artfractures journal issue 03 spring 2010 Pythagorean Theorems and Renaissance Ideals of Friendship in ‘The Ambassadors’ Ramesh Ramsahoye & John Finlay

The discipline of art history and the practice of art criticism Matt Bowman

‘My Name is Charles Saatchi and I am an Artoholic’ Martin Boland

Interview: Lan Yuan-Hung Robert Priseman

Interview: Kimsooja Laura Earley

Stephen Carley 12 x 12 Andrea Hadley Johnson

La Caméra-Stylo Today Sam Ishii-Gonzales Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 03 | Spring 2010

From the Editor

Welcome to Artfractures Quarterly Spring issue. We have continued along the same lines as our winter issue by including and contrasting art historical essays, exhibition reviews, and artist interviews. This quarter includes a fascinating article by Matt Bowman on the distinction between the discipline of art history and the practice of art criticism. Following this is a review of the book ‘My Name is Charles Saatchi and I am an Artaholic’. We also feature pieces on the work of three fascinating artists, Lan Yuan-Hung, Kimsooja and Stephen Carley. The new change to our journal is the adaptation of the film review section into a film theory section under the guidance of Sam Ishii-Gonzales.

We would like to extend a warm welcome to Catherine Crawford and Martin Boland who have generously agreed to join our editorial board. The Quarterly wishes to thank all those who continue to support us at Artfractures. We hope you enjoy this issue as much as we have enjoyed making it and encourage you to pass on the edition to anyone you feel may gain pleasure and interest from our journal.

John Finlay Editor

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Artfractures

Chairman Elizabeth Cowling Professor Emeritus of Twentieth Century European Art, Edinburgh University

Publisher Robert Priseman

Editor Dr John Finlay

Designer John Wallett

Editorial Advisory Panel

Fr. Martin Boland, Dean, Brentwood Cathedral, UK

Anthony Bond OAM, Head Curator International Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, AUS

Dr Matthew Bowman, Art Historian, Curator and Editor of Rebus: A Journal of Art History and Theory, UK

Dr Ben Cranfield, Lecturer, Birkbeck College, London, UK

Dr Catherine Crawford, Lecturer, University of Essex, UK

Sam Ishii-Gonzales, Principle Faculty Member in the Department of Media Studies and Film, The New School in New York City, USA

Andrea Hadley Johnson, Curator at Derby Museums and Art Gallery, UK

Dr Steve Swindells, Reader at Huddersfield University in Fine Art, UK

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In this issue

Art History: “The goods of friends are common”: Pythagorean Theorems and Renaissance Ideals of Friendship in Holbein’s The Ambassadors Ramesh Ramsahoye and John Finlay p.5

Art Critical Essay: Waiting For Time to Tell (or Not) An essay exploring the intersection or distinction between the discipline of art history and the practice of art criticism. Matt Bowman p.17

Book Review: My Name is Charles Saatchi and I am an Artoholic Martin Boland p.25

Private Public Interface: An interview with the artist Lan Yuan-Hung Robert Priseman p.28

Kimsooja - Art Monthly Talking Art Interview, Tate Modern, 20 February 2010 Laura Earley p.31

Stephen Carley: 12 x 12 Andrea Hadley Johnson p.33

Film Theory: La Caméra-Stylo Today: David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006) Sam Ishii-Gonzales p.39

Contributors p.42

Notes for submissions p.43

Front cover photograph by John Wallett Back cover: ‘Liberty’ by Stephen Carley

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Art History “The goods of friends are common”: Pythagorean Theorems and Renaissance Ideals of Friendship in Holbein’s The Ambassadors Ramesh Ramsahoye and John Finlay

Ramesh Ramsahoye and John Finlay

Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors, 1533, oil on panel, National Gallery, London Pythagoras’s contribution to ancient Greek thought and mathematics had a profound influence upon the thinking of Aristotle and Plato—the founding fathers of Western rationalism and philosophical enquiry [1]. His concept of a universe governed by mathematics has proved to be one of the most enduring and influential ideas ever and the scientific methodologies attributed to him continue to shape the world we live in. So we are all, to a degree, Pythagoreans, but at the time when Holbein’s The Ambassadors was painted in 1533, the sitters, Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selves, were amongst a group intellectuals who aligned themselves more directly with Pythagoras’s theories. There is abundant evidence in Holbein’s painting to support the idea that the work resonates with distinctly Pythagorean concepts and, equally importantly, that the picture is a ‘friendship painting’ related to a particular ideal of intimate male amity based on classical knowledge and philosophy.

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As Christiane Joost-Gaugier has argued in her groundbreaking study, Pythagoras and Renaissance Europe, the impact of Pythagorean theory upon Renaissance thought and culture has often been underestimated in the modern era, especially with regard to the visual arts, due to our inclination to isolate scientific and philosophical disciplines [2]. Perhaps the best way to test such a hypothesis is to begin by discussing the ornate floor upon which the two protagonists stand. Holbein’s elaborate floor design was evidently based on the Cosmati pavement, adored with inlaid marble, at Westminster Abbey. To date, scholarly interpretations have focussed on the symbolism of the various still- life objects represented on the table/étagère in the painting, the distorted skull in the foreground and their possible relationship to the patterned floor itself. They have not however, illuminated the importance of the floor design in relation to the positioning of the figures.

