Have We Lost the Art of Vision?
I mean deep, thoughtful contemplation. This can apply to anything, but the question becomes especially acute when it comes to art. The problem is whether we have come beholden to too many recommendations and that we become hypnotized by the words of others, such as what we find in audioguides.
Or even chat-sites, podcasts and blogs!
Has our attention-deficit economy robbed us of the skill of looking? Do we grow impatient when we look (or read) at something, and we cannot ‘get’ it in under a few seconds: click, scroll, until something else affords that instant gratification.
In the 1960s, the Minimalists' mantra was that the average time spent looking at a work of art is under three seconds. Over fifty years later, it may be that that statistic has narrowed even more. Although this measurement escapes exact control, you may turn to yourself in the first analysis. Most if not all of us are guilty to some extent.
In the 1990s, there was the fad of ‘slow food’ as an antidote to ‘fast food’. This was food cooked at home and savoured with friends and loved ones over conversation and wine. Are books over 200 pages only for the die-hards? What are the fruits of deep and engrossed contemplation of a beautiful or intriguing object such as a work of art?
Do we rely too much on what we are told about a work of art at the expense of looking, looking when it takes on the form of a concerted physical act—looking as a form of communion with the whatever is looked at?
Are we too obsessed with the ‘top tens’, and to what extent do museums nourish cultural myopia?
The entrepreneur Naval Pavikant explains that he spends an hour every day in silent contemplation. He says that this, his form of meditation, gives him a broader perspective in his everyday dealings and a more nuanced approach to the world.
Similarly, we may wish to think more closely about how we might benefit from a deep, long, and intense acts of looking, in what it will confer not only on our understanding of the work of art but most importantly, on ourselves.
An Anecdote About Looking at One of the World’s Greatest Works of Art
A few years back, I made a pilgrimage to see the altarpiece by Jan Van Eyck (1432) in St Bavo's cathedral in Ghent in Belgium. It is the most famous work of art in the city, so famous that it is known only as ‘The Ghent Altarpiece’. Numbered among the great treasures of Western art, it comes with a touristic mandate. No visit to the city is complete without it, and, like the Mona Lisa, people visit it for the sake of being able to say that they had.
The Ghent Altarpiece, or Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, completed in 1432 by Jan van Eyck, is considered the first great painting of the Renaissance — http://n.pr/3hOhYmR
It is one of those generic masterpieces interchangeable with its place whose value as a sign has to a greater or lesser extent eclipsed its intrinsic aesthetic merit, that is, if we can assume that the two criteria or merit and notoriety can be separated.
Since the work was housed within a church, I sighed with relief that my Euro-weary wallet would be spared another assault, since as a rule, art museums throughout Europe charge entry, which can be hefty of the exchange rate is not going your way.
I entered the old cathedral, always relishing their echoes, their coolness, and the smell of old stone. I thought I had found the altarpiece when I chanced upon something that I remembered it to be hanging within one of the adjoining chapels that subtended the rear of the central nave.
But it had a dull and even glow, which definitely wasn't paint. It was a large reproduction. It had the aesthetic effect of hearing a great piece of music played on a Fisher-Price keyboard.
Nor did the church give me that delicious feeling, even when you don't belong to any religion, of entering into a vale of silence. On either side of the main altar were two large speakers piping early Renaissance chant, a player and an amp nestled against one of the thick venerable columns.
The actual altarpiece was to be found off to the side, ensconced to the hard left of the entrance, but behind several partitions. The first was a guichet manned (sorry, personnel) by a young student who sat placidly reading a book.
Still reeling over the memory that I had to part with pounds to enter St Paul’s in London, my hapless wallet opened again with a weary groan. Gripping my ticket, I entered an enclosed chamber that emitted the feeling of what one imagined was something like a Victorian sideshow tent. In the darkened room, the altarpiece shone out like an epiphany.
Before I had any time to let this epiphany stir inside me, I was interrupted by a woman on my right if I wished to use an audioguide. She sat behind countless numbers of them, like a military sergeant in charge of the battle arsenal. As if to entice me, she advised me that they were included within the ticket price.
