Website is an interpretation of the book 'Allegory Of The Cave Painting'. The site was made by Michalina Wojtkiewicz on the coding class taught by Quentin Creuzet at The Royal Academy of Art, Den Haag.
TEXTS: *Dear, by Tom Nicholson*The Distant Past by Susanne Kriemann*Symbiotic Art and Shared Nostalgia by Ignacio Chapela*
Dear,
It's been hectic since I saw you. On the way back I had two very good days in London, one of which was dedicated to the National Gallery. The main purpose of my visit was Manet's Execution of Maximilian. Though I have spent so many hours looking at that image in the studio, I was still surprised by seeing it in the flesh again: the the way the painting works at its own scale (I have almost become habituated to the image at the scale at which I am drawing it); its fragmentation (which registers more viscerally in the object itself); the effect of its missing parts (i.e., we only see the hand of Maximilian; this absence of the figure who would be executed leaves a space open,to fill ourselves).
I also did some grazing on the collection. The surprise in this was Titian's Death of Actaeon, which made me think of the origins of the Allegory show, the endless process of self-devouring that is also the Gwion Gwion's self-generation into the present. I am not sure if you have ever spent much time with that Titian painting, but part of what is striking is the different painterly or material treatment in different parts of the picture. In the section where Actaeon is turned into a stag to be devoured by his own hounds (i.e, the right-hand section of the image) the painting becomes incredibly crude, scarcely more than paint itself, so that our itinerary towards this scene of violence is both towards Actaeon (suspended at the moment before he is) consumed by his own dogs, but also towards (the suspension of) the moment when figuration is consumed by the matter of the painting. This was all the more pronounced with Manet's Execution in my like one head, where the firing of a lethal projectilr is figured like one moment endlessly repeated, whith that Manet coolness: all those soldiers, almost replicas of one another, seem to perform that same instant, like a Muybridge which does not progress into a representation of movement, with all the figures that cut out and stacked into one frame. By contrasting Titan's painting has the moment of the arrow being shot, and what follows from that shooting, all within one frame, a series of unfolding events in one picture. The arrow is absent, but the scene races to transform itself ahead of the protagonist's act of firing to become the materiality of paint, towards another kind of devouring, where the picture consumes its scene. Spending time with the surface of that painting, that "racing" also slowed down my looking, to the pace of painting (rather than the speed of firing), or produced a type of looking that seemed to track the pace of executing a painting.
I did have one other moment that reminded me of our Gwion Gwion conversations while I was away: a little escape moment from installing in Selestat to see - for the first time - the Isenheim altarpiece in Colmar. Have you seen it in the flesh? It is extraordinary as a first-hand experience, for which no number of reproductions fully prepares you. Partly this is to do with the weirdness of the entire complex, the less well-known parts of the polyptych, a kind of weird sci-fi Christian technicolor hallucination. In particular the Resurrectior is a strange thing. Christ's face is almost obliterated by its own glow, becoming simply yellowy-orange surface; his eyes the only feature of his face to fully survive its own luminosity, strangely giving the impression they are the seeing eyes of the picture itself rather than of the face the image woulu bear. The St Anthony picture wonderfully monstrous. Though it is of course the most familiar on some level, it is the Crucifixion that is the most deeply shocking, truly affecting, and it was also the thing that reminded me of our discussion. This was partly through the stunningly rendered flecks of blood (and bruising around them) that seem to be proliferating on Jesus' body. Here the very powerful physicality of the picture seemed important, the sense of the altarpiece being painted on a bunch of huge slabs of wood that hover over and above you. The flecks-with their strong suggestion of the patterning on a tree (alongside the tree-like gnarled form of Christ's body)-begin to suggest that Christ's body is both tattooed by the signs of his torture by his captors, but also marked by the gradual process of his body becoming the very matter of the image itself. Does this make any sense? The power of the image-as an illusion of cosmological significance - is bound up in the strange sense that the very physicality of the picture surface is starting to impose itself on its own image. A very incoherent set of thoughts, I am afraid, but in front of that great thing I did feel my experience begin to touch the edge of our conversations.