Odericus Cosmati, Pavement, marble, 1268, Westminster Abbey, London The inscription on the Westminster Abbey pavement reads as follows: In the year of Christ one thousand two hundred and twelve and sixth minus four, King Henry III, the Church of Rome, Odoricus and the Abbot laid down these porphyry stones. If the reader go carefully round all this he will come to the end of the Primum Mobile. A hedge is three years, you add dogs and horses and men, stags and crows, eagles, a wild sea monster, the world: each triples the years of the one before it. This spherical ball shows the Macrocosmic archetype. [3]

Central roundel of the Westminster Abbey pavemen The reference to a “spherical ball” most probably refers to the central roundel made of a marble disc and portraying the “macrocosmic archetype”. In medieval cosmology

6 Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 03 | Spring 2010 this referred specifically to the concept of the universe in the mind of God before creation, which preceded the macrocosm of the sensible world. Although the onyx disc has been read as a representation of the earth itself [4], the craftsman who built the pavement (named in the inscription as Orodicus Cosmati) clearly used the naturally occurring patterns inherent within the marble to represent this essental substance of the universe before its final order and form was ordained by God. The irregular but rhythmic shapes recall medieval images of the cosmos, and it is interesting to note that the design of the central roundel—producing an apparent order arising from chaotic permutations—bears similarities to the globe in a medieval parchment from a Bible Moralisée (c. 1220-30) showing God as Architect of the Universe.

Left: God as Architect of the Universe, from a Bible Moralisée, c. 1220-30 Illumination on parchment, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna Right: God as Architect of the Universe, from a French Bible Moralisée, in the British Library Another medieval image of God as Architect of the Universe relates compositionally and thematically to the floors in Westminster Abbey and Holbein’s portrait, featuring at its centre the archetypal globe—again containing irregular shapes—to which Christ has begun to give geometric form. The quartrilobe mandorla is also akin to the four minor spheres set within the square at Westminster, with four angels taking the place of the outer circles of the pavement. It is significant that medieval concepts of a ‘macrocosmic archetype’ have their origins in Pythagorean cosmology, in particular passages from Plato’s Timaeus [5]. During the Renaissance, however, the most lucid expression of these Pythagorean ideas about creation is to be found in Nicholas of Cusa’s On Learned Ignorance: In creating the world, God used arithmetic, geometry, and likewise astronomy. (We ourselves also use these arts when we investigate the comparative relationships of objects, of elements, and of motions.) For through arithmetic God united things. Through geometry He shaped them, in order that they would thereby attain firmness, stability, and mobility in accordance with their conditions. Through music He proportioned things in such a way that there is not more earth in earth than water in water, air in air, and fire in fire, so that no one element is altogether reducible to another.... And so, God, who created all things in number, weight, and measure, arranged the elements in an admirable order. [6] The creation myth behind the design of the Westminster pavement has, nevertheless, been slightly modified in The Ambassadors. The positioning of the feet of both figures—

7 Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 03 | Spring 2010 deliberately placed so that Dinteville’s foot is planted in the centre of a circle whereas De Selve places his on a circumference—echoes Plotinus’s Neo-Platonic account of the individual’s soul and its distinct relationship with the cosmos and the universal consciousness that is God, of which all human beings are part: “All beings may be thought of as centres uniting at one central centre...They are all one because they share the same centre...” [7] As well as referencing Plotinus’s concept of individual consciousnesses radiating from a common centre, the precise positioning of the men’s feet is highly suggestive of the Pythagorean ‘monad’, which is denoted by a circle with a dot in the centre.

Holbein, The Ambassadors, detail, possibly indicating The Pythagorean Monad According to Diogenes Laertius, The first principle of all things is the monad...Out of the monad and indefinate dyad come the numbers, out of the numbers come the points, out of these the lines, from which (are formed) the plane figures; from the plane figures (are formed) the solid figures, from these the sensible bodies, whose elements are four: fire, water, earth, air... [8] This cosmic first principle is discreetly indicated for viewers at the Chateau of Polisy by their hosts, who seem to be alluding to Pythagorean creation theory. Holbein informs the viewer that his two ambassadors are not only conscious of their oneness, but of their connection to each other, to the universal mind, and to God the first creator. Now that we have briefly explored a number of Pythagorean ideas in relation to the floor design of The Ambassadors, it is possible to turn our attention to the still-life objects themselves, which, as many scholars claim, refer to the trivium and quadrivium of the liberal arts. Pythagoras is said to have been the first to group arithmetic, astronomy, music and geometry into the quadrivium [9], so the items situated on the étagère may signify his achievements and observations in relation to these scholarly fields. During Holbein’s time, music was considered a branch of mathematics as it was governed by precise ratios and scales giving rise to the effects of harmony. Pythagoras made the astute observation that the length of a string affected the note and concluded that measurement, number and proportion lay behind the beauty and harmony of music. In Pythagorean cosmology, the distance between the planets was equivalent to musical ratios and, as they revolved, they produced the ‘music of the spheres’. Three still life objects on the lower shelf of the table—the pipes, the strings and the compass—can also seen in a contemporary print from Franchino Gaffurio’s De Harmonia Musicorum Instrumentorum, a treatise on musical harmony illustrating Pythagoras’s important musical discoveries.

