As published on kaput.gr

Beyond Immaterialism: Parallels between Judeo-Christian doctrine and Contemporary Art

by Theo Michael

Human culture is shifting from material to immaterial. I am going to suggest that this is related to man’s fear of nature. This fear, has got a pattern. It becomes more obvious in periods and areas with scarce resources or under strain. Less apparent in groups of people emerging from crisis. It manifests itself as an aversion to material objects. This text will try to explain how this phenomenon substantiates in the field of modern art and by comparing art with other faces of culture, will make a case that the art world is largely unaware of this condition.
Revolution against Nature
Let’s take a look into the Bible, the bestselling book of all time. What’s groundbreaking about the Bible is that it provides its readers with a new way of living. A way, rid of material pleasures and pains, a way more economical and efficient. A common pattern throughout the Old and New Testament is swapping the material with the immaterial. The material is usually represented as evil and the immaterial as good. The examples are many. In Genesis a world of plenty (Eden) is swapped with a world of scarcity. The source of temptation is an animal. From the very beginning there is an association of Nature with the unattainable, but also an association of nature with evil (snake). A counteract to man’s sense of futility upon confronting the natural world.
In Leviticus, a manual for social operating (or God’s contract with Israel if you prefer), there is a list of animals that are considered unclean. In the Book of Job, Leviathan, a crocodile (or hippo), represents the darkness of the physical world. In Jonah, one of the most popular tales, the hero is swallowed by a giant fish and surviving the encounter with the animal provides the supernatural core of the story.
“And they shall no more offer their sacrifice unto devils…“
Leviticus 17:7
In this particular verse, “devils” is a translation of the Hebrew word sairrim which literally means wild goats.* In order to make the swap from material to immaterial more effective, the editors of the Bible (composing the Old Testament at around 400b.c.) borrowed a concept from the Persians. Good and evil.
“… the Persians had become the dominant nation in Asia, and Persian thought would be expected to be very influential among all nations which, like Judah, were under Persian rule. Persian religion had just been systematized by a great prophet, Zarathustra (Zoroaster), at about the time of the return from Babylonian captivity, and the earth rang, so to speak, with the new doctrine. Zoroastrianism offered a dualistic view of the universe. There was a principle of good, Ahura-Mazda (or Ormuzd), and a principle of evil, Ahriman, which were viewed as virtually independent of each other and very nearly equal.”**
The dualistic good-evil concept made life easier to explain and added an element of excitement and drama in storytelling. Nowhere before 1 Chronicles is Satan mentioned, but after that he regularly appears introducing worldly vices to various characters, including Jesus Christ.
The above were examples of how the Bible managed to expose the “problematic” nature of the physical world and man as animal and insert a conceptual non material world that offers freedom to everyone. Like the computers’ revolution today, where there is no need for physical activity given you are connected, the Bible signalled a similar revolution many centuries ago. One only needs his mind and two ears to experience God. He is nowhere to be seen anyway. Western monotheistic religions signal the departure from the material to the immaterial, just like modern notions of progress signal the same. Talking became text messaging and a meeting became a skype conference and travelling will become teleportation. The disability of man to access matter and resources, leads to all sorts of economic measures. Economy itself is the manifestation of this universal and primeval nature-phobia. In later paragraphs I will attempt to show how contemporary art is afflicted by the same inclination towards economy and dematerialization. What better way to start this by sticking to the Bible for a while.
And he (Aaron)…fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods O Israel… ***
Exodus 32:4.
The myth goes that when Moses came down from mount Sinai in Exodus, he brought with him the Ten commandments, which were plain text. In addition he destroyed the golden calf, an idol made by the Israelites as they waited for him. This is maybe the cleanest example of swapping the material for the immaterial. The rejection of the material is especially strong because it is artwork that Moses destroyed. Swapping crafted art for linguistic code was indeed a groundbreaking act in 1200bc. It made life easier. From a secular perspective, the Bible qualifies as a piece of art but the Ten Commandments as conceptual art. The message was that Israel would function through code, not through the abstraction and chaos of visuals. This was the revolution against nature. The more it disregards nature and material life the more successful a religion is. Before monotheism paganism was very close to nature and became prey to the new doctrine.
Sculptures of animals existed thousands of years before Moses, yet written language was a recent development, especially for an impoverished tribe of exiled people wandering in the desert of Sinai. Text in this occasion represents a solution of economy and urgency. When your people are in the desert, saving energy is a matter of life or death. Fair enough.
