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Bloom & Decay (Draft XX)

Introduction:

Propagation in the Wasteland

Memories announce themselves as degrading reels of film, playing over and over, with subtle variations depending upon how forcefully we try to change the moments long-since experienced. However, even in the best imagined outcomes, reality molds the mind back to the inevitable result of the things that have already come to pass. So much of our early lives, simple joys, and ignorance based bliss is lost into the void of the mind and its need to distinguish, pasts, presents, and futures*.

In writing on the Destruction of Art Symposium, a month-long symposium focused on the exhibition of destructive and destroyed works that took place in 1966

London, Art historian Kristine Stiles describes Destruction in art as not being the same as destruction of art. Moreover, she went on to write that the destruction in art addresses the negative aspects of both social and political institutions, and manifests as an attack on the traditional identity of the visual arts themselves. While these artists were responding to their individual overarching philosophies of destruction in the form of ephemeral art object and performance based works, there was never an established movement nor manifesto unifying the practice. Though the symposium itself was formulated by the artist Gustav Metzger, who coined the term ‘Auto-Destructive Art’ seven years prior, it would seem final meditations of both destruction and decay as separate from any particular canon following the month-long event would end there.

Eight years later, In the 1974 essay Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger presents a similar problem, more directly asking the question as to how the development of art and literature could be reconstructed within a bourgeois society. This question, alluding to a later point made in the piece in which definitions of individual works are thus not made through the autonomy of the object itself, but rather solely through socially institutionalized investigation. The institution of art itself, then presents itself as the system of production and distribution of the prevailing ideas that dictate an object's reception of what we would consider to be Art. Dadaism had poised itself as a radical movement 50 years prior within the European avant-garde, in their manifested criticism of art as an institution (TAV_PB.22). The movement, in fact challenged nineteenth century aestheticism and art object through the self-criticism of art, or rather the theoretical destruction of Art within the realm of the institution. The Dadaists were among the first to introduce a means of subverting capitalist ideas directly within the western art canon, while also destroying traditional comprehension of what we would call aesthetic experience. Though, the paradox in the base ideas of an anti-art itself, reside in the fact that such concepts have long since been inducted into institutional canon, and by extension the greater art market. As recognized by Gustav Metzger, ‘They did not destroy enough’(ADA_GM_30). Object even in a Dadist manner, acting as a signifier to nothing but itself and the meaninglessness nature of the modern world, was still left with meaning by its physical presence in the facet of a world it was attempting to critique.

In Antony Hudek’s The Object (pub.2014), objecthood is understood as a thing that has obtained verified value through the perception of the individual, or a conformed and collective intellect. In both cases, objects become subjects themselves. Later in the text, Hudek addresses the relationship between this valued and venerated thing, as being made object in relationship to the specifically thinking subject (Tobj.HudPg17). However, arguably in both cases, the object is nothing more than a thing, oppressed with meaning and extensions of two subjects’ own ego and narcissism. Consider an art object. In the process of making, a cumulation of things that would have otherwise been overlooked (in the most general sense where one does not actively seek the particularly used material, or in the more ideal situation in which the material is sourced other than otherwise commodified or sentimental means), suddenly become object. That object then becomes one of subjective perceptions by a larger body. The art object, in that particular moment of exhibition, transforms into a mirror, in which this primary subject observes and make reflected judgment on a now secondary subject, the maker. The object itself then operates as if both hiding its own past thingness and intent, in ambiguous form and meaning. However, as the object becomes further commodified through institution, original thinghood transcends to proposed magnificence.

While opulence often has (understandably) more association with physical tokens of wealth, this can be arguably more abstracted in that opulence is the way in which we manifest, cast out, and assert our productions of grandeur into a system that demands it in exchange for the false promise of value (heroism) in the greater and perversely commodified heroic machine*(EB). Post-opulence then, is a theory aimed at dismantling and reversing the deconstruction/reconstruction process. Though the relationship to the art object is similar to that of destructionist practice, it is also a recycling practice between a materials’ thingness and objecthood. Post-opulence introduces unpredictability in material presence, rather than finding comfort in the stable image or object. It aims first, to reveal the sought ideal and iconic states as nothing more than a mimetic reflections of questionable institutional/social standards (Destruction of Art). Secondly, actively creates afflictions and ambivalence toward a conventional aesthetic, through the destruction of the art object (Destruction in Art). Post-Opulence highlights the investment in an idealized form, to then reduce the object back to a state of “thingness”. Moreover, explores a struggle that ensues between the formerly idealized art object (Icon) and new variable form revealed, through a process of deconstruction and decay. Post-Opulence rejects notions of value and stagnation in a commodified system, and operates as institutional disruption in that it consistently makes reference to both actions and signals of changed circumstances and time.

The Reality of Decay

Every moment of our life belongs to the present only for a moment; then it belongs for ever to the past. Every evening we are poorer by a day. We would perhaps grow frantic at the sight of this ebbing away of our short span of time were we not secretly conscious in the profoundest depths of our being that we share in the inexhaustible well of eternity, out of which we tan for ever draw new life and renewed time (*VE).

In his essay, On the Vanity of Existence (1924), Arthur Schopenhauer describes our existence as a fruitless struggle amidst a life dictated by instability and confusion. In that the living body is a dedicated mechanism to strife, in the pursuit of a recognized sustainable present of satisfaction. However, this journey will inevitably end in vain as that which was meant to embody a lasting existence, would not have non-being as its preordained goal(*VE). Arguably, the objective reality is that at one moment life is, and eventually it is not. Moreover, it’s in our subjective reality during the process of life, that such definitions become skewed and distorted through culture and institution. It is through such domineering vessels of that even our basic realities are taken from us, being supplemented by false promises of eternal life, hollow examples of transcendence, and vacant reward for allowing our individual realities to be managed by forces no better nor worse than ourselves. In this, the made environment shapes the way in which we define and find value in our own individual definitions of what our realities are.

Post-Opulence then is eventually interested in both the exploration and disentombing of this turn from humanity's rebellion toward a false dominance of a commodified society. This being said, the visual experience should not be reinforced to just seek the supplementation of permanent images and icons, but go on to embrace the decay of them. While representation is inherently mimetic of reality, Modernist ideology called for the delusion of it and is thus much more dangerous. Where the physicality of the made form is a manifestation of tangible truth, paintings manipulate the texture of the mind. To quote Harold Rosenberg, “Art as action rests on the enormous assumption that the artist accepts as real only that which he is in the process of creating”. In what could’ve been unknowingly hinted by him at the time, was the potential for narcissism in self-referential types of art that creates a volatile iconization of itself in the form of artistic commodity. Good art being overdetermined by economy, while external society is abstracted away.

The Icon

‘It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to form a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count (*DeDeath5). ‘

An icon is representative of something otherworldly. Moreover, is by extension defined as an object or image deployed to aid devotion/action toward such heroisms. Secondly, an icon is defined separately as a representative symbol, or as being worthy of veneration. Even in such surface definitions, there’s a redundancy in both definitional cases, as an icon serves as nothing more than a manifested access point to something perceived as greater than the self. Whether in a composition, place of worship, or in our pockets, we imbue faith and define reality via iconic vehicles of reconciliation and promises of fixed access to the infinite.

In The Denial of Death (pub.1973), cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker poses that the human mind is occupied by both anxiety and despair as we meditate upon impending demise. Moreover, as humans we seek a buffer or antidote to this truth, in adopting a greater urge to heroism - an application of significance to one’s own existence*(also freud). However, while certain imagined heroisms are inaccessible to most, we find ways of seeking heroism in our daily routines (i.e. work, religion, politics, relationships). This heroism is short lived, in that its destined for failure. This is because the cosmic significance of the individual person is nonexistent. Additionally, we subscribe to what is ultimately the illusion of permanent meaning. As religion was the once prominent means of establishing this illusion of greater individual significance, the institution in this form began to lose its hold as modernity began to supplement this need via a cultural heroism defined by its respective culture.

It’s in the latter that we begin to see the rise of cultural heroes (or icons), and the creation of heroic machines. These apparatuses, being of the institution, dictate the rhetoric that the average individual can only hope to fold into the illusion of being a part of the greater heroic movement. Again, this machine being directed and represented by the culture in which it grows, for better or worse. Becker, asserts that this quest for cultural heroism is the most actualized form of heroism that an individual could hope to achieve. There are rare instances, however, that Becker coined as being called genuine heroism. For Becker, genuine heroism refers to a small population of people that do not require any form of heroism illusion to live, and can face the impossible situation of living that we find ourselves in.

I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever [humanity] does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise, it is false (DD_EB).] good quote

Applying such a context once again to this idea of the physical icon, the Post-Opulent role is that of the institutional iconoclast, and the introduction of an aesthetic anti-heroism. In that while one accepts that we are indeed subject to the individual limitations of the unconscious drives to cultural heroism, the objects and images we produce in this world are fleeting offerings to the two facts of our current temporal finitude: being and non-being. Moreover, by redirecting the productions of oneself away from satiating the cultural/institutional beast in favor of starving it, one may produce an aesthetic theory or practice similar to that which can be viewed as a genuine heroism.

Final Notes: Anti-Heroism & Reverence of the Non-Opulent Object

In the 1995 piece by John F. Schumaker, The Corruption of Reality, When an individual is in need of order in a chaotic system, the solution requires the individual to establish and maintain an unjustified or artificial order. Schumaker goes on to assert that this develops into a second system of operation that begins to eliminate competing data from the individual consciousness. Thus, the ordered institution becomes dependent on a social body of individual dissociation(CR.34). The example Schumaker provides in regard to the way in which the artificial reality takes hold, is the institution of religion. Much like hypnosis, such institutions produce a state of complacency by way of deconstruction of the individual scope via disassociation, and supplementing through a reconstructive process of suggestion (CR.81). Object and icon begin to then form as waypoints, or rather as gaslights along a darkened street, leading the collective consciousness down a path laid down by unknown entities that claim such passages safe.

Some worthwhile examples come to mind that would reveal the bridge between “hypnotic” and religious behavior. Consider the recently publicized miracle that took place when a figure of Christ on the cross began to shed tears. The cross was situated high against the front wall of the church, too high in fact for anyone actually to see the drops of water firsthand. Yet a great percentage of people who visited the church were convinced wholeheartedly that tears were being shed by the figure. At a later point, zoom cameras were able to show that there were no changes to the figure’s eyes, even while people reported seeing the tears. // They stared at the eyes for long periods of time, which had a trance-inducing effect due to the visual monotony*. At the same time, the staring caused eye fatigue and some inevitable perceptual variations // These effects were then interpreted in relation to believers’ original suggestion, namely, that Christ’s eyes would water (CR.81).’

Here is one example of iconic object, fulfilling the role as a vessel of prescribed imaginative illusion and suggested magnificence, or rather opulence. The maker venerates the thing to object with meaning and direction toward a subject, the object then becomes a mimetic representation and reflection, of the once subjected target. This new observer, with prescribed reason, imbue in the cycle of deconstruction and reconstruction of meaning. In short, an object and the concept of its meaning, means little compared to the amount that institution itself can

There is no art without ourselves, or acknowledgement of the lack of it.

Chapter I

On the Destruction of Ideology:

Post-Opulence & Critique in Early Iconoclasm

If all that changes slowly may be explained by life, all that changes quickly is explained by fire. Fire is the ultra-living element. It is intimate and it is universal. - (PF/GB)

Icon and sacred object have always served as powerful means of instilling pillars of power. While we may think of the word icon in solely western terms, such as digital representation of files or in relationship to objects of Christianity, this use of object or image as vessel to areas beyond our conceptual understanding is a cross cultural phenomenon that has spanned throughout time. From the objects of polytheism and pagan era deity worship, to contemporary vessels such as photographs that capture and represent memory, all can fall within the theoretical characterization of the ‘Mimesis’. This, being the concept that artistic expression and creation are nothing more than a re-representation and imitation of both internal and external realities. In this sense, the iconoclast or destroyer (in terms of being an antithesis to the ‘maker’), inadvertently still holds a specific aesthetic sensibility and potential to create a work that reveals an opposite reality than the initial object implies. Aesthetically and socially speaking, we now exist in a time where iconoclasm thus can be argued to have the ability to present itself as an evidence of progressive victory over historically problematic institutions. Iconoclasm then could be argued to better be described as a conceptual construct, that has evolved in relationship to an auto-destructive culture that in fact created the environment that fosters it. Reframing the negative associations of the destruction of Icon based on Byzantine era victors and influences, iconoclasm overall serves as both a powerful aesthetic strategy and political tool. The legitimacy of the destruction of the icon, has found both evolution and intersection within whole practices of sociopolitical life and contemporary aesthetics. The French Revolution, being one way that iconoclasm had found its most drastic shifts in narrative following the period in which it was defined solely by it’s religious targets, French revolutionaries destroyed artworks and portraits of the wealthy, as these symbolized the luxury, vanity, and opulence of the aristocracy. However, as the social valuation of art itself began to grow, these revolutionaries evolved once more this concept of iconoclasm, and created new techniques of destroying and transforming symbolic meaning through the process of renaming, rededication, and the full removals from sites where display and interpretation can be institutionally controlled.

Hugo Ball, a key theorist and practitioner of the Dadaists in early twentieth century Zurich, took this concept of reframing in the realm of iconoclasm by motivating the Dada movement though complex thinking on language, philosophy, theology, mysticism, history, and politics. Not only did the views of Dada contradict Christian mysticism, but characterized similar institutions (such as the museum), as ‘outdated, hierarchical repositories of power’. Dada thus was at an intersection between iconoclasm, anarchism, and aesthetic experience. Moreover, viewed the iconoclastic movements as being a singular mold of both religious and secular, although its participants would claim one or the other. Dada was responding to aestheticization of late 19th century art, which itself was the aristocratic bourgeoisie response to industrialization - While the use of the term iconoclasm in Balls essays were in relationship to a historical ‘Bildersturm’, otherwise known as the 16th century’s Great Iconoclasm during Europe’s Protestant Reformation, it was treated as an important means of force in political conflicts that continued to resonate into the twentieth century.