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Left: Plate from F. Gaffurio, De Harmonia Musicorum Instrumentorum, 1518 Right: Intarsia panel from the Studiolo of Duke Federigo da Montefeltro in the Ducalo Palace, Gubbio, possibly designed by Franceso di Giorgio, c. 1479-82 Gaffurio is known for his adherence to Pythagorean musical theory and, as Jan Herlinger has pointed out, Pythagorean tuning was traditionally associated with “the structure of the cosmos, and with the harmony of the human microcosm.” [10] The pipes, compass and strings depicted in Gaffurio’s book are the emblems of a theorist committed to the Pythagorean view of music and its relationship to the cosmos, so when we see the same objects in The Ambassadors it is perfectly feasible to surmise that the two diplomats, Dinteville and De Selve, held similar ideas and values, were familiar with Pythagorean learning and, in relation to the objects surrounding them, wished to present themselves and mankind as a microcosm of the entire universe. We see a similar grouping of instruments of measure, proportion and harmony in the Studiolo of Federigo da Montefeltro where they evoke the erudite Duke’s familiarity with Pythagorean learning. Scientific instruments associated with the observation of celestial bodies on the upper portion of the table are juxtaposed with more ‘worldly’ items such as musical instruments and books below. The way in which the figures of Dinteville and De Selve bridge these areas is entirely in keeping with the Pythagorean concept of man as a mediator between the earthly and heavenly realms, a supposition clearly articulated by the Neo-Platonist Pico della Mirandola” [11]: ...Man is the intermediary between creatures, that he is the familiar of the gods above him as he is the lord of the beings beneath him; that, by the acuteness of his senses, the inquiry of his reason and the light of his intelligence, he is the interpreter of nature, set midway between the timeless unchanging and the flux of time; the living union (as the Persians say), the very marriage hymn of the world. [12] Given the numerous references to cosmology in Holbein’s painting, and to the liberal arts education befitting the gentlemanly Ambassadors, it is highly likely that the mathematics text on the lower shelf is similarly intended to draw the viewer’s attention to the achievements of Pythagoras.

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Holbein, The Ambassadors, Detail The square extends from the pages of the book in such a way as to convey the notion that “mathematics gives us our square”. Given that many of the objects on display are related in some way to a branch of mathematics, it is highly likely that the square’s mathematical origins are being highlighted [13]. As John North has elucidated, Holbein’s painting reveals all kinds of mathematical and geometrical patterns [14]. It has, however, been overlooked that the precise positioning of the Ambassador’s feet demonstrates an ancient Pythagorean method for obtaining a true square - Theorem 12 of Book 3 of Euclid’s Elements. [15]

Holbein, The Ambassadors, Detail The square separating the pages of the arithmetic book would appear to reflect contemporary values with respect to how individuals should conduct their lives. Indeed, a contemporaneous brass square of 1507 [16], discovered beneath the foundation stone of Baal Bridge, near Limerick, in Ireland, and bearing the inscription “I will striue to lieu with loue & care upon the leul by the square”, clearly demonstrates that the symbolism attributed to this measuring instrument in the eighteenth century [17] is of considerably earlier origin and was certainly current in Holbein’s day.

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The Baal Bridge Square, 1507 Inscription: I. WILL STRIUE. TO. LIUE.--WITH. LOUE. & CARE .--UPON. THE LEUL.--BY. THE. SQUARE.

The supposed division and discordance highlighted by the book and instruments on the étagère are surely not connected to any particular historical circumstance [18], but rather to the imperfections of the world—material and visual—and contrasted with the mathematical perfection of the heavens. This binary opposition was intrinsic to contemporary Pythagorean understanding of the universe, summarized by Marsilio Ficino in his Platonic Theology... For things above the soul they think of as united rather than numbered, but things under the soul as indeed numbered but totally discordant among themselves. [19] Holbein and his two sitters were also undoubtedly aware of the idea that the mimetic arts can enlighten and guide us towards a knowledge of the ‘good’, a fundamental part of Plato’s Republic and Neo-Platonic philosophies in general. For example, in order to know that a Pythagorean ‘hexad’, rather than, say, a ‘pentad’ (five-pointed star), lies behind the skull, we have to use deductive reasoning.

The Pythagorean Hexad

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We need to calculate where the lines would converge etc. In other words, we know that a hexad is there without needing to see it. Holbein ingeniously reminds the viewer of the higher form of knowledge promoted by Plato in which the mind engages with pure concepts rather than the mere examples of those concepts existing in the sensible world. Plato’s comments in The Republic make these points very clear: You know too that they make use of and argue about visible figures, though they are not really thinking about them, but about the originals which they resemble...The actual figures they draw or model...these they treat as images only, the real objects of their investigation being invisible except to the eye of reason. [20] The hexad therefore invokes a level of knowledge—that of the good—which is beyond that of mere empirical observation [21]. Through his concealment of the ‘hexad’ Holbein steers the viewer to a superior mode of thought which Plato called dialectic: ...when one tries to get at what each thing is in itself by the exercise of dialectic, relying on reason without any aid from the senses, and refuses to give up until one has grasped by pure thought what the good is in itself, one is at the summit of the intellectual realm... [22] A clear understanding of the ‘good’ or ideal as a contemporary concept in Holbein’s painting—and represented by the liberal arts on the étagère (areas of learning which lead us to a knowledge of the good)—is crucial to assessing the special nature of the relationship between the men that the portrait documents. Pythagoreans often advocated intimate types of friendship. According to Porphyry in his early biography of Pythagoras, “His friends he loved exceedingly, being the first to declare that “The goods of friends are common,” and that “A friend is another self.” [23] Rather than signifying worldly indulgence as part of a vanitas message, are these objects in fact things “held in common”, exemplifying a sharing and communion to be equated with virtuous living? Aristotle also maintained that material possessions were to a degree necessary for the acquisition of virtue in order for the individual to live a complete life, and defined the happy man “as one who is active in accordance with complete virtue, and who is adequately furnished with external goods...” [24] Knowledge of the ‘good’ is, according to Aristotle, essential for what he terms “perfect friendship”: For these people each alike wish good for the other qua good, and they are good in themselves. And it is those who desire the good of their friends’ sake that are most truly friends, because each loves the other for what he is, and not for any incidental quality. [25] Although Aristotle made a strong argument against Plato’s concept of an ideal good, which was part of his theory of forms in The Republic, he nevertheless found more acceptable the Pythagorean concept of unity as a form of the good: Nor will the good be any more good by being eternal, if a long-lasting white thing is no whiter than an ephemeral one. On this point the Pythagoreans...seem to have a more plausible doctrine, for they place unity in their column of goods. [26]

