“I give myself up to feverish dreams, but I do so in
order to deduce new laws. In delirium, I
seek multiplicity, subtlety and the eye of reason, not rash prophecies.”
Antonin
Artaud
Formless:A
User’s Guide is the catalog of an exhibition held at the Pompidou Center in
Paris during the summer of 1996. It is
also much more, both a theoretical-historical monograph and a manifesto. Curator-authors Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain
Bois wish to redefine the boundaries of modernism and put that redefinition to use in a shake-up of the art world that
will “redeal modernism’s cards.”
Much of this has a familiar
ring. For a long time now, the
demystification of the “pretensions” of modernism with respect to “significant
form,” “the autonomy of the work of art,” “pure visuality,” “transcendence,”
the quest for “the essential,” etc. has been an obsessive theme of the
“post-modern” critical enterprise. But
Krauss and Bois are not exactly card carrying post-modernists. We see very little if anything in this book
of the usual PoMo vocabulary:
“art-as-language,” the “gaze,” the “signifier,” feminism,
multiculturalism, historicism, semiosis, textuality, deconstruction, etc. Our authors take as their principal point of
departure, not the work of Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Lyotard,
Deleuze-Guatarri, etc., nor even, surprisingly, their own recent and noteworthy
research on pictorial semiology, but certain writings of an important, long neglected
thinker: Georges Bataille.
Putting Bataille to Use
Notorious for a bitter dispute with
André Breton, Bataille was well known in surrealist circles, but hardly an
international figure. With the advent of
post-structuralism, however, he has become, in retrospect, something of a
legend, one of those all too necessary “precursors” whose work seems justified
more by the use to which it can be
put at the present moment than any real value it may ever have had. But the value of “real value” is no longer
what it used to be. And “use” can have a
value all its own, as we shall learn.
Inspired by the strange “dictionary”
Bataille published serially in the journal Documents
during the late Twenties, Krauss and Bois have organized both their book and
their exhibition according to an amusing “fractured” logic. Responding to the four “foundational
postulates” of modernism summarized above, are four basic “categories” of the formless: Base
Materialism, Horizontality, Pulse, Entropy. Each is divided into exactly six
subcategories (except for the last, which has ten), each explicated in a brief
essay by one (never both — with one exception) of our collaborators . But it is very difficult to see how the
subheadings fit under their categories.
For example, under Base
Materialism we have Abattoir, Base
Materialism, Cadaver, Dialectic, Entropy and Figure. Under Horizontality we have Gestalt, Horizontality, Isotropy, Jeu
Lugubre, Kitsch, Liquid Words. The
joke, a good one, is that all the subheadings are organized alphabetically,
with no regard for the boundaries of the categories under which they are
listed. Thus the first subcategory under
Horizontality: Gestalt, comes alphabetically just after the last subcategory
under Base Materialism: Figure.
Moreover, each main category is also a subcategory, either of itself or
another category. Clearly, the authors
have here endeavored to apply the subversive “anti-methodology” of Bataille
himself.
Let us now focus our attention on
the word: in French, informe, in English, “formless.” As “defined” by Bataille, this term is informed by the “task” of bringing
things “down in the world.” “What it
designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like
a spider or an earthworm.” The Bataillian
“formless” speaks to us of what is belittled, denigrated, repressed. The difficulties entailed in this notion
become evident when we review certain key distinctions emphasized by our
authors. Bataille’s “formless” is “base
materialism,” but not the flattened
“material” surface of Clement Greenberg.
It is “formless,” but not the art informel of Tapié or Dubuffet. It can be bloody, excremental and disgusting,
but not in the manner of artists such as Nitsche or Beuys. It can be “abject” (Bataille put this term to
use), but not in the currently “fashionable” manner now associated with Julia
Kristeva.
