OFLUXO
The Song of First Love
Art Against the Meanings
Natalya Serkova
One of the aims of interpreting art is to single out the certain novel art movement and clear the place that this movement can legally take over time. Gradually, the masses of critical and theoretical texts, which aim to clarify semantic and formal essence, expand. Clarification comes through analysis of individual artworks related to movement and discovery of the place which the movement hold of within the institutional system. Whatever methods the interpreter uses (including criticizing one or other interpretative methods), art remains the raw material waiting for preparation/interpretation, utilizing varying degrees of perseverance. Skillful critics or theorists of art bake the Phenomenon from this raw material, which then safely fills the world museums and galleries of contemporary art. Such a forward motion seems to be inevitable nowadays. Perhaps the same will happen with art, which is being produced by a new generation of artists. In turn, I, as an author, by writing this text, might fulfill the role of a baker, who adds his pinch to the general recipe.
Despite possible future outcomes, the situation described above continues to contain the notorious problem of elitism, non-commitment and, ultimately, child safety of even the most radical art. At one time, the Russian avant-garde tried to solve this problem, declaring the confluence of art and life. Its capacity was not enough for the successful implementation of this plan, and the avant-garde lost. Art, which the avant-garde produced and which aimed at capturing all segments of population of young Soviet State, grew out of a sophisticated, intense intellectual work and a developed aesthetic taste far more advanced than of an ordinary Soviet viewer. For this reason, no matter how much denied, their art descended to the Soviet people down the staircase of revolutionary work, and at the bottom of this staircase, as expected, there was no support. The lack of power of the revolutionary aesthetic struggle of the avant-garde laid in the very construction of this struggle — carried on through art, which, like an unusual flower, was produced in the laboratory and therefore sensitive to temperature extremes.
Todays search for a new niche for art, emancipated from the castrating claws of institutions and capital, looks unconvincing. The newest place that the liberated art must occupy simply cannot be found. Again and again, the newly developed strategy first rushes in a stream of refined non-places, and then gradually calms down and eventually finds a space well-known for everyone. At the same time, young artists (those of them who have the ability to experience reality particularly acutely) remain with a feeling of severe prostration, torn by an inner need for work along with a deep understanding of the non-working state of the institutional art system. Because of the weak institutional feedback, artists hardly understand what do they after all produce.
Despite all this, the current situation still works more in favor of the artist, and not vice versa. Perhaps the time has come again to look at the object of art (I will use this phrase in the broad sense, as in “unit of art”) as a full-fledged tool for constructing reality. In this sense, unlike avant-garde art, infested with the same ideas, today’s art has a number of strategic advantages. On the one hand, unlike the first, it does not borrow its forms from ivory towers, but collects them directly from under our feet, steals it from the feeds of our social networks and dialogues in chats. On the other hand, it has a tremendous digital resource of self-distribution. Lastly, it is produced at such a time when confusion and hesitation of meanings have penetrated so deeply into the very tissue of reality that it becomes easier to make forays into the enemy’s rear — the keepers of the dominant meanings risk not to distinguish a successful spy.
At the same time, in order to start implementing such work, art must cease to be what it is, namely, raw material, waiting for its interpretation. Objects of art become independently acting units, resisting taming with the help of one or another supposedly inherent meaning. The object of art resists the meaning imposed on it, just as the protagonist of any anti-utopia does. The protagonist understand that he can begin to act only by avoiding “conceptualization”. First in a whisper, and then publicly he declares: I am not a subject for decoding! According to this statement, he dooms himself to “literal” interpretation as an easily destroyed and replaced element of the overall structure. The “literal” nature of art objects is to be discussed below, but for now let us outline the situation in which the instrumentally active work of art becomes possible.