For Aristotle, higher forms of relationship are to be esteemed and distinguished from friendships based on ‘utility’ or ‘pleasure’, where the expectation of benefit hinders the bonds between individuals. Aristotle’s theory of the good also echoes Pythagorean

12 Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 03 | Spring 2010 ideas in supposing that true friendship is only possible with a select few. The emphasis in Pythagorean thought on a special closeness and intimacy in male friendship finds its Renaissance equal in Baldesar Castiglione’s characterization of the ideal courtier. ...without this perfect friendship men would be the unhappiest of all creatures...here in our midst may be found more than one pair of friends, whose love is constant and without deceit, and bound to endure in all its intimacy until death...This is what happens when one chooses for a friend someone of similar ways, apart from the influence of the stars...I also believe that the bond of friendship should not involve more than two people...The reason for this is that, as you know, harmony is more difficult to achieve with several instruments than with two. I wish our courtier, therefore, to have a sincere and intimate friend of his own. [27] On balance, it appears likely that the model of friendship and equality propagated by Holbein in The Ambassadors is highly sympathetic to Pythagorean ideals—reinforced by an inherent compositional balance within the picture, something that is more than simply an aesthetic, visual trope deployed by the artist. Here Dinteville and De Selve act as visual parentheses representing politics (the state) and ethics (the church) respectively, in a manner which emphasises the Pythagorean goal of “effacing of all rivalry and contention from true friendship.” [28] The Ambassadors seem concerned to appear as universal men, schooled in diverse areas of learning, connected with the cosmos and drawn together by Pythagorean bonds of friendship, defined as “...an effort to achieve a certain divine union, or communion of intellect with the divine soul.” [29] At the time, this sophisticated and recondite concept of friendship, grounded in classical philosophy, was expressed in almost gnostic terms by Pico della Mirandola...... like earthly Mercuries, we shall fly on winged feet to embrace that most blessed mother and there enjoy the peace we have longed for: that most holy peace, that indivisible union, that seamless friendship through which all souls will not only be at one in that one mind which is above every mind, but, in a manner which passes expression, will really be one, in the most profound depths of being. This is the friendship which the Pythagoreans say is the purpose of all philosophy. This is the peace which God established in the high places of the heaven and which the angels, descending to earth, announced to men of good will, so that men, ascending through this peace to heaven, might become angels. [30] This model of friendship suggests that the objects on the étagère are not simply the worldly possessions of ambitious men, eager to promote an image of piety in the early 1530s. Rather, Jean de Dinteville and Georges De Selve are portrayed as individuals aspiring to the beauty and perfection of the self through knowledge (gnosis) of the ‘good’. As we have seen, the two diplomats could not possibly have ignored Pythagorean ideals and to them Holbein was without question not just a mere artisan, but someone who could define and present them in relation to theories of the cosmos drawn from the greatest thinkers of antiquity and their own time. Ultimately, Renaissance portraits were not just a means of articulating social status, wealth and public image: they were also a means of affirming and conveying what we now term a ‘sense of self ’. As a carefully considered and intricately constructed friendship painting, Holbein’s Ambassadors offers us invaluable insights into how many Renaissance individuals viewed themselves and understood their relationship to each other, to the universe around them and to God. Today, as physicists utilize mathematics, like the early Pythagoreans, in their quest for a theory of everything and one that can connect gravity with quantum mechanics—

13 Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 03 | Spring 2010 the macrocosm with the microcosm—they peer backwards into time and the farthest reaches of space to explore and understand what the early Pythagoreans termed the ‘first principle’, which scientists today choose to call a ‘singularity’. If our mathematicians and theoretical physicists eventually discover the missing equation or find a string theory explaining the Universe in all its diversity, it might suddenly seem as familiar to us as to those Renaissance individuals, who attempted long ago to join what is above (the celestial) with what is below (the terrestrial), and uncover the secrets of both heaven and earth.