Prefacing Modernism, it was thought that ‘Because man is unable to escape the concrete, all abstraction, as an attempt to manage without the image, leads only to an impoverishment, a dilution of, a surrogate for the linguistic process.’ Moreover, that ‘Abstraction breeds arrogance; it makes men appear the same as or similar to God (even if only in illusion)’. In which case, the museum presents itself as it’s church.

In his essay, Functions of the Museum (1973), Daniel Buren describes the museum as being a privileged place with three specific realms of function: In the Aesthetic, Economic, and Mystical. First, it frames itself as the central viewpoint in which to consume the narratives of the collection, under the guise of individual emphasis or freedom from agenda. The museum exhibits what it wants to show, to which point the institution itself becomes synonymous to stage. Secondly, the museum removes object from commonplace, creating an inclusive value system based on the privileged/selected. Thirdly, perpetuates a self-reflecting mythysism of omnipotent power over what is consumed as ‘Art’, in both it’s implied promise and intention of self-preservation. This preservation, perpetuating the idealistic notion of becoming eternal*DB within it.

The museum has been tasked with a cultures’ protection against time itself. It is an artificial space, ‘granting it an appearance of immortality which serves a remarkably well discourse which the prevalent bourgeois ideology attaches to it*DB. The museum presents itself as self-evident, all while protecting itself and it’s own fragility through the serving upward collection of voice and gesture. This collection, becoming where art becomes born and buried* in the museum’s ability to create the space for simplification. The two roles of the collection then presents itself as either a silencing of the many, or the embedding of value upon the privileged few.

Chapter II

Destructive Nature:

Modernism, Auto-Destructive Art, and Post-Opulence

Auto-Destructive Art (1959) was acutely concerned with the problems of the repressed aggressions of and toward the individual, as well as those within the greater society. Additionally, operated against a system that was viewed by Metzger as being the maker of its own destruction, responding to WWII, and the increased Industrialization of war and nuclear armament. In three separate manifestos, he went on to criticize privileged institutions and their dominion of both nature as a tangible entity, and in more metaphysical forms in relationship to the greater society. Metzger viewed people as being vessels of the unresolved and suppressed aggressions against ourselves. Moreover, That this predisposition toward destruction served as a critical threat to the continuation of the institutional illusion of balance and control. It is for this reason that he rationalized, that due to this conflicting unconscious allure, any art celebrating this pleasure would be quickly rejected*(GMB).

How have we progressed in regard to the way in which we in a neo-gilded culture, invest in the ideals of the ideal, consume art, and adorn creation as a half-realized concept; keeping in mind that no product of creation can or will exist in its most opulent or idealized form forever. Additionally, within a culture that both appropriates and consumes the aesthetic and moral principles of it’s would be counter. Mass media, as an example, serves us daily reminders of the realities of our modern day capacity for destruction, disruption, and decay. Through it, catastrophe and their sediments are made both palatable and distant, creating a cognitive distance as a kind of means of not looking, alienation, and disassociation. The question as to whether or not art object can both accurately describe reality and catalyze redemption, is one I put before Post-Opulence to answer, through the reclamation of destruction within the infrathin* moments between a completely destructive process and its inherent aesthetic manifestation following.

The contemporary ways of viewing of this progression/interaction with the perceived and ‘finalized’ art object, mirrors Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, in which reality itself is formed from an endless reproduction of the real. Moreover, Developing into a relationship of equivalence, indifference, then the extinction of the original*. The way in which mass production has shaped our way of viewing, has both destroyed and altered the relationships we have with our own experienced reality. Additionally, it has created a perceived hierarchy of these two visual forms of completion and degradation into two opposing icons of status.

Where Auto-Destructive Art and Post-Opulence diverge, is in the intention toward the intimate actualization of a specific set of ethical and political ideals, rather than solely becoming a grand spectacle of them. Auto-Destructive Art was interested in complex and large-scale forms, somewhat hypocritical (ironic?) relations to the art market itself, and rings problematically absolute in its overall practice. The practice always needing something tougher (GM-pg34), and was characteristically power driven and hungry in it’s goal of being a ‘constructive force in society (GM-36)’. Auto-Destructive Art craved destruction in the form of violence, expelling through force of action, rather than decomposition. Post-Opulence is based on the passing of time, rather than a specific and complex manipulation of it. Moreover, it strives to relinquish control, rather than perform it. Where the theory of Auto-Destructive Art was an attack on the capitalist art market through performance in conjunction with maximal material form, Post-Opulence is rejection of the idealized or fixed state of material form, as well as an attack on the notions of extended iconization through similarly problematic traditional gallery systems.

Aside from acknowledged relationships to Dada, Auto-Destructive Art sucessfully lacked being a complete theory. However, the work of Auto-Destructive Art began to be defined by its scientific motivations, idealizing the future machine based experiences ‘that we need’ (GM_ADAC-191). These, being equally fallible frameworks subject to the draw of institutional self-preservation. Auto-Destructive Art found manifestation (or lack thereof) not only in the physical practice of deconstructing works, Destruction in art, but also by means of the manifesto/lecture format. Much like Post-Opulence, acting somewhat beyond a means of a self-authoritative or object based artistic practice, Auto-Destructive Art worked as a synthesis of the aesthetic values of destruction, and the performative aspects of public/collective engagement. Specifically to Post-Opulence, the lecture/manifesto takes form in events which have been informally called ‘burnings’. However, the overall criticism of Auto-Destructive Art in relationship to Post-Opulence, is in the synthetic and violent texture of the Auto Destructive movement itself.

(Image credits for Key)

As a continual modernization process provided the western world with a means of dealing with the traumas of war and its disasters, it additionally left open the questions surrounding whom truly carries the authority over the conventions of art and its institutional value. Clement Greenberg, a prominent art critic of the mid-twentieth century, adopted a new iconoclastic ideology and championed Abstract Expressionism within the western canon. His rejection to representation was not due to a personal dislike of the narrative image, but rather out of necessity as aesthetic progress called for it. Abstract expressionism created a standard and climate for the privileged to foster the grand modernist narrative, in that it demanded critical analyses, interpretations, and informed opinions (BJM_37). Here, iconoclasm has found itself appropriated as a tool of illusionary progress in the form of the abstract. Illusionary, in its failure in this form to provide a genuine challenge against normative consumer/capitalist ideology at the time.

The modern studio itself can be seen to conform to the limitations of the neutral space, to which the hope it is to be selected, exhibited, and sold. While on the one hand the studio was a private space, a heroic space, the studio was and remains a space with the intention of convenience for the organizer, curator, or exhibitors own designs*(DB_FS). Institution provides an easy to understand space, in which it’s own values characterize the studio into a described, ‘boutique where we find ready-to-wear-art’ *(DB_FS); tailored and fitted to the markets’ needs. Said institution, abstracting that which challenges between its space of production and its space of exhibition and distribution.

It would seem the case that such institutional powers (Which were/continue to be problematic and white-male dominant) would continue to provide answers. To that point, and the institutionalization of art itself in the development of higher conceptual frameworks belonging to those who can access it, has transformed Art into a vessel

(or icon) of a flawed social order. The concepts and aesthetics of the artistic field grew in relationship with the post war period, which today are still taught as fundamental knowledge. However, Abstract Expressionism eventually removed a necessary conflict between an ‘Advanced Art’ and the dominant culture, in that it kept alive the social and political norms of the west, and thus became an icon in both its material reality and lack of image.

Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power

Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future. Instead of being made of natural materials, such as marble, granite, or other kinds of rock, the new monuments are made of artificial materials, plastic, chrome, and electric light. They are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages. They are involved in a systematic reduction of time down to fractions of seconds, rather than in representing the long spaces of centuries. Both past and future are placed into an objective present (RS_NM11)

Minimalism acted as a theoretical reversal of power relations between individual values and those of society. Where in reality, in its compositions, minimalism represented authority. It not only embodied a prevailing social authority, but also the currency of power of the social patriarch. Moreover, made a case of an inherent discourse of implied power that was present in minimalist work, contextualized by inscribed problematic meaning. These included implications of industry, representations mimicking the rhetoric of a perceived dominant figure (the male), and a visual violence/aggression that would be directed toward the viewer, and as a complete occupation of communal space.

In Anna Chave’s essay, Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power (1990), Robert Morris’s work is described as being reminiscent of “carceral images of discipline and punishment”. The images themselves portray imprisonment or and repression, and Chave goes on to comment that even in [Morris’s] writings, he was more interested in power, rather than the countering of the current political/social context of the time. As an example, the Morris piece Hearing was a gallery installation made up by a copper chair, zinc table, and a heated led bed. In the description of the piece, all the installed objects were connected with live electricity, with load speakers playing an interrogation. While the compositions are a clear reference to a prison setting, the implied and forced narrative is that of a context of intimidation and the policed state.

Dan Flavin’s work is described as having including corporate references, in its recontextualizing the mass produced fluorescent light. Moreover, generated a market practice that was solely supported by its authorship over the readily available material, in short, selling the name.

‘Flavin’s Diagonal not only looks technological and commercial - like Minimalism generally - it is an industrial product and, as such, it speaks of the extensive power exercised by the commodity in a society where virtually everything is for sale’ - (Adorno, Pg.46)

Donald Judd’s work can also be argued to be making reference to an implied inner figure or ‘Strong body’. Through composition and scale, Judd’s work captures the characterization of the proverbial ‘strong silent type’ as described by Chave. Moreover, in the work there is the expression of power, which similarly lacks feeling or communication.

While Minimalist sculpture did succeed in its aim of expressing an implicit power over time and space, the model and phallic heavy references to outdated notion, exposed the monuments to their own overcompensation evolving since the previous period. It’s not until pieces are introduced having other dilapidated form via destruction or judgment from time and the elements, that the absolute nature of the works begin to feel less absolute and thus less authoritarian in nature.

Chapter III

Destruction on Display:

Practice & Presentation

It’s in these created moments of chaos, destruction, and broken silence, that we momentarily operate outside of a reality constructed by the mundane. The spectacle of the broken glass, engages our most primal drives, alerting us to the space in which we’re operating, but also instantaneously connects us to a space we presently share with others. By means of joining a destructive process with the power invested in a sought idealized state, a struggle over iconic form through its breaking, salvaging, and reuse begins to be exhumed. Additionally, creates reference to the actions and signals of changed circumstance & time.

In recent years however, we have seen a progression toward the dismantling of this resonant flawed modernity in both iconoclastic aesthetics and social intervention in the Contemporary. The practice and concept, both being free from the confines of institutional structure and influence. As an example, Earlier in 2017, the city council of Charlottesville voted to remove a confederate statue of Robert E. Lee and the surrounding park. Later, on August 12th a ‘Unite the Right’ Rally was scheduled following months of earlier protest from white nationalists. This rally, resulting in the death of one and injury of nineteen others when a white nationalist, James Alex Fields, drove his car through a crowd of counter protesters.

By no means do I make this illustration lightly, but it's worth exploring the fantasticism and need for the illusion/safety found in connection to such a fetishised preservation of toxicity as monument. Moreover, the social revelations made by such progressive iconoclastic action toward said icon and monument, comprised of nothing but material and thing. Ernest Becker might understand this relationship as being the essence of transference as a certain taming of terror, by means of creating order in a chaotic universe (*EB_DD145-9). In that certain monuments, or icons, represent what we aim to be loved by or to hate. In the former, comes with the consequence of Transference Terror*, in which one fears to lose the love of the object that manifests as an icon of one’s heroistic ideal(*EB_145-9). Iconoclasm in this sense, successfully disrupts and challenges the heroic projects/objects of the oppressing institutional body, while revealing it’s reality and greater insignificance. Following the events of Charlottesville, there was a wave of stated illegal and legal instances of iconoclasm of Confederate monuments in Durham, North Carolina, and Baltimore, Maryland**(NI_pg1-9). While the subject is still one between proposed ‘heritage’ and social progress, iconoclasm now manifests as an aesthetic tool that still makes the propositions of progress, however through actual physical instances and evidences of destruction.

During the same year as this Iconoclastic wave, contemporary artists Doreen Garner and Kenya (Robinson), came out with their two-person exhibition White Man On A Pedestal (WMOAP), opening at Pioneer Works in 2017:

Installation view of ‘White Man On A Pedestal’ at Pioneer Works, 2017

‘Pioneer Works is pleased to present White Man On A Pedestal (WMOAP), a two-person exhibition by Doreen Garner and Kenya (Robinson), from November 10 – December 17, 2017. WMOAP questions a prevailing western history that uses white-male-heteronormativity as its persistent model.

Both artists approach WMOAP from an individual practice that is responsive to their individual experiences as black women, operating in a system of white male supremacy. At a time when removing Confederate statues—literally white men on pedestals—were cultural flashpoints of whiteness and class, Garner and (Robinson) play with the size, texture, and scale of white monumentality itself, referencing both real and imagined figureheads of historical exclusion’

Installation view of ‘White Man On A Pedestal’ at Pioneer Works, 2017

Iconoclasm has thus serves as a subtle force of change, beyond the conventional ideas surrounding it as simple brutality. The questions remain open in the aesthetic exploration of the destruction in art, vs. the destruction of art. Moreover, aesthetic iconoclasm being a matter of politics, art, and navigated areas of intersection in relationship to the greater social body. Other exhibitions and areas of site are considered when visualizing some successful means of destruction both in and of art.

Spiral Jetty and La Jetée are two examples of a makers attempt to reconcile with such destructions through time. In each, we get a sense of an acknowledgement and understanding of a descension of the past into a present chaos, entropy. In Spiral Jetty, it’s in the form of the natural degrading archaeology of the pieces’ direct exposure to the elements. The variable and unstable manifestation of form at this location, act as as both a time-marker and the exhumed nature of these decaying themes in relation to the present. Likewise, in the film La Jetée, the subject character of the film, is in constant reference to an abstract time before the dropping of the bomb.