The scope of loosening of sense-bearing structures that is currently taking place, is truly impressive. Although it would be more accurate to speak rather not about loosening, but about their structural regeneration. The preceding decades of the postmodern regime set the stage for such a transition. The deliberate, declared chaos of the discourses of postmodernism resembles the entropy of individual particles of meaning. Still, the entropy was not able to influence the deep structure of the overall construction. As it became known in physics, at some point in time the number of randomly moving free particles of physical matter is able to reach a critical point at which the entire structure of matter enters the risk zone of irreversible mutation. Such critical marks, or otherwise, bifurcation points, become turning points, passing through which two outcomes become possible: free particles adopt the behavior of ordered particles of the structure, and then the structure returns to its original state, or the critical mass of free particles irreversibly changes the entire structure, creating something completely different in its place. The fact that chaotic particles can not only be ordered, but completely and irreversibly rebuild the structures to which they previously belonged, is a prominent discovery in the physics of the second half of the 20th century. [1]
By allowing such achievement of the critical point of chaotically tossing meanings in the present tense, can we assume that we have reached the bifurcation point, do deformed semantic structures begin to assemble into new combinations and patterns? Any physicist will caution us against literal analogies between behavior of microscopic structures and social communities and their products. However, such analogy can help us produce a hypothesis, unexplainable changes can be formulated and understood, relating to the way of functioning and general features of individual objects of art that form a certain trend already. In turn, these ways of functioning and these features can serve as bright pointers to hidden, more general processes of moving and deformation of meanings, which occur around us. The meanings drawn from the observation of art objects become a tool of understanding reality.
Thus, we turn over the avant-garde model of functioning of art: from the tool of the pursued deformation of meanings and the product of artificial catalysis of this deformation, as it was at the time of the avant-garde, art turns into a tool of manifestation, and natural catalysis of deformation. For this reason, we assume: objects of art that will point us to the places of deformation, to which it would make sense to put an extra effort to speed up mutations. Careful observation of moving of objects of art shows us that the bifurcation point has been reached.
What kind of observation gives us reason to claim that? Bifurcation point is the moment in which the semantic structures of postmodernism, which did not threaten the general structure due to the absence of their own alternative structure, gain critical mass, are starting to distort the structure of reality. In order to show that the ordering process has been launched, we need to identify those features of the newest art that, on the one hand, still remain to be the signs of postmodernism, and make art immune to fixation on all sorts of opposing variations of “chaos” and “order” in favor of creating their own alternative structures. It should be reiterated that a transition through the bifurcation point may have another, directly opposite outcome. In this case, the behavior of objects of art will become a marginal flash and, having calmed down with time, will occupy their modest place, among other phenomena, for nothing significantly affecting the certain period of historical time. In this sense, we can only build hypotheses, to one of two unpredictable outcomes. The movement of particles during the transition through the bifurcation point is so intense that a fracture in favor of one of the two scenarios becomes no more predictable than the result of the roll of the dice.
The beginnings of the formation of brand new structures within the newest contemporary art are manifested on three different levels which characterize this art, such as: the ways of its dissemination, its formal features and ways in which this art relates to the meaning.
Earlier, describing the first of these levels, namely the distinctive features of the dissemination of new art, I highlighted the differences in the ways of its dissemination from the ways of dissemination the Internet and Post-Internet art and called this new way gallery fiction [2]. The essence of this method lies in the fact that art no longer gravitates to any particular environments of representation: neither physical nor digital. While Internet art declaratively went online, and the Post-Internet art tried to declaratively return offline, nodding intensively towards its “digital homeland”, the art which follows them no longer sees the need to separate these two spaces. It mixes those spaces together and uses this mix for its own purposes. The opposition of the physical and the virtual, which began at the end of the last century and lasted until recently, was a chaotic being, marking the phase of the entropy of contemporary art, which wanted to break away from the structure of institutions but still belonged to them.
The weakness of any opposition lies in the fact that it rests on concrete theses, which are as easy to distinguish and organize as they are adopted. In turn, the absence of any claimed opposition to the old order makes a separate phenomenon that is difficult to distinguish. While the forces of art of the last two decades were left to different forms of opposition and separation, the newest art has the ability to save resources for the formation of new institutional forms. These forms can crystallize in the formats of Internet blogs or online galleries, physical spaces with unstable topology or scalable physical sizes, of objects of art that belong simultaneously to the virtual and physical environments, ultimately, in the formats of international communities capable of fully ensure their own functioning and growth.