Notes

[1] There is some debate about the precise nature and extent of Pythagoras’s contribution to ancient Greek thought. Although no works by Pythagoras survive, his influence on philosophical thinking and mathematical theory is nevertheless undeniable. For a critical assessment of scholarly debate surrounding the true extent of Pythagoras’s contribution to Greek philosophy and mathematics, see Charles H. Kahn, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, A Brief History, Hackett Publishing Co. Ltd., Indianapolis/Cambridge, 2001, esp. Ch. 2. [2] Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier, Pythagoras and Renaissance Europe: Finding Heaven, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009, p. xiii. [3] Translation taken from John North, The Ambassador’s Secret: Holbein and the World of the Renaissance, Orion Books Ltd., London, 2004, pp. 208-212. [4] Ibid. p. 212. [5] “…fire, water, earth and air bore some traces of their proper nature, but were in the disorganized state to be expected of anything which god has not touched, and his first step when he set about reducing them to order was to give them a definate pattern of shape and number.”, Plato, Timaeus and Critias, Introduction by Desmond Lee, Penguin Classics Edition, Penguin Books, London, 1977, pp. 72-3 [6] Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance (De Docta Ignorantia) Book II, Chapter 13, translation by Jasper Hopkins, The Arthur J. Banning Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1981, p. 99. [7] From Plotinus, Enneads, 6.5.5, quoted in Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, Jesus and the Goddess: The Secret Teachings of the Original Christians, Harper Collins, London, 2002, p. 96. [8] This discussion of the monad by Diogenes Laertius from his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers is quoted in Kahn, op. cit., p. 80. [9] Following Plato, The Republic, Book 7, “…just as our eyes are made for astronomy, so our ears are made for the movements of harmony, and that the two are, as the Pythagoreans say, and as we should agree, Glaucon, sister sciences.” Penguin Classic Edition, translated by Desmond Lee, Penguin Books, London, 1987, p. 340. See also Kahn, op. cit., p.40. [10] Jan Herlinger ‘Medieval Canonics’ in Thomas Street Christensen, The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, p. 182. [11] Normally referred to as a ‘Neo-Platonist’, Pico, in his famous Oration makes numerous references to Pythagoras whom he clearly regards as a higher authority than even Plato. Holbein had also painted the portrait of Sir Thomas More in 1527, who was an enthusiast of Pico’s philosophy and had published his biography in England. He therefore had ample opportunity whilst at the English court to become acquainted with Pico’s philosophical concepts and his vision of man. [12] Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, Translated by A. Robert Caponigri, Rengery Publishing Inc., Washington, 1956, p. 3-4. [13] Much has been made of the mathematical text book, open on a page concerning division, which has been interpreted as a reference to the Reformation, a division within the church. The book, it has been

14 Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 03 | Spring 2010 argued, connects with the broken string on the lute and the incomplete set of pipes as further symbols of discord. Susan Foister is certain of the validity of this interpretation, see Susan Foister, Ashok Roy and Martin Wylde, Holbein’s Ambassadors – Making and Meaning, National Gallery Company Ltd., London, 1997, pp. 40-43. However, an examination of Pythagorean sources and of the understanding of Platonic thought articulated by Marsilio Ficino during the Renaissance suggests that the division and discord indicated by the objects on the lower shelf are to be seen as inherent features of the world as a whole. [14] John North’s brilliantly researched and highly imaginative book, cited above, contains numerous suggestions as to the geometric basis of Holbein’s composition as well as a useful account of the mathematical ideas which influenced the painting. However, some of the arguments posited in the text, such as North’s identification of a hexagram in the upper region of the painting seem imposed upon the image, rather than derived from it (See North, op. cit., p. 195). [15] Utilising this method, any triangle formed by extending two lines from a point placed anywhere on the circumference of a circle to the edges of the diameter of that circle, will be a perfect right-angled triangle. This technique was employed with spectacular results by medieval stonemasons and is related to the 47th problem of Euclid, set out in Book 1 of his Elements, also known as “The Pythagorean Theorem”. [16] Brother Furnell in the Freemasons’ Quarterly Review, 1842, p. 288, originally read the date on the square as 1517, but it is actually 1507. [17] Particularly as a symbol in speculative freemasonry. [18] It has been assumed by several commentators that these details refer to religious tensions within Europe, exacerbated by Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn on 25th January 1533. This interpretation, it is claimed, is reinforced by the religious songbook conspicuously open on a German translation of a Catholic hymn. However, there is no reason to assume that these issues are being intimated by Dinteville and De Selve in a painting very much about themselves and their intellectual interests, containing no direct reference to their diplomatic mission in England and destined for a chateau at Polisy, not the English court. [19] Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, Book XVII, Ch. 2., Trans. by Michael J. B. Allen, Latin text edited by James Hankins and William Bowen, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2006, p. 21. [20] Plato, The Republic, op. cit., pp. 313-314. [21] For Pythagoreans, the hexad was a geometric representation of the number ‘6’ and signified the creation of the world. It is therefore entirely appropriate as a substitute for the onyx slab denoting the archetypal macrocosm in the Westminster Abbey pavement. According to an anonymous fourth century Pythagorean text, probably by a student of Iamblichus,“the universe is ensouled and harmonized by it and, thanks to it, comes by both wholeness and permanence.” See, The Theology of Arithmetic, Trans. by Robin Waterfield, Phanes Press, Michigan, USA, 1988, p. 76. For Pythagoreans, the hexad was also associated with marriage and the cosmic fusion of opposites, formed by the union of two triangles, one masculine and the other feminine. The number 6 which it signifies was also thought to blend male (even [2]) and female (odd [3]) numbers through multiplication as opposed to the pentad, or five pointed star, which is formed by adding the same two numbers. St. Augustine attached mystical significance to this number in his account of the completion of Creation in The City of God, as did Philo of Alexandria in his De Opificio Mundi (III 13-14). Dinteville and De Selve would undoubtedly also have been familiar with Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s musings on the mystical properties of the number six, drawn primarily from Pythagorean sources, in Book 2, Chapter 9 of his Occult Philosophy. [22] Plato, The Republic, op. cit., p. 342 [23] From Porphyry’s Life of Pythagoras, in Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie, The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library, Phanes Press, Michigan, USA, 1987, p. 129. [24] Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, Trans. by J. A. K. Thomson, Penguin Classics revised edition, London, 2004, p. 24. [25] Ibid. p. 205. This Platonic and Pythagorean concept of the ‘good’ was developed by Eudorus in his concept of the ‘telos’, a supreme good to which the individual could aspire.