In the present, both works express a returning to a work in progress, both with the intention of resolution, albeit a resolution resulting in decay each time. With the spiral jetty, in it’s created intention, is inevitably going to find itself eroded, as our protagonist in La Jetée is to be ‘liquidated’ as the task becomes complete.

Nothing distinguishes memories from ordinary moments. Only later do they become memorable by the scars they leave. (Narrator, La Jetée)

In the film, there is also a sense of the auto-destructive attitude toward technology and humankind’s industry both to create and destroy. However, the Spiral Jetty again better represents the idea of passive destruction vs. that based around its violet nature. In the former, it’s either the implied violence of individual erasure or world ending catastrophe, and the latter being a relinquishing of something of human production to the natural progress of time and decay.

Lastly, in the documentation piece (Spiral jetty), there’s an interesting shot of Smithson in his film as we follow the maker via helicopter. He runs down the jetty for what seems like an endless amount of time as he progresses towards the center. However, as he follows this spiral form and begins to get closer to the eye, past and near future parts of the track began to be revealed in the frame. Until reaching the center and conclusion of the track, leaving the artist nowhere to go. Likewise in La Jetée, the protagonist asks those residing in the future to return to the beginning, but once returned and as he runs down the pier, it’s revealed that at the end is in fact the inevitability of death. It’s in these final moments, that past, present, and future clash for our subjects, leading to a progressively quickened state of entropy and closure.

Show the line between Bloom & Decay

When Attitudes Become form

Formalized

Passive/conceptual disruption

HS - LA Exhibit

Theme/theatre

aggressive/violent disruption

Contrast to Post-Op

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fifthimageart · 5 years

Text

Bloom & Decay - Draft XIII

Introduction

memories announce themselves as degrading reels of film, playing over and over, with subtle variations depending upon how forcefully we try to change the moments long-since experienced. However, even in the best imagined outcomes, reality molds the mind back to the inevitable result of the things that have already come to pass. So much of our early lives, simple joys, and ignorance based bliss is lost into the void of the mind and its need to distinguish, pasts, presents, and futures(2006*).

Post-Opulence aims to reveal the contemporary mimesis of permanence as nothing more than a shadowy reflection of a luxurious modern projection of both the sought ideal and iconic state. In practice, Post-Opulence creates afflictions and ambivalence toward a conventional aesthetic, through the destruction of the art object. Post-Opulence highlights the investment in an idealized form, to then reduce the object back to a state of “thingness”. Moreover, explores a struggle that ensues between the formerly idealized art object and new variable form revealed, through a process of deconstruction and decay. Post-Opulence rejects notions of value and stagnation in a commodified system, and operates as institutional disruption in that it consistently makes reference to both actions and signals of changed circumstances and time.

The Icon ‘It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to form a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a sky scraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count (*DeDeath5). ‘

An icon is representative of something otherworldly. Moreover, is an object or image deployed to aid devotion to otherworldly beings. Secondly, an icon is defined separately as a representative symbol, or as being worth of veneration. Even in this surface definition, there’s a redundancy in both definitional cases, as an icon serves as nothing more than an access point to something perceived as greater than the self. Whether in a composition, place of worship, or in our pockets, we imbue faith and define reality via such iconic vehicles of reconciliation and promises of fixed infinitude.

In The Denial of Death, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker poses that the human mind is occupied by both anxiety and despair as we meditate upon impending demise. Moreover, as humans we seek a buffer or antidote to this truth, in adopting a greater urge to heroism - an application of significance to one’s own existence. However, while certain imagined heroisms are inaccessible to most, we find ways of seeking heroism in our daily routines (i.e. work, religion, politics, relationships). This heroism is short lived, in that its destined for failure. This is because the cosmic significance of the individual person is nonexistent. Additionally, we subscribe to what is ultimately the illusion of permanent meaning. As religion, the once prominent means of establishing this illusion of greater individual significance, began to lose its hold as modernity began to supplement this need via a cultural heroism defined by its respective culture. It’s in the latter that we begin to see the rise of cultural heroes (or icons), and the creation of the heroic machine, in that the average individual can only hope to fold into the illusion of being a part of the greater heroic movement. Again, this machine is directed and represented by the culture in which it grows, for better or worse. Becker asserts that this quest for cultural heroism is the most actualized form of heroism that an individual could hope to achieve. There are rare instances, however, that Becker coined as being called genuine heroism. For Becker, genuine heroism refers to a small population of people that do not require any form of heroism illusion to live, and can face the impossible situation of living that we find ourselves in. I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever [humanity] does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise, it is false (DD_EB).

Applying such a context once again to this idea of the physical icon, the Post-Opulent aim is to play the role of both the institutional and aesthetic anti-hero. In that while one accepts that we are indeed subject to the individual limitations of the unconscious drives to cultural heroism, the objects and images we produce in this world, are fleeting offerings to the two facts of our current temporal finitude: being and non-being. Moreover, by redirecting the productions of oneself, away from satiating the cultural beast in favor of starving it, one may produce an aesthetic or practice similar to that of genuine heroism.

The Broken Screen: Anti-Heroism & Reverence of the Non-Opulent Object

In Antony Hudek’s The Object, objecthood is understood as a thing that has obtained verified value through the perception of the individual, or a conformed and collective intellect. In both cases, objects become subjects themselves. Later in the text, Hudek addresses the relationship between this valued and venerated thing, as being made object in relationship to the specifically thinking subject (Tobj.HudPg17). However, arguably in both cases, the object is nothing more than a thing, oppressed with meaning and extensions of two subjects’ own ego and narcissism. Consider an art object. In the process of making, a cumulation of things that would have otherwise been overlooked (in the most general sense where one does not actively seek the particularly used material, or in the more ideal situation in which the material is sourced other than otherwise commodified or sentimental means), suddenly become object. That object then becomes one of subjective perceptions by a larger body. The art object, in that particular moment of exhibition, transforms into a mirror, in which this primary subject observes and make reflected judgment on a now secondary subject, the maker. The object itself then operates as if both hiding its own past thingness and intent, in ambiguous form and meaning. However, as the object becomes further commodified through institution, original thinghood transcends to magnificence. While opulence often has (understandably) more association with physical tokens of wealth, this can be arguably more abstracted in that opulence is the way in which we manifest, cast out, and assert our productions of grandeur into a system that demands it in exchange for the false promise of value (heroism) in the greater and perversely commodified heroic machine*(EB). Post-opulence then, is a theory aimed at dismantling and reversing the deconstruction/reconstruction process. Though the relationship to the art object is similar to that of destructionist practice, it is also a recycling practice between a materials thingness and objecthood. Post-opulence introduces unpredictability in material presence, rather than finding comfort in the stable image. When an individual is in need of order in a chaotic system, to Schumaker, the solution requires the individual to establish and maintain an unjustified or artificial order. Schumaker goes on to assert that this develops into a second system of operation that begins to eliminate competing data from the individual consciousness. Thus, the ordered institution becomes dependent on a social body of individual dissociation(CR.34). The example Schumaker provides in regard to the way in which the artificial reality takes hold, is the institution of religion. Much like hypnosis, such institutions produce a state of complacency by way of deconstruction of the individual scope via disassociation, and supplementing through a reconstructive process of suggestion (CR.81). Object and icon begin to then form as waypoints, or rather as gaslights along a darkened street, leading the collective consciousness down a path laid down by unknown entities that claim safe passage. Some worthwhile examples come to mind that would reveal the bridge between “hypnotic” and religious behavior. Consider the recently publicized miracle that took place when a figure of Christ on the cross began to shed tears. The cross was situated high against the front wall of the church, too high in fact for anyone actually to see the drops of water firsthand. Yet a great percentage of people who visited the church were convinced wholeheartedly that tears were being shed by the figure. At a later point, zoom cameras were able to show that there were no changes to the figure’s eyes, even while people reported seeing the tears. // They stared at the eyes for long periods of time, which had a trance-inducing effect due to the visual monotony*. At the same time, the staring caused eye fatigue and some inevitable perceptual variations // These effects were then interpreted in relation to believers’ original suggestion, namely, that Christ’s eyes would water (CR.81).’

There is no art without ourselves, or acknowledgement of the lack of it.

The Reality of Decay Every moment of our life belongs to the present only for a moment; then it belongs for ever to the past. Every evening we are poorer by a day. We would perhaps grow frantic at the sight of this ebbing away of our short span of time were we not secretly conscious in the profoundest depths of our being that we share in the inexhaustible well of eternity, out of which we tan for ever draw new life and renewed time (*VE).

In his essay, On the Vanity of Existence, Arthur Schopenhauer describes our existence as a fruitless struggle amidst a life dictated by instability and confusion. In that the living body is a dedicated mechanism to strife, in the pursuit of a recognized sustainable present of satisfaction. However, this journey will inevitably end in vain as that which was meant to embody a lasting existence, would not have non-being as its preordained goal(*VE). Arguably, the objective reality is that at one moment life is, and eventually it is not. Moreover, it’s in our subjective reality during the process of life, that such definitions become skewed and distorted through culture and institution. It is through such domineering vessels of that even our basic realities are taken from us, being supplemented by false promises of eternal life, hollow examples of transcendence, and vacant reward for allowing our individual realities to be managed by forces no better nor worse than ourselves. In this, the made environment shapes the way in which we define and find value in our own individual definitions of what our realities are.

However, Post-Opulence is interested in both the exploration and eventual disentombing of this turn from humanity's rebellion and false dominance of a commodified society.

(corruption of reality?) ---

It is important to note the way in which visual communication has evolved since the birth of the image, and how visual communication and culture were key in terms of survival and production of both community and culture since the Paleolithic. In that the development of the neocortex and reasoning power, led to ritual practices and reverence for the animals early hunting societies preyed on. However, how have we progressed in regard to the way in which we in a neo-gilded culture, invest in the ideals of the ideal, consume art, and adorn creation as a half-realized concept; keeping in mind that no product of creation can or will exist in its most opulent or idealized form forever. Additionally, within a culture that both appropriates and consumes the aesthetic and moral principles of it’s would be counter. Mass media, as an example, serves us daily reminders of the realities of our modern day capacity for destruction, disruption, and decay. Through it, catastrophe and their sediments are made both palatable and distant, creating a cognitive distance as a kind of means of not looking, alienation, and disassociation. The question as to whether or not art object can both accurately describe reality and catalyze redemption, is one I put before Post-Opulence to answer, through the reclamation of destruction within the infrathin moments between a completely destructive process and its inherent aesthetic manifestation following. The contemporary ways of viewing of this progression/interaction with the perceived and ‘finalized’ art object, mirrors Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, in which reality itself is formed from an endless reproduction of the real. Moreover, Developing into a relationship of equivalence, indifference, to then the extinction of the original*. The original, being an objects’ initial state of base material and again, this idea of “thingness”. In short, the way in which mass production has shaped our way of viewing, has destroyed and altered the relationships we have with our own experienced reality. Additionally, it has created a perceived hierarchy of these two visual forms of completion and degradation into two opposing icons of status.

In the western canon, following the end of World War II, iconoclasm via the abstract form (i.e. Tachisme and Abstract Expressionism) became the predominant means of cultural expression within a mass episode of cultural forgetting within the western world, in that there were no means of both accurately confronting and aestheticizing the horrors of the post-war world that remained grounded in both it’s reality and truth. In the destruction of recognizable imagery, In favor of the abstract form, reality was even further removed and that unpleasantness successfully buried. This brings to question the role of the Icon in relationship to our visual memory, and how the representation of our realities are chosen, with history and its sediments being presented to us as abstract entities that reject the creation of concrete memory and experience. As the physical presence of Icons manifest, transform, and are replaced over time, truth and origin destroyed as they are given new rendering and context.

Take for example some earlier burial practices of Mayan idol sculpture, and the way in which people would continue to engage with sculptures after they were both unmade and broken by foreign forces. As attackers would destroy them as a means of attacking the ideology, the communities would then go on to salvage and reclaim what remained to use as building material for new offerings, structures, or other sculptures.

This being said, the visual experience should not be reinforced to just seek the supplementation of permanent images and icons, but go on to embrace the decay of them as they carry the sediments of said decay into new forms of transformed narrative. While representation is inherently untruthful as an imitation of reality, Modernist ideology called for the delusion of it and is thus much more dangerous. Where the physicality of the made form is a manifestation of tangible truth, paintings manipulate the texture of the mind. To quote Harold Rosenberg, “Art as action rests on the enormous assumption that the artist accepts as real only that which he is in the process of creating”. In what could’ve been unknowingly hinted by him at the time, was the potential for narcissism in self-referential types of art that creates a volatile iconization of itself in the form of artistic commodity.

Chapter I

Post Opulence, Auto-Destructive Art, and the DIAS

From the Ashes: Auto-Destructive Art Gustav Metzger began coining the term Auto-Destructive Art in 1959. Auto-Destructive Art as acutely concerned with the problems of the aggressions of the individual, as well as those within the greater society. It was against a system that was viewed by Metzger as being the maker of its own destruction (In response to WWII, Industrialization of war and increased nuclear armament). In three separate manifestos, he goes on to criticize privileged institutions and their dominion of Natures both physical and in relationship to the society. Metzger viewed people as being vessels of the unresolved and suppressed aggressions against ourselves and the greater society. Moreover, That our predisposition toward destruction served as a threat to the continuation of the illusion of balance and control. It is for this reason that he rationalized that due to this conflicting unconscious allure, that art celebrating this pleasure would be quickly rejected*(GMB).

Auto-Destructive Art found manifestation (or lack thereof) not only in the physical practice of destroying works, but also by means of the manifesto/lecture format. Much like Post-Opulence, acting somewhat beyond a means of a self-authoritative artistic practice, Auto-Destructive Art worked as a synthesis of the aesthetic values of destruction, and the performative aspects of public/collective engagement. Specifically to Post-Opulence, the lecture/manifesto takes form in events which have come to be called ‘burnings’, in which art is taken, completely burned, and the remains both distributed and left to their next incarnation. The burnings have manifested as a social form of catharsis and community building, with the focal point being this intention and draw to a chaotic process of destruction. Here, Post-Opulence begins to integrate the art and social practice, into a celebration of the post-apocalyptic and aestheticization of the decaying form.