All this, to say the least, didn’t make me perky. I declined and tried to salvage my ‘true’ and ‘private’ response to the ‘real’ altarpiece that I had come expressly to see (oh, ah, the mandatory cynicism of the postmodern world!).
Although the room was not crowded, there was still a bit of jostling and bumping caused by the people who ad adhered the audioguides firmly to their ears, their senses torpid in attention to the gadget, their eyes beadily intense yet dead.
I made my peace with the audioguide a long time ago, and I have learned to suffer them with unruffled silence in the same way as I don’t let the imperative ‘Enjoy!’ proclaimed by a waiter in a restaurant when laying down a dish ruin my meal.
It was cold outside, a bleak, humid, arthritic cold, and I picked up one of the guides as an excuse to stay a little longer in the room. Inevitably, I thought, there is something to gain from these guides, and sometimes it is worth relaxing one’s standards.
C'mon said the little voice in my head, chill out, baby, and don't be an uptight elitist snob.
So I picked up one of those things, hoping that its previous patron hadn't suffered from the winter grippe. I pressed the first button and held the thing to my ear, after which I was assaulted again by an early Renaissance motet, the voices cracking, grating, and welling, pounding my ear with their distortions.
I grimaced and looked at my son, who, like any child, cries when he feels distressed or discomforted, and I suddenly wished I was free to do the same.
The music carried on for longer than was bearable, and long enough to make me feel that I was part of the soundtrack of a B-Grade Medieval mystery movie. I removed the piece from my ear for a few moments, like someone experiencing a berating over the phone, and after doing this a couple of times, I got the commentary. I was now waiting with a mixture of anticipation and dread.
Finally came the voice: a slow, deep bass tremolo purr that could make, if read out loud, a pizza menu sound like a literary epic.
He said that it was a great and mysterious work. Well, that's why I parted with five bucks to see it. It is rich in detail. I can see that. It is a work over several different panels. Right again.
On the upper level, it has a central figure (right on!) flanked by two figures on separate panels on either side (yup!). The central figure is the largest (uhuh), and he is clad in red (yay! I'm not colour-blind!); the figure on the right is dressed in green (yep, definitely not colour-blind!); the naked figures on the outer panels of a man on the left and woman on the right symbolise Adam and Eve (I’m no theologian but hey yeah I sussed that…..)
I lowered the piece from my ear incredulously and wondered whether I had chosen the right version. If there were commentaries in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch, maybe there was also one in the language of the mentally challenged.
In the weakness that incredulity frequently instils, I returned to the apparatus and pushed another button, which then went on to describe the lower panels in prosaic detail.
As I navigated through the console, I did pick up some useful points of historical detail, but by then, my confidence had been so eroded, and I felt so exhausted that I went outside into the cobblestone square where at least, there wasn't any piped music.
The well-preserved glory of the work still held a place in my mind, and it glows there still. Yet, when I turn the corner in my memory, I also see the woman behind the counter, the small room, the student at the ticket booth, and the people with blank expressions shambling about listening to their audio prosthesis.
In effect, I was robbed of that space for quiet communion with the object. And true enough, I had been partially to blame for that.
Museums and the New Blindness
Powerful works of art manage to transcend or at least squeeze past the circumstances that may mire them and infect so many lesser works. While it is far from an easy or complete transcendence, we still emerge, if we make enough, with a sufficiently rounded sense of the work.
By contrast, take, for example, how the academic sculptures that flank the main entry hall of the Musée D'Orsay are engulfed to the point of eradication by the cavernous and depersonalising geometric space of the interior structure.
The D’Orsay and most other major museums have their audioguides, as they are now somewhat de rigueur for the art-going public. Still, they are among the phenomena that amount to a decline of vision’ as the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio puts it. He argues that it is an extreme popularising, which has denuded us of the ability to reflect, and an externalizing visuality that renders us blind.
Here's what may be an unpopular polemic: galleries have become so friendly to the public that they risk unfriendliness to the art. Some years back, I recall walking through the National Gallery in London and stumbling upon works labelled 'Highlight Painting'. (It has been some time since I have been there, and I don't know if this has changed, but the relevance of the point remains.)