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[26] Ibid. p. 11. [27] From Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, Penguin Classics Ed., Penguin Books, London, 2003, pp. 138-139. [28] From Iamblichus’s Life of Pythagoras, 33, cited in Guthrie, op. cit., p. 112. [29] Ibid. p. 114. [30] Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, op. cit., pp. 21-22.

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Contemporary Theory Waiting For Time to Tell (or Not) Matthew Bowman

I

The issue of the intersection or distinction between the discipline of art history and the practice of art criticism remains significantly unresolved. Whatever the essential nature of the relationship between art history and art criticism, it seems evident enough that their relationship is conceptually flexible and historically mobile, rather than set in stone and unchanging. True enough, some texts are identifiably written by art historians, while others are recognisably by art critics—and what contributes to them being identifiable as one or the other is broadly the consequence of a particular way of writing, as well as also being the result of a particular set of concerns, and even the writer’s institutional position. Often, we might imagine, the university-based art historian writes with the ultimate aim of producing a book-length study or something shorter for a scholarly journal; while the art critic is less likely to reside in academia, and inclined to perceive the newspaper or art magazine as the home for his essays. But there are also some writers who appear to intertwine art history and art criticism. Amongst these figures Stephen Melville counts the likes of Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, Joseph Koerner, Michael Baxandall, and T. J. Clark—whether or not they are explicit or vocal about this intertwining. Baxandall, for instance, and very recently Fried, have registered a certain scepticism toward any imagination of art history and art criticism being distinct modes. And this suggests, according to Melville’s reading of Baxandall’s Patterns of Intention: “not that the art historian should be a critic, but that an adequate account of explanation in art history, adequately attended to, reveals art history as criticism.” Even though the terms art history and art criticism are capable of being shown to be fundamentally continuous, it’s nonetheless the case that we do have these two discrete terms, and that Baxandall and his fellow critical historians of art represent a particular conception of the intersection between art history and criticism. For the main thrust of this paper, I want to keep art history and art criticism as distinct—that is not to say conflicting—terms. Part of the reason as to why I wish to do this is to foreground the different temporalities that art history and art criticism constitute and are constituted by; in this way, we can begin to develop a clearer picture of what is at stake in a critical history of art. To do this I want to juxtapose two very different writers: speaking for art history, I shall present Erwin Panofsky; and for art criticism, Stanley Cavell. The choice of these two writers might initially seem eccentric. In some respects, art history might regard itself as largely past Panofsky and his project of iconology; that’s probably mostly true, but only insofar as that getting past Panofsky has seemingly meant internalising many features of his art-historical programme. Cavell, on the other hand, is best known as a philosopher whose writings on art have focused mostly upon

17 Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 03 | Spring 2010 literature, theatre, film, and music; while references to painting and sculpture do occur in his writings—and when they do they generally take on decisive importance—they are considerably less frequent. In selecting these two writers, I hope to demonstrate how they expose a particular temporality or historical relation between artwork and writer, and how that temporality might be consequent for both art history and art criticism. However, I don’t claim that either writer is wholly definitive, or should be taken as such: the temporality ascribed to art history by Panofsky is currently undergoing a severe challenge by a growing interest in Aby Warburg which has been generally led by Georges Didi-Huberman and, from a different angle, by Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood—although, Michael Ann Holly’s recent writings on melancholy arguably revise and re-entrench Panofsky’s position. And Cavell is relatively seldom discussed by art critics, and when he is, the temporal structure that he finds in modern art criticism is generally under-mentioned. Nonetheless, both writers offer powerful suggestions that, as I hope to suggest, might encourage us to think rigorously about the different temporalities implicit in various forms of artwriting.

II

It’s not unusual to divide Panofsky’s career into two broad periods cleaved apart by his departure from Nazi Germany. The early period, mostly spent in Hamburg, witnesses Panofsky’s concerted attempts to establish art history as a quasi-scientific discipline, a Kunstwissenschaft; the second period, beginning in the early 1930s, sees Panofsky establishing himself as the foremost art historian working in America—as indeed, demonstrating what the discipline of art history is. In this latter period the densely theoretical questions that animated his earlier period weren’t so much set aside as buried within each text in much the way the foundations of a building are buried: though not always obviously perceptible to the eye, these foundations support the visible superstructure. The notion of “historical distance” became the keystone of his America years, but was gradually formulated during his time in Hamburg; in order to understand this notion, it’s useful to track how it was formulated in those years. During the 1920s, Panofsky attempted to discover an objective ground upon which artworks—often made from subjective, perhaps even irrational desires—can be analysed. His 1920 essay “The Concept of Kunstwollen,” for instance, sought to locate a “fixed Archimedean point” that would function as such a ground by reformulating Alois Riegl’s notion of the Kunstwollen and divesting it of its allegedly psychologistic undertones. Panofsky worried that Riegl’s notion of the Kunstwollen contained within its borders the problematic notion of reconstructing the intentions of the individual artist, and tried to counter this by reading Riegl alongside Kant. In doing this, Panofsky believed that he can develop underlying principles that are universal and therefore internal to art. This process was deeply non-historical. As Margaret Iversen writes: “History at this stage in his thinking seems to have been associated with a kind of temporal causal determination foreign to objective art history.”