Openness, permeability of such communities gives the opportunity to absorb incoming resources, changing their structure at the cellular level and incorporating into their own emerging structure. These new structures are absolutely omnivorous, able to absorb and recycle any material that goes inside them. For the prying eyes, this makes them poorly distinguishable from market capital structures. On the other hand, probably for the first time in recent history, we can observe structures acting by the forces of capital and forming structural lattices that are qualitatively different, built on open forms of communication and their full permeability. At this level objects of art act as memes. With the help of capturing the viewer’s attention, they strengthen and gradually calibrate their aesthetic perception, offering him a different aesthetic standard at the pre-linguistic level. This becomes the first step in further, deeper changes in viewer’s perception. At the same level, we can also talk about the new autonomy of an object of art, which exists through meme-replication, free from institutional approval, free from the viewer equipped with a certain apparatus of understanding of art.
What are the formal features of the new art that can give us the opportunity to talk about the calibration of the previous aesthetic perceptions? Here we reach the second feature that characterizes this art. It offers the viewer an experiment, a fascinating attraction, participation becomes a thrilling adventure for the viewer. This property of attractiveness is what takes the place of the modernistic breakdown of the object, which once forced this object out of the mass of others and let us see it. At one time, the Heideggerian tool had to break down in order to become visible. Now the object of art connects the mode of maximum attractiveness to become a tool. Such attractiveness is reminiscent of flirtation, which, on the one hand, contains naked physiology in its core, repulsive for the participants of it, and, on the other hand, masks this physiology with its complicated game forms, the desire to connect to which becomes difficult to overcome.
Just as the content of a conversation when flirting can be absolutely anything, it is impossible to reduce objects of the newest art to the final set of formal features. But, as in the case of flirtation, a call for concrete actions is hidden behind external forms. This call is absolutely clear to participants of the flirtation, but remains unnoticed by outside observers. A person who is already aesthetically infected with the particular objects of art, begins to recognize this call. Formally these objects can be smooth, streamlined and glossy, like the works of Pakui Hardware; torn, rough, consisting of hundreds of small parts, like the works of Jakub Choma or Vitaly Bezpalov; depicting frightening pagan totems, like sculptural works of Tarwuk; not depicting anything like the abstract paintings of Martin Lukáč; deliberately pleasant to look at and deliberately repulsive; expensive or cheap to manufacture; colored, transparent, large and small, digital and physical, in short, they can be whatever. Themes for works, formal techniques, styles and materials are truly endless. This is the legacy of postmodernism for artists, and this is what makes incredibly difficult, almost nullifies the selection of this art in a separate movement according to certain formal grounds.
This impossibility of reducing to any particular art movement becomes an intuitive consequence of artists work in identifying, displaying and accelerating structural mutations. This is what allows their objects to be exactly the tools of such work and not just objects of art. However, what distinctive formal features, showing that the bifurcation point is passed and the mutation process is running, is it still possible to distinguish? Conducting an analogy with flirtation, I assumed that at the formal level a conversation running in flirtation mode can support any kind of topic and contain absolutely any set of words. At the same time, he can still be recognized as a flirtation by an outside observer. The observer will recognize flirtation if he sees that what is being said during the conversation has absolutely nothing to do with its actual content. Individual words during the flirtation become detached from connotations and, radically transformed, create new meanings in place of the former ones. These new connotations do not have any direct relation to the signifiers; it will be impossible to establish the link without observing the entire pattern of the conversation. Here we face mimicry of the flirt in the most ordinary conversation.
Something similar happens with the described art. The formal features of individual objects, taken in isolation from the general pattern, often quite successfully mimic art created in other periods of time, and only the subtle differences may tell us that this art cannot belong to one or another period of time in the past. Formally, these objects, like chameleons, turn into that side which will be closest to you and to the general context within which you are. This side will attract you, but it will be just as difficult for you to explain the reason for this attraction to yourself, just as how difficult it is to explain your craving for this or that person. The flirting appeal of such art lies in its relationship with meaning as such, relations that are poorly accessible to superficial appreciation. Forms absorb everything because the very structural phenomenon of meaning, after several decades of parting with it by forces including a formal language among others, becomes possible.