Thankfully, since entry to the National Gallery is free, audioguides are not included in any price, which makes people more reluctant to hire one, which in turn means that there are less dazed automatons peregrinating from said ‘highlight painting’ to ‘highlight painting’ (each room in the National Gallery has one or two ‘highlight paintings’).
I can see the paintings coming to life at night and arguing over who should be the highlight painting and who shouldn’t, the highlight painting fraternity lording condescendingly over all the other works deprived of the luxury of being highlighted.
As an artist myself, when I grow up, I too want to produce a highlight painting and maybe to be a highlighted artist.
Or maybe not. It is one of the biases of the Internet culture, which is mostly a lexical culture that everything is laid onto the same matrix and everything can be rated: hotels, movies, tourist activities, restaurants, indeed everything: you are invited to give your view, supply a rating add your five cents.
The trouble with opinion is that, like money, it too is susceptible to inflation. Too many opinions have the opposite effect of being anodyne and of undermining criticality. This tendency of opinionated profusion or rating experience (click here to write your review!) spills out into all areas of life, especially in museums where there is an unspeakable delineation between good, better, and best.
There are, however, still collections on display, which are the collections of individuals who have less of the curatorial tendentiousness increasingly anxious about pleasing the public. There is nothing wrong with this aim. It is democratic, but its democratic impulse seizes more on what the public wants than generating an aesthetic policy, a set of ideas, to allow the works to evolve by the prevailing culture. Private collections (in Paris the Cognacq-Jay or Nissim de Camondo, in Basel the Beyeler, in Philadelphia the Barnes) bear the imprint of their originator.
The Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Courtesy Wikimedia. - http://bit.ly/3r84jLo
As Walter Benjamin remarked in his famous essay on the collector, they say as much of the collector as what is collected. As such, they retain a trace of the individual and thus fallible stamp.
Private collections are not motivated by a generalising impulse underscoring, rightly or wrongly, many public collections. As imprinted with the individual sensibility, the private collection has many surprises and curious smaller works that enrich the larger ones. Each work has been chosen according to different imperatives from those of public accountability.
Such collections remain on display without populist pizzazz, which means that visiting them is frequently, in my opinion, a less depersonalising and more rewarding experience.
One has the sense of having uncovered and shared something rather than of being the witness to an aesthetic event that exists in all its grandeur whether you are there to see it or not.
Ironically, it would seem, the private collection, although born from elitism, the least democratic impulse, succeeds in highlighting the humanist function of the objects in its store and the particular (as opposed to general) motivation that gathered them together.
Humanism is the cornerstone of democracy, but what democracy is most inclined to forget since the view of democracy is typically directed outward rather than within, toward what the public likes in the long term rather than taking risks with what is best for the long-term good.
Art's present condition foregrounds this tension within democracy, given that both in art and gallery management, the big questions are tipped in the direction of what people (not the artists) would like to see rather than on what are the relevant philosophical questions of artistic merit.
If there is a pedagogical role that the museum must serve, it is obscured if people call the museum didactic or dry. Don't be serious, don't be glum, art can be fun!
Art and the Decline of Vision
While there are undeniable benefits to the popularising of art, it can also be seen as a symptom of a particular form of visuality in our culture, compensating for the culture of fear (which makes one thing visible at the expense of another). One of the telescopic and televisual that favours surfeit over scrutiny, and where the cult of personality is so strong, it paradoxically inhibits the subjectivities which comprise the cult itself.
I want to discuss these ideas for the rest of this essay, with special reference to Virilio’s book, L’Art à perte de vue, which translates roughly as art at the horizon but could also read as art and the decline of vision. It can also mean ‘the art of vision’s decline’ and ‘the art of declining vision’. Seen together, these four phrases give us plenty to think about.
Virilio sees this decline of vision in terms of the decrease in insight, which might otherwise be named aesthetic scrutiny and reflection. He puts this down to what he calls 'communism of emotion', which has come to replace the communism of public interests.
