‘Sucker punch’ — Natalya Serkova on aura and pornography of art – OFLUXO

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Sucker punch

On aura and pornography of art

Natalya Serkova, January 2021

Why are we so fond of watching Hollywood movies? Most people will probably object at once that they do not love and have never loved it, but even they, I think, will find it difficult to deny the power of this guilty pleasure in such moments when it is necessary to raise your spirits and at the same time relax. For bringing this stirring aesthetic pleasure, the critic on the left side has long been placing Hollywood movies in the same row with flagrant examples of products of the capitalist system, corrupting the common man and plunging him or her into a state of ecstatic hypnosis. In order to prevent the consumer from birth to death from being familiar with the sober state of mind, capitalism puts into practice everything he has just invented (or appropriated): endless entertainment, imposed consumption, fast food, sweet soda, and, of course, sex. The colossal power of pornographic images, ready to capture our consciousness almost everywhere—all sorts of interpretations of this maxim have long ago become a common place of criticism of capitalism. It is obvious that, in its application of this logic, the critique comes to a simple conclusion: any affect experienced by an individual from a collision with bourgeois reality carries in itself a deception of this individual, his or her aesthetic enslavement and civil powerlessness.

The authors, who protest against this very bourgeois reality but are also ‘professionally’ active in the fields of affect and sex, have always been unequivocal and open about their isolation from the mainstream socio-cultural discourse. Marquis de Sade, Baudelaire, Bataille, Breton, Bruce LaBruce and his famous thesis ‘Masturbation is counter-revolutionary!’ from the ‘The Raspberry Reich’ movie—in their work (and sometimes in life) they have been declaratively taking a counter-cultural position, showing a different, liberating potential of affect. Such an articulated declaration was a passageway ticket to the other side of the ‘ordinary’ culture and at the same time justified for the culture of ‘intellectuals’ treatment of the authors to what seemed to be completely eaten and digested by the market and the capital (the example of de Sade in this case can be regarded as a proto-cultural gesture of the author, whose life and creative practice were in opposition to the regime of the Enlightenment ethics).

By the beginning of the second half of the last century, this trend has led to the fact that sensual effects, that could possibly serve as a reason for creating art, began to acquire their right to exist only after the expediency of these effects was fixed by the direct participants of the artistic process. Susan Sontag in her essay ‘Against Interpretation’ identified such a state of affairs as problematic. “It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world. (“This world”! As if there were any other.)”[1], she writes eloquently, calling the interpretation a reactionary, cowardly and suffocating activity that kills the object of art as such. Only after imposing a heavy chain of meanings on the object of art was this object allowed to deliver to the viewer an unobtrusive aesthetic effect, which was only within reasonable limits. To avoid the interpretation that both legitimises the aesthetic effect contained in the object and at the same time castrates the object so that the effect is beforehand framed and weakened, according to Sontag, is possible. To do this, it is necessary to create “works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be…just what it is.”[2]. To illustrate her thesis, Sontag has not found enough appropriate examples among contemporary art of her time, while today we can observe art objects functioning in the mode described by Sontag[3]. The process of emancipation of an object of art from the predefined interpretation models takes place right before our eyes, and at the same time the questions of how we should build a new model of perception of art, what this model will contain and what it will be based on, arise.

In answering these questions, Sontag concludes her essay with the following thesis: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”[4]. Instead of the endless process of disenchantment of the object, throwing the baby out with the bath water, she proposes to listen to the object of art, its naked materiality and formal givenness. There is no other better world behind the objects, the object stands before us as it is, and it simultaneously shocks and dulls the viewer who does not know where to put his or her eyes and where to hide, wishing at the same time to continue looking at the object and to stop doing so. In similar terms, twenty years after Sontag, Baudrillard will describe the way pornography, this glossy product of developed capitalism, functions. But today we know that even within pornography, discursive resistance is possible, for example, where its creators claim to be part of a feminist discourse. Here, we can see that the articulation of differences continues to play an important role, while the question of how exactly feminist pornography differs from that of white heterosexual men, takes second place.

