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In the West, the philosophical temperament of our age inclines towards materialism and atheism. For us, that means that this world is the only world. It is a world, moreover, which our ethics oblige us to be aware of, and technologies such as those of the mass-media and internet ensure this ideal a practical realisation. While these conditions remain in place, art cannot turn away from the world, or cannot do so for more than a little while. Art, then, must attend to the world, and must do so while fully conscious of another fact - that for the most part it cannot change the world. Art influences art, but little else; it is, for the most part, unable to relieve the suffering of either ourselves or others. What sort of art might exist in such a world and what might it do? I suggest two possibilities below, but there are certainly many others. Those I mention are ways, strategies, to draw pleasure from what may ordinarily be repellent and fearful to us, of recouping pleasure from those aspects of the world that deny it.
The first of these strategies is humour. I'll take a broadly Freudian line about humour: that it's a way of recouping a little pleasure, a little autonomy from a world that usually denies these things. As I think about it now, it strikes me that there's more art about that uses humour than there ever has been. (I'm thinking of some of the Young British Artists, Paul McCarthy, etc.) The Australian sculptor John Barbour has made a number of works that exemplify this use of humour for me. He often makes objects out of cardboard and masking tape that reference functionalist design and formalist aesthetics. Pictured below is Barbour's "Poorbox" (2001).
It's a small irregularly shaped cardboard box that sits on the floor and has a slot in the top large enough to admit a coin. Most art, I suppose, wants to be looked at, to be loved, to be valued in some way - "Poorbox" is uncharacteristically up front about what it wants from the viewer. What's funny about it is that while it's up front in its demand, it's got very little to give in return - its modest grey form gives no conventional aesthetic pleasure, its construction required little skill and its simple, blocky forms seem pointedly arbitrary and inexpressive. "Poorbox" sets itself up to be rejected, to fail. Like many things we have to live with that are designed along debased, functionalist and formalist principles, it gives little pleasure, its functionalist-derived forms speaking more of the rule of an unsympathetic law. For me, it's seeing these principles brought low - reduced to penury - that's funny. It's a strike against authority, and as I said, a way of recouping a little pleasure, a little autonomy from a world that usually denies these things.
My other strategy for drawing pleasure from those things that usually deny it involves taking a very different attitude to the world - rather than finding humour in those things, finding them - to use a difficult word - sublime. Longinus described the sublime as something that takes the subject "out of himself", and I have a similar state in mind - an intimation, typically pleasurable, of a dissolution of the self in the world. For the nineteenth century Romantic looking at a painting of the Alps, this frisson might have been found when he felt his soul soaring over the depicted mountain tops. We, I think, find the sublime in many other places. The example I take is from the Los Angeles based sculptor Kristian Burford. He makes hyperrealistic, life-sized figurative sculptures which he locates in equally intricate "sets". The work pictured below is "Kathryn..." (2001). It portrays a semi-naked adolescent girl, wearing only knickers and make-up, sitting on a settee. She holds a cat's collar in her right hand, and a bleeding arc marks her right wrist, where the cat has scratched her. She recoils with an almost spastic action, her body subsiding into the settee. A stain of urine on her panties indicates a further loss of control.
Like Barbour's "Poorbox", Burford's "Kathryn..." is brought low. But where "Poorbox" is humorous, "Kathryn..." suggests the presence of a different sort of pleasure. Subsiding back into the settee, she surrenders herself to a stream of mildly painful sensations. She gives herself up to them and there, Burford's portrayal appears to suggest, in the midst of these discomforts lies a source of pleasure - the release found in surrender to a force greater than oneself, the Romantic's fantasy of a mingling of one's self with this greater will. Like Bernini's "St. Theresa in ecstasy", giving herself up to divine will, Kathryn is overtaken by some irresistible, perhaps ultimately erotic, prerogative. In a moment of self-abnegation, the forces Kathryn allows to overtake herself become sublime.
So far as this sublime is understood as intimating a real dissolution of the self in the world, it is surely a fantasy - "delusory", as Rosalind Krauss has put it in her criticism of Kristeva. It is true, too, that the sense of sublime usually evaporates when the self is put under genuine threat. Nevertheless, the sublime, as an affect, exists; if we are liable to be misled by it, that is all the more testament of its affective power.
There's much more to be said about the sublime and the joke, not least in the way of criticism and evaluation of their political uses (which mostly occur outside of art). Like every tool of any value, they have the potential to be used for good or ill, to support authority, or to undermine it. Both are ways of recouping pleasure from a world that denies it. If that world is the world of the future, then these two strategies may play a role in a future art.
Michael Newall
St. Peters, Australia
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