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Visual culture and technological arts: the observer formerly known as spectator

Jorge Leandro Rosa

1. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the process of visual perception became a primary object of vision itself and, consequently, of theory. In a certain sense, we can say that a new understanding of both light and temporality is the main source for XX centurys phenomenology and ontology of visual art. Technological modernization also effected a revaluation of vision opening the path toward a new understanding of image and visual perception in contemporary technological arts. Aesthetics is now a philosophy mainly concerned with light and perception. It is no coincidence that such a self-conscious author as Goethe would underline the process of perception itself as both an essential object of perception and a primary object of aesthetics. In this turning point, its no longer the artistic concept that seeks reality as validation. The artist gives visibility to the insufficiency of the object to his concept (and, very soon, any object will fulfill this role). Does the history of art coincide with a possible history of perception? In our days, the art critic and the art scholar are bound to a strange cognitive asymmetry of narratives: while they are in the process of turning away from a debilitated aesthetical quality in the present day work of art, they must assure, at the same time, that all the technological frames sustaining and dynamizing contemporary art do not become a teleological justification of technology in itself. In fact, cultural studies are increasingly confronted with the need of conceptualizing technology as culture. Digital image plays a central role in this sort of double-bind and defines todays problematic phenomenon of the observer. As I intend to discuss in this paper, such asymmetry of narratives is becoming a powerful and disturbing twinkling of memories and perceptions clearly disrespectful of presumed ethical posture of the observer, which, as we usually think, should be constant and largely independent of perception.

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I want to briefly discuss the cultural problem of image from an aesthetical point of view. Ill use, for that purpose, the testimony of someone who was, at a precise moment and place, driven into and out of her aesthetical training by force of a inner sense of its inevitable inadequacy. For a certain period of Western cultural history, the aesthetical perspective would be understood as an obvious choice: artistic images seemed to deal directly with the deep meaning of senses. Romantic aesthetics, in particular, developed in parallel the author and the spectator as pivotal personifications of truth in the art process. However, as we all know, truth is no longer a social and symbolic product of authorship. While technoscience is becoming the last paradigm of truth production, the parallel value system installed by the arts has lost nearly all the criteria not based on the spectacular performance of the so called artist. And technoscience itself is no longer a viable economical and symbolical priority without a large media network that sustains its prevalence in a deeply uncertain western society.

The new image networks, with their apparatus of irrelevant contents and highly charged neuronal and neurotic stimuli, have, in first place, obliged the author to sit side by side with the viewer who doesnt recognize him as such, and, in second, has given this viewer a virtual status as near author. Dont think, however, this is the work of mass media in contemporary democratic societies. In fact, the Nazi system, although historically destroyed, has developed this plebeian kind of authorship. Some aspects of it were clearly incompatible: first of all, its nihilistic elements were incomprehensible to the street Nazism and, therefore, partially disguised. Im talking, of course, of the Holocaust and its aesthetical program. Its politics of disappearance is better known than its aesthetics of disappearance. But Aesthetics it was, certainly. As we can see in retrospective movement, something in it was already the art of making possible what seemed impossible.

Jacqueline Lichtenstein, professor at the University of California, who wrote some seminal works on bounds between rhetoric and painting, between truth and delight, recounted her experience:

When I visited the Museum at Auschwitz, I stood in front of the display cases. What I saw there were images from contemporary art and I found that absolutely terrifying. Looking at the exhibits of suitcases, prosthetics, childrens toys, I didnt feel frightened. I didnt collapse. I wasnt completely overcome the way I had been walking around the camp. No. In the Museum, I suddenly had the impression I was in a museum of contemporary art. I took the train back, telling myself that they had won! They had won since theyd produced forms of perception that are all of a piece with the mode of destruction they made their own1.

Describing her experience at the Auschwitz memorial, Jacqueline is not exactly overwhelmed by the tragic dimension of those remainings, quality she certainly knows well, otherwise she wouldnt be there! On the contrary, she is deeply disturbed by something which is not there:
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Interview quoted by Paul Virilio, Art and Fear, p. 15.