Thus, the objects of the newest art resist their own interpretation. However, it can be said that during the entire 20th century, this was inherent in any object of art, to a certain extent. The object of art arose at the price of expansion of new formal and methodological territories, not yet marked up by any interpreter. The object of art strove to slip away, and the interpreter made endless efforts to catch it. In this game of pursuit, the interpreter ended up always winning: the object of art, surrounded on all sides, surrendered to the meaning. The object of art became an illustration of meaning, and this illustration could now be replicated and distributed without fear that the image depicted on it would slip away from the interpreters’ gaze. In this sense, conceptual art managed to make a real revolution: it was the first movement in art that refused to play in the game of pursuit with meaning. Conceptualists declaratively destroyed the distance separating the object of art and the meaning at the very start of the life of their objects, that distance that has been inevitably reduced to zero in the process of institutionalizing of the object of art and thereby castrating it. Perhaps for this reason, in the second half of the 20th century the Soviet artistic underground has gravitated so much to its own formats of conceptualism — in Soviet reality, the format of the game of pursuit was painted for its participants in more gloomy tones than for the Western artists.
This impossibility of reducing to any particular art movement becomes an intuitive consequence of artists work in identifying, displaying and accelerating structural mutations.
In Postmodernism, the situation somewhat changed: the object of art refused trying to escape from the meaning and stopped. It pointedly refused to move because of the general conviction that there was nowhere else to move anymore. The game of pursuit ended, and the art began flirtatiously playing with its interpreters. These flirtations provided a calm life to it, not interrupted by the game in which art had suffered defeat for so long. The art of Postmodernism welcomed all sorts of meanings as old friends. Any interpretation, as obligatory as it had been before, was met with cheers even before appearing. Such charming benevolence of Postmodern art ensured universal popularity and success not only for this art, but also for the art that preceded it. Art and meaning merged in warm embraces, carefully guarded by interpreters. However, such embraces were necessary not only for Postmodern art as they were just as important for meaning as such. During this period of time, semantic structures with their own internal tension began to lose this tension and weaken. Art aestheticized this weakening, thereby reconciling it with itself. Art did not accelerate, but also did not inhibit weakening — rather, it was allied to illustrate it, taking on the role of comrade, who is aimed to ironically soothe you in difficult times.
The aesthetics of weakened semantic structures can be also observed in the newest art. However, unlike Postmodern art, in the art of recent years one can hardly find the soothing irony of a good friend. Just as a person who is flirting with you cannot become a good friend of yours, so the newest art can hardly be perceived as such. Both in relation to the meaning and to the viewer it behaves like a cold, alienated object, always ready to recall the distance separating it from the first and the second. It is this distance that makes the newest art so attractive, and it is what prevents any interpretation from penetrating into its object predatorily.
But how did it happen that art and meaning has opened their embrace? The reason for this will become clear if we again recall the analogy with the passage of particles through the bifurcation point. Once, being inside a stable structure, art and meaning played a linearly moving game of pursuit, but, locked in their arms due to a change in their trajectories and speed, they flew out of the structure, hitting the same randomly moving clutches. After building up the critical mass and passing through the bifurcation point, the chaotically moving particles began to order: each particle of art and each particle of meaning began to create their own brand new structures. Clutches began to crumble, while the coupled particles started to fly away from each other, creating distances in the places of the formed voids. These distances now separate the structures of art formed after the chaos and the newly growing structures of meaning. In such a situation, a return to the game of pursuit or another flirtation of art with its interpreters becomes nothing more than an attempt to reverse the process to where art and meaning are still connected by linear relationships and where this connection can still be calculated. In contrast, in the current situation the another level of autonomy regime appears — the autonomy of art from the meaning.
