materials and put up in galleries in a very simple
way, in a very reductionist gesture. Once again, you know, there
is very difficult for them to avoid this pendulum. Now. One of the
things that happens, and it's interesting to start thinking about, is that there
is in the nineteen sixties especially, and it's then in the nineteen seventies you
have almost like a breakout where I think many of the artists started to realize
just how sterile a lot of this abstract art was becoming, this conceptual art,
these minimalists are, how sterile, and just because it's the fetishized in
the weirdest way, that these objects started to becoming and so what you have
is artists that almost tried to start to break out. And in that group
you have performance artists who start to use art almost in a ritual fashion.
And this is what I mean by the question of ritualization. So this is
Joseph Boyce. Joseph Boyce was a airplane pilot in World War Two and his
plane crash and he has a whole story about what happened to him. And
so his art tends to deal with these issues, right with the issues of
the of the war, the issues of survival, the issues of the human
person put in contact with animality. And so some of it is a little
simplistic because it's almost like his own process of healing through where he went,
you know, like the felt blanket that he would have had in the military,
the sled, a flashlight. You know, there's a sense in which
he's creating these spaces that are just putting things together in a way that is,
let's say, remembering participation. Right. So it's the object in the
gallery is obviously just fetishized like all the other art objects, but because he's
trying to bring about a memory of the war, a memory of you know,
how these objects participated in his own life. Then there's something going on.
Now we're going to get back to Joseph's boice. But first of the
most famous of the performance artists, especially right now is of course Marina Brownitch.
And it's interesting to think about her and her work in what she was
trying to do, because in some ways, you know, she was also
trying to kind of break through the problem of art, art especially you know,
represented as here's the art and here's the public, and now we go
in and we are these passive, these passive almost you know, consumers,
and we just look at these art objects and there's no form of connection to
the world and to life. And so what she was trying to do,
you know, she was trying to do a lot of things, but one
of the things she seems to be trying to do is to try to break
to break through that that problem. So she did very strange performances. Or
one of her most famous performance is is shown here where Marina Brownwich stood in
a gallery for six hours and she put on a table a bunch of objects,
and all those objects were objects that a certain amount of people in the
space with her were allowed to use on her and so you had feathers,
you had papers, string you can kind of see, but you also had
more dangerous objects like a gun, like a knife, and she just stood
there for six hours. She wasn't allowed to react. She just had to
take it. And then everybody in the gallery was allowed to do whatever they
wanted. They were absolved of any responsibility ability legally. Of course, probably
some of this is quite staged. You know, I don't want to question
her method. But of course, as you can imagine, the situation starts
very likely and then accelerates, and it ends in moments where you know she's
very much in danger, where a knife is used on her. You know,
there's a she's stripped, she's put on the table, you know,
these things that are happening to her. You know, someone's you know,
kind of threatens her with a knife. And so in the end, someone
tries pulls the gun out, and then someone reaches for the gun and takes
the gun away, and so you know, it's like intensity a nice Hollywood
movie. But what it seems like she's trying to do is trying to break
through the problem of this passive relationship to the art object. Now she's doing
it obviously in a very modern way. She's doing it in a way which
tends to reduce human human No, she now becomes passive and the viewer becomes
active, and the whole relationship is one which seems to be framed on the
possibility of sadism and a kind of passive masochism. And so, of course
the relationship that she brings about is a very tortious modern relationship. But she's
trying to bring back He could say something like the stakes, like the stakes
of art, like what are we doing? Imagine in the ancient world,
where you build a church and people would go and worship, and they would
be these relics would be taken into the church and people would light candles,
you know, and then people would people when they were angry at the king
or whatever, they would deface the statue. And there was this whole relationship
of art which was seen as participative and connected to life. And so it
seems like she is trying to re engage that in a very perverse way.
But nonetheless, you can see that there's a sense that there's despair in the
art world, that we realize that this is the problem. What are these
paintings like what is you know, there's nothing wrong with decorating decorative art,
but is that what it is is that all of these paintings are are I
don't most of the modern artists don't think so. They think they're doing something
extremely important, but in the end these art objects end up just being passive
objects to look at, you know, to trade, to exchange, to
make money off of. And so artists like her try to break that with
this type of activity. And so she's famously known for doing all kinds of
weird things. You know. Here's a performance where she holding a bow and
her friend is pulling on the arrow and for six minutes he just holds the
arrow stretched out and if he would let go, she would die. Of
course, the arrow would go into her heart. And so it's all about
again the same weird problem of how to represent a kind of you know.