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contemporary art. In fact, shes not telling us that what she saw was art itself. On those objects, she saw the image of art. And this image appears through such fragments as toys or prosthetics, capturing them in negative representation, as if their direct presence in front of the viewer could, at any moment, turn into unbearable violence. Exhibited in that way, those remainings were caught in the vicious circle of contemporary image: as Fredric Jameson wrote, the visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination ; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object2. Jacqueline expresses her situation as someone caught in the aesthetical double-bind: giving herself to the fascination of such objects, her experience of them would be a minor perception, too much self-centered, too near an auto-erotic experience of the gaze. So, she sees artistic shapes, an unconscious way of retreating to a safe distance, a way of retreating to the position of the spectator. Who is the spectator? Suddenly, Jacqueline finds herself in the position of the spectator, of the despicable spectator. Why is the spectator despicable? Because he is, precisely, the product of a long process where the tragic dimension of unbearable things can be, in some way, addressed. The remainings of the Auschwitz would, then, be a mockery of their allegorical quality. Allegory emerges when there is no hope that a compelling similarity might be established or even pursued. Given the exceptional character of those remains, something central to the postAuschwitz spectator, in accordance to the Adorno dictum, they are at the core of todays impossible objects. As such, all allegorical perception would turn into sadistic gaze. Please remember: what Jacqueline sees is not a classical exhibition, but contemporary art itself: confronted by such impossible choices, contemporary art has introduced a blind spectator in its field and, above all, has instituted blindness at the core of its experience. Through such blindness, the spectator becomes an observer, at best, usually a blind viewer without guidance. In a certain way, contemporary art produces the kind of intense delusion Jacqueline felt in front of the Auschwitz exhibit: the artistic quality is self evident precisely because such evidence absorbs the viewer in his own vision. Those objects remain as individual entities and no skilled perception can grasp an ontological ensemble in them. Here, both at the Auschwitz memorial as in contemporary art, contemplated object passes either out of the reach of our will or beyond mimesis into a nonrepresentational knowledge.

2. In his highly misunderstood book, La Procdure Silence, Paul Virilio describes a substantial part of contemporary art as profanation of forms and bodies3. In a society that as lost all sense of a symbolic equation between sacred and profane, such a claim could seem quite inappropriate. In fact, it is not: today, contemporary art deals mostly with spectral elements of the western culture where the common sacredness of body and forms is clearly a central one. A nihilistic trend that defines the beginning of artistic visibility at that point where bodies and
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JAMESON, Fredric, Signatures of the Visible, p.1. VIRILIO, Art and Fear, p.15.

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forms become unrecognizable things, at the point where they loose, in each case, their skin and their shape, is at work in contemporary art. In order to have something of an artistic order, its necessary to undress both the body and its representation. If the body had become, at this point, a totally unbodied reality, a portion of flesh, then its vexation would be consummated and all operation at the level of visibility would be aesthetically useless. Such was the case with the Third Reich concentration camps: there shouldnt be any remaining corpses, all human remainings should be cremated, because those bodies, when alive, had already fulfilled their aesthetical purpose by serving as facsimiles of Jewish anthropometry. Shoa is, then, a modern aesthetical process in the sense that it destroys its own support here understood as a living and pictorial material. Only a comprehensible self restriction prevents us from declaring nazi destruction of Jews as a modernist aesthetics of disappearance. With the disappearance of those bodies, art would also loose its last rooted institution: the concentration camp. These would be completely destroyed before the end of the war. At that point, art, this kind of body art, would have successfully transformed all European life, not only in its cultural and political sense, but essentially in a biological sense. Europe would, then, become that gigantic museum dedicated to a story impossible to narrate. This would be an empty museum (except for a rather banal art that underlines, precisely, the absent presence of the great gesture) because the artist disappears with his subject. The greatest and more radical entangling between life and art (and is there a more powerful modernistic vision of art?) fulfills the romantic author, that no longer restrains himself to representation. If the last real institution would disappear, provoking a new kind of aesthetical blindness, all the remaining ones would stress that condition by appearing merely as blind buildings (see Spear models of the reconstructed Berlin). A sublime blindness, of course. Kants analysis of the Sublime in the Critique of Judgement (1790) prepared the ground for this new urban museum of emptiness. First of all, this new city museum would be, in a nietzschian sense, the consequence of a natural law destroyed by its own appeal and necessity. In the sublime, the analogy between man and nature is made only to be broken, since it alone is absolutely unique and admits no comparison. In its sublime realm, art becomes an exercise on solitude. Both, an epistemological and sensorial solitude. Certainly the kind of feeling Hitler tried to experience during his three hour tour, between 6 and 9 oclock in the morning, in a Paris voided of its inhabitants. He declared he had experienced the Europes geist in that city. This king of aesthetical emotion could only lead to its sublime complement: the destruction of Paris, avoided at last minute by bourgeois Wehrmacht officers. As Jacqueline wrote, they had won since they had produced forms of perception that are all of a piece with the mode of destruction they made their own.