Where Auto-Destructive Art and post-opulence split, is the intention in the embodiment of a specific set of ethical and political ideals. Where the theory of Auto-Destructive Art was an attack on the capitalist art market through an art lacking material form, Post-Opulence is rather a rejection of the idealized state of material form, as well as an attack on the notions of iconization through similarly problematic traditional gallery systems. Additionally, there are three key notions within the manifestos of auto-destructive art that I recognize as being problematic. First, aside from acknowledged relationships to Dada, Auto-Destructive Art lacked being a complete theory to the extent that reproduction of the first manifesto in the second edition was needed as a ploy in which to validate the movement. In contrast, Post-Opulence takes into account the conceptual history of the destructive process/destruction of object outside of the narrowed scope of any particular contemporary practice of the western canon. Secondly, in the second manifesto it is the stated intention of Auto-Destructive Art to reflect the power ‘man’ has over natures being. Within Post-Opulence, the relationship between maker and these natural and chaotic forces is innately symbiotic. Lastly, the work of Auto-Destructive Art began to be defined by its political motivation, and thus created icon and symbolic metaphor. These, being the conceptual and ideological frameworks that Post-Opulence aims to destroy & transcend.

(Image credits for Key)

Propagation in the Wasteland: The Destruction in Art Symposium

In writing on the Destruction of Art Symposium, which was a month-long symposium focused on the exhibition of destructive and destroyed works that took place in 1966 London, Art historian Kristine Stiles describes Destruction in art as not being the same as destruction of art. Moreover, she went on to write that the destruction in art addresses the negative aspects of both social and political institutions, and manifests as an attack on the traditional identity of the visual arts themselves. While these artists were responding to their individual overarching philosophies of destruction in the form of ephemeral art object and performance based works, there was never an established movement nor manifesto solidifying the practice. While the symposium itself was formulated by the artist Gustav Metzger, who coined the term ‘Auto-Destructive Art’ seven years prior, it would seem final meditations of both destruction and decay as separate from any particular cannon following the month-long event would end there. (Expand/Death Drive?)

Chapter II

On the Destruction of Ideology to Contemporary Practice: Post-Opulence and Iconoclasm

If all that changes slowly may be explained by life, all that changes quickly is explained by fire. Fire is the ultra-living element. It is intimate and it is universal. - (PF/GB)

The instances of iconoclasm are best known and defined by the Byzantine and Protestant Reformation periods. Finding its strongest cultural association as being solely socio-religious in nature as being a polemic, rooted in the Greek word for ‘war’ polemos. Iconoclasts not only culturally transformed the previous idea that the universe consisted of many deities, but even as time transformed these newly installed institutions of monotheism, these powers would likewise find themselves a target of others against their icons. In this way, iconoclasm would better be described as a conceptual construct that has evolved in relationship to the culture that creates the environment that breeds it. Reframing the negative associations of the destruction of Icon based on Byzantine era victors and influences, iconoclasm serves as both aesthetic strategy and political tool.

The legitimacy of the destruction of the icon has found both evolution and intersection within whole practices of sociopolitical life and contemporary aesthetics. The French Revolution, being one way that iconoclasm found its most drastic shifts in narrative. Following the period in which it was defined by a religious targets, French revolutionaries destroyed artworks and portraits of the wealthy, as these symbolized the luxury, vanity, and opulence of the aristocracy. However, as the social valuation of art itself began to grow, these revolutionaries evolved once more this concept of iconoclasm, and created new techniques to destroy and transform symbolic meaning. This being done by means of renaming, rededication, and removals from sites where display and interpretation can be institutionally controlled. Hugo Ball, a key theorist and practitioner of the Dadaists in Zurich, took this concept of reframing in the realm of iconoclasm by motivating the movement though complex thinking on language, philosophy, theology, mysticism, history, and politics. Not only did the views of Dada contradict Christian mysticism, but makes the case of the Church as an ‘Outdated, hierarchical repository of power. Dada was at an intersection between iconoclasm, anarchism, and aesthetic experience. Moreover, viewed the iconoclastic movements as being a singular mold of both religious and secular, although its participants would claim one or the other. While the use of the term iconoclasm in Balls essays were in relationship to a historical ‘Bildersturm’, it was treated as an important means of force in political conflicts that continued to resonate into the twentieth century. Prefacing Modernism, it was thought that ‘Because man is unable to escape the concrete, all abstraction, as an attempt to manage without the image, leads only to an impoverishment, a dilution of, a surrogate for the linguistic process.’ Moreover, that ‘Abstraction breeds arrogance; it makes men appear the same as or similar to God (even if only in illusion).’

In the aftermath of the Second World War, modernism provided the western world with a means of dealing with the traumas of war and its disasters. Additionally, it left open the questions surrounding whom truly carries the authority over the conventions of art and its institutional value. Clement Greenberg, a prominent art critic of the mid-twentieth century, adopted a new iconoclastic ideology and championed Abstract Expressionism within the western canon. His rejection to representation was not due to a personal dislike of the narrative image, but rather out of necessity as aesthetic progress called for it. Here, iconoclasm has found itself appropriated as a tool of illusionary progress in the form of the abstract. Illusionary, in its failure in this form to provide a genuine challenge against consumer/capitalist ideology at the time. It would seem the case that such institutional powers (Which were/continue to be problematic and white-male dominant) would continue to provide their answers. To that point, and the institutionalization of art itself in the development of higher conceptual frameworks belonging to those who can access it, has transformed Art into a vessel of a flawed social order. The concepts and aesthetics of the artistic field grew in relationship with the post war period which today are still taught as fundamental knowledge. However, Abstract Expressionism eventually removed a necessary conflict between ‘Advanced Art’ and the dominant culture, in that it kept alive the social and political norms of the west, and thus became an icon in both its material reality and lack of image.

In recent years however, we have seen a progression toward the dismantling of this resonant flawed modernity in both iconoclastic aesthetics and social interventions in the Contemporary. Moreover, the reaction of the facets of society that remain the result of it. Take for example the events of 2017’s Charlottesville, VA.

Ernest Becker, understands the essence of transference as a certain taming of terror, by means of creating order in a chaotic universe (*EB_DD145-9). In that certain monuments, or icons, represent what we aim to be loved by or to hate. In the former, comes with the consequence of Transference Terror*, in which one fears to lose the love of the object that manifests as an icon of one’s heroistic ideal(*EB_145-9).

Earlier in 2017, the city council of Charlottesville voted to remove a confederate statue of Robert E. Lee and the surrounding park. Later, on August 12th a ‘Unite the Right’ Rally was scheduled following months of earlier protest from white nationalists. This rally, resulting in the death of one and injury of nineteen others when a white nationalist, James Alex Fields, drove his car through a crowd of counter protesters.

By no means do I make this illustration lightly, but its worth exploring the fantasticism and need for illusion/safety in connection to such a fetishised preservation of an expired ideal, icon, and monument. Moreover, the true social revelations made by such progressive iconoclastic action toward old icon comprised of nothing but material and thing. *I feel like I can expand more, especially with the EB section, but I feel this could become a whole other thesis.* Following the events of Charlottesville, there was a wave of stated illegal and legal instances of iconoclasm of Confederate monuments in Durham, North Carolina, and Baltimore, Maryland**(NI_pg1-9). While the subject is still one between proposed heritage and social progress, iconoclasm now manifests as an aesthetic tool that still makes the propositions of progress, however through actual physical instances and evidences of destruction.

During the same year as this Iconoclastic wave, Contemporary Artists Doreen Garner and Kenya (Robinson) came out with their two-person exhibition White Man On A Pedestal (WMOAP), opening at Pioneer Works in 2017:

Installation view of ‘White Man On A Pedestal’ at Pioneer Works, 2017

Both artists approach WMOAP from an individual practice that is responsive to their experiences as black women operating in a system of white male supremacy. At a time when removing Confederate statues—literally white men on pedestals—are cultural flashpoints of whiteness and class, Garner and (Robinson) play with the size, texture, and scale of white monumentality itself, referencing both real and imagined figureheads of historical exclusion’

Installation view of ‘White Man On A Pedestal’ at Pioneer Works, 2017 Iconoclasm has thus served as a subtle force of change, beyond the conventional ideas surrounding it as simple brutality. The questions remain open in the aesthetic exploration of the destruction in art, vs. the destruction of art. Moreover, aesthetic iconoclasm being a matter of politics, art, and navigated areas of intersection in relationship to the greater social body. Chapter III Lot to do here* Post Opulence & Its Functions Related to Practices of Destruction

The question of space begets a number of alternative intention and action in relationship to Post-Opulence. In terms of the art object, having been manifested in the studio, typically falls prey to the very goal in which it is institutionally groomed to aspire to. The first rejection Post-Opulence makes of the traditional space, is of the neutral walls innate foreshadowing of the morbid display of the stinted and mummified. There’s something interesting about the ways in which both new (or rather transformed) object and form, inadvertently manifest from the object left to the mercy of both time and the space. Looking at city streets and various attempts at a particular idealized design or structural outcome, Metzger would argue that we are currently existing in a space created of our own filth. Subtle vibrations that erode and split concrete, progressions fated to obsoletion, Institutions that conform us to a deformed and self-destroying society of development, are all things present in the more open minds of the day (GMB*). However, working through the rot, there are moments in which de/composition inherently manifest foundational aesthetic principles, though perceived as negative moments of degradation & incompletion. It’s in these moments of viewing through the scope of Post-Opulence, where viewed sites of decay, bloom into new sites of aesthetic reclamation.

In these moments, seemingly about nothing, are sediments of our own daily rituals over time. Moreover, are an example of the ways in which we engage with what is left. Post-Opulence meditates on comprehensive aesthetic systems, and refers back to the fundamentals of both the physical and metaphysical in acknowledgement of absolute reality that all things are in a state of decay, and made to eventually become nothing. Moreover, through that nothingness there can be found revelations of the infinite potential for new and transformed aesthetic experience of the real. As we view decay as being dark, morbid, spoiled, or fleeting, it is an equal element in an interlocked relationship to the perception of bloom as being lighter and louder in terms of having the idealized texture of vitality. The latter, being an allegory for the treatment of the art object, space, and contemporary icon, as we operate in a means in which to preserve longevity and a holding onto the opulent form.

Conclusion Lot to do here* An Intention in the Contemporary

The ironic nature of Post-Opulence, is that its success lies in its failure. The practice is not meant to be a how- to in terms of a specific practice, but rather as a greater reminder that all will fade. In other words, the consuming fire or broken glass are not representations of destruction, rather they are destruction itself.

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fifthimageart · 5 years

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Draft X - Bloom & Decay

Embracing the passing of time and it’s inherent destructive nature, as now memories and their icons are left to decay and new found freedoms to transform & bloom into the unrecognizable, Post-Opulence aims to reveal the contemporary mimesis of permanence as nothing more than shadowy reflections of a luxurious modern projection of both the sought ideal and iconic state. In practice, it creates deep afflictions and inaccessibility to a conventional aesthetic, through variable acts of destruction toward the art object. Post-Opulence highlights power invested in a sought idealized form, to then create struggle over the former realized art object through its breaking, burning, and decay into revelations of new form. Post-Opulence makes reference to both actions and signals of changed circumstance & time, accepting that all eventually fades again into nothingness. Thus, rejecting the notions of worth and value bestowed by the commodified authority. Chaos, just as with Order, are the described primordial uncarved blocks (FR)* of the multiple realities of the physical, spiritual, and ideological. Taking control, and shaping the narrated lives of both gods and the individual instances of humankind alike, chaos is its own independent force manifested before all others. The poet Paul Eluard states ‘I must not look on reality as being like myself’*, but how is this so? In regard to what starts as an observed object of interest, the reasons in which we look upon it reveals more about our internal selves, as well as the relationships we have with these internal moments that take shape below the surface of the skin. However, initial impressions are arguably narrowed perceptions of a truth born of an impure examination. The Post Opulent are the neo-agents of Chaos, bringing about a lux et voluptas to both the commodified market, and the reinforcement of such worship of commodity through the icons they create. These icons, being the now commercialized art object.

Let me first attempt to define what I consider an Icon to be. By definition, it is an image or idol as representative of something otherworldly. Moreover, an object or image used as an aid to devotion to these otherworldly beings. Secondly, it is defined separately as a representative symbol, or as being worth of veneration (dic)*. Even in this surface definition, there’s a redundancy in that in both cases an icon serves as nothing more than an access point to something we perceive as being greater than ourselves. May it be in a composition, place of worship, or in our pockets, we put our faith in these vehicles of reconciliation of our fluid individual definitions of reality.

In his piece The Denial of Death, the cultural anthropologist Ernst Becker poses that in the face of meditating on the significance of our impending demise, the human mind would be occupied by both anxiety and despair. Moreover, that we as humans need a buffer or antidote to this truth, by ways of adopting a greater urge to heroism and an application of significance to one’s own existence. However, while certain imagined heroisms are inaccessible to most, we also find ways of seeking this notion in our daily routines (i.e. work, religion, politics, and/or relationships). This heroism is short lived, in that its destined for failure due to the fact that the cosmic significance of the individual person is nonexistent. Additionally, that because of this we subscribe to what is ultimately the illusion of permanent meaning. As religion, the once prominent means of establishing this illusion of greater individual significance, began to lose its hold as modernity began to supplement this ‘need’ by creating a cultural heroism that is defined by its respective culture. It’s in the latter that we begin to see the rise of cultural heroes (or icons), and the creation of the heroic machine, in that the average individual can only hope to fold into the illusion of being a part of the greater heroic movement. Again, this machine being represented and directed by the culture in which it grows, through better or worse. It is also the belief that this cultural heroism, was the most actualized form of heroism that an individual could hope to achieve. There are rare instances, however, that Becked coined as being called Genuine heroism. In that there is a small population of people that do not require any form of heroism illusion to live, and can face the impossible situation of living that we find ourselves in. ‘I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever [humanity] does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise, it is false (DD_EB)*’

Applying such a context once again to this idea of icon, the Post-Opulent aim is to play the role of the institutional Anti-hero. In that while one accepts that we are indeed subject to the individual limitations of the unconscious drives to cultural heroism, the objects and images in which we produce in this world, are rather made as fleeting offerings to the two facts of our current temporal finitude: existing life and existing death. Moreover, it is the thought that by redirecting the productions of oneself, away from satiating the cultural beast in favor of starving it, can produce an aesthetic/Institutional practice of something similar to that of genuine heroism.