And this is not just entertainment, right, This is not just a performance
in the sense of a play, right, or a ballet or something that
is without stake that it's just people doing things and we watch it, then
we go home. There's a sensity where she's putting herself in danger whilst she
is creating this performance of course, you know, as like I said before,
the relationship seems to be reduced to a kind of Sable masochism, and
which is very close. You know, it's funny if people don't realize to
what extent Sato masochism is related to modernism and to what extent in the Enlightenment.
At the birth of the Enlightenment appears both characters, right, Matthi sad
and sasam Asuk, the two originators of what we could call Sadism and masochism,
because there is already a problem. Once the Enlightenment and its pendulum starts
to swing, you can see the first fruits of that in this reduction of
relationships. On the idea of acting purely on someone right, being the complete
actor, where the other person is a complete passive puppet for your desires.
And on the other hand, the opposite of becoming that pure puppet for someone
else's desires, of just becoming a passive recipient of other people's desires and violence.
That that is something which could inevitably happen at the birth of modernism.
And so Marina, whether she knows it or not, is putting on the
scene this relationship, this kind of weird sado masochist relationship that the modern world
has in a desire to re engage, re engage the stakes of art and
re engage. I think it kind of participation at least at least the stakes
you know, of art, and so much of her art is and so
she became very famous because she's ditch and weird or stuff. Now, this
is one of her performances where she just sits in a galley space with a
bunch of cowbones and she spends six hours a day or eight hours a day
whatever trying to wash the blood from the bones. So that's all she did.
She would sit in the galley and she would just try to wash the
blood off the bones for hours. That it creates again this very dark image
of what it is to be human, what it is to participate, you
know, is that what human life is, right, is that what human
life is is to try to wash the blood off of bones. Right.
The imagery is quite stark, and it is quite you know, it's actually
a very good image of what contemporary life is and what the contemporary world is.
This is what the world of the participation in the modern world. The
analogy or the metaphor for a participation is Now, she got herself in a
lot of trouble in the last few years because she did a lot of weirder
stuff, things that are closer to the occult, things that are closer to
rituals. Now you can understand whether she's sincere or not, like whether or
not she's doing it on purpose or not. How what she's doing is coming
closer to resembling rituals because intuitively we understand that ritualization is a form of participation,
which is closer to the way that we understand art. What art is
that is it's a reduction of the world, the compression of the world into
into a kind of dance, a kind of ordered gesturing, ordered object making.
It's a reductive object. Right. We compress things into images, we
compress you know, the cup that is used in the liturgy, is it
kind of compressed cups, like the cup of cups? Right, it's a
ritualized cup. It's not just the cup you use every day, but it
is. But it is a condensation of cup. So there's a there's an
inevitable almost sense that what will happen is is as there's this desire to break
out of the of the just the passive relationship to art. Things that people
are doing, these performance artists will often start to look like ritual Now,
whether they of themselves can eve what they're doing as rituals, nonetheless, it's
participating in the same aesthetics, and there's no surprise that the rituals that they
will engage with will be rituals which will reflect the sickness of the modern world,
you know. And so she got of course also into a lot of
trouble with what these these performances she did where there were spirit cooking or whatever.
You know, She's done a lot of things. She would write up
all these absurd recipes that look like magical formulas using human fluids and stuff mixed
together in order to create food. And she did she does a lot of
things with pain where she would film herself just you know, putting her hand
over a candle or whatever and just burning herself. You know. I mean,
it's not surprising, you know that that this is what she's doing,
and you can understand that in some ways what she was doing in the nineteen
seventies, and what she was doing back then is what would lead to things
like cutting and self harm in the modern world, because cutting in self harm
is all also a desire to participate. It's a desire to re engage the
world, right, to reawaken our engagement with the world. It's just a
just a very deluded and deranged version which enters into this this Sato masochistic paradigm
that appears at the beginning of the modern age. Right, It's like,
all I can understand the world to be is either a world of power in
which I, you know, inflict pain and violence and torture, or I
am the recipient of violence and pain and torture. And if I can do
that to myself, then I am in like in control of the nihilism that
I mean that I'm living in right of the of the kind of dark world
that I'm engaged with. So you can kind of understand why this is happening.