But what if the artist doesn’t make statements about his or her own protest? What if, at the same time, he or she creates art that has an explicit attractive effect, that excites the viewer and irritates his or her aesthetic receptors? Would we be right if, based only on these two circumstances, we call this artist a pornographer of the neoliberal cultural industry? Or, remembering the conclusions of Sontag, we will try to find another form of analysis? We have already gotten used to the fact that art engaged in criticizing of the certain manifestations of the dominant order, usually presents us either aesthetics of reserved or even openly boring formal language (as in case of research and archival projects focused on their textual content and procedural nature of multiple public discussions), or with an intentionally repulsive aesthetics (as in case of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn or Christian Boltanski). In both cases, such projects are framed by a warning that the meaning of such art goes ahead of its formal features. Perhaps it is time to talk about the emergence of a new aesthetics—the aesthetics of art, which does not shy away from the popular expressive language, but builds its own principles of its application; which does not make public statements about the creation of alternative narratives, but at the same time functions like an elusive blockchain network; which focuses its attention primarily on the materiality of the object, rather than on its possible interpretations; in short, perhaps it is time to talk about the aesthetics of such art which operates by methods of capital and at the same time doesn’t coincide with the logic of capital.

On the face of it, such a statement seems to be a pathos that is hardly justified. After all, how can one insist on any inconsistency if it has not been expressed in the language, and what do I do when I look for the needed examples of art, as not interpreting it, allowing the effect of the collision of the viewer with this art to happen in the right way? And also, if art, which will be discussed below, does not serve on the side of the replicated pornographic images of liberalism, then why does this art itself seek to produce such pornographic images and to act according to their laws? However, if we think in this vein, we will miss several important points that are relevant to the situation unfolding in the current cultural, social and political discourses.

I speak about the attempts made in modern philosophy to speak about things and phenomena, the knowledge of which fundamentally goes beyond the limits of the way of perception and processing of reality accessible to us. Within this approach, deliberately explained object remains for us as alienated, inaccessible and hidden as before any explanation, and its decoding does not add anything fundamentally new to our knowledge. Emancipation of an object, which in turn can allow us to see this object in a new way, should occur in a different, pre-discursive dimension. It is also desirable that, in the process of its emancipation, the object, like Lovecraft’s monsters so often mentioned today, does not refuse to invade the immediate vicinity of the observer’s space, which he or she had previously considered fully deciphered and safe. If at least these two conditions are met—our refusal to fence off ourselves with knowingly false and incomplete interpretations, and the intense, shocking interaction of the object with us—we have a chance to shift and expand our understanding of reality and to stand on the same plateau with what finds itself in the network of intensive general interactions.

In such a network of interactions, an object of art exists in a special position. On one side, produced by man, as just another one object among other objects, it becomes autonomous and hidden from human beings on an equal footing with other material objects in the world. On the other side, it still remains an object produced by man, which means that it seems to be subordinated to its author’s arbitrary rule. On the third side, throughout the modern history, the object of art was understood as a certain unit with a certain otherness in comparison with the objects of non-art produced by man, and therefore, it was an object with the certain potential to attack in the spirit of Lovecraft’s monsters, only with a slightly different outcome. The last of the above mentioned moments gives the modern object of art a head start in the questions of intensified influence on the perception of the potential viewer, and at the same time it leaves behind the peculiarity that the objects not only made by man possess, i.e. their drowning in the world never available for the full decoding. And if in certain periods of the existence of art the otherness of an object was achieved by the discursive, textually oriented effort of the artist, as in the case of conceptual, non-spectacular or even post-internet art, nowadays this otherness is achieved by the combination of two peculiarities of the object of art, namely, its formal characteristics and methods of its representation. This corresponds accurately to the best actual way to ‘see’ the object: by abandoning any previously given text, carefully observing its behavior and the way how the object itself changes in this process. Eventually, only these are the things we can record with a certain degree of confidence in what is happening.

The problem of representation of art was widely discussed throughout the last century. In Walter Benjamin’s famous thesis, the unique object of art was deprived of its special intangible aura by being reproduced in the form of a two-dimensional image in the photo or by other technical means. Despite the fact that Benjamin himself has somewhat obscured the near-mystical concept of aura (to write about such intangible substances clearly and distinctly is in principle a hardly achievable task), his thesis that the mechanically reproduced object of art loses the value of its own unique stay in the world, was quite unambiguous. “The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated.”[5], writes Benjamin, and the presence becomes, along with the authenticity, another quality of the object of art that this object is deprived of. To lose presence essentially means to lose the link with reality, only within which any authentic objects and events can occur.