In other words, Virilio translates his theory of speed, which made him famous as a thinker in the 1980s, into the hyper-diffusion of effect for the masses, not only in the media but in art.
It is a condition in which curators, culture workers, and ministerial funders look towards 'public benefit' instead of the pursuit of good art.
Virilio finds that the effect of this lust for mass satisfaction is not necessarily motivated by the desire to school more people in art. Instead, he speaks of 'a forced acquiescence' to which the general public unwittingly submits due to the devaluing of the aesthetic debate that is internal and alive within all decent art.
The 'emancipation of art from rules', suggests Virilio, means that art imbibes a purposeless and boredom because art is divested of its dialectical energy; there is not enough at stake. The only law, art's highest standard, is to serve the public, to become the artwork of the week, and to be explicable through a portable hearing device. Thus 'communism of public emotion …[has come to]… replace, with such discretion, the communism of public interest’. (79)
Virilio insists that the externalization of global culture is, in fact, paradoxically, guided increasingly by paranoia. Our 'visual field', of which the spectacle is of course part, has receded into a series of values defined by suspicion of terrorists (and in Australia, among other counties, of illegal migrants).
This is a vast woven tissue of fear and media-generated energy that eradicates rather than enforces the local (subjective) visual fields. The internalisation that paranoia brings is different from personal internalization. It is a displacement of self that allows neither interior nor exterior thought.
Virilio writes:
In an era when walls are everywhere and where there are no frontiers, the resultant closures end up not only building the claustropolis of tomorrow, but above all inhibit the perception of what lies around us, since what lies hidden is no longer, as it once was, the face, but rather the visual field, which now draws back to an extreme extent thus illustrating a return to the topological, or better, the toposcopic, which comes from on high, since instead of projecting from afar, all around, the look [vue] is lowered so as only to see the point of one’s feet, not from timidity, but from introversion. (83-4)
The 'toposcopic' results from the acceleration of the real. Its most evident avatar are the satellites that orbit and scour the globe; no surface is untouched, and all horizons annulled.
As the successor to the telephonic and televisual, the toposcopic is also part of the world of webcams and mobile phones, which bring the private domain of one domicile into another. The public-private binary that defined the spaces of modern life have become convoluted, confused by the intrusions of technology; one can potentially be surveilled anytime, anywhere; everything from changing-room antics to the meal one is having is potentially reproducible as a digital image.
Virilio refers to the ‘insufferable’ mobile telephone and its recent incarnation of mini-multiplex of radio, image-receiver, movie-theatre, and camera. The 'televisionophone’—his word for what would become the smartphone—is the ‘third generation of the mobile telephone which now attracts more attention to those around us and which threaten to provoke the kind of accidents that result less from the loss of vehicle control than the inattention of the driver’. (86)
According to Virilio, technology and population have engendered such complex visual fields that they have finally introjected—or imploded. The spectacle has become so superabundant that our participation in it, or interactivity, has made us all into potential surveillants, and equally the unwitting victims of spycams.
Within the realms of art, this phenomenon has made itself felt in art's externalisation. Virilio's observation is nothing new, especially since the impact of technology on art since the 60s has seen it enter into the public sphere in ways that confound high and low.
While Pop art is the main example of this, it is crucial to observe that the main debates surrounding video in its earliest years of the 1960s and 70s centered around the public's infiltration within the private domain of the lounge room.
The externalisation advanced and accelerated by digital technology Virilio calls ‘disastrous’. In the cultural sphere, popularity is never in question if numbers accompany it. Externalisation equals quantity, as exemplified by the massive push to justify and attract crowds to exhibitions.
Virilio states: 'On evidence, museums pay more attention to who leaves than who enter', meaning that the weighting is more on numbers than on what the people do, what they see, or how they see it (not to mention, of course, the homogenisation afforded by the ubiquitous audioguides).
Virilio's complaints with the 'marketing operations' of the culture industry are not motivated by gratuitous high-mindedness, snobbery, or elitism.
Virilio's problem is that culture is so glibly circumscribed: art one day and a swimming carnival the next.