It is reduced from how dark it is. But of course that the
most important to me, the most important thing that Marina did recently that kind
of shows us an image of of the modern world and what is going on
is the event she did at the at the Museum of Modern Art in La
I think that's where it is, and so she did this performance with the
singer of Blondie of all people, where you know, now we had a
full on scale desire to re engage participation, and so she did a created
and an art event which was also eating, you know. And so remember
all the things that I've said about the you know, eating as an active
participation and communion especially as the kind of highest ritual act and the highest act
of participation. But that is a form of ritualized eating, because eating is
so close to our our you know, our engagement with the world. And
so now what she does is she creates a feast of eating, and I'm
not going to show you all the pictures because they're quite disturbing, you know,
where she engages all the tropes of cannibalism, you know, and all
the tropes of human sacrifice into her event. So she had these cakes made
of herself and of the Blondie singer, and the cakes came in on these
tables, and now with the knife, they stabbed them and cut them and
cut pieces and handed pieces of their cake to the people. And you can
see how it's a parody, of course obviously of communion, a parody of
the Lord's Supper, but done in a kind of dark carnivalesque way, but
that is nonetheless right, trying to like in their own perverted, disturbing way,
trying to break through the problem of the passivity of the art, of
the art object, and the passivity of the entertainment culture and the representation culture.
And so during the event, on the tables, they had actors artists
who just stuck their head through the table and their heads were like the centerpiece,
almost like in like a pig with it apple in its mouth in the
middle of the table. As people were eating, they would just sit there
and stare blankly, and they had, you know, naked women lying on
tables with like skeletons on them, and you know, just very dark and
disturbing things, right, and so close to ritualization that of course, you
know, during the nine twenty sixteen kind of frenetic thing around Pizzagate, people
started seeing these images and freaking out. And the thing is with good reason.
You know, it's so funny that someone like her engages with tropes of
occult cannibalism, all these very very dark images and then defends herself and says,
you know, oh, I'm just an artist. This is just art,
but her whole project is about breaking through the just art, like breaking
through the idea that artists are just like innocent people who represent things. She's
trying to break through. She's trying to re engage. She's trying to use
images of her own self harm and her own you know, doing all these
these very dark, disturbing gestures and then she's surprised when it breaks out,
and then people react in a way that links it to the very things that
she's using as her source material in order to create these things. And so
whether or not she's an actual satanist or ancultist, like I've said off often
in these videos, it's like, I don't have access to that, and
to be honest, I don't care. But the the the the tropes that
she's using are those if you use tropes of cannibalism, and you use tropes
of human sacrifice and huge, you use tropes that are that are that are
magical spells and magical formulas in your recipes and whatever, then don't be surprised
if people react to that as if that's what you're doing. So anyways,
it's just funny to see how she she she's out then she tried to play
the victim, and you can see there's all these articles you can find them
online where she's playing the victims, like, oh, stop harassing me.
I'm just an artist. You know. All these conspiracy theorists that are saying
that I'm doing these dark things, well, you are doing these dark things.
You might not take it seriously. Maybe you're just doing it, you
know, to be an artist, whatever that means. But like I said,
the tropes you're engaging, those are the tropes. Those are the tropes.
So you know, obviously I don't want people to harass her or whatever.
I wouldn't want. I don't want that to happen. But you know,
nonetheless, this is what is This is what is going on in your
work now. One of the things I want to do is return to Joseph
Boys, because Joseph Boys, you know, understood what he was doing very
much as ritual and he was almost using kind of shamanistic shamanistic thing. He
did these performances where he would lock himself in a room with with like wolf
with a wolf, and he wore this felt blanket and would like engage with
with the wolf in certain ways and was trying to almost create these rituals.