While such distinctions might seem
arbitrary or even a bit snobbish, there is a genuine insight here. Bois and Krauss are at pains to distinguish
between strategies designed to elevate
the debased, abject, formless, by “sublimating” them into “Art,” and strategies
designed to get viewers “down and dirty,” inviting them to experience
“formlessness” on its own, far more subversive, terms. As they might put it: no to sublimation — yes to “return of the
repressed.” (The index entry under
“Freud” occupies twelve lines, second only to “Bataille.”)
Formless vs. Gestalt
To help us understand the relation
between issues pertaining to form and formlessness, repression and its return,
Krauss invokes, in an essay entitled “Gestalt,” the venerable, but still
useful, “mirror stage” of Jacques Lacan, the period in the child’s development
when it begins to recognize itself in its mirror image, as a Gestalt, i.e., a unified
subject. “Lacan seized on this model of
the Gestalt’s ‘good form’ as securing the centered subject . . . which will . .
. serve to prefigure the ‘I’.” And, a
bit farther along: “The [Lacanian] Imaginary . . . continues to play a part in
the [Lacanian] Symbolic’s meaning-effect, insofar as the Gestalt provides the
illusion that meaning itself is, first, resolvable, unifiable, univocal, one; and, second, a reflection of the
subject, as in a mirror, thus belonging to the subject, arising from him.” Ultimately “Lacan widens the field of the
Gestalt from vision to signification, spreading its net to the phallic ‘one’ as
meaning/being.” Thus the mirror stage
establishes the Lacanian Imaginary as a Gestalt, the unifications of which then
become the basis for verbal language (the Symbolic) and its repressive subject
(the Ego). Krauss then takes this a bit
farther. Noting that “[t]he image, as seen in the mirror, will
also be upright,” she argues that “verticality” is a necessary ingredient in
the Gestalt/Imaginary brew, linking signification/meaning with man’s uniquely
upright posture, a position which orients
him to his surroundings and at the same time establishes a set of values based
on “up” and “down,” “high” and “low,” the repression
of what is “base,” which cannot even be thought until “lifted up” via sublimation.
As Krauss makes clear in the same
essay, Bataille’s interest is overwhelmingly in that “low,” that
“baseness.” But his intention is not at
all to “lift it up,” via sublimation, Hegelian Aufhebung, or, least of all, any kind of “artistic” or “poetic”
transfiguration into anything resembling “significant form.” On the contrary, “the work of formlessness”
destroys the very categories (classes) which give form to the lofty Symbolic,
“stripping off the ‘mathematical frock coats’ of the categories, . . . lowering
these integers — whether visual or cognitive — from their upright positions as
vertical Gestalts, by knocking them off their pedestals of form, and thus
bringing them down in the world.” A kind
of sublimation in reverse — desublimation as return of the
repressed. And this is certainly one
of the keys to the interest our authors
take in Bataille. Inspired by his essay,
“The Use Value of de Sade,” Krauss and Bois are interested in putting Bataille
himself “to use” in “shaking” the art world by negotiating the return of its
own long repressed, long denied, “other.”
Now that we know a bit about formless, we are left with the question
of how to achieve it. Which is where
our four main headings come in. Base Materialism, Horizontality, Pulse,
Entropy, each represents a set of strategies through which form, meaning,
the subject, language, Art, can be knocked off their pedestals and brought down
to earth so that what has been “repressed” can more (un)easily “return.” Let’s briefly examine each.
Base Materialism
For Bataille, the materialism of the
philosophers, even the dialectical materialism of Marx and his followers, is
still too dependent on “an obsession with an ideal form of matter.” Base
materialism is more extreme. In the
essay presented under this heading, Bois explains: “. . . the formless matter that base materialism
claims for itself resembles nothing, especially not what it should be, refusing
to let itself be assimilated to any concept whatever, to any abstraction
whatever. For base materialism, nature
produces only unique monsters . . .” To
“find a support on which to construct this base materialism” one must “learn to
submit one’s being and one’s reason ‘to what is lower . . .’”