The Broken Screen: Anti-Heroism & Reverence of the Non-Opulent

While Opulence often has (understandably) more association with physical tokens of wealth, this can be arguably more abstracted in that Opulence is the way in which we manifest, cast out, and assert our productions of grandeur into a system that demands it in exchange for the false promise of value (heroism) in the greater and perversed commodified machine. Post-Opulence then is a theory aimed at dismantling by way of reversing the deconstruction/reconstruction process. When an individual is in need of order in a chaotic system, to Schumaker, the solution requires the individual to establish and maintain an unjustified or artificial order. He goes onto assert that this develops into a second system of operation that begins to eliminate competing data from the individual consciousness. Thus, the ordered institution becomes dependent on a social body of individual dissociation(CR.34). The example Schumaker provides in regard to the way in which the artificial reality takes hold, is the institution of religion. Much like hypnosis, such institutions produce a state of complatancy by way of deconstruction of the individual scope via dissociation, and supplementing through a reconstructive process of suggestion (CR.81). Object and Icon begin to then form as waypoints, or rather as gaslights along a darkened street, leading the collective consciousness down a path laid down by unknown entities that claim safe passage. ‘Some worthwhile examples come to mind that would reveal the bridge between “hypnotic” and religious behavior. Consider the recently publicized miracle that took place when a figure of Christ on the cross began to shed tears. The cross was situated high against the front wall of the chrch, too high in fact for anyone actually to see the drops of water firsthand. Yet a great percentage of people who visited the church were convinced wholeheartedly that tears were being shed by the figure. At a later point, zoom cameras were able to show that there were no changes to the figure’s eyes, even while people reported seeing the tears. // They stared at the eyes for long periods of time, which had a trance-inducing effect due to the visual monotony*. At the same time, the staring caused eye fatigue and some inevitable perceptual variations // These effects were then interpreted in relation to believers’ original suggestion, namely, that Christ’s eyes would water (CR.81).’

Here is one example of iconic object, fulfilling the role as a vessel of prescribed imaginative illusion and suggested magnificence, or rather Opulence.

However, Post-Opulence is interested in both the exploration and eventual disentombing of this turn from humanity's rebellion and false dominance of a commodified society.

(corruption of reality?) ---

It is important to note the way in which visual communication has evolved since the birth of the image, and how visual communication and culture were key in terms of survival and production of both community and culture since the Paleolithic. In that the development of the neocortex and reasoning power, led to ritual practices and reverence for the animals early hunting societies preyed on. However, how have we progressed in regard to the way in which we in a neo-gilded culture, invest in the ideals of the ideal, consume art, and adorn creation as a half-realized concept; keeping in mind that no product of creation can or will exist in its most opulent or idealized form forever. Additionally, within a culture that both appropriates and consumes the aesthetic and moral principles of it’s would be counter. Mass media, as an example, serves us daily reminders of the realities of our modern day capacity for destruction, disruption, and decay. Through it, catastrophe and their sediments are made both palatable and distant, creating a cognitive distance as a kind of means of not looking, alienation, and disassociation. The question as to whether or not art object can both accurately describe reality and catalyze redemption, is one I put before Post-Opulence to answer, through the reclamation of destruction within the infrathin moments between a completely destructive process and its inherent aesthetic manifestation following. The contemporary ways of viewing of this progression/interaction with the perceived and ‘finalized’ art object, mirrors Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, in which reality itself is formed from an endless reproduction of the real. Moreover, Developing into a relationship of equivalence, indifference, to then the extinction of the original*. In short, the way in which mass production has shaped our way of viewing, has destroyed and altered the relationships we have with our own experienced reality. Additionally, it has created a perceived hierarchy of these two visual forms of completion and degradation into two opposing icons of status.

In the western cannon, following the end of World War II, iconoclasm via the abstract form (i.e. Tachisme and Abstract Expressionism) became the predominant means of cultural expression within a mass episode of cultural forgetting within the western world, in that there were no means of both accurately confronting and aestheticizing the horrors of the post-war world that remained grounded in both it’s reality and truth. In the destruction of recognizable imagery, In favor of the abstract form, reality was even further removed and that unpleasantness successfully buried. This brings to question the role of the Icon in relationship to our visual memory, and how the representation of our realities are chosen, with history and its sediments being presented to us as abstract entities that reject the creation of concrete memory and experience. As the physical presence of Icons manifest, transform, and are replaced over time, truth and origin destroyed as they are given new rendering and context.

This being said, the visual experience should not be reinforced to seek the supplementation of images and icons, but rather embrace the decay of them as concrete evidences of what was. In addition, carry the sediments of said decay into new forms of transformed narrative. While representation is inherently untruthful as an imitation of reality, Modernist ideology called for the delusion of it and is thus much more dangerous. Where the physicality of the made form is a manifestation of tangible truth, paintings manipulate the texture of the mind. To quote Harold Rosenberg, “Art as action rests on the enormous assumption that the artist accepts as real only that which he is in the process of creating”. In what could’ve been unknowingly hinted by him at the time, was the potential for narcissism in self-referential types of art that creates a volatile iconization of itself in the form of artistic commodity.

Chapter I

Post Opulence, Auto Destructive Art, and the DIAS

Metzger viewed people as being vessels of the unresolved and suppressed aggressions against ourselves and the greater society. Moreover, That our predisposition toward destruction served as a threat to the continuation of the illusion of balance and control. It is for this reason that he rationalized that due to this conflicting unconscious allure, that art celebrating this pleasure would be quickly rejected*(GMB).

Where Auto-Destructive Art and Post-Opulence split, is the intention in the embodiment of a specific set of ethical and political ideals. Where the theory of Auto-Destructive Art was an attack on the capitalist art market through an art lacking material form, Post-Opulence is rather a rejection of the idealized state of material form, as well as an attack on the notions of iconization through similarly problematic traditional gallery systems. Additionally, there are three key notions within the manifestos of auto-destructive art that I recognize as being problematic. First, aside from acknowledged relationships to Dada, Auto-Destructive Art lacked being a complete theory to the extent that reproduction of the first manifesto in the second edition was needed as a ploy in which to validate the movement. In contrast, Post-Opulence takes into account the conceptual history of the destructive process/destruction of object outside of the narrowed scope of any particular contemporary practice of the western canon. Secondly, in the second manifesto it is the stated intention of Auto-Destructive Art to reflect the power ‘man’ has over natures being. Within Post-Opulence, the relationship between maker and these natural and chaotic forces is innately symbiotic. Lastly, the work of Auto-Destructive Art began to be defined by its political motivation, and thus created icon and symbolic metaphor. These, being the conceptual and ideological frameworks that Post-Opulence aims to destroy & transcend.

On the Destruction of Ideology to Contemporary Practice: Post-Opulence and Iconoclasm

If all that changes slowly may be explained by life, all that changes quickly is explained by fire. Fire is the ultra-living element. It is intimate and it is universal. - (PF/GB)

Repeatedly in the essay of Aesthetics, Hegel describes the making process as both equally destructive, as well as simultaneously creative - In the example of the melting pot and the witches brew. The latter being:

‘A forge in which “everything murky, natural, impure, foreign, and exorbitant” is consumed in the purifying fire of the “deeper spirit.” The fire strips away what is “formless, symbolic, unbeautiful, and misshapen”—the nocturnal phantasmagoria of the animal, the irrational, [ ], the pre-human, the nonhuman—just as it draws into relief [her- ausheben] the spiritual identity of human and divine. “congealed light” is both the residue and the exemplary manifestation of this fire (the product presents the perfect image of its own process of production) —an anticipatory image of enlightenment caught in frozen stone.’

The instances of iconoclasm are best known and defined by the Byzantine and Protestant Reformation periods. Finding its strongest cultural association as being solely socio-religious in nature as being a polemic, rooted in the Greek word for ‘war’ polemos. Iconoclasts not only culturally transformed the previous idea that the universe consisted of many deities, but even as time transformed these newly installed institutions of monotheism, these powers would likewise find themselves a target of others against their icons. In this way, iconoclasm would better be described as a neutral conceptual construct that has evolved in relationship to the culture that creates the environment that breeds it. Reframing the negative associations of the destruction of Icon based on Byzantine era victors and influences, iconoclasm serves as both aesthetic strategy and political tool.

‘Because man is unable to escape the concrete, all abstraction, as an attempt to manage without the image, leads only to an impoverishment, a dilution of, a surrogate for the linguistic process. Abstraction breeds arrogance; it makes men appear the same as or similar to God (even if only in illusion). De facto, it weakens his closeness to God, his na ̈ıvete ́, his faith; that clinging, grasping force that is a prerequisite for all receptivity and all devotion. It is hard to see how abstraction and culture can be reconciled.’

However, following the two World Wars, in response to the treatment of architecture and what was deemed ‘degenerate art’ by the Nazi party, physical destruction of art for political reasons became socially impermissible. While Art has found itself better protected and culturally valued, the aesthetic use of the destroyed image and reclamation of meaning has once more found its way at the dawn of modernism.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, modernism provided the western world with a means of dealing with the traumas of war and its disasters. Anselm Kiefers work, as an example, conceptualized at as not only a means of exhuming memory, but as a means of confronting it and its emotional resonance as well. Despite the recreations of iconic and monumental forms to serve as allegory reconciling his personal lineage, having been born in 1945 germany as the country was attempting to reform their previous identity, Kiefers work is conceptually materialized with the aim of reconciliation in a period of dismantlement between both Living and Prosthetic Memory in postwar Germany. The first being memory linked to the lived experience of an individual, and the second being memories that are circulated in the public, yet experienced with one’s own body forming an experiential relationship.

In the same period, Gustav Metzger began coining the term Auto-Destructive Art in 1959. Auto-Destructive Art as being acutely being concerned with the problems of the aggressions of the individual, as well as those within the greater society. It was against a system that was viewed by Metzger as being the maker of its own destruction (In response to WWII, Industrialization of war and increased nuclear armament). In three separate manifestos, he goes on to criticize privileged institutions and their dominion of Natures both physical and in relationship to the society.

Auto-Destructive Art Manifesto Pamphlet, Gustav Metzger cir.1960

Eventually Clement Greenberg, a prominent art critic of the mid-twentieth century and during so championed abstract expressionism, also adopted a new iconoclastic ideology. Where his rejection to representation was not due to a personal dislike of the narrative image, but rather out of necessity as aesthetic progress called for it. Here, iconoclasm has found itself transforming into a tool of progress and creation of a linear narrative, rather than solely as a tool of regression and destruction. The concepts and aesthetics of the artistic field grew in relationship with the post war period which today are still taught as fundamental knowledge. However, Abstract Expressionism removed a necessary conflict between ‘Advanced Art’ and the dominant culture, in that it kept alive the social and political norms of the west, and thus became an icon in both its material reality and lack of image.

Modernism left open the questions surrounding whom truly carries the authority over the conventions of art, and its institutional value. However, in the failure of challenging the dominant American culture at the time, it would seem the case that those contemporary institutional powers (Which were problematic and white-male dominant) would in fact be the answer. To that point, and the institutionalization of Art itself in the development of higher conceptual frameworks belonging to those who can access it, has transformed Art into a vessel of a flawed social order. In recent years however, we have seen a progression toward the dismantling of this resonant flawed modernity in both iconoclastic aesthetics and social interventions. As an example, following the events of Charlottesville, there was a wave of stated illegal and legal instances of iconoclasm of Confederate monuments in Durham, North Carolina, and Baltimore, Maryland. While the subject is still one between proposed heritage and social progress, iconoclasm now manifests as an aesthetic tool that still makes the propositions of progress, however through actual physical instances and evidences of destruction.

Installation view of ‘White Man On A Pedestal’ at Pioneer Works, 2017

Chapter III Post Opulence & Its Functions Related to Practices of Destruction

Conclusion and Assertion An Intention in the Contemporary

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fifthimageart · 5 years

Text

Bloom & Decay Draft IX

It's funny how specific moments, memories of situation and context, eventually become nothing more than abstract and confused fleeting moments. Looking back, memories announce themselves as degrading reels of film, playing over and over, with subtle variations depending on how forcefully we try to change the moments long since experienced. However, even in the best imagined outcomes, reality molds the mind back to the inevitable result of the things that have already come to pass. So much of our early lives, simple joys, and ignorant based bliss, lost into the void of the mind and it's need to distinguish our pasts, presents, and futures.

Let me first attempt to define what I consider an Icon to be. By definition, is it an image or idol as representative of something otherworldly. Moreover, an object or image used as an aid to devotion to these otherworldly beings. Secondly, it is defined separately as a representative symbol, or as being worth of veneration (dic)*. Even in this surface definition, there’s a redundancy in that in both cases an icon serves as nothing more than an access point to something we perceive as being greater than ourselves. May it be in a composition, place of worship, or in our pockets, we put our faith in these vehicles of reconciliation of our fluid individual definitions of reality.

‘I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever [humanity] does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise, it is false (DD_EB)*’

The Broken Screen: Anti-Heroism & Reverence of the lost WIP

However, Post-Opulence is interested in both the exploration and eventual disentombing of this turn from humanity's rebellion and false dominance of a commodified society.