And one of the problems that we're they were trying to deal with these artists
was, of course World War Two. And you know, Joseph Voyce was
a German artist. How to deal with the scandal of World War Two,
how to break through the guilt and the shame and the guilt, you know,
all the things that happened that he did as a soldier, that Germans
did, and so trying to create these almost rituals of atonement in order to
get through that, and so he did all kinds of stuff, you know,
kind of absurdest things. Now, of course, the problem with this
is the same problem as with Kandinsky, is that you can totally understand the
desire to re engage rituality. You can totally understand the desire to also feel
like there's no way to atone for the sins of your people, for your
own sins, and try to create rituals of atonement and of transformation. But
when you do it in a gallery, and you do it, you know,
in a space that is just there to hold art objects, when you
do it in a language that becomes so idiosyncratic that nobody can participate it except
for you that people are looking at you ripping up pieces of paper and you
know, writing on billboards and skinning a hair like he did, all kinds
of stuff, you know, playing the piano absurdly that you might think that
you're kind of doing something that's breaking through. But ultimately this will remain with
you, right, it will not become a true language of a participation another
artist that I personally enjoy and like I said, it's just because each of
these artists has a little hint that there's a desire to move away from a
kind of fetishization and and and of the of art and a you know,
and a kind of meaning not meaninglessnss. But you know this idea of art
for art's sake, that this pure art that just exists is an artist called
ansel keeper. So and some keeper did things that were similar to what Joseph
Boyce was doing. And but his whole uh that's a theme is about the
possibility of using art as a a kind of medicine, where the representation of
the images could take that's a culture and break it down or bring it down,
uh, into the dark place, and then try to have it rise
back off. And so you know, he would represent some of these Nazi
uh Nazi building archet, this Nazi architecture, and would cover it with tar,
would would try would cover it with like all with actual material, not
just paint, you know, he would he would have ash and he would
put sand and straw and all these things on the paintings. And would you
know, and trying to in some ways, you know, rebaptize or or
refound these buildings that are there. Right, what do you do now you
have these Nazi buildings that are there in Berlin or in in other places in
Germany? And how do you get through this? Like? Do you destroy
them? Do you just get rid of them? And so his sense is
that there's a kind of deep duplicity in his art where he is trying in
some ways to recast very with hesitation, these objects and almost trying to act
like a kind of traditional healer and heal these art objects. Now, once
you understand that's what he's doing his art, the key to his art opens
up very simply. He represents you know, these lead wings or sometimes you
represent a lead artist palette, painter's palette that will be stuck on top of
his of his images. He represent airplanes sometimes war airplanes as this dual symbol
of something which is both dark but also rises up. And so there's this
ambiguity about his work, but the ambiguity seems to be wanting to kind of
push through and to to to break through the problem of modernism and the problem
of World War two. The iconology that he uses is actually quite it's a
little simplistic, you know, it's a little it's a little over the top.
So here's a simple example, right, He a man lying on his
back, and then out of him is coming this thing a flower, you
know, a kind of stream, and this is going up now becoming a
flower that dies and the seeds now fall back on the earth. And so
you can kind of see this cycle of death and rebirth that he's trying to
show. In the image here, this is actually the louver. You can
see that there's a bunch of books, right, and the books are kind
of stacked and piled and they they're made of lead, and so they're dead,
you know in some ways, or they they're kind of like the problem
of you know, I talk about this the problem of culture and the problem
of the problem of art as this supplement, as this kind of dark aspect
to culture in general. And so he gets that, and then he shows
out of it, you know, a nonetheless kind of lead in flower.
And so if you had seen this in person, the very center of the
dead flower is gilded and has gold on it. And then a few of
the seeds that have fallen back onto the trees, onto the books are also
golden, and so a lot of it is led. If you have this
kind of little hope piercing through right this dead this dead culture, see the
same, you know, in this image as well. So the sunflower comes
up, and then the sunflower drops its seeds back onto the ground, and
you hope that some of it will be reborn. The sunflower seeds are also
stars in his kind of imagination, you can understand, you know, here
is something like the milky Way, this idea of like the principalities coming up
and then acting back upon us, you know. And so there's something about
his work which is obviously a little kitschy, a little new age, a
little simplistic in its in its kind of basic imagery, something that you might
find in a kind of second rate union type of thinking. But the desire
to represent this this kind of decadence and this breakdown of culture and the weight
of history, and how you know in this death that there might be something
that is reborn. I think is a desire and a hope that for sure
I share, and so I do find some resonance in his work in that
sense, and I think that understanding that is something that has pushed me towards
some of the things that I'm doing now. The problem, of course with
Keefer, and just like the problem with Joseph Boyce or the problem with Marina
Brownvich, is that the spaces in which they create these things, they are
artificial spaces themselves, right The museum, the gallery, these are are kind
of fetishized space. They aren't spaces of They aren't the public square, they
aren't the church, they aren't the civic buildings. They aren't the things that
we kind of recognize as holding our identity, holding our participation. And although
the artists, you know, created these gallery spaces, not the artists,
but for the art dealers, created these spaces just for art in order to
sell arts, and those those spaces became, you know, like just places
to see art and to to visualize. It is a desire to break through
now I don't think they succeed. I don't think they succeed because they're trapped
inside the art world. They're trapped inside a weird like key. For for
example, his his paintings are very much on the art market. They're they're
objects of speculation for for our dealers and art collectors, you know. And
so just like all the other artists, he probably manages many pieces he puts
out in the market and calculates his moves in order to make sure to make
the best killing in terms of selling. All of these things are inevitable in
the in the art world. And then collectors will, uh, let's say,
want to see shows by this artists in order to make their collection be
worth more. So there's this strange, this whole strange things in which they
participate. And the same thing with Marina Abramovich. You knows, she's she
she has these this this art foundation, and then she has it funded by
these elites in order to make performance art that exists only within the space of
the artists, of the space of art. Uh and doesn't really land right,
It doesn't. It doesn't turn into folk dances, it doesn't turn in
to the things that people imitate and in some ways she probably doesn't even want
that to happen because she she doesn't totally understand the way that patterns embody themselves
in the world. And so, but what you can see is at least
the desire to kind of break through. And I think that once you see
that, you can understand why. You know there are ways to do it,
You know that there is a possibility of re engaging. And you know,
at least in my vision, it starts with liturgical art, because the
liturgical space the church is still a true space of participation. It is not,
although in some churches in Europe it has become a fetishized museum. Most
churches at least are still and sometimes the ones that are the least beautiful or
that aren't as beautiful as the great cathedrals, for example, are spaces of
true participation. And so the possibility of creating objects within that that world,
you know, can anchor them in terms of their beauty, but then also
in terms of the participation. Now, in order to give you a bit
of hope, it's not like these contemporary art movements were the only movements to
exist in the modern world. There were movements that tried to also integrate the
different forms. So there are art movements that tried to you know, resist
this fetishization that happened in the in the modern world. You know, you
can see that, of course in movements like the arts and craft movements and
also Art nouveau, which tried to link you know, the the architectural,
the object printmaking that tried to kind of integrate that into the into the world.