Formulation of the laws governing
such a process of submission will be the task of “heterology,” “the science of
what is entirely other.” Linked in
Bataille’s mind with both scatology (“the science of excrement”) and “the
sacred,” heterology can be understood as a kind of arrested dialectic, a raw,
abyssal, “scission” interposed between “high” and “low,” with no possible
Hegelian “third term” through which the division could be resolved
(sublated/sublimated) on some “higher plane” of awareness or artistic
achievement. As Bois explains, in
his essay under the heading,
“Dialectic,” “[e]ach time that the
homogeneous raises its head and reconstitutes itself (which it never stops
doing since society coheres only by means of its cement), the job of the informe, base materialism, and scission
is to decapitate it. What is at stake is
the very possibility of a nondialectical materialism: matter is heterogeneous; it is what cannot be
tamed by any concept.” [71]
Horizontality
Bois (paraphrasing Bataille): “Man
is proud of being erect (and of having thus emerged from the animal state . . .
) but this pride is founded on a
repression. . . . his present
architecture, by means of which his horizontal gaze traverses a vertical field,
is a travesty.” [26] If what is desired
is “lowness,” then surely the horizontally aligned animal is in a better
position to experience it. But man has
repressed this token of his animalistic history by insisting on standing
upright and striving, always, for that which is “high.” We like to think we live in our heads, not
our feet, which, for Bataille, is a scandal.
In her “Horizontality” essay, Krauss
discusses some examples of the sort of art which promotes the informe by getting, and staying,
low. The first, that of Jackson
Pollock, is a surprising choice, given the strong link between his work and the
“idealized,” aestheticised materialism of Clement Greenberg. For her, the most important of Pollock’s many
breakthroughs was his moving of the site of painting, not so much from the
easel to the wall, ala Greenbergian theory, but down onto the floor, where he
placed his unstretched canvas, literally dripping and pouring the paint. The “import of lowness encoded onto Pollock’s
assumption of the horizontal,” was masked by fanciful, idealized titles, such
as Sea Change, Vortex, etc., which were, in fact, not by Pollock at all, but a
helpful, “literary” neighbor. Such works
institute a new relation between the canvas and the viewer, who must observe
these dripped, poured, cigarette-stubbed-out-on, trash-thrown-into canvasses as
though looking downward. Krauss
continues with more predictable readings of certain floor-oriented works by
Robert Morris, followed by a discussion of what may be the most “apt” examples
of any in the book, Andy Warhol’s spectacular “Oxidation Paintings,” produced
by literally placing canvasses on the
floor and pissing on them.
Pulse
While not a term widely employed by
Bataille, “pulse” is here used both to “attack the modernist exclusion of
temporality from the visual field” [32] and assert the importance, for the informe, of the “repetition compulsion”
so fundamentally associated with Freud’s theory of the “death drive.” For Bois, pulse
“involves an endless beat,” continually renewed, thus anti-teleological, a beat
which, like that of the heart, “incites an irruption of the carnal.” In her essay entitled “Moteur,” Krauss
elaborates, via an extended discussion of certain time-based works of Duchamp, on
the contrast between the gestaltist, Husserlian, “modernist” approach to time,
which is, ultimately, for her, a denial of temporality, and the pulsing,
erotically suggestive, “throb” of Duchamp’s rotoreliefs, which “disrupt the
laws of form” to “invent the pulse as one of the operations of the formless . .
. [bringing] the news that we ‘see’ with our bodies.” Moving from Duchamp to the monotonously
repetitious film, Hand Catching Lead,
by Serra, thence to a brief consideration of stroboscopic “flicker” films by
Kubelka and Sharits, Krauss distinguishes between the structuralist “purity” of
such works and their “corporeal dimension,” in a not wholly successful attempt
to link their strategies with the obsessions of Bataille.
Entropy
Entropy, according to the second law
of thermodynamics, is what leads all matter and energy inevitably into an
increasing state of disorder. For Bois,
this law is strongly linked with
“Bataille’s fascination with rot and waste, with the decomposition of
everything.” [37] In the work of certain artists, notably Robert Smithson,
Raoul Ubac, Gordon Matta-Clark, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenberg, Marcel Duchamp,
it operates by means of “degradation,” “accumulation,” “inversion,” “the
invasion of noise,” “wear and tear,” etc.