Our time at Lake Mungo last month continues to persist in my mind. I liked what you said the other day about our time wandering around that extraordinary landscape. I think you called it a " wind-borne archaeology", and you're right. It's an unstable landscape that seems to reveal and cover over its histories of inhabitation in a strikingly fluky way. That landscape, the fineness of its constituent matter, has been with me again the last couple of days. As I think I mentioned when we met up, I am working this week with Saskia on that trial wall drawing. We have begun the process of pouncing (i.e., beating those cartoons,those perforated drawings of the Manet Execution image, with little cheesecloth bags full of ground charcoal), working on the large wall of my studio (which by good fortune is almost identical in scale to that wall at Extra City). It made me think a lot about charcoal itself, which for me has always been important to consider as particles. It works by disaggregating as you draw. Certainly the pouncing we have begun relies on this characteristic of charcoal. There is something fascinating about the way those little specks of burnt wood become airborne, making their way through the perforations in the cartoons, re-constituting themselves as a landscape of dots on the wall behind, the surface beneath the images we were also beginning to un-make with that pouncing. It will be many days of work to get it to the density it needs-to fill the wall with the right accumulation of those charcoaly flecks, the traces of all those perforations. It's hardly the strange palette of Lake Mungo, but the sense of a fine matter saturating the air-its movements at once dispelling and disclosing the images of another moment we would glimpse-feels close to what we were within when we walked amongst those dunes last month.
I am also sending you that picture (weird still life with Maximilian's blood-saturated clothes, plus mysterious monochrome/image-less picture!) that I know you love so much.
Big hugs, Tom
A 2010 archeological study found that the prehistoric Gwion Gwion paintings in Australia, whose chromatic vividness contrasts with their age and their exposure to sun and rain, are inhabited by "living pigments". A symbiotic biofilm of red cyanobacteria and black fungi sustains a process of permanent self-painting, while also etching the pictures deeper into the quartz wall. The texts commissioned for the reader respond, from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, to an idiosyncratic temporality and economy - or ecology - of signification. Descending from an inscrutable past to the same extent that they are made now, in radical contemporaneity, the Gwion Gwion are examined as an allegorical metabolism that generates new articulations of “art” and “life”, contamination and purity, prehistory and modernity, bacterial and human colonies, lost knowledge and scientific advancement - collaborative relations between antonyms, altered schemas of “origin” and “identity”.
In which Celan's time-crevasses shelter ancient organisms resisting radiocarbon dating, forming and reforming images, zooming into the rock and zooming out of time. But are these indeed figures-of bodies afloat between different planes of experience, of mushroom heads, dendrianthropes and therianthropes, of baobabs traveling thousands of miles from Africa to the Australian Kimberley; are they breath- crystals, inhaling and exhaling in the space between the mineralogical collection of the museum and the diorama of primitive life; are they witness to and trace of the first days and nights of soul-making; are they symbioses of mitochondria and weak acids, of one-celled nothings, eyes and seeds, of nerves and time and rock walls? Another humanity was possible and we are what it did not become.
Tout s'efface, or everything fades, yet Blanchot may assist in grasping, and willing into language, a character before any signification, an act of production before memory, a regression groping in the darkness of the cave. Do those lines demand chronological fixation or attribution, or do they point to a beyond or a below of art history, where the first imager turns away from what had been the gesture before the first image, its object or support, and touches, intoxicated with the worlds of vision and possibility that thus open, the boundary that separates image from non-image, and the human from its antonyms. These strange images - shadows - call upon us to turn around, apprehend their pulsating reality: to overcome them, like a student superseding the master. This is paideia. But it is also play, the cave painting as feeling and experimenting "hands," as positive and negative vying for the same truth. We will return to this.