To make the Ten Commandments, no serious labor was involved, no waste of precious metals, no need for craftsmen or equipment, only thought and stones. 600 years before this event, Abraham had introduced monotheism to his people. Well, the concept of monotheism fits the same bill. An economic solution to the problem of faith, one that brings an end to quarrels about whose and which god is superior, an end to manufacturing different gods and figures for different physical phenomena and attributes of nature. Perfect for people with no resources. In a time of scarcity these were the perfect measures to keep unity. At this point a question comes to mind. The Ten Commandments was the way to the future in a context of harsh conditions and poverty 3200 years ago. These ideas were well digested by the millions of Bible believers that followed and could have been left aside by now. So why is modern art, the avant-garde of culture and society, operating according to Moses’ principles? We will look into this shortly.
The shifting decades. From outgoing to shy, material to immaterial.
A few years after the moon landings, there was talk of space cities to be, going to Mars by 2000, flying cars to replace most transportation and nuclear fusion that would create a surplus of energy and power. Not to mention robots as laborers, the cure of cancer etc. That was the spirit of the 70s the 80s and even the 90s. It was a time of abundance and all of the above were associated with the idea of progress. A linear idea of history dominated. The years after two World Wars found humanity reborn, ready to build from scratch. Ready for new adventure. Humans would physically explore the world, expand in the universe and sort out earthly problems by inventing new machines and technologies. Few of these ever materialized. The complex socio-political map did not allow all this progress. The appetite for expanding and new exploration that emerged from the repression of the World Wars, slowly faded into the past and was replaced by earthly and everyday problems.
This is an example of how I perceive a global shift from material to immaterial activity in recent history. I will expand this example below explaining immaterial activity.
A non physical transformation is currently taking place, that of information. Outbound explorations were deemed too expensive, too material, too unrealistic. Not only that but Earth has almost run out of unexplored areas. The world slowly turned its attention inwards to the cheap and immaterial technology that is computer software and hardware. The word inwards describes the relationship of man with nature. The material activity inside a computer is alternating current, something the eye cannot sense. Software is maths on wire and hardware is silicon machines. Amazing stuff indeed, even more so the subsequent applications of internet and the cloud. Recent Quantum mechanics applications in smartphones**** show this trend is actively evolving. Google is more capable than what most preceding civilizations expected their God to be, you ask and it answers back. Literally. The opening up of information for all is a successful concept that is becoming a central nervous system for humanity. Yet information (today at least) is meant mostly as data and not as a holistic experience that includes the abstract sensory of the body-space relationship. No matter how many basketball games you watch on cable or play on Playstation there is no way you can become a good player unless you grab the ball and go shoot some hoops. Reading artist’s manifestos and oil painting manuals will make you no good an artist but might make you an art theorist. The success of new immaterial technologies shows that The “real” experience is not very fashionable. Looking at a full inbox is exciting. Looking at the adventures of Yves Rossy or Felix Baumgartner is foul tasted and tacky. I’m not advocating extreme sports, rather highlighting that going towards nature is the exception in a world where the norm is sitting on a desk and processing data.
Isn’t it an indicator that the Concorde was discontinued, the moon missions were discontinued and cars became villains? In a hypothetical world of infinite energy resources that would never be the case. Two weeks ago the Obama administration put all NASA manned missions to the fridge. Everything we do is bound to material restrictions. These ambassadors of materialism have negative associations attached on them. Not everyone will say that, yet this is the current in advanced western societies. Somehow machines with moving parts (and even worse men riding machines) have come to symbolize the decadence of humanity. But what’s wrong with machines? Could it be that they are attempts at imitating and improving nature? The same nature is vilified in the Bible, the uneconomic nature. To understand this we have to look into some of man’s most primal fears.
The Ontology of the Problem
In this introvert revolution all one needs is a brain and two eyeballs. You do not need the rest of your body. A good thing about modern times is that if you become paralyzed from the neck down, you can still spend a creative rest of your life on the web. I sometimes visualize a future were biocomputers have advanced to the point that a major percentage of mankind has dropped the physical body in order to become part of the “big grid” or maybe what the future of the internet is. The eyes of a future visitor to Earth would observe Valleys of immobile techno slime, which in “reality” would be people perfectly content, living their wildest fantasies in a data haven (yes, like Matrix). Still, apart from the introvert humans, I see the other edge of the spectrum, “The Materialists”, this old fashioned (now) tribe, the ones who will attempt the terraforming of Mars and the colonization of exoplanets that resemble Earth. The ones who go out. They will too use the grid and the technologies of the nano-scale but They will also create real utopias, fantasy planets, and why not, maybe even breed with alien forms of life to create new advanced species. Judging from current trends, the immaterialist peoples seem like a very realistic future, the path of least resistance. The other group (the materialists?) seem like an outrageous concept for the few privileged that can only realize on the back of others, very right wing, doomed to fail, bad capitalists, an orgy of vanity and unsustainability.