(corruption of reality?) ---

It is important to note the way in which visual communication has evolved since the birth of the image, and how visual communication and culture were key in terms of survival and production of both community and culture since the Upper Paleolithic (FofB). However, how have we progressed in regard to the way in which we in a neo-gilded culture, invest in the ideals of the ideal, consume art, and adorn creation as a half-realized concept; keeping in mind that no product of creation can or will exist in its most opulent or idealized form forever. Additionally, within a culture that both appropriates and consumes the aesthetic and moral principles of it’s would be counter. Mass media, as an example, serves us daily reminders of the realities of our modern day capacity for destruction, disruption, and decay. Through it, catastrophe and their sediments are made both palatable and distant, creating a cognitive distance as a kind of means of not looking, alienation, and disassociation. The question as to whether or not art object can both accurately describe reality and catalyze redemption, is one I put before Post-Opulence to answer, through the reclamation of destruction within the infrathin moments between a completely destructive process and its inherent aesthetic manifestation following. The contemporary ways of viewing of this progression/interaction with the perceived and ‘finalized’ art object, mirrors Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, in which reality itself is formed from an endless reproduction of the real. Moreover, Developing into a relationship of equivalence, indifference, to then the extinction of the original*. In short, the way in which mass production has shaped our way of viewing, has destroyed and altered the relationships we have with our own experienced reality. Additionally, it has created a perceived hierarchy of these two visual forms of completion and degradation into two opposing icons of status.

Post Opulence, Auto Destructive Art, and the DIAS

On the Destruction of Ideology to Contemporary Practice: Post-Opulence and Iconoclasm

If all that changes slowly may be explained by life, all that changes quickly is explained by fire. Fire is the ultra-living element. It is intimate and it is universal. - (PF/GB)

The instances of iconoclasm are best known and defined by the Byzantine and Protestant Reformation periods. Finding its strongest cultural association as being solely socio-religious in nature as being a polemic, rooted in the Greek word for ‘war’ polemos. Iconoclasts not only culturally transformed the previous idea that the universe consisted of many deities, but even as time transformed these newly installed institutions of monotheism, these powers would likewise find themselves a target of others against their icons. In this way, iconoclasm would better be described as a neutral conceptual construct that has evolved in relationship to the culture that creates the environment that breeds it. Reframing the negative associations of the destruction of Icon based on Byzantine era victors and influences, iconoclasm serves as both aesthetic strategy and political tool.

Auto-Destructive Art Manifesto Pamphlet, Gustav Metzger cir.1960

Installation view of ‘White Man On A Pedestal’ at Pioneer Works, 2017

Chapter III Post Opulence & Its Functions Related to Practices of Destruction

Conclusion and Assertion An Intention in the Contemporary

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fifthimageart · 5 years

Text

WIP // Describing Icon and Reality (from thesis draft IX)

Let me first attempt to define what I consider an Icon to be. By definition, is it an image or idol as representative of something otherworldly. Moreover, an object or image used as an aid to devotion to these otherworldly beings. Secondly, it is defined separately as a representative symbol, or as being worth of veneration (dic)*. Even in this surface definition, there’s a redundancy in that in both cases an icon serves as nothing more than an access point to something we perceive as being greater than ourselves. May it be in a place of worship or in our pockets, we put our faith in these vehicles of reconciliation of our fluid individual definitions of reality.

In his piece The Denial of Death, the cultural anthropologist Ernst Becker poses that in the face of meditating on the significance of our impending demise, the human mind would be occupied by both anxiety and despair. Moreover, that we as humans need a buffer or antidote to this truth, by ways of adopting a greater urge to heroism and an application of significance to ones own existence. However, while certain imagine heroisms are inaccessible to most, we also find ways of seeking this notion in our daily routines (i.e. work, religion, politics, and/or relationships). This heroism is short lived, in that its destined for failure due to the fact that the cosmic significance of the individual person is nonexistent. Additionally, that because of this we subscribe to what is ultimately the illusion of permanent meaning. As religion, the once prominent means of establishing this illusion of greater individual significance, began to lose its hold as modernity began to supplement this ‘need’ by creating a cultural heroism that is defined by its respective culture. Its in the latter that we begin to see the rise of cultural heroes (or icons), and the creation of the heroic machine, in that the average individual can only hope to fold into the illusion of being a part of the greater heroic movement. Again, this machine being represented and directed by the culture in which it grows, through better or worse. It was also the belief that this cultural heroism, was the most actualized form of heroism that an individual could hope to achieve. There are rare instances, however, that Becked coined as being called Genuine heroism. In that there is a small population of people that do not require any form of heroism illusion to live, and can face the impossible situation of living that we find ourselves in

Applying such a context once again to this idea of icon, the Post-Opulent aim is to play the role of the institutional Anti-hero. In that while we accept that we are indeed subject to the individual limitations of the unconscious drives to cultural heroism, the objects and images in which we produce in this world, are rather made as fleeting offerings to the two facts of our current temporal finitude: existing life and existing death. Moreover, it is the thought that by redirecting the productions in this life, away from satiating the cultural beast in favor of starving it, can produce an era of something similar to that of genuine heroism.

The Broken Screen: Anti-Heroism & Reverence of the lost

(corruption of reality?)

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fifthimageart · 5 years

Text

Bloom & Decay Thesis Draft VII

Introduction

In writing on the Destruction of Art Symposium, which was a month-long symposium focused on the exhibition of destructive works that took place in 1966 London, Art historian Kristine Stiles describes Destruction in art as not being the same as destruction of art. Moreover, went on to write that the destruction in art addresses the negative aspects of both social and political institutions, and manifests as an attack on the traditional identity of the visual arts themselves. While these artists were responding to their overarching philosophies of destruction in the form of ephemeral art object and performance based works, there was never an established movement nor manifesto solidifying the practice. While the symposium itself was formulated by the artist Gustav Metzger, who coined the term ‘Auto-Destructive Art’ seven years prior, it would seem final meditations of both destruction and decay as being separate from any particular cannon following the month-long event would end there.

Embracing the passing of time and it’s inherent destructive nature, as now memories and their icons are left to decay and new found freedom to transform & bloom into the unrecognizable, Post-Opulence aims to reveal the contemporary mimesis of permanence as nothing more than shadowy reflections of a luxurious modern projection of both the ideal and iconic state. In practice, it creates deep afflictions and inaccessibility to a conventional aesthetic, through variable acts of destruction toward the art object. Post-Opulence highlights power invested in a sought idealized form, to then create struggle over the former realized art object through its breaking, burning, and eventual revelation of new form. Additionally, Post-Opulence makes reference to both actions and signals of changed circumstance & time, as all eventually fades again into nothingness. Chaos, just as with peace, are the described primordial uncarved blocks (FR)* of the multiple realities of the physical, spiritual, and ideological. Taking control, and shaping the narrated lives of both gods and the individual instances of humankind alike, chaos is its own independent force manifested before all others. The poet Paul Eluard states ‘I must not look on reality as being like myself’*, but how is this so? In regard to what starts as an observed object of interest, the reasons in which we look upon it reveals more about our internal selves, as well as the relationships we have with these internal moments that take shape below the surface of the skin. However, initial impressions are arguably narrowed perceptions of a truth born of an impure examination. The Post Opulent are the neo-agents of Chaos, bringing about a lux et voluptas to both the totalitarian regimes of problematic art institutions, and the worship of commodity through the icons they create.

It is important to note the way in which visual communication has evolved since the birth of the image, and how visual communication and culture were key in terms of survival and production of both community and culture since the Upper Paleolithic. However, how have we progressed in regard to the way in which we in a broken capitalist culture, invest in the ideals of the ideal, consume art, and adorn creation as a half-realized concept; keeping in mind that no product of creation can or will exist in its most opulent or idealized form forever. Additionally, within a culture that both appropriates and consumes the aesthetic and moral principles of it’s would be counter. Mass media, as an example, serves us daily reminders of the realities of our modern day capacity for destruction, disruption, and decay. Through it, catastrophe and their sediments are made both palatable and distant, creating a cognitive distance as a kind of means of not looking, alienation, and disassociation. The question as to whether or not art object can both accurately describe reality and catalyze redemption, is one I put before Post-Opulence to answer, through the reclamation of destruction within the infrathin moments between a completely destructive process and inherent aesthetic manifestation. The contemporary ways of viewing of this progression/interaction with the perceived and ‘finalized’ art object, mirrors Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, in which reality itself is formed from an endless reproduction of the real. Moreover, Developing into a relationship of equivalence, indifference, to then the extinction of the original*. In short, the way in which mass production has shaped our way of viewing, has destroyed and altered the relationships we have with our own experienced reality. Additionally, it has created a perceived hierarchy of these two visual forms of completion and degradation into two opposing icons of status.

In our own western cannon, following the end of World War II, iconoclasm via the abstract form (i.e. Tachisme and Abstract Expressionism) became the predominant means of cultural expression within a mass episode of cultural forgetting within the western world, in that there were no means of both accurately confronting and aestheticizing the horrors of the post-war world that remained grounded in both it’s reality and truth. In the destruction of recognizable imagery, In favor of the abstract form, reality was even further removed and that unpleasantness successfully buried. This brings to question the role of the Icon in relationship to our visual memory, and how the representation of our realities are chosen, with history and its sediments being presented to us as abstract entities that reject the creation of concrete memory and experience. As the physical presence of Icons manifest, transform, and are replaced over time, truth and origin destroyed as they are given new rendering and context.

This being said, the visual experience should not be reinforced to seek the supplementation of images and icons, but rather embrace the decay of them as concrete evidences of what was. In addition, carry the sediments of said decay into new forms of linear narrative. While representation is inherently untruthful as an imitation of reality, Modernist ideology called for the delusion of it and is thus much more dangerous. Where the physicality of the made form is a manifestation of tangible truth, paintings manipulate the texture of the mind. To quote Harold Rosenberg, “Art as action rests on the enormous assumption that the artist accepts as real only that which he is in the process of creating”. In what could’ve been unknowingly hinted by him at the time, was the potential for narcissism in self-referential types of art that creates a volatile iconization of itself in the form of artistic commodity.

‘What is needed is not a definition of meaningful imagery but the development of our perceptive potentialities to accept and utilize the continual enrichment of visual material.’ - Richard Hamilton (Group 2: Richard hamilton, John McHale and John Voelcker), ‘Are they Cultured?’, in This is Tomorrow, ed Theo Crosby, Whitechapel Art Gallery/Whitefriars Press, London, 1956, unpaginated*

Where Auto-Destructive Art and Post-Opulence split, is the intention in the embodiment of a specific set of ethical and political ideals. Where the theory of Auto-Destructive Art was an attack on the capitalist art market through an art lacking material form, Post-Opulence is rather a rejection of the idealized state of material form, as well as an attack on the notions of iconization through similarly problematic traditional gallery systems. Additionally, there are three key notions within the manifestos of auto-destructive art that I recognize as being problematic. First, aside from acknowledged relationships to Dada, Auto-Destructive Art lacked a being a complete theory to the extent that reproduction of the first manifesto in the second edition was needed as a ploy in which to validate the movement. In contrast, Post-Opulence takes into account the conceptual history of the destructive process/destruction of object outside of the narrowed scope of any particular contemporary practice of the western canon. Secondly, in the second manifesto it is the stated intention of Auto-Destructive Art to reflect the power ‘man’ has over natures being. Within Post-Opulence, the relationship between maker and these natural and chaotic forces is innately symbiotic. Lastly, the work of Auto-Destructive Art began to be defined by its political motivation, and thus created icon and symbolic metaphor. These, being the conceptual and ideological frameworks that Post-Opulence aims to destroy & transcend.

Chapter I

Post Opulence, Auto Destructive Art, and the DIAS

Chapter II

On the Destruction of Ideology to Contemporary Practice: Post-Opulence and Iconoclasm

If all that changes slowly may be explained by life, all that changes quickly is explained by fire. Fire is the ultra-living element. It is intimate and it is universal. - (PF/GB)

Icon and sacred object have always served as powerful means of instilling pillars of power. While we may think of the word icon in soley western terms, such as digital representation of files or in relationship to objects of Christianity, this use of object or image as vessel to areas beyond our conceptual understanding is a cross cultural phenomenon that has spanned throughout time. From the objects of polytheism and pagan era deity worship, to contemporary vessels such as photographs that capture and represent memory, all can fall within the theoretical principle of the ‘Mimesis’. This, being the concept that all artistic expression and creation are nothing more than a re-representation and imitation of nature. In this sense, the destroyer and iconoclast, inadvertently has a specific aesthetic sensibility and potential to create an even greater work that nearly captures our truer reality than the object that was set out to be destroyed. Aesthetically and socially speaking, we now exist in a time where iconoclasm thus can be argued to present itself as an evidence of progressive victory over historically problematic institutions.

The instances of iconoclasm are best known and defined by the Byzantine and Protestant Reformation periods. Finding its strongest cultural association as being solely socio-religious in nature as being a polemic, rooted in the Greek word for ‘war’ polemos. Iconoclasts not only culturally transformed the previous idea that the universe consisted of many deities, but even as time transformed these newly installed institutions of monotheism, these powers would likewise find themselves a target of others against their icons. In this way, iconoclasm would better be described as a neutral conceptual construct that has evolved in relationship to the culture that creates the environment that breeds it. Reframing the negative associations of the destruction of Icon based on Byzantine era victors and influences, iconoclasm serves as both aesthetic strategy and political tool.

The legitimacy of the destruction of the icon has found both evolution and intersection within whole practices of sociopolitical life and contemporary aesthetics. The French Revolution, being one way that iconoclasm found its most drastic shifts in narrative. Following the period in which it was defined by a religious targets, French revolutionaries destroyed artworks and portraits of the wealthy, as these symbolized the luxury, vanity, and opulence of the aristocracy. However, as the social valuation of art itself began to grow, these revolutionaries evolved once more this concept of iconoclasm, and created new techniques to destroy and transform symbolic meaning. This being done by means of renaming, rededication, and removals from sites where display and interpretation can be institutionally controlled. Hugo Ball, a key theorist and practitioner of the Dadaists in Zurich, took this concept of reframing in the realm of iconoclasm by motivating the movement though complex thinking on language, philosophy, theology, mysticism, history, and politics. Not only did the views of Dada contractic Christian mysticism, but makes case of the Church as an ‘Outdated, hierarchical repository of power. Dada was at an intersection between iconoclasm, anarchism, and aesthetic experience. Moreover, viewed the iconoclastic movements as being a singular mold of both religious and secular, although its participants would claim one or the other. While the use of the term iconoclasm in Balls essays were in relationship to a historical ‘Bildersturm’, it was treated as an important means of force in political conflicts that continued to resonate into the twentieth century.