3. The radical separation of art and technology is a historically recent achievement. Indeed their radical separation seems to be integral to their contemporary particular constitution as arenas of human knowledge and activity, especially as these pertain to questions of practicality, utility and goal. This is to say that the fine arts have been constituted as Art precisely in as much as they have been removed from other modes of activity and enquiry such as technology or science. Furthermore, it is apparent that this radical separation proceeds from no single

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explicitly framed project but is rather enmeshed within the complex historical processes of modernization. Technological meaning is, both in a linguistic and philosophical sense, a central question we must ask again and again. Heidegger has reinvented this question4, which should be fundamental for the twentieth century post-metaphysical thought. However, instead of questioning it again and again, as he would expect, we are creating new images, again and again, inside technological worlds. These images are not only created by technology but essentially the re-creation of technology itself. They clearly manifest the separation of art and technology in the sense that art is no longer an historical departure from techn, but a new way of doing things beyond its original technical possibility. If technology drives history, then we should add that it drives it beyond the point of recognition as art is no longer, as Heidegger wrote, a domain that, on one side, is connected to the essence of technology and, on the other, is in itself different from it5. Culture is no longer facing technology. Today, no one is considering culture as a force that opposes technology as an autonomous agent of transformation. On the contrary, when art became separated from technology, all possible points of view about the technical problem vanished from Western culture and the artist became a bystander who works in a black box. In a certain sense, art is still a domain connected to the essence of technology, but became fully incapable of exhibiting its difference. Virtual art is at the centre of this transition from the figure of the spectator to the observer, who embodies the new artists situation: he seems to be fully autonomous, not from technology, but within technology. Florian Rotzer wrote an essay on The Virtual Body in which the technological project of virtual corporeality is presented as a definitive paradigm for artistic work: But no matter what technical solution is chosen, nothing can alter the basic situation of being in two bodies at once: the one in which we are materially em-bodied, and the other into which we project ourselves. To the artist, the task of exploring this unbridgeable gulf, playing with its manifold possibilities and making its variations and dimensions visible, poses a major philosophical and aesthetic challenge.6 In a certain sense, we can say that contemporary art is still undecided about which part of humanity is revealed through this king of negative anthropometry, where we can remain alive, while some fragment of us measures a new technically connected body. If this is a more democratic, a less organic, kind of extermination, then we have the answer for that seemingly inappropriate phrase of Virilio about artistic profanation. All possible body depends upon an infinity of images analogically related with humanity. Analogy is, then, the key word. This is not, however, a human produced analogy. In the global world we live in, biometrics or recognition technologies are exploding. Face identification, hand geometry and iris scanning indicate that we are part of an exhibit of data. Here, we are, simultaneously, an observer and a data processed object. Here, two genealogical lines converge: a technical one and an artistic one. Their intersection means choosing a certain kind of attention, an analogous dilemma to that felt by Jacqueline Lichtenstein. And here lies the secret reason of
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HEIDDEGER, Die Frage nach der Technik, 1954. HEIDEGGER, p.47. 6 ROTZER, Florian, The virtual body, p.135.

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the anguish felt by her: the object of technology is not the ensemble of technical beings but the individuation of technical objects. Consequently, no technical knowledge is capable of knowing its object. Only direct individualized knowledge, directly applied as prosthetics, can gain knowledge of individual objects. And technical objects, that are in front of us as toys from Auschwitz, are only accessible to humans because of an analogy with the singularity produced in the work of art. This analogy, as disturbing as it can be, is probably the only thing that can save us. Because, at the end, as Jacqueline, we finally understand the deep link between perception and destruction.

Jorge Leandro Rosa

Bibliography: DERY, Mark.Escape Velocity : Cyberculture at the End of the Century, Hodder & Stoughton, 1996. DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges, Images Malgr Tout, Paris : Minuit, 2003. HEIDDEGER, Die Frage nach der Technik in Vortrge und Aufstze, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1954. JAMESON, Fredric, Signatures of the Visible, London: Routledge, 2007. MOSER, Mary Anne (org.), Immersed in Technology, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996. POSTMAN, Neil, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, New York: Knopf, 1992. ROTZER, Florian, The Virtual Body in Perspektiven der Medienkunst/Media Art Perspectives, Karlsruhe: ZKM, 1996. VIRILIO, Paul, Art and Fear, London: Continuum, 2003. VIRILIO, Paul, Negative Horizon, London: Continuum, 2005.