What do we read when we read, and which desires or anxieties preclude us from actually reading: allegory here opens towards symbolic dispossessions, figures of thought that are with their subject, minds aping objects, bacterial and human colonies, eviscerated geologies and Western chronocolonization. Another hand, Stevens's "palm at the end of the mind," apprehends: "the absolute hand of poetry." Then, a wrinkleless, white-skinned hand manipulating black fungi that blacken marble monuments - which, like all monuments, are in and out of time, tell and terminate their story. Black fungi and red cyanobacteria, cohabitating in their biofilm are contrasted to "our" lichens, always extending, colonizing. eating time. Then, what would a monument to cannibalism look like, what would it digest? What would a politics of metabolism presuppose, prescribe, and enable?
Foucault wondering about a truly socialist governmentality and Agamben's monastery rule readings, a Rauschenberg erasure and a gender- and border-crossing with Pasolini, a genealogy of biopolitics in which fungi consume Freud, Dawkins is obscured by memes and genes, Thucydides foresees LOLcats, Bök collaborates with bacteria and Hobbes; the same but not the same story over and over again, but also a gathering of these copies and ordering the copies of copies, and a talking about an ordering of them, an ethnography of delirious replications, of returns as farce and tragedy, of what does not end and what does not begin in a copy. These juxtapositions and conceptual relations, tentative but active in the mind of scholar and the artist alike, point to other connections between the procedures of the humanities and conceptual art, a relation that perhaps should be read through the human, the anthropos, the an-tropical: without trope, endlessly producing tropes.
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No sun was lighted up, the world to view; No moon did yet her blunted horns renew: Nor yet was Earth suspended in the sky, Nor pois'd, did on her own foundations lye: Nor seas about the shores their arms had thrown; But earth, and air, and water, were in one. Thus air was void of light,and earth unstable, And water's dark abyss unnavigable. No certain form on any was imprest; All were confus'd, and each disturb'd the rest. For hot and cold were in one body fixt; And soft with hard, and light with heavy mixt. But God, or Nature, while they thus contend, To these intestine discords put an end: Then earth from air, and seas from earth were driv'n, And grosser air sunk from aetherial Heav'n. Thus disembroil'd, they take their proper place; The next of kin, contiguously embrace; And foes are sunder'd, by a larger space. The force of fire ascended first on high, And took its dwelling in the vaulted sky: Then air succeeds, in lightness next to fire; Whose atoms from unactive earth retire. Earth sinks beneath, and draws a num'rous throng Of pondrous, thick, unwieldy seeds along. About her coasts, unruly waters roar; And rising, on a ridge, insult the shore. And as five zones th' aetherial regions bind, Five, correspondent, are to Earth assign'd: The sun with rays, directly darting down, Fires all beneath, and fries the middle zone: The two beneath the distant poles, complain Of endless winter, and perpetual rain. Betwixt th' extreams, two happier climates hold The temper that partakes of hot, and cold. The fields of liquid air, inclosing all, Surround the compass of this earthly ball: The lighter parts lye next the fires above; The grosser near the watry surface move: Thick clouds are spread, and storms engender there, And thunder's voice, which wretched mortals fear, And winds that on their wings cold winter bear. Nor were those blustring brethren left at large, On seas, and shores, their fury to discharge: Bound as they are, and circumscrib'd in place, They rend the world, resistless, where they pass; And mighty marks of mischief leave behind.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 1
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Volver a los diecisiete después de vivir un siglo Es como descifrar signos sin ser sabio competente Volver a ser de repente tan frágil como un segundo
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Se va enredando, enredando, como en el muro la hiedra Y va brotando, brotando, como el musguito en la piedra
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To look back on seventeen after having lived for a century Is like deciphering signs not being a competent sage And to become, suddenly, as fragile again as a second
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It twists and it tangles, as the ivy on the wall And it sprouts and it grows, as the moss does with the stone
-Violeta Parra
fig. 1, Phylogram showing the degree of relatedness between representatives of all life-forms known to exist on our Planet in the late 20th Centur y. The distance along lines connecting life forms (with individual names or "terminals" as representatives of each) is proportional to the degree of relatedness through a common ancestor bet ween two life forms.
Three large domains of life are evident at this phylogenetic scale, Organisms with similarities in time-and space- scale to humans (the universe we can physically see and hug) are all contained in the shaded area; outside this area, life-forms areas individual organisms - invisible ("microbial") to the human experience.