It is “a sinking, a spoiling, but perhaps also an irrecoverable waste.”
[38]
In attempting to take things a bit
farther, Krauss borrows a simple example of entropy from the writings of
Smithson: as a child runs around inside
a sandbox neatly divided between black and white grains, the colors will
inevitably mix into a uniform gray. For
her, this particular movement from differentiation to non-differentiation calls
to mind “the photographs from [the surrealist journal] Minotaure of insects so perfectly imitating the patterns of their
habitats as to vanish completely into the uniformity of one continuous
texture. And this in turn suggests that
what is at issue is the question of boundary or contour, which is to say, of
the distinction between figure and ground.” [75] Entropy, therefore, is not simply
the wearing away of form, but much more, an attack on meaning itself, and its
subject, via a subversion of the basic principle that produces the Lacanian
imaginary: the Gestalt.
This creates something of a problem
for Krauss. She wants to associate the
breakup of the figure-ground distinction with the formless, but is all too aware of the importance this breakup has
had for that very “Greenbergian” modernism she is so eager to reject. Her solution is to make a strong distinction
between the “visuality” of “mainstream” modernism, where figure-ground
differentiation is overcome for the sake of some more or less Hegelian
sublation/sublimation into “purified space,” and the “determinedly
antivisualist” work of artists such as Robert Smithson, for whom, at least at
first, “the intellectual challenge posed by entropy was temporal rather than
spatial . . .” [76] When, in one
of his later works, Enantiomorphic
Chambers, Smithson engages the visual, he does it in such a way as to
utterly stymy “the beholder’s visual logic” through the creation of a mirrored
space with “multiple, unsynthesizable vanishing points.” Thus, even the visual
can be “anti-visual” when it “logically erases any beholder.” Krauss concludes: “The entropic, simulacral move . . . is to float
the field of seeing in the absence of the subject; . . . the disappearance of
the first person is the mechanism that triggers formlessness.” [78]
Modernism, High and Low
Bois and Krauss have chosen to
concern themselves with a topic of the greatest interest, importance, relevance and even timeliness: the reconsideration, on the verge of the
Twenty First Century, of certain crucial aspects of a phenomenon profoundly
characteristic of the Twentieth — “modernism.”
In their view, what modernist art is most importantly about is not, as
“mainstream” modernism maintains, the reduction of all aspects of art to some
rarified, purified, “essence” (which would merely be a continuation of the
project of romanticism), but something far more challenging and problematic: the lowering of Man’s sights “from the sky
above to the mud below” and the loss of meaning, the descent into chaos, this
entails. This is not a particularly new
or even unusual topic. In one form or
another it continually recurs in the literature in and around Twentieth Century
modernism, from the writings of Alfred Jarry and some (not all) of the Futurist
manifestos, to practically everything in Surrealist theory (including both
Bataille and his nemesis Breton) and the writings of Artaud, not to mention
DADA, all the way to works such as Morse Peckham’s Man’s Rage for Chaos, N. O. Brown’s Life Against Death, the collected writings of John Cage, and
beyond, to take its place as a major theme of postmodernism. But this is an issue fraught with difficulties,
as our authors are at pains to demonstrate.
Because there would seem to be two very different ways of approaching
such a loss, such a descent: from the
viewpoint of what is above, as tragic loss, or, at best, conundrum, in an
economy which must demand redemption, restitution, explanation -- or from the
viewpoint of what is below, as liberation, literally “return of the repressed,”
in an economy of excess, overflow and unreason, what Bataille has termed
“expenditure without reserve.”
Our authors are therefore fighting a
battle on two fronts, first against the by now rather old (and apparently
defeated) “Greenbergian” view, an idealized materialism one step removed from
romanticism, and second, against the more sophisticated and fashionable but
nevertheless equally compromised view of a postmodernism which would rather thematize the return of the repressed
than actively engage it. This latter
issue lies, I suspect, at the heart of their continual return to that notion
which has such importance for Bataille: “use.”