Auto-Destructive Art Manifesto Pamphlet, Gustav Metzger cir.1960

Installation view of ‘White Man On A Pedestal’ at Pioneer Works, 2017

Chapter III Post Opulence & Its Functions Related Practices of Destruction

Conclusion and Assertion An Intention in the Contemporary

#Post Opulence

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fifthimageart · 5 years

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Bloom & Decay Thesis Draft IV

Bloom & Decay: Beyond Opulence

By John James Hartford V

San Francisco Art Institute

Submitted Thesis for MA 2020

Abstract:

This thesis is an examination of the term, Post-Opulence. Its practice and theoretical framework is an attempt to, find its origins where Auto-Destructive Art ends, explores characteristics of the making process and the context in which art object is created to then be destroyed. However, Post-Opulence is not as example of annihilation, but rather one of redemption. Gustav Metzger, having been the one to conceive Auto-Destructive Art in 1959, viewed the world and contemporary art institution sites of both privilege and harbingers of their own deterioration, both physically and theoretically via growing industrialization and weaponization. Lastly, this thesis project will offer examples in which Post-Opulence address such issues in our contemporary, while encompassing the practical and philosophical means of producing new intersectional experience with what remains following the inevitably decayed state of its icons.

Key Words: Destruction, Transformation, Icon, Iconoclasm, Memory, Aesthetics

Methodologies

A number of primary and secondary sources will be reviewed and cited in the creation of this thesis. These include published works of various destructive practices, implemented in both the western and eastern cannons/cultures, while also looking toward the conceptual frameworks which would then surround the transformed subject.

My methods of research would also include the collecting of museum archives and conservation records of The Africa Centre, Serpentine Galleries (both sites of exhibition for Auto-Destructive Art), and direct interviews with practitioners of the various methodologies/schools of thought surrounding the conceptual framework of destruction as its own entity with corresponding history.

Introduction

Embracing the passing of time and it’s inherent destructive nature, as now memories and their icons are left to decay and new found freedom to transform & bloom into the unrecognizable, Post-Opulence aims to reveal the contemporary mimesis of permanence as nothing more than shadowy reflections of a luxurious modern projection of both the ideal and iconic state. In practice, it creates deep afflictions and inaccessibility to a conventional aesthetic, through variable acts of destruction toward the art object. Post-Opulence highlights power invested in a sought idealized form, to then create struggle over the former realized art object through its breaking, burning, and eventual revelation of new bloom. Additionally, Post-Opulence makes reference to both actions and signals of changed circumstance & time, as all eventually fades again into nothingness. Chaos, just as with peace, are the described primordial uncarved blocks* of the multiple realities of the physical, spiritual, and ideological. Taking control, and shaping the narrated lives of both gods and individual instances of humankind alike, chaos is its own independent force manifested before all others. The poet Paul Eluard states ‘I must not look on reality as being like myself’*, but how is this so? In regard to what starts as an observed object of interest, the reasons in which we look upon it reveals more about our internal selves as well as the relationships these internal moments shape beyond the surface of the skin. However, initial impressions are narrowed perceptions of a truth born of an impure examination. The Post Opulent are the neo agents and disciples of Chaos, bringing about a lux et voluptas to both the totalitarian regimes of the art institution, and the worship of commodity through the icons they create.

It is important to note the way in which visual communication has evolved since the birth of the image, and how visual communication and culture were key in terms of survival and production of both community and culture since the Upper Paleolithic. However, where have we progressed in regard to the way in which we in a broken capitalist culture, invest in the ideals of the ideal, consume art, and adorn creation as a half-realized concept; In that no product of creation can or will exist in its most opulent or idealized form forever. Additionally, all this within a contemporary culture that both appropriates and consumes the aesthetic and moral principles of it’s would be counter in destructive aesthetics, as mass media serves us daily reminders of the realities of our modern day capacity for destruction, disruption, and decay. By such means, catastrophe and their sediments are made both palatable and distant, creating a cognitive distance as a kind of means of not looking, alienation, and disassociation. The question as to whether or not art object can both accurately describe reality and catalyze redemption, is one I put before Post-Opulence to answer, through the reclamation of destruction within the infrathin moments between process and aesthetic manifestation.

The contemporary ways of viewing of this progression/interaction with the perceived and ‘finalized’ art object, mirrors Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, in which reality itself is formed from an endless reproduction of the real. Moreover, Developing into a relationship of equivalence, indifference, to then the extinction of the original. In short, the way in which mass production has shaped our way of viewing, has destroyed and/or altered the relationships we have with our own experienced reality. Additionally, it has created a perceived hierarchy of these two visual forms of completion and degradation into two opposing icons of status.

In our own western cannon, following the end of World War II, iconoclasm via the abstract form (i.e. Tachisme and Abstract Expressionism) became the predominant means of cultural expression within a mass episode of cultural forgetting within the western world, in that there were no means of both accurately confronting and aestheticizing the horrors of the post-war world that remained grounded in both it’s reality and truth. In the destruction of recognizable imagery In favor of the abstract form, reality was even further removed and that unpleasantness successfully buried. This brings to question the role of the Icon in relationship to our visual memory, and how the representation of our realities are chosen, with history and its sediments being presented to us as abstract entities that reject the creation of concrete memory and experience. As the physical presence of Icons manifest, transform, and are replaced over time, truth and origin destroyed as they are given new rendering and context.

(Memory Research/Writing)

In terms of the destroyed icon/object, questions in regard to a distant history should be contextualized again as a sense of excitement of mysteries to be solved, as well as answers to be found. As acts of destruction are not registered in the same way of those of traditional (commercial) production, Iconoclasm stems from the situational and the variable, where there is no belief in proscribed image. Take for example some earlier burial practices of Mayan sculpture, and the way in which people would continue to engage with sculptures after they were both made and broken by foreign forces. As attackers would destroy them as a means of attacking ideology though the breaking of icon, the community would then salvage and reclaim what remained to use as building material for new offerings, structures, or other sculptures.

This being said, the visual experience should not be reinforced to seek the supplementation of images and icons, but rather embrace the decay of them as concrete evidences of what was and carry the sediments of said decay into new forms of linear narrative. While representation is inherently untruthful as an imitation of reality, Modernist ideology called for the delusion of it and is thus much more dangerous. Where the physicality of the made form is a manifestation of tangible truth, paintings color the texture of the mind. To quote Harold Rosenberg, “Art as action rests on the enormous assumption that the artist accepts as real only that which he is in the process of creating”. In what could’ve been unknowingly hinted by him at the time, was the potential for narcissism in self-referential types of art that creates a volatile iconization of itself in the form of artistic commodity.

Where Auto-Destructive Art and Post-Opulence splits, is the intention in the embodiment of a specific set of ethical and political ideals. Where the theory of Auto-Destructive Art was an attack on the capitalist art market through an art lacking material form, Post-Opulence is rather a rejection of the idealized state of material form, as well as an attack on the notions of iconization through similarly problematic traditional gallery systems. Additionally, there are three key notions within the manifestos of auto-destructive art that I recognize as being problematic. First, aside from acknowledged roots in Dada, Auto-Destructive Art lacked a being a complete theory to the extent that reproduction of the first manifesto in the second edition was needed as a ploy in which to validate the movement. In contrast, Post-Opulence takes into account the conceptual history of the destructive process/destruction of object outside of the narrowed scope of any contemporary practice and the singular western canon as a whole. Secondly, in the second manifesto it is the stated intention of Auto-Destructive Art to reflect the power ‘man’ has over natures being. Within Post-Opulence, the relationship between maker and these natural and chaotic forces is innately symbiotic. Lastly, the work of Auto-Destructive Art began to be defined by its political motivation, and thus created icon and symbolic metaphor. These, being the conceptual and ideological frameworks that Post-Opulence aims to destroy & transcend. *Expand

Chapter I

Post Opulence, Auto Destructive Art, and the DIAS

Metzger viewed people as being vessels of the unresolved and suppressed aggressions against ourselves and the greater society. Moreover. That our predisposition toward destruction served as a threat to the continuation of the illusion of balance and control. It is for this reason that he rationalized that due to this conflicting unconscious allure, that art celebrating this pleasure would be quickly rejected.

Chapter II

On the Destruction of Ideology to Contemporary Practice: Post-Opulence and Iconoclasm

If all that changes slowly may be explained by life, all that changes quickly is explained by fire. Fire is the ultra-living element. It is intimate and it is universal. - (PF/GB)

Repeatedly in the essay of Aesthetics, Hegel describes the making process of one being equally destructive as well as simultaneously creative - In the example of the melting pot and the witches brew*(IdealismandIcon) where:

‘A forge in which “everything murky, natural, impure, foreign, and exorbitant” is consumed in the purifying fire of the “deeper spirit.”22** The fire strips away what is “formless, symbolic, unbeautiful, and misshapen”—the nocturnal phantasmagoria of the animal, the irrational, the non-Western, the pre-human, the nonhuman—just as it draws into relief [her- ausheben] the spiritual identity of human and divine.23** “congealed light”24** is both the residue and the exemplary manifestation of this fire (the product presents the perfect image of its own process of production) —an anticipatory image of enlightenment caught in frozen stone.*(IdealismandIcon)’

The instances of iconoclasm are best known and defined by the Byzantine and Protestant Reformation periods. Finding its strongest cultural association as being solely socio-religious in nature as being a polemic, rooted in the Greek word for ‘war’ polemos. Iconoclasts not only culturally transformed the previous idea that the universe consisted of many deities, but even as time transformed these newly installed institutions of monotheism, they would likewise find itself a target of those against their icons. In this way, iconoclasm would better be described as a neutral conceptual construct that has evolved in relationship to the culture that creates the environment that breeds it. Reframing the negative associations of the destruction of Icon based on Byzantine era victors and influences, iconoclasm serves as both aesthetic strategy and political tool*(The New Iconoclasm).

The legitimacy of the destruction of the icon has found both evolution and intersection within whole practices of sociopolitical life and contemporary aesthetics. The French Revolution is one way that iconoclasm found its most drastic shifts in narrative. Following the period in which it was defined by a religious targets, French revolutionaries destroyed artworks and portraits of the wealthy, as these symbolized the luxury, vanity, and opulence of the aristocracy. However, as the valuation of art itself began to grow, these revolutionaries evolved once more this concept of iconoclasm, and created new techniques to destroy and transform symbolic meaning. This being done by means of renaming, rededication, and removals from sites where display and interpretation can be controlled. Hugo Ball, a key theorist and practitioner of the Dadaists in Zurich, took this concept of reframing in the realm of iconoclasm by motivating the movement though complex thinking on language, philosophy, theology, mysticism, history, and politics*(DADA). Not only did the views of Dada contractic Christian mysticism, but makes case of the Church as an ‘Outdated, hierarchical repository of power *(DADA). Dada was at an intersection between iconoclasm, anarchism, and aesthetic experience. Moreover, viewed the iconoclastic movements as being a singular mold of both religious and secular, although its participants would claim one or the other. While the use of the term iconoclasm in Balls essays were in relationship to a historical ‘Bildersturm’ *(DADA), it was treated as an important means of force in political conflicts that continued to resonate into the twentieth century.

However, following the two World Wars, in response to the treatment of architecture and what was deemed ‘degenerate art’ by the Nazi party, physical destruction of art for political reasons became socially impermissible * (Destruction of Art-Oxford). While Art has found itself better protected and culturally valued, the aesthetic use of the destroyed image and reclamation of meaning has once more found its way at the dawn of modernism.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, modernism provided the western world with a means of dealing with the traumas of war and its disasters. Anselm Kiefers work, as an example, conceptualized at as not only a means of exhuming memory, but as a means of confronting it and its emotional resonance as well*(IcasCa). Despite the recreations of iconic and monumental forms to serve as allegory reconciling his personal lineage, having been born in 1945 germany as the country was attempting to reform their previous identity, Kiefers work is conceptually materialized with the aim of reconciliation in a period of dismantlement between both Living and Prosthetic Memory in postwar Germany. The first being memory linked to the lived experience of an individual, and the second being memories that are circulated in the public, yet experienced with one’s own body forming an experiential relationship.

Auto-Destructive Art Manifesto Pamphlet, Gustav Metzger cir.1960

Eventually Clement Greenberg, a prominent art critic of the mid-twentieth century and during so championed abstract expressionism, also adopted a new iconoclastic ideology. Where his rejection to representation was not due to a personal dislike of the narrative image, but rather out of necessity as aesthetic progress called for it*(Ideology and Iconoclasm). Here, iconoclasm has found itself transforming into a tool of progress and creation of a linear narrative, rather than solely as a tool of regression and destruction. The concepts and aesthetics of the artistic field grew in relationship with the post war period which today are still taught as fundamental knowledge. However, Abstract Expressionism removed a necessary conflict between ‘Advanced Art’ and the dominant culture*(The AofAA), in that it kept alive the social and political norms of the west, and thus became an icon in both its material reality and lack of image.

Modernism left open the questions surrounding whom truly carries the authority over the conventions of art, and its institutional value. However, in the lack of challenging the dominant American culture at the time, it would seem the case that those contemporary institutional powers (Which were problematic and white-male dominant) would in fact be the answer. To that point, and the institutionalization of Art itself in the development of higher conceptual frameworks belonging to those who can access it, has transformed Art into a vessel of a flawed social order. In recent years however, we have seen a progression toward the dismantling of this flawed modernity in both iconoclastic aesthetics and social interventions. As an example, following the events of Charlottesville, there was a wave of stated illegal and legal instances of iconoclasm of Confederate monuments in Durham, North Carolina, and Baltimore, Maryland *(Monument1). While the subject is still one between proposed heritage and social progress, iconoclasm now manifests as an aesthetic tool that still makes the propositions of progress, however through actual physical instances and evidences of destruction.