Today 'culture' is continually being corralled into particular social perimeters, like government departments, so that 'culture' can accord its requisite share within the civil sphere; a physical quantity like health, sanitation, immigration, etc.
‘The minister, worried at the declining numbers of museum visitors seeks out yet another ploy, at the expense of controlling the intrinsic quality of artworks, contemporary or otherwise, which enter into French museum collections.’ (70)
In short, art, whose virtues are in its very unquantifiable, is accorded strict limits. Exactly what are art's qualities at present, why art is unquantifiable, and yet why it continues to make sense and to be valued—all the primary aesthetic questions—are not entered into because to value them would also be to value the other apparatuses that keep such debates alive: criticism, critical curatorship and the like, the artistic endeavours which also openly set out to challenge the status quo of images, identity and 'culture'. And when nationalism and paranoia are on the rise, such challenges can be invidious.
The Casualties of Art’s Spill into Entertainment
An index of art’s spill into the realm of entertainment is the degree to which aesthetic questions, which are often complex and esoteric and almost always specialised, are made to appear supplementary, indeed pointless.
Therein, to extrapolate Virilio, is the real elitism, but it is a retro-elite that elevates the 'quick pull' while ghettoising the more demanding, more critical tasks of cultural diagnosis. It is what keeps art-goers happy. But if we look at artists of all stripes, from Caravaggio to Géricault to Lautrec to Dix to Arbus, art was not always made to make people happy.
If such work pleases, it is through a certain crispness of expression—and it may also even please many of us the viewers of today through the relief that pleasure, vaudevillian, meretricious pleasure, for such artists is not the measure.
This de-emphasis on the critically aesthetic in favour of spurious populism (like importance given to the attendance figures to museums) has the profound effect of devaluing vision, in the sense that vision is to seeing as listening is to hearing. We see and hear, and we are measured externally by how many of us are doing so.
It is this sideshow mentality which Virilio cites as leading to aesthetic confusions of which the average visitor, enticed rather than convinced, is unaware:
[[Going beyond Olafur Eliason’s Museum of the Sun of the Tate Modern in 2003, Paris created The Night Museum to attract the hordes, young and not-so-young, of night-owls; filling places with all the charms of ambient music, like the Gustave Moreau museum where the evening visitors could sway to the rhythm of Salomé’s dance…
From 7 in the evening to 1 in the morning, on the night of Saturday, 14 May 2005, visitors were allowed the groping adventure in the glow of hand torches and candles to inspect various exhibited works—the sculptures at the Rodin museum, the paintings at the Louvre, which, we are told, reached ‘the limits of its capacity’, as the crowds squeezed together to admire the Mona Lisa of the enigmatic Da Vinci Code fame.]]
The irony pregnant of the notion of the 'night musuem' is not lost Virilio, for a night where all cows are black requires no discrimination at all, and it is the one time when all can agree on art, especially those who know what they like.
Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images — http://bit.ly/2WuZn54
In his 2000 book La Procédure silence (translated three years later as Art and Fear), Virilio begins with an excerpt from an interview with Jacqueline Lichtenstein, who recounts her horror when she visited the museum at Auschwitz, only the horror was not inspired by the content but by the manner of the display:
The moment I visited the Auschwitz museum, I became terrified by glass displays with images of contemporary art. I felt no fear standing before the displays with suitcases, prostheses, and children's toys. I didn't feel crushed by them. I wasn't ripped apart like I was when I walked into the camp, no, but in the museum, I suddenly had the impression of being in a museum of contemporary art. I took the train back saying to myself, ‘They’ve won!’ they won because they have produced forms of perception which are completely continuous with their particular mode of destruction. (cit Virilio, La Procédure silence, 14-5)
This remark is about a certain horizon of art and curatorship. When the aim is to be novel before it is to be sensitive, then, as in the circumstances such as those outlined above, their results can also be catastrophic.
There is no room for tact in sensationalism. Virilio’s characterization of the loss of vision is a symptom of the dehumanisation of art in favour of products and events whose approval is through consensual, mass ('communal/communistic') acclaim. It is a condition of late capitalism in which art finds itself not just within the marketplace, but the same within the market, and where the spirit of the commodity does everything to reposition art away from its critical raison d’être.