Thus Krauss argues, in the concluding section, against those who would
interpret the work of Cindy Sherman in terms of Kristeva’s abject: “That the reconsolidation
of Sherman’s images around the semantics of the wound acts contrary to
their most radical and productive resources . . . is to be seen in an operational understanding
of her work. Which is to say that
‘abjection,’ in [merely] producing a thematics of essences and substances,
stands in absolute contradiction to the idea of the formless.” [245] “Thematics,” the mere mention of or reference to
the “abject,” the “low,” the “formless,” the mere “semantics of the wound,” is
not sufficient. The wound, the informe, must become “operational,”
i.e., be “put to use.” Thus most of the
art on display in the exhibition must be understood “operationally,” not as
thematizations, representations, symbolizations of the formless, but specific
instances of its being put to use. And, in turn, these works themselves have
been put to use by the authors, in an
effort to demonstrate the “operationality” of the informe.
Caveat Emptor
Before proceeding to an evaluation
of this work, I must confess that, despite my best efforts, my own response may
not be without some degree of bias.
Krauss and Bois have followed a “trajectory” (to borrow one of their
favorite terms) which, at several points (and not only in this book),
intersects with certain aspects of my own.
My reading cannot help, therefore, but be colored by my own
explorations, for some time now, in similar terrain and the somewhat different
conclusions I have drawn. The first
thing I wish to say is how much I have always admired these authors, how much I
have learned from them, how impressed I am with what they have accomplished
here, and how enthusiastically I welcome an approach which so effectively gets
beyond so many of the limitations and oversimplifications of a certain, very
common, type of “postmodern” discourse
on the arts. The second thing I wish to
say is how surprising it would be for someone who has followed so similar a
“trajectory” to arrive at exactly the same destination. So thirdly, I must assert that, for me, and as Krauss herself ultimately
implies, there is still a great deal to be learned about the very important and
also very difficult, very tricky, issues raised in this book.
Opposing the Oppositions of
Dialectics
To begin with the Introduction, I
must observe that Bois, in seeking to “declare null and void” the
characteristically “modernist” opposition, form
vs. content, seems to forget that he
and his colleague are seeking to replace it, in effect, with another, equally
Hegelian, equally “idealist,” opposition:
formed vs. formless. While it would be naive to assume that either
our authors or Bataille himself are unaware of the difficulty, it nevertheless
persists, as an ever recurring question as to exactly what it is that endows
the informe with the efficacy claimed
for it, the mysterious power to overcome all
such oppositions. Thus, when Bois states
that “the formless matter that base materialism claims for itself resembles
nothing,” [53] or that “this dualist mode of thought refuses to resolve
contradictions . . . [and thus] sets a movement of asymmetrical division to
work, separating high from low and, through its asymmetry, implying a fall from
high to low” [69] or when Krauss writes of “a sense of the erosion of good
form, an experience of prägnanz in
the grip of the devolutionary forces of a throb that disrupts the laws of form,
that overwhelms them, that scatters them”, [135] it’s hard to avoid the feeling
that some unformulated, long buried question is being rather strenuously
begged.
In a by now classic study of
Bataille’s encounter with Hegel, “From Restricted to General Economy,” Derrida,
after a generally approving summary of Bataille’s transgressive strategies,
hesitates: “But this transgression of discourse (and consequently of law in
general . . . ) must, in some fashion, and like every transgression, conserve
or confirm that which it exceeds.” From
this point, therefore, it is necessary for Derrida to “interpret Bataille
against Bataille, or rather, . . . interpret one stratum of his work from
another stratum.” In another essay from
the same volume, “La Parole Souflée,” Derrida writes in a similar vein with
reference to certain comparably transgressive claims of Antonin Artaud, of “a
necessary dependency of all destructive discourses: they must inhabit the structures they
demolish, and, within them they must shelter an indestructible desire for full
presence . . . The transgression of metaphysics . . . always risks returning to
metaphysics.” [194] Indeed, it’s hard to
see how formlessness per se, base
materialism per se, horizontality per se, etc., as simply the intention to
make some sort of mess, assert the presence of some irreducibly humble “base”
matter, bring the viewer literally (though more often figuratively) down to the level of the “low,” etc.,
could be subtle enough to carry out its project without at the same time
strengthening the dialectical oppositions it ostensibly seeks to subvert.