Now, I think that the arts and craft movement and Art Nouveau succeeded
much more than the modern artists in avoiding the extremes. Now, of course,
one of the issues with with the arts and craft movement and Art Nouveau
is there was nonetheless this kind of how can I say this, There was
a lack of angering a little bit in terms of you know, there was
a fantastical movement, especially in our nouveaux, where we kind of moved for
these fantastical shapes that moved into extreams and were very hard to embody in the
long term, for example, So it's not surprising that our New Vaux was
like a flash that really tried to integrate but then didn't really succeed in the
end. It ended up finding a falling apart. And also because they there
was so much emphasis on ornament you know, you see that with William Morris
and and some of the arts and craft people. There was so much a
beautiful ornamentation. You can see that, you know in the you can see
that in these interiors for example, where there's a use there's a rich use
of fabric of ornamentation, trying to kind of integrate these things into the common
life, beauty into the common world, So not just beauty for beauty's sake,
but but beauty in a chair, beauty in a beauty in a a
curtain, and something that is part of the everyday life. And so so
you know, there's still some of that. People can still kind of hold
on to that a little bit, but there was such a there is such
a kind of access, you could say, in the in the aesthetics in
terms of I mean here it's like gilded peacocks on the wall, you know,
this type of gilded surfaces and extremely you know, designed surfaces are things
that maybe shouldn't be reserved for civic spaces, for for churches. But of
course, because our new vogue is the modern movement, it got focused on
homes, and you know, it's okay for your home to be beautiful,
but if you push it too much and you create these excessively lavish homes that
aren't for a king, for example, that are that are trying to be
a model for the way in which we exist, it's going to be difficult
to kind of hold on to that. But there are some things from these
movements that we can nonetheless capture and a kind of vision in order to think
differently about how art participates in life and to underst stand that, you know,
the possibility of integrating beauty into the every day into the everyday object is
something which is not is not impossible because the the arts and craft movement and
the art removal movement was able to make beautiful lands, beautiful, post beautiful,
you know, different objects of just participation in the world, and so
there is a bit of access and so you can understand why, you know,
the modernists tend to think that because of the industrial the industrial process,
that these types of ornamentation have become impossible, that we should really you know,
move towards you know, a kind of simple symbol, simple geometric forms.
So hopefully this was just a bit of fun for you to kind of
understand and see that the not only does the modern world and modern art really
emphasize these extremes often this pendulum of abstraction, you know, high high attraction,
but then also materialless very reductionist concerns, but that there were desires,
and there's artists that tried to break through, you know, this just passive
weird art object try to re engage participation, but would often do it in
a way that would nonetheless re engage these extremes, extremes of idiosyncrasy, extremes
of sadism and masochism in the terms in the case of Abramovic, you know,
and and create these obscure languages that nobody understood. Although there are some
like and some keeper that I show you who were re engaging images that you
could recognize, right the wing artists, palette, human body, these things
trying to be reintegrated. A little kitschy, maybe a little new agy,
but at least you can perceive the desire, right, this desire to break
through. And ultimately I do think that that liturgical art is the way out
at least for you know, not to become a famous artist. And to
become and to become known and to be shown in magazines or whatever and in
different publications, but in order to really participate in a community, UNI making
meeting making within the community. This seems to be at least the anchor of
a way out. And so thanks everybody for your attention. I hope you
enjoyed it, and I will talk to you very soon. If you enjoy
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