During the same year as this Iconoclastic wave, Contemporary Artists Doreen Garner and Kenya (Robinson) were the two-person exhibition White Man On A Pedestal (WMOAP) opened at Pioneer Works in 2017:

Installation view of ‘White Man On A Pedestal’ at Pioneer Works, 2017

Installation view of ‘White Man On A Pedestal’ at Pioneer Works, 2017 Iconoclasm has served as a subtle force of change, beyond the conventional ideas passed down history as simple brutality. The questions remain open in the aesthetic exploration of the destruction in art, vs. the destruction of art. Moreover, continue to question aesthetic iconoclasm as being as a matter of politics, art, and/or their areas of intersection in relationship to the social body.

Chapter III Post Opulence & Its Functions Related Practices of Destruction

The question of space begets a number of alternative intention and action in relationship to Post-Opulence. In terms of the art object, having been manifested in the studio, typically falls prey to the very goal in which it is institutionally groomed to aspire to. The first rejection of the traditional space, is of the neutral wall’s innate foreshadowing of the morbid display of the stinted and mummified. There’s something interesting about the ways in which both new (or rather transformed) object and form, inadvertently manifest from the functional object left to the mercy of both time and the space. Looking at city streets and various attempts at a particular idealized design or outcome, Metzger would argue that we are existing in a space created of our own filth. Subtle vibrations that erode and split concrete, progressions fated to obsoletion, Institutions that conform us to a deformed and self-destroying society of development, are all things present in the more open minds of the day (GMB*). However, working through the rot, there are moments in which de/composition is inherently born as foundational aesthetics, though perceived as negative moments of degradation & incompletion. It’s in these moments of viewing through the scope of Post-Opulence, where we can become radically shifted from simple viewed sites of decay, into sites of aesthetic reclamation

Thus the construction site wall becomes a completely autonomous, and more importantly anonymous, social practice of creation through destruction of an original idealized state. Moreover, in the unintentional care of the graffitied and clearly long-since weathered billboard.

In these moments, seemingly about nothing, are sediments of our own daily rituals over time. Moreover, are an example of the ways in which we engage with what is left. Post-Opulence meditates on comprehensive aesthetic systems, and refers back to the fundamentals of both the physical and metaphysical in acknowledgement of absolute reality that all things are in a state of decay, to eventually fade and thus become nothingness. Moreover, that it’s from that nothingness that revelations of the infinite potential for new and transformed aesthetic experience of the real is only then possible. As we view decay as being dark, morbid, spoiled, or fleeting, it is an equal element in an interlocked relationship to the perception of bloom as being lighter and louder in terms of having the idealized texture of vitality.This, being an allegory for the treatment of the art object, space, and contemporary icon, as we operate in a means in which to preserve longevity and a holding onto the opulent form.

Conclusion and Assertion An Intention in the Contemporary

Post-Opulence is the individuals expression of ecstasy through pain, creation through destruction, bloom though decay. What has been explored in this document, is the way in which one particular existence has found truth in a world of the ignored decay that surrounds us. While this is no new thought responding to Metzger, the Post-Opulent existence is one that presents itself as the fire that brings forth the next harvest and revelation with it.

Annotated Bibliography

Stiles, Kristine (1987).The Act: Performance Art.Synopsis of the Destruction in Art symposium, Vol 1/No.2, 22–31. https://monoskop.org/images/c/c9/Stiles_Kristine_1987_Synopsis_of_the_Destruction_in_Art_Symposium_and_Its_Theoretical_Significance.pdf

Munson, M. M. (2017). Iconoclasm as Catharsis: Anselm Kiefer and the Seeds of Memory. International Journal of Arts Theory & History, 12(2), 27–39. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asu&AN=129509648&site=ehost-live

Benitez, J. M. (2012). Ideology and Iconoclasm: The Image in Mid-twentieth-century American Art Criticism. International Journal of the Image, 2(1), 37–46. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asu&AN=86933028&site=ehost-live

O’neil, megan e. 1,., reinders, eric3, brubaker, leslie4, clay, richard4, & boldrick, stacy4. (2014). the new iconoclasm. Material Religion, 10(3), 377–385. https://doi.org/10.2752/175183414X14101642921500

Samir, N. (2013). Iconoclasm: The loss of iconic image in art and visual communication. Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, 11(3), 335–341. https://doi.org/10.1386/tear.11.3.335pass:[_]1

Koerner, J. L. (2017). Afterword. Art History, 40(2), 450–455. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12314

Koren, K. (1994 & 2008). Wabi-sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers

Wilson, A. (2008). Gustav Metzger’s Auto-Destructive/Auto-Creative Art: An Art of Manifesto. 178-193. Recieved from http://www.tandf.uk/journals DOI:10.1080/09528820802012844

O’Reilly, E. E. O. ac. u., Miller, R., & Bodor, J. (2016). Curation, conservation, and the artist in Silent Explosion: Ivor Davies and Destruction in Art. Studies in Conservation, 61, 167–173. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393630.2016.1188250

Lambourne, N. (1999). Production versus destruction: art, World War I and art history. Art History, 22(3), 347–363. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.00161

WHITE, D. (2013). Art After the Destruction of Experience. Millennium Film Journal, (57), 32–45. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asu&AN=94638249&site=ehost-live

Hughes, J. (2002). Destroy & reclaim: artists and disaster sites. New Art Examiner, 29(5), 66–73. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asu&AN=505026126&site=ehost-live

Irga, C. (1998). Imagery of destruction and reconstruction: Giuseppe de Nittis’ forthright approach to post-commune Paris. Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, 67(3), 157–173. https: //doi.org/10.1080/00233609808604459

Yap, C.-C. (2010). A History of Violence. ArtAsiaPacific, (71), 68. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asu&AN=505370246&site=ehost-live

Stiles, K. (2005).The story of the Destruction in Art Symposium and the “DIAS affect”, (41-65). Retrieved from https://web.duke.edu/art/stiles/KristineStilesDIAS_Affect-2.pdf

#Post Opulence

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fifthimageart · 5 years

Text

Thesis Introduction/Chapter I - Draft II

Bloom & Decay:Beyond Opulence aka.Toward a Fetish for Destruction

----

Introduction

In writing on the Destruction of Art Symposium, which was a month-long symposium focused on the exhibition of destructive works that took place in 1966 London, Kristine Stiles describes Destruction in art as not being the same as destruction of art. Moreover, went on to write that the destruction in art addresses the negative aspects of both social and political institutions, and manifests as an attack on the traditional identity of the visual arts themselves (ks). While these artists were responding to their overarching philosophies of destruction in the form of ephemeral art object and performance based works, there never was an established movement nor manifesto solidifying the practice. While the symposium itself was formulated by the artist Gustav Metzger, who coined the term ‘Auto-Destructive Art’ seven years prior, it would seem final meditations of both destruction and decay as being separate from any particular cannon following the month-long event would end there.

Embracing the passing of time and it’s inherent destructive nature, as now memories and their icons are left to decay and new found freedom to bloom into the unrecognizable, Post-Opulence aims to reveal the contemporary mimesis of permanence as nothing more than shadowy reflections of a luxurious modern projection of both the ideal and iconic state. In practice, it creates deep afflictions and inaccessibility to a conventional aesthetic, through variable acts of destruction toward the art object. Post-Opulence highlights power invested in a sought idealized form, to then create struggle over the former iconic object through its breaking, burning, and eventual revelation of new bloom. Additionally, makes reference to both actions and signals of changed circumstance & time, as all eventually fades again into nothingness.

It is important to note the way in which visual communication has evolved since the birth of the image, and how visual communication and culture were key in terms of survival and production of both community and culture since the Upper Paleolithic. However, where have we progressed in regard to the way in which we in a broken capitalist culture, invest in the ideals of the ideal, consume art, and adorn creation as a half-realized concept. Additionally, within a culture that both appropriates and consumes the aesthetic and moral principles of it’s would be counter. I equivocate our contemporary ways viewing of this progression/interactions with the art object much like Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality*, in which reality itself is formed from an endless reproduction of the real. Moreover, Developing into a relationship of equivalence, indifference, to then the extinction of the ‘original’. In short, the way in which mass production has shaped our way of viewing, has destroyed and/or altered the relationships we have with our own experienced reality. Additionally, has created a perceived hierarchy of these two visual forms of completion and degradation into two opposing icons of ‘status’. (I,IV)

In our own western cannon, following the end of World War II, iconoclasm via the abstract form became the predominant means of cultural expression within a mass episode of cultural forgetting within the western world, in that there were no means of both accurately confronting and aestheticizing the horrors of the post-war world that remained grounded in it’s reality and truth. In the destruction of recognizable imagery In favor of the abstract form, reality was even further removed and that unpleasantness successfully buried. This brings to question the role of the Icon in relationship to our visual memory, and how the representation of our realities are chosen, with history and its sediments being presented to us as abstract entities that reject the creation of concrete memory. As the physical presence of Icons manifest, transform, and are replaced over time, truth and origin destroyed as they are given new rendering and context. In terms of the destroyed icon/object, questions in regard to a distant history should be contextualized again as a sense of excitement of mysteries to be solved, as well as answers to be found. As acts of destruction are not registered in the same way of those of traditional (commercial) production, Iconoclasm stems from the situational and the variable, where there is no belief in proscribed image. Take for example the earlier burial practices of Mayan sculpture*, when people would continue to engage with sculptures after they were both made and broken by foreign forces. As attackers would destroy them as a means of attacking ideology though the breaking of icon, the community would then salvage and reclaim what remained to use as building material for new offerings, structures, or other sculptures. (I,I) (I,III)

The visual experience should not be reinforced to seek the supplementation of images and icons, but rather embrace the decay of them as concrete evidences of what was. Moreover, carry the sediments of said decay into new forms of linear narrative. While representation is inherently untruthful as an imitation of reality, Modernist ideology called for the delusion of it and is thus much more dangerous. Where the physicality of the made form is a manifestation of tangible truth, Paintings color the texture of the mind. To quote Harold Rosenberg, “Art as action rests on the enormous assumption that the artist accepts as real only that which he is in the process of creating*”. In what could’ve been unknowingly hinted by him at the time, was the potential for narcissism in self-referential types of art that creates a volatile iconization of itself. (I,II)

Referring back to to Auto-Destructive Art, it found manifestation (or lack thereof) not only in the physical practice of destroying works, but also by means of the manifesto/lecture format. Much like Post-Opulence, acting somewhat beyond a means of a self-authoritative artistic practice, Auto-Destructive Art worked as a synthesis of the aesthetic values of destruction, and the performative aspects of public/collective engagement. Specifically to Post-Opulence, the lecture/manifesto takes form in events which I’ve come to call ‘burnings’, in which art is taken, completely burned, and the remains both distributed and left to their next incarnation. The burnings have manifested as a social form of catharsis and community building, with the focal point being this intention and draw to a process of destruction. Here, Post-Opulence begins to integrate the art and social practice, into a celebration of the post-apocalyptic and aestheticization of the decaying form. ‘What is needed is not a definition of meaningful imagery but the development of our perceptive potentialities to accept and utilize the continual enrichment of visual material.’ - Richard Hamilton (Group 2: Richard hamilton, John McHale and John Voelcker), ‘Are they Cultured?’, in This is Tomorrow, ed Theo Crosby, Whitechapel Art Gallery/Whitefriars Press, London, 1956, unpaginated* Where Auto-Destructive Art and Post-Opulence splits, is the intention in the embodiment of a specific set of ethical and political ideals. Where the theory of Auto-Destructive Art was an attack on the capitalist art market through an art lacking material form, Post-Opulence is rather a rejection of the idealized state of material form, as well as an attack on the notions of iconization through similarly problematic traditional gallery systems. Additionally, there are three key notions within the manifestos of auto-destructive art that I recognize as being problematic. First, Auto-Destructive Art lacked any type of grounded history, to the extent that reproduction of the first manifesto in the second edition was used as a ploy in which to validate the movement. In contrast, Post-Opulence takes into account the conceptual history of the destructive process/destruction of object outside of the narrowed scope of any contemporary practice and the singular western canon as a whole. Secondly, in the second manifesto it is the stated intention of Auto-Destructive Art to reflect the power ‘man’ has over nature. Within Post-Opulence, the relationship between maker and these natural and chaotic forces is innately symbiotic. Lastly, the work of Auto-Destructive Art began to be defined by its political motivation, and thus created icon and symbolic metaphor. These, being the conceptual and ideological frameworks that Post-Opulence aims to destroy & transcend. (II,I) *Expand

Chapter I: Root/Relevant Philosophies and Theories - Post Opulence

There’s something interesting about the ways in which both new (or rather transformed) object and form, inadvertently manifest from the functional object left to the mercy of both time and the space. Looking at city streets and various attempts at a particular idealized design or outcome, there are moments in which de/composition is inherently born, though perceived as negative moments of degradation & incompletion. In terms of Post-Opulence, what if the ways of viewing such things were radically shifted? For example, through the scope of Post-Opulence, the construction site wall becomes a completely autonomous, and more importantly anonymous, social practice of creation through destruction of an original idealized state. Moreover, the unintentional care of the graffitied and clearly long-since weathered billboard.

(Not Pictured)

These moments, seemingly about nothing, are sediments of our own daily rituals over time. Moreover, are an example of the ways in which we engage with what is left.

Post-Opulence meditates on comprehensive aesthetic systems, and refers back to the fundamentals of both the physical and metaphysical in acknowledgement of absolute reality that all things are in a state of decay, to eventually fade and thus become nothingness. Moreover, that it’s from that nothingness that revelations of the infinite potential for new and transformed aesthetic experience of the real is only then possible. As we view decay as being dark, morbid, spoiled, or fleeting, it is an equal element in an interlocked relationship to the perception of bloom as being lighter and louder in terms of having the idealized texture of vitality.This, being an allegory for the treatment of the art object, space, and contemporary icon, as we operate in a means in which to preserve longevity and a holding onto the opulent form.

#Post Opulence

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