Formless vs. Omnipotence of
Thought
Another, not unrelated, aspect of
the problem can be seen in Freud’s treatment, in Totem and Taboo, of the process he calls “secondary
elaboration”: “[A]n intellectual
function in us demands the unification, coherence and comprehensibility of
everything perceived and thought of, and does not hesitate to construct a false
connection if, as a result of special circumstances, it cannot grasp the right
one.” He continues, relating secondary elaboration to the notion of primitive
animism, “a contagious magic which depends upon contiguous association,” and is
motivated by “the wish and the will.”
Animism causes objects to be “overshadowed by the ideas representing
them; what takes place in the latter must also happen to the former.” The basis of animism is “similarity and
contiguity,” two forms of “contact” which are also the basis for the primitive
notion of “taboo.” Freud ultimately
labels the fundamental principle behind both secondary elaboration and animism
“Omnipotence of Thought.”
To Freud, the elaborate pretensions
of thought, attributed so often to the logical systemizations of dialectical
metaphysics, are clearly pre‑logical, pre‑systematic. In a statement that might have been aimed
directly at Bataille’s notions of liberatory eroticism, Freud contends that
“the belief in the omnipotence of thought, the unshaken confidence in the
capacity to dominate the world . . .” is accounted for by the fact that “among
primitive people thinking is still highly sexualized.” But the will to imaginary domination cannot,
of course, be confined to the primitive.
As Freud makes clear, the basic principles of animism remain in the
modern world “as the foundation of our language, our belief, our philosophy.”
A simple, but nevertheless telling,
example of secondary elaboration can be found on the front jacket of the book
under review, a reproduction of a detail from Alberto Burri’s Combustione Plastica, one of the works
presented in the Pompidou exhibition.
What is clearly intended as an example of the formless “put to use” can quite easily be seen otherwise, as a
crouching, black haired, faceless figure, with an elongated head, knees just
below the chin, with a right arm extended downward to both encircle the legs
and clasp a left arm at the elbow.
Hardly the result of any intention on the part of either the artist or
the author/curators, this figure emerges nevertheless to remind us that
formlessness, in itself, as simple lack of form, is simply not strong enough to
subvert the powerful processes of formation
Freud associated with “omnipotence of thought.”
A “Science” of Formlessness
To do justice to both Bataille and
Artaud, our invocations of Derrida and Freud cannot tell the whole story with
respect to the intentions, if not the
accomplishments, of these famously “outrageous” poet-thinkers. Indeed, in my view, Derrida’s assessment of
Artaud, while undeniably trenchant, is not as devastating as he might have thought. Because Artaud is not simply advocating transgression per se, the breakup of traditional forms and values per se, but something quite new,
something which Derrida has no right to dismiss simply because he has never
encountered it. Far from being a crude
assertion of absolute, unmediated presence,
Artaud’s self-aborted, unrealized and possibly unrealizable project (in this
sense more in tune with Derrida’s later notion of the Messianic, the “to come”)
was conceived as a work of the most acute precisions: “I give myself up to
feverish dreams, but I do so in order to deduce new laws. In delirium, I seek multiplicity, subtlety
and the eye of reason, not rash prophecies.”
We do not know what those “new laws” were to be. Perhaps they were never even formulated. But until the (Messianic) “coming” of such
laws, we have no right to assume Artaud’s project must inevitably defeat
itself.
Can “new laws” be discerned among
the “rash prophecies” of Bataille? In
his essay, “Dialectic,” Bois distinguishes the Hegelian dialectic from
Bataille’s notion of “scission.” While
“the dialectic is geared toward a final reconciliation [of opposites], . . .
scission, on the contrary, always tries, by means of a low blow that attacks
reason itself, to make the assimilation of the two opposites impossible. Scission is the basis of heterology as ‘the
science of the wholly other’ . . .”