However, Benjamin has never indicated such an understanding of reality when reality stratifies into ontologically detached Platonic levels, the movement between which, if it exists, remains extremely difficult or even impossible (the latter, in principle, is uncharacteristic for the mystical way of describing and perceiving reality—any mystic, even if he or she describes the divine world inaccessible to cognition, always leaves a hole through which he or she receives the mystical knowledge). According to Benjamin, the reproduced object of art, having lost its authenticity and its presence, runs in the same plane with the original, remaining a weak mold of the auratic object and not having its own place and time. Schematically, this can be depicted as follows:

At the same time, the reproduced image retains a strong connection with the original, because in case this connection is broken, it loses its very basis of existence, namely, the indication that the original object exists or, at least, existed. In turn, the aura, which allows for an aesthetic effect of varying degrees of force when the viewer meet the original, in the case of a reproduced image, only leaves this image a feature to be a documentary evidence of the existence of the aura in some distance, inaccessible to those who look at the image. “By making many reproductions it [reproductive technique] substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.”[6], and this plurality of copies in a sense frightened Benjamin, showing him the most influential cultural product of his time, created due to technical progress, namely, the film. Being in close proximity to its viewer, not having any original, the film became not only the first copy with no original—it possessed the feature, which the replicated image, according to Benjamin, could not possess. The film was able to produce the strongest aesthetic effect on the viewer, and for this it did not need neither to distance itself from the viewer, like a magical mountain, nor to remain the one and only captivating the viewer’s attention with its uniqueness. Mass culture was devouring precious and rare aura, replacing it by a monster with a new, mutated type of aura, uncontrollable and wild.

An aesthetic effect not disciplined by political (read: discursive) consciousness is dangerous—it is not by chance that Benjamin expresses this thesis by the end of the essay. In this sense, the effect of the collision with the original of the object of art could never become destructive because the object of art always appeared before the viewer already inscribed in a certain semantic flow, already neutralized, withdrawn from the ancient or medieval cult, where it once, not yet being a modern object of art, stayed. Yes, such a derivation, as Benjamin believed, gave birth to an endless chain of auto referenced l’art pour l’art, a kind of theology of art, but isn’t it better to have it than the wild god of the mangled aura, who doesn’t count with any originals? In fact, Benjamin identified such a way of perceiving art in which any aesthetic effect of tangible strength produced by art, not accompanied by an articulated analysis, was considered suspicious and dangerous. The original with an aura is finite, stopped, has coordinates and is accessible for observation, it is derived from all possible contexts and literally placed in a clean room with muted acoustics. The replicated object of mass culture is infinite and wild, it slips away from any analysis like a snake, gives rise to confusion and chaos, and, ultimately, is always ready to serve the darkest tasks of anti-utopian programs. To prevent this object from possessing its own aura was, for Benjamin, the last chance of culture to maintain its own status quo.

The process, which had just gained momentum during Benjamin’s lifetime, by the second half of the XXth century had become fully operational. Benjamin’s sad suspicion was replaced by the despair of those who were critical of the so-called postmodern cultural paradigm. In addition, Benjamin’s method of interaction with the object of art, in which any sensual effect is framed by interpretation, has become not just the main one, but essentially the only correct one. It is precisely this approach that Sontag was opposed to, calling for the return of the eroticism of art, and it is this approach that remains predominant to this day. The subtlety is that, unlike naked pornography, which represents naked life before any discursive distinction, eroticism is itself a product of a certain discourse, namely, if we look at the interpretation of Jean Baudrillard, of a Modern history discourse of understanding the body as collected from many separate parts. In this sense, eroticism always remains a hostage of discursive games, while pornography exists in a naked, pre-discursive field, thus possessing a much greater subversive potential (in particular, for this reason, de Sade, Bataille or Labruce were attracted to pornographic rather than erotic writing and depiction). It is pornography that first of all capital appropriates, making it one of the universal elements of its social functionality (and that is why the policy of Pornhub is so resonant as if it is opening up this bundle of pornography and actions in the social field).