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“Perspective as Symbolic Form,” an essay of 1925, indicates a major transformation in Panofsky’s practice. The contours of this essay have been closely examined by several writers, so we needn’t occupy ourselves for too long on this matter—but we should note the purpose of the essay is to show how the Renaissance constructed a model of linear perspective that sets a rationalised spatial distance between viewpoint and scene. Crucially, Panofsky suggests that this model is revealingly analogous with the epistemological relationship between subject and object. As Panofsky argues: “Thus the history of perspective may be understood with equal justice as a triumph of the distancing and objectifying sense of the real, and as a triumph of the distance-denying human struggle for control.” But insofar as perspective is capable of both possibilities, it must balance the two, and attain a correct distance between object and subject. Otherwise, perspective becomes overly objective, and therefore a denial of the human; or too subjective, and thus blind to the world. Perspectival “distance-denying” is very different from the ontological “de-distancing” ascribed to Dasein by Heidegger. The issue of perspective is present in a slightly later essay, “The First Page of Vasari’s Libro” from 1930. Yet even though its presence there is only glancing, its role is fundamental, for it’s there that that perspectival distance is aligned with the notion of historical distance; it’s there, in some respects, that history becomes a genuine problematic in Panofsky’s writings. Put simply, Panofsky is exploring how the Italian Renaissance perceived Northern Gothic art, and why Vasari—who loathed the Gothic—would fashion a Gothic frame around a treasured drawing by Cimabue. His conclusion is that Vasari was able to see the Gothic as a style that can be appreciated and appropriated in relative terms, that is, according to its own time and culture; and yet also be denigrated insofar as it doesn’t meet the standards of the Italian Renaissance. Leaving aside the wider discussion, it’s worth mentioning that Panofsky suggested that the North couldn’t engage with the Gothic in a Vasarian manner until it had gained enough distance from the Gothic in the late-eighteenth century; in his own words: “on the one hand, [the North] had to be converted to a strictly classicist point of view from which the Gothic style . . . could be seen ‘at a distance’ and, therefore, in perspective . . . on the other, it had to become susceptible to the historical and national significance of medieval monuments of art.” In other words, the North was only able to treat the Gothic as a style once it had learnt to see it from the distanced perspective of Classicism and once it was able to treat the Gothic as an historical mode. Panofsky describes these two different approaches as “apparently—but only apparently—contradictory experiences.” The contradiction that is “only apparent” appears to be a disjunction between spatial and temporal or historical approaches, and between detachment or distance and proximity. According to Panofsky the Renaissance managed the same achievement through their renewal of antiquity, thereby rendering them cognitively and stylistically distanced them from the Gothic—a distance further guaranteed by the geographic and national distance separating North and South. The key issue is, for Panofsky, that by placing a frame around Cimabue’s drawing Vasari evinces the “birth” of an historical point of view—based upon a notion of distance—that has philosophical implications for the art historian’s discipline. The framed drawing doesn’t simply belong to history, but is also a theoretical object that constructs history, or teaches how history is to be constructed.

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The notion of “historical distance” isn’t fully present in the 1930 essay, but we can see how that essay begins to develop that notion. By 1939, in his famous “Iconography and Iconology,” perspectival distance and history appear to be reconciled. As a well- known passage goes: “For the medieval mind, classical antiquity was too far removed and at the same time too strongly present to be conceived as an historical phenomenon . . . Just as it was impossible for the Middle Ages to elaborate the modern system of perspective, which is based on the realization of a fixed distance between the eye and the object and thus enables the artists to build up comprehensive and consistent images of visible things; so it was impossible for them to evolve the modern idea of history, based on the realization of an intellectual distance between the present and the past which enables the scholar to build up comprehensive and consistent concepts of bygone periods.” Perspectival distance balances the distance-denying impulse that threatens to overly impose our subjective desires upon the artwork against the contrariwise danger that the artwork will become too remote, too alien from us. And in balancing the two poles, it lessens the risk both might pose. Historical distance would thus become the methodological principle of Panofsky’s art history and would, sometimes covertly, sometimes explicitly, become the cornerstone of art history as such. It’s interesting, though, that this principle is primarily based upon a kind of spatialization of time, rather than time itself, which, as has been remarked by others, suggests that our attachment to artworks stems from our detachment from them. Indeed, time or history appears as a modification of the principle of distance or detachment rather than its essential fact. Thus, the distance formulated in the Renaissance, its detachment from the Gothic, is first of all a kind of cultural distance. In a later essay, the retrospective “Three Decades of Art History in the United States,” Panofsky comments that the achievement of Alfred Barr, curator of MoMA, comes from his skill in showing that historical distance “is replaceable by cultural and geographical distance.” Detachment and distance, operates, for Panofsky, as the objective guarantee of the discipline of art history; our having artworks is conditioned by them being always a little bit out of our grasp—a thought that leads Holly to claim that the discipline of art history’s is essentially melancholic. It should be clear by now that the Italian Renaissance serves, for Panofsky, very strikingly, as the theoretical model for the discipline of art history as such. And it does so not because—or not simply because—Vasari was the “first” art historian, or because the Renaissance in some sense constitutes the “first” proper generation of artists. But this should lead us to wonder how art history, in this Panofskian framework, can direct its attention towards non-Renaissance artworks. For example, we might suspect that artworks from other periods lack “historical distance” as an integral factor of their being, although these artworks might be examined from the viewpoint structured around historical distance. The historicity of such works may consist of their “belonging- to-the-pastness”—and this might not be the same thing as a work that possesses and implicitly proclaims its historicity as historical distance. The Renaissance artwork, structured by Panofskian historical distance, is presumably temporally elsewhere, always away from us; our attachment to the work always conditioned by detachment or distance from it. With this in mind, we now turn to Stanley Cavell