Reason, attacked not through the simple assertion of unreason, but the subversive operations of a
“science.” This is promising, but Bois
seems primarily interested in the philosophical implications, the establishment
of heterology as a radically disjunctive mode of thought, a kind of “negative
dialectic” not far removed, perhaps, from that of Adorno. The manner in which this science might
actually operate to perform a
non-dialectical subversion in, say, a work of art, is not really
discussed. Heterology puts in an
appearance in Bois’ essay on Base Materialism as well, but again it is the
purely philosophical aspect that gets most of the attention. When finally Bois considers specific works of
art, by Giacometti, Fontana, Burri, Rauschenberg, etc., it is their simple
assertion of “base materialism,” not their employment of any sort of
heterological “science,” which occupies him.
Heterology puts in one more
appearance, in the final chapter, Krauss’ “Conclusion:The Destiny of the
Informe.” It is here, in explicitly
rejecting strategies of “thematization” in favor of formlessness as an operation, “a process of ‘alteration,’
in which there are no essentialized or fixed terms, but only energies within a
force field . . .” that she comes closest to expressing the sense of “new laws”
(laws of subversion which might
direct such energies in the production of such a field) rather than simple transgressions
of the sort that too easily return us to either traditional dialectics or
animism. But when it comes time to put
her insight “to use,” she can do no better than produce, as examples, some
concept art pieces by Mike Kelley, installations which seem to operate mostly,
once again, by means of simple assertion and, indeed (as does most concept art)
thematization. If any “energies” or
“force fields” are put into play in these works, they are strictly conceptual, not “material.”
In her essay entitled “Isotropy,”
Krauss draws upon Lyotard’s Discours/Figure, which replaces the static structuralist grid with the complexities of a transformational matrix, on which might be plotted the
“spatial ‘logic’ of the unconscious.”
“This work of the matrix is then to overlay contradiction and to create
the simultaneity of logically incompatible solutions. . . The destruction of
difference, the work here of the matrix figure, is the destruction of
form.” This is indeed promising. But again, the move from the theoretical to
the all important operational is
desultory. A few examples of image
“melting” and the “blurring of sexual difference” from the surrealist
photography of Ubac, Bellmer and Man Ray, are mentioned (in a single sentence)
but never discussed.
Disappointingly, most of the art
chosen by Bois and Krauss for the purpose of actively putting the informe “to use” seems to lack much in
the way of energy and is, in fact, strangely passive. Robert Smithson goes to a great deal of
trouble and expense to dump tons of dirt on a hill -- the real “work” of the
piece is then accomplished, over time, by nature (“entropy”). Robert Morris earnestly cuts a huge bolt of
felt according to some simple scheme and then just hangs it from a wall, where
the strands deploy according to gravitational laws (nature’s own
“horizontality”). Andy Warhol and
friends randomly “relieve nature” on a large canvas, which is then left to
“cure” and later displayed as a (surprisingly spectacular) “oxidation
painting,” where it proudly exhibits the effects of “natural” laws. Claes Oldenberg compulsively collects
various pieces of junk in the shape of “ray guns,” which are then displayed in
a case, like arrowheads in some nature lodge.
There are some compelling
exceptions. Gordon Matta-Clark’s
remarkable “anarchitectural” projects involved carefully planned and precisely
executed “cuts” in the floors and/or walls of condemned buildings, to produce
“negative spaces . . . pierced into the architecture . . .” “To visit his final works was to be seized by
vertigo, as one suddenly realized that one could not differentiate between the
vertical section and the horizontal plan . .”[191] Smithson’s Enantiomorphic Chambers (discussed above), was “a work made up of
facing mirrors positioned in such a way that the viewer placed between them —
instead of being multiplied infinitely in the crossfire of reflections — would
both disappear from the space . . . and observe the trajectory of his or her
gaze bifurcate into multiple, unsynthesizable vanishing points.” [76] Such effects of vertigo and self-obliteration
do indeed suggest the implementation of “new laws,” the development of an
“antilogic” which might well be “put to use” by a heterological “science.” What really interests Krauss about the
Smithson piece, however, is not the logic of the carefully deployed mirrors,
which she never discusses, but the tired thematics of the mirror as simulacrum, the metaphysics of which she
dwells on for the remainder of the essay.