In the second half of the XXth century, Baudrillard turned to the concept of simulacrum to describe a completely new way of life for images at that time. In the world he described, simulacrum, this attractive pornographic image, generated by the neoliberal paradigm, is detached from any originals and begins to form its own simulation around itself. In this simulation we are all doomed to live, forgetting about any uniqueness and authenticity. The true reality is no longer capable of producing new products or auras. Instead, auras are now produced in unlimited quantities in a world of simulations. Any interpretation is optional, the emotional effects are pushed to the limit to keep us in constant drug relaxation. Access to reality is either denied or extremely problematic and traumatic. Simulacres “manifest themselves in all the brilliance and power of fascination”[7], they have become “more real than their originals’ ‘[8], while the real world is buried under a dense mass of autoreferenced images. Schematically, this can be depicted this way:

In the lower part of the scheme there are originals that no longer produce any aura, and above them, in the world of simulacres, there are numerous copies torn off from the originals, oozing their own aura. Baudrillard’s world, unlike Benjamin’s, is bifurcated. The difficulty of getting to the lower level and moving between the levels was clearly demonstrated by the Wachowski siblings in their Matrix—in order to carry out the movement and stay alive, you need to be at least as good as Neo. For all others who are not as heroic, the prospect of a doomed stay in the artificially designed world remains. The ideas expressed by Baudrillard have driven the last nail into the coffin cover of any deliberate attractiveness. After that we all finally understood that if something is aimed at causing an emotional response in us or at least to please us, it means that it tricks us into cheating to the benefit of the capital, which has successfully built its global simulation. Any strong emotional effect has become at least suspicious for the modern intellectual, and at most—vicious and deceitful. In contemporary art, this has led to the fact that Sontag’s call for eroticism of the object has not yet been implemented.

The picture built up by Baudrillard excludes the possibility of any activity in the true world, and if such activity is possible, it is only at the cost of strong-willed rejection of and self-exclusion from the simulation model of the world. Essentially, such an approach leads to the painful exaltation of many cultural producers, who have to solve the unsolvable: to be on the other side of the mass culture ignoring its falsehood and authenticity, and at the same time to work with it in one way or another, trying to reflect on it as well as to appropriate its certain parts. As a result, in place of what the author has done, we find small, mangled monsters that are ugly enough to cause our perplexity, and helpless enough to do anything to us. Ultimately, life in Baudrillard’s world is a life full of despair, and any meaningful action in such a world is an action that was initially doomed to fail. For that reason, in particular, it is so important for Sontag to point out the uniqueness of the world we have. The interpretation, this kraken of a thousand tentacles, always swims nearby always ready to drag an object of art from the visible world of profanation and lies to the murky underwater world of some true meanings. But the problem is that the very notion of the existence of such an underwater world not only closes the object of art from us, but also forces us to treat with arrogant disregard any silent presentation of what we actually need to see.

However, as I mentioned above, there is a tendency in contemporary art right now that is directly in line with the approach that Sontag proclaimed at the time. However, it is no longer about eroticism, but rather about the pornography of art, no matter how frightening the latter word scares us with its strict neoliberal connotation. As with any kind of pornography, words play a completely supportive role here, while the image presented to our view tends to evoke a thrilling sensual response in us. To a large extent, this new language of art has been made possible by the fundamental changes that have taken place in recent years in the questions of distribution of art—namely, its wide Internet dissemination. Today we see a technically reproduced object of art, its digital image which we meet on the Internet. Artists have learned to make their objects exclusively photogenic so that the mystical aura which envelopes the object, as in the case of Baudrillard’s simulacrum, moves from the original to its copy, but, contrary to Baudrillard, the original is no longer deprived of it. Also, unlike the Baudrillard’s scheme, the copy does not lose touch with its original and does not proclaim any alternative world within which it functions independently. The copy and the original remain connected, but at the same time none of this has a dominant ontological status. The original does not have this status because it can no longer fully exist (or, in other words, be distributed) without its copies (and also because its physical existence becomes conditional in a sense), while the copy does not seek to possess this status, if only because the opposition between the worlds of copies and originals as well as the bifurcation of these worlds, are removed. Schematically, it may look like this:

Copies with an aura are centrifugally distributed from the original in all digital and analogue directions, and then begin to multiply themselves, growing with fractal patterns. Copies do not cover up any genuine reality in which the original exists, in particular because the original does not suffer or hide in any way because of its duplicated copies. In another text, I have identified such an original as a donor object[9] that separates a part of itself for a copy, but does not get hurt or diminished as a result of this action. Ultimately, this union of copy and original connects and reconciles two disparate levels of reality, returning us to one single reality, simultaneously authentic and filled with duplicated images and copies without the originals.