It is a complaint that places Virilio within the terrain of a cultural critique set in motion by thinkers such as Benjamin and Adorno, and before them, Simmel and Veblen.
For Virilio, 'teleobjectivity' (objectif also means 'lens'), or our age of satellites and global implosion has, in turn, produced what he goes on to call 'telesubjectivity' which 'vastly falsifies its relationship to things' whereby Duchamp's call to extra-retinal art sounds, to Virilio's mind, prophetic, but in a way that compensates for the myriad, technological, pathological and ethical conditions, salutary and mostly not so salutary, that rob us the possibility of perception.
Virilio never uses the words ‘authentic’ or ‘real’ to qualify this manner of perception that he says is being inhibited or lost. Yet by way of compensation, he says certain (more or less post-Duchampian) developments since the 60s, such as Minimalism, are restitutive of the loss of vision through recourse to the 'haptic'.
Telesubjectivity has robbed us of the capacity to relate perceptively to the outer world in anything but an overly mediated and cursory way—
This is why we can better understand, today, the survival of haptic sensation—the success, for example, of the sculpture of someone like Richard Serra, or even famous 'installations', or whatever the name is given for all that is palpable and tangible.
Two such installations that may be in Virilio's mind are in the Pompidou's collection. One is Christain Boltanski's huge installation, alternately titled Dispersion or Lost Property, a deeply memorable work in numerous incarnations with its base principle in a collection of thousands of cast-off clothes that line the walls or bedeck the floor.
Cœur, 2006, by Christian Boltanski — https://bit.ly/2LSVgho
The other is Joseph Beuys’ felt installation Plight (1958/1985) conceived just before the artist's death, a room-like enclosure also with the suggestion of another room (an enclosed entry cubicle constrains viewers) beyond it.
Plight, 1985, by Joseph Beuys — http://bit.ly/2J6UX1t
The felt is in thick rolls insulating the walls; the first room stands a closed grand piano. Both are post-Holocaust works about the silence that reigns over the fractured remains of a tragedy. In both works, the non-visual effects are as strong if not stronger than the visual ones; Boltanski's installation is replete with the smell of must. Beuys's rooms are thick with silence and the heavy humidity of imposed, unwanted warmth. Both inspire claustrophobia. Both sneak up on the sensorium.
Such works, borrowing from Virilio’s thesis, render themselves visible by circumventing the well-worn paths that lead to vision’s loss. Everyday vision of ‘telesubjectivity’ decodes and censors with such ruthless alacrity that little is left to chance, and near everything arrives as only varying degrees of clichés.
But in these works, once vision has been bypassed, the viewer is invited to see it afresh, as a rich composite of experience, and as free as free can be of crass platitudes.
The work retains its innocence because vision is still embedded within the material, not with a Brancusi or Caro-like sanctity, but quite the opposite, through the consciousness of guilt delivered in the manner of sensory shocks available only from within the work itself, where seeing is indissoluble from experiencing.
Like all art, they are encoded but encoded not with the implicit injunction that they be decoded. These works impress, but they do not entertain because they emanate, palpably and conceptually, an indescribable sadness whose pleasure comes from the excellence of how the work conveys itself to us.
If they liberate us, it is because they do not force happiness or pleasure onto us. They do not expressly set out to communicate to everyone or lay virtue inaccessibility.
They are also, I might add, 97% audioguide resistant.
*
As with many of Boltanski's works, it exists in numerous incarnations due to their site-specific reformulation. For commentary on this work in a 1995 incarnation in New York, see the review from 26 May 1995, 'Lost, Found and Somewhere in Between' by Holland Cotter in the New York Times web archive.
† Joseph Beuys, Plight (1958/1985) was recently re-installed in the exhibition ‘Le mouvement des images’ (2006) at the Pompidou Centre, Paris. Also see it at: www.insecula.com/salle/MS01700.html
Books Cited:
Paul Virilio, La Procédure silence, Paris: Galilée, 2000
Paul Virilio, L’Art à perte de vue, Paris Galilée, 2005