Entropy, Expenditure and the
Subject On Trial
The odd conjunction of the “natural”
and the passive, embodied in the mirror theme, is exemplified also in the
surprising choice of “entropy” as a major category. Selected, in all likelihood, as a reflection
of the authors’ interest in the work and writings of Smithson, for whom it is
all important, it creates some serious problems in the context of a discussion
centering on Bataille. As Bois readily
admits, entropy was not a part of Bataille’s working vocabulary. Indeed, the rejected alternative which according to Bois would probably have been
more acceptable to Bataille, “expenditure,” would indeed have been a far better
choice. This notion, known more commonly
as “expenditure without reserve,” is a key aspect of Bataille’s most important
contribution to current critical theory:
“general economics.” Oddly,
neither Krauss nor Bois seem particularly interested in the radical “illogic”
of either “expenditure” or “general economics,” ideas far more challenging and
dynamic than entropy, a topic already done to death years ago, based on a
“scientific law” which can all too easily lead one to equate formlessness with
some sort of “return to nature.”
For me, the most serious lapse can
be found in Krauss’ essay, “Yo-Yo,” where an illuminating summary of Freud’s
insights regarding the role of negation in language, via the rhythms of the
fort-da game, culminates in a surprisingly simplistic misreading of Julia
Kristeva’s theories relating negativity to rhythm. Assuming that the “semiotic” rhythms of
Kristeva’s chora “produce the
speaking subject” and then “put in place both the stability of form and the
fullness of meaning,” Krauss declares such ideas incompatible with the anarchic
“work of the formless.” This is a serious oversimplification. The subject of Kristeva’s le sémiotique is a sujet en proces, a “subject on trial,” a radically divided,
“unsettled” subject very different from the self-assured “subject of
enunciation” Krauss has confused it with.
Le sémiotique is, for
Kristeva, the return of the repressed, as a “heterogeneousness to signification
[that] operates through, despite, and in excess of it and produces in poetic
language ‘musical’ but also nonsense effects that destroy not only accepted
beliefs and significations but, in radical experiments, syntax itself, that
guarantee of thetic consciousness . . .”
Few authors have developed Bataille’s most problematic ideas as
thoroughly and radically as Kristeva.
Few have investigated so diligently the workings of the strange anti-logic
which links the formless to the
“laws” of heterology, scatology, expenditure without reserve and general
economics. Indeed, her le sémiotique and chora come very close indeed to expressing such “laws.” Which may, for our authors, be the problem.
Kristeva states: “In the experience of a Joyce or a Bataille .
. . literature moves beyond madness and realism in a leap that maintains both
‘delirium’ and ‘logic.’” If transgressive
strategies such as the formless are
not going to end by re-affirming what they set out to disrupt (Derrida), if
they are to adequately withstand the powers of re-formation (secondary
elaboration, omnipotence of thought), they cannot simply be transgressive -- there must be a “logic,” no matter how
illogical, problematic or elusive, to establish them on a ground of their own,
however shaky, ephemeral, excessive, “delirious.” Krauss and Bois seem, at times, to
understand this, but never really come to grips with it. Base Materialism, Horizontality, Pulse and
Entropy are certainly relevant and “useful,” but, in themselves, inadequate to
the ambitious task required of them here.
As is, indeed, in my opinion, the great majority of the art works
cited. These noted historian-critics
have had some remarkable insights into the thinking behind Bataille’s informe, as both concept and operation. I highly recommend their book. But the need to actively pursue certain laws of operation, and the problematic
“logic” behind such laws, seems to have eluded them.
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