Such an approach opens up a possibility for us to work constructively with mass culture, because we can now say that there is no place where the criteria for its authenticity can be in principle opposed to some more authentic reality. Mona Lisa, Deadpool, 300 Spartans and the latest examples of contemporary art on the same plane, they multiple fractally and thus create numerous patterns of the same reality. At the same time, the original, which gives life to the copies, no longer has a Benjamin type of aura, providing the viewer with a charming stable sense of presence of something significant nearby. According to Benjamin, the original began to possess an aura at the moment when it became an object of art, losing its applied function of an object serving a cult. As a result of such a loss, it was distancing itself from the viewer at an incalculable distance. Today, the original regains its applied function—the function of a donor and a nodal beam of growing patterns, thus turning from an object of art to a motor mechanism of their construction. We should no longer be embarrassed by the fact that today the copy also possesses an aura, this hypnotic attraction which scared Benjamin and in which Baudrillard saw the deadly effect of a total simulation culture. In a situation of flat reality common for all, such an aura becomes not a lie that puts us to sleeps, but something that can connect us to the networks of interactions themselves where a speculative mind seeking to emancipate from itself, is looking for a way. Although the originals of objects of art still exist, the disappearance of such an original will not stop the growth of the fractal and will not affect the effect produced by the copies. The situation of fundamental convergence of the concepts of copy and original unfolds before our eyes.

The Internet environment in which the copies function and reproduce, contributes to the development of such a visual language on the part of artists, in which a strong aesthetic effect on the viewer, preceding any text interpretation, becomes the dominant quality of the new object of art. The object presents itself to the viewer, gets naked in front of them, trying to stop the viewer’s gaze and make them carefully consider its individual parts (especially those that cause the greatest emotional response). Only after this initial excitement of the viewer’s attention, the object begins to slowly unfold its conceptual component, begins its own flirting. Some may argue that art acting in this way is no longer art in the strict sense of the word, turning into unpretentious and stupid mass images instead. This can be answered as follows. The latter statement once again refers to a situation in which the line between art and mass culture is still strictly drawn, and the reality of art continues to exist much higher than the underground realm of unworthy simulations. Also, if we turn to the history of contemporary art, we will see that today art continues to follow its logic, namely, to expand beyond what was previously conventionally defined as art. Finally, and this point can be called the key one in the analysis of the newest trends in contemporary art, today art more than ever seeks to become non-art, grossly violating the institutional arrangements related to the primacy of interpretation, the existence of certain places of its display and regulated channels of its distribution.

Such violations, such an uprising of art against itself, allow us to eventually say that today art can function in the territory of capital, freely adopt the language of neoliberal culture, and at the same time use that language to build its own narratives, not absorbed by the capital. In particular, such maneuvering is possible for art precisely because today it refuses to follow any type of interpretation obediently, instead offering itself to the viewer and thereby causing the viewer to be embarrassed and blushing, to react emotionally to art and to follow its movements even before the road on which the viewer is led is clear. It’s suspiciously similar to what a Hollywood movie, pornography or sweet soda does to any of us, but unlike following them, we never know where an object of art will lead us, an object openly flirting with us, but not explaining anything. We can no longer dismiss any aesthetic excitement as knowingly deceiving us simply because we can no longer hope for the presence of the correct path, laid somewhere under the cover of sparkling simulations. Unexpected assembly, other logic, literality and naked physiology of the object of art allows it to rise above the smoky ground and lure us in the direction of a series of surprises. Our heads remain cold while our hearts are being warmed up by the alien approaching us.

In place of a hermeneutics we need pornography of art.

Notes

1. S. Sontag, Against interpretation. Against Interpretation and Other Essays, p. 17, Ad Marginem Press, Moscow, 2014

2. Ibid, p. 21

3. I refer to my article The Song of First Love. Art Against the Meanings (first published in Moscow Art Magazine №107 p. 140-149, 2018)

4. S. Sontag, Against interpretation. Against Interpretation and Other Essays, P. 24, Ad Marginem Press, Moscow, 2014

5. W. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Illuminations, Schocken Books, New York, 1969 (ebook)

6. Ibid

7. J. Baudrillard, Precession of Simulacra. Simulacra and Simulation, p. 10, POSTUM Press, Moscow, 2015

8. Ibid, p. 20

9. I refer to my article Gallery Fiction. Towards the New Technology of Art Dissemination (first published in Moscow Art Magazine №104 p. 57-61, 2018)

The article was first published in Russian in Moscow Art Magazine №108, 2019

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