What it the problem with physicality? In the 1960’s to become an astronaut or drive your car you needed your body. And to fly in the Concorde you actually needed to be there yourself. Even to go to war you had to get your balls in the cockpit. Now you just seat on a leather armchair at Balad Air Base in Las Vegas and nuke’em by drone in Afghanistan. (The Lockheed F-35 might be one of the last man operated war aircrafts.) You can also drive a Ferrari F40 in front of your 42 inch flat screen wearing 3D glasses and steering a little plastic wheel. Many people said “why go to the planets” or “we went to the moon, so what? … with that money we could have built 200 hospitals” after the Apollo program. This is related to an ancient fear. Man’s physical restrictions.
The vast scale of the universe makes us feel very small. Man is intimidated when generations work and use resources only for a few people to go from A to B, a tiny distance in the cosmic scale. The distances are massive or we are tiny. Intimidation, defeat, pointlessness, awe, fear, the unknown. Astronomers still cannot account for what makes 95% of the universe. The maths don’t add up, so dark energy accounts for 75% of the universe’s mass and dark matter for 20%, the rest 5% is all the galaxies, stars, planets, nebulae, you name it. Isn’t that scary? Possible infinite parallel universes are not even considered here. We don’t know where we come from, we don’t know what is our surrounding space, we can’t find others in the neighbourhood and on top we are going to die! This is why the physical experience is equated with evil, because it scares us to death. The unknown is so massive that it feels nice to look inside, inwards to the small things and feel like in control. We are tiny in space scale and also in time scale as we live for an average of 80 earth years yet we do not live for infinities. Where were you from Big Bang to now? Nowhere. Where are you going to be from 2070 and after? Nowhere. Nothing. That feels restricting, it seems we can’t know everything, we can’t see everything, we can’t go everywhere, it feels like we are excluded from the party. Humans’ reaction to these realizations was to throw their own party and not invite nature. It was the new religions that found perfect form in the Judeo-Christian and subsequent Islamic narratives.
The Fascism of Language
Living in London during the last decade, I attended countless conceptual, language and “idea” based art shows. These vaguely fit in the Post-Minimalism and post-conceptual brackets. Most of them were in major venues like the Tate Modern, ICA, Hayward, but also commercial galleries, non profit art organizations and project spaces. I would read the labels or leaflets until I understood the work. I was committed to understanding the concepts behind the work and so I did. It wasn’t hard to understand the value and importance of artists like Bruce Nauman or Gabriel Orozco yet what struck me repeatedly was the fact that their work somehow could not be argued with. The linguistic constructions that support the works were so tight that didn’t allow any space for questioning or doubting. The work was stripped down to a minimum of visual handles only enough to back the concept.
Most upmarket contemporary art is so closely knit to its text that it feels as the work is only accompanying the text, as if we could actually do without the work. Many times I read the idea and realise that I don’t need to see the work, because whatever extra the work will give me will either be the work’s fault or my misunderstanding of it. Well that’s one way of making art, yet I found myself more and more in museums like the National Gallery or Tate Britain’s Collection looking at big paintings or other hand made work. I didn’t need to read little concept explaining panels and in contrast with the interpretational asphyxia of conceptual art, here I was at last free to think on my own about art and slowly develop a critical eye. It also became obvious that many artists of the renaissance and the enlightenment, way before art for art’s sake, had a very strong conceptual base and their works were full of ideas, needless of explanations and justifications.
Overanalysis, diminishes the visual department of the work. On top of that, a great deal of new work is directly referential to other historically recent works. Something that makes art be like football. Let me explain. If someone turns on a TV and watches without sound at a random moment of the game, he won’t understand who is playing nor the score and he will just see little figures running on a green background. The same happens with contemporary art. If you can’t read the text or have someone explain to you the work, or even worse you don’t know about who the artist is and what is his context, the work ceases to be interesting. What happened to art that can stand its ground without needing an external network? I was trying to understand why I am being mocked for using icons in my work. Could it be that I was a modern day idolater?
I also kept visiting shows that stimulated my imagination without restricting me to the zeitgeist visual diet. Some artists still use materials freely, so much that the work viewed from a Christian viewpoint looks evil. There is a paganistic freedom in the works of Meese or Altmejd to mention but two. It is the body perceiving the work not just the compartment of the brain dealing with language.