In this connection, it will be more accurate to speak not about the resistance of the new object of art to the interpretation, but about its indifferent attitude to it. Art and meaning become equal and independent from each other, and the methods of their connection can now be more diverse and unnecessary than ever. Objects do not wait for these compounds — they act regardless of their presence or absence. They are able to initiate these compounds and, at the same time, able to ignore or avoid them. It is for this reason objects of art begin to gravitate to the language of literal, to the deliberate evidence of what they present as themselves. Tide Pods laid on a slice of pizza are at risk of being exactly what they are: Tide Pods laid on a slice of pizza — simply because art can now afford it. Moreover, they do not just take that risks — they really are just and only themselves. It is no longer a meaning generated by the interpretation what makes Tide Pods on a slice of pizza become an art piece, but the pattern to which this object belongs, and which, like the pattern of flirtation, can be distinguished only by distancing itself from its individual parts. At the same time, just like the pattern of flirtation, the pattern that owns such objects of art also contains a very specific call. This is a call to see the distance between the object and the meaning, the distance that was formed during the process of mutation and which cannot be ignored when still trying to connect the object and the meaning in ways that seemed familiar to us before. It is for this reason that objects of art become objects-spies: making their way to where the relationship of objects and meaning seems understandable, they distort and destroy this relationship, show us the new distance between them. For the same reason, objects of art become tools. By using them, we expand the area of the pattern, accelerating the ubiquitous mutation processes of those semantic structures that still contain tight connections between the object and the meaning.
The distance between the object and the meaning is no longer a postmodern chaos of particles detached from large and powerful structure. Rather this becomes one of the signs that entropy slowed down. We can assume that new, mutated structures began to form at the place of the formed distances. Behavior of memes reflects the post-entropy stop: they multiply by stopping the viewer’s gaze on themselves. The more powerful and unexpected this stop of viewer’s gaze will be, the more successfully the meme will multiply. However, no matter how long we look at the newest object of art, this will not make it more understandable to us, nor friendlier and more intimate. The task of such object is to carry a record of the distance separating it from the meaning, from interpretation, and from the viewer, who, for obvious reasons, does not want to fall into the zone of minimal semantic clarity.
At this point, we can draw a distinction between those objects of art that belong to the pattern of mutation and those that do not. The objects belonging to it do not aspire to approach you, but also do not aspire to disappear. Instead, they maintain a distance that is almost unchangeable over time. Flirtation ends where mutual recognition in the inevitable physiological intimacy happens: the pattern and its distance crumble. Therefore, the task of objects of art is to flirt with you until the mutation is implemented, until the mutation finally wins. If an object looks harmonious, this is a sure sign that it was a mimicking impostor in its place, carrying a record of the embraces of an object and meaning. If an object starts to hide from you, it means that it still gravitates to the game of pursuit and waits for its decryption. The relations between the object of art and the meaning becomes the litmus, which determines the belonging of the object of art to the pattern of mutations.
Any mutations need a place to spread out. If my observations are correct, the distinctive features that can be distinguished in the newest art, indicate that we are witnessing the passage of the former semantic structures through the bifurcation point. Once the particles of meaning that had flown away from the old semantic structure, today gained critical mass and, slowing down the movement, began to gather into new, mutated structures, simultaneously infecting everything around with their mutation. The objects of the newest art born in the process of mutation spread the mutation through digital and physical spaces. They never lie to the one who looks at them: it is impossible to lie where the meaning and interpretation have lost their former influence. They do not tell stories: they themselves are a record of history, mutating, distorting and multiplying before our eyes. They do not approach or run away: instead, they maintain a distance that makes them so attractive and inaccessible to us. These objects are inaccessible because you can never completely determine whether they really exist or not. The always remaining possibility that these objects do not exist in reality, can be considered a reminder that it is impossible to predict the moving of mutation after passing the bifurcation point. The impossibility of predicting the future is a luxurious gift that the passage through a bifurcation point can give us. Our ignorance and openness to meet any mutations contain a future that is valuable at least because it does not repeat its past. Eventually, ignorance and openness towards any mutation show the distance that is able to separate us from the old meaning, and therefore allow change to come.
Notes:
1. For more information on the entropy of elementary particles, the passage through bifurcation points, the irreversibility of such changes, the ordering of chaotically moving particles, and the applicability of these observations to both microscopic and macroscopic systems, see the book by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers “Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature”. Bentam New Age Books, 1984.
2. Referring to my article “Gallery Fiction. Towards the New Technology of Art Dissemination”, which was published in “Moscow Art Magazine” issue #104 and in O Fluxo magazine.
Written by Natalya Serkova,
philosopher, art theorist, co-founder of TZVETNIK
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