One can still read the text but the works speak on their own. Leaving language on the side for a while won’t harm, on the contrary it will train the neglected visual and abstract thinking compartments of the brain. Language is the dominant human system for communication because it is the most materially efficient. The most economic. Definitely not the richest or complex system. Minimum effort to convey a concept, minimum materials used, minimum innovation involved. Language is a code used for functional purposes only and has got little to do with real innovation. It is the experiments with the physical world that produce innovations. As in evolution, so in art, the new comes from random mutations and mistakes. Something that also became apparent after viewing hundreds of Post Minimalist shows was that language only becomes effective when it is not fully understood.
I don’t need to read a text plate in order to appreciate an artwork. It is my opinion that if you have to read the text beneath an artwork it is because you don’t like what you see and you try to replace it with something else. With a plausible idea. Reading the plate though, usually has two possible effects. The one of fully understanding the text, which, demystifies and resolves the work and puts an end to the experience. The other effect, which is the one most artist-curator-theorist partnerships achieve, has to do with not fully understanding the text. That usually happens by inserting internal art references or obscure specialist language that deny one comprehension. Admitting ignorance is defeat in the professional circle, the viewer is left with the feeling of exclusion from an elite group or a sense of humiliation together with admiration towards a superior intellect. Both feelings transmit power to the work in a manipulative way. It seems Post Minimalism is a win-win model. The support text makes sense so the work is justified, or it doesn’t make sense and no one can say something bad about it in fear of embarrassment. Language works as an enforcer. The actual/physical work is low key and has no “handles”, in a way that no one can actually accuse it of bad taste or make it look irrelevant or timed. After all, a text on a wall will always be a text on a wall. Sometimes the team that never loses can win the championship, no matter how bad the football was. Could that be the reason the iconoclasts have found their way into the big venues?
Curators in the Desert
So, what with the immaterialism in the museums? Like Moses and the people of Israel, so do modern curators and museum directors wonder in a landscape of scarcity. Tight economic conditions mean safer shows. Restricted budgets lead to less risk. The security of a work that is fully justified in linguistic terms guarantees the curator his job as no one can make an argument against the certain choices. The more safe one’s work is linguistically the bigger his chances of finding his way to the museum. It is disastrous for a museum to have complaints and protests about the intellectuality of artworks and this is solved using the least offensive (towards language) artworks. The business runs better if there are no disruptions. Like Abraham’s monotheism, if art becomes one efficient brand then the masses will unite behind it.
Immaterialism, the visual manifestation of conceptual and post minimalist art, although very much in fashion among the contemporary art circles, let me repeat myself, is associated with the most conservative practices, (Islamic Law, iconoclasts of Byzantium, other religious traditions) but also with Conservatism itself. Conservatism is to hold on to trusted ideals and traditions and avoid experiments. That works great in politics but not in art. In politics one needs to protect disadvantaged populations and avoiding risk is more often than not the right way. I want to see art that doesn’t follow the global trends of economic crisis and esotericism but instead leads the way out of the drought and this is why I get nausea when I go into museums and Biennials. Increasingly I find myself in the museums and the cafeterias of Venice, instead of the Giardini and Arsenale, which last year synoptically consumed within two afternoons.
Change of Course
“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
-Oscar Wilde *****
So what could diversify the current situation? Maybe the abandonment of using language to interpret art. Impossible. It would be interesting to see some institutions that withdraw the text labels from the artworks. It would be nice to see more art that is incapable of justifying itself with words but is justified by the spontaneous reactions of the viewer. Maybe there should be more art that is subject to failure in established spaces. It would be nice to see art that is not scared of images like the rest of the world is, but instead highlights the complexity and mystery of the material world. I would like to see art that is equally enjoyed not only by people with very specialist art knowledge but by a doctor or a nuclear scientist too. But then again all this doesn’t make financial sense, so why bother?

Co-edited by Theo Michael and Harris Mylonas

Works cited:
*Asimov’s Guide To The Bible, Isaac Asimov, The Old and New Testaments, p. 159.
** Asimov’s Guide To The Bible, Isaac Asimov, The Old and New Testaments, p. 409.
*** The Bible, Revised Standard Version, Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1946.
**** example here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8504373.stm
***** quoted in Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation.

Monday, 27 June 2011

before the comeback

Tuesday, 21 June 2011

Beyond Immaterialism

As published on kaput.gr

Beyond Immaterialism: Parallels between Judeo-Christian doctrine and Contemporary Art

Wednesday, 15 June 2011

Mahony at SOMA this Thursday , June 16th