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III

Cavell’s account of criticism, most evident in his 1967 essay “Music Discomposed,” derives from his experience of and participation in late-modernism. Although, as its title suggests, the essay’s main focus is the criticism subtending modernist music, its concerns are intentionally broad enough to offer an analysis of modernist criticism as such. And indeed, the publication of the essay is historically synchronous, and in close dialogue with Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood.” But if Panofsky construed the Italian Renaissance as the essential origin of the modern discipline of art history, thereby giving the Renaissance a trans-historical value that nonetheless preserved and engendered the notion of historical distance, we should say that for Cavell criticism as such is not tied in the same way to a given historical period, or that a given period operates as a model for the practice of criticism; modernist criticism is interlinked with modernist art, just as Romantic criticism would be with Romantic art. Stating the obvious, we might simply say that criticism is conjoined with the present and is therefore contingent upon and answerable to that present. The parallel, then, between art history and the Renaissance, on the one hand, and between art criticism and modernism, on the other, is uneven; suggesting that criticism might be discursively and historically specific while art history is trans-historical. In elucidating Cavell’s understanding of modernist criticism, we therefore need to elucidate his understanding of modernism. Instead of conceiving modernism as a rational process motored by medium-specificity, Cavell argues that modernism is best characterised by a loss of tradition, and thus by the absence of any normative criteria that can determine, in advance, what counts as a given art, let alone as a successful instance of that art. Flatness and the delimitation of flatness, for example, wouldn’t necessarily count as laying bare the essence of painting or as guarantee for a successful painting. And relying upon past standards would also be insufficient. As Cavell argues: “The essential fact of (what I refer to as) the modern lies in the relation between the present practice of an enterprise and the history of that enterprise, in the fact that this relation has become problematic.” The question, then, is how can we know what artworks count, and how they count when the traditional conventions and criteria that used to determine what counts have become problematic? A further question is what to make of the works that don’t count? Answering the second question first, Cavell labels the works that fail “fraudulent”—a tricky term, that in this case, doesn’t depend upon notions of sincerity or forgery insofar as applicable criteria are non-existent and therefore the work can’t be judged authentic or fraudulent according to them. Let’s return to the first question in a slightly different form: how can we differentiate between fraudulence and authenticity when criteria aren’t available? One possible answer—which returns us to the problematic of temporality—is that time will tell; Cavell isn’t satisfied, though: “What will time tell? That certain departures in art-like pursuits have been established (among certain audiences, in textbooks, on walls, in college courses); that someone is treating them with the respect due, we feel, to art; that one no longer has the right to question their status? But in waiting for time to tell that, we miss what the present—that the dangers of fraudulence, and of trust, are essential to the experience of art.” One basic difference between art history and criticism, then,

21 Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 03 | Spring 2010 is that the latter cannot wait for time to tell, that historical distance—or perhaps even just history—is not a dimension of its procedures. But that isn’t to say time as such is absent from criticism. Indeed, modernism has a distinct impact upon the temporality of criticism. Without criteria, criticism, for Cavell, exists in an altered relationship to the art it interprets. And this means, he argues, that criticism is no longer expendable or subservient to art—i.e., that it’s not something that just comes after the art—but has become internal to art; it sets the ground for our understanding of certain artworks. This claim has temporal consequences: “The issue is simply this: we know that criticism ought to come only after the fact of art, but we cannot insure that it will come only after the fact.” In other words, criticism might precede the artwork it interprets. There are several ways we can think of this: we might, for instance, imagine that the precession of criticism as characterising the alleged prescriptiveness of Greenbergian criticism, or we might take it as registering the greater role played by critical writing in the oeuvres of many artists emergent in the 1960s. The latter case—we might think of Smithson, Morris, Buren, etc.—seems a more accurate instance, in that in these works criticism seems internal to the work, rather than an afterthought. But those writings were in tense dialogue with Greenberg and his ilk, and so we might imagine that criticism by critics helped to produce the art and criticism by the artists. In that sense, too, criticism becomes internal to the art rather than mere appendage. Such criticism might seem an attempt to forestall criticism, to refuse the critic; but such criticism is not free from the critical impulse insofar as it, too, must be analysed, judged authentic or fraudulent.

IV

The last few sentences have attempted to suggest that modernist criticism is non- arbitrarily connected to its objects, that its objects actively produce their criticism. Thinking back to earlier, we might remark that for Panofsky, the Renaissance is the mirror upon which art history perceives and thereby constitutes itself. Art history fastens upon the notion of historical distance as part of its methodological self- definition precisely because it was the achievement of the Renaissance to construct and demonstrate the validity of historical distance—although we might suspect that, in Panofsky, his art-historical writing partly forgets how historical distance is internal to the Renaissance artwork by universalizing it; that is, making historical distance methodological. All this raises questions that I can only touch upon in closing this paper: if our writing—whether art-historical or art-critical—derives in some measure from the object written about, then we should ask when is the work of art? By this question, by asking “when,” I am not asking about when—which decade or period— the work was made, and I want to take the word “work” in an active sense. In other words, what temporality does the artwork invoke? And is the working of art something that happens only in certain ages? This last question is worth asking insofar as that no matter when historically the work was made, it’s always experienced in our present. We might ask if historical distance really does add clarity to the artwork, or if some works

22 Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 03 | Spring 2010 are really legible in their own time? At what juncture does the work become open to historical rather than critical analysis? When does a work cease being contemporary and becomes historical? It is worth noting that in “Three Decades of Art History in the United States,” Panofsky comments that “we normally require from sixty to eighty years” for the appropriate historical distance to emerge. Not asking these kinds of questions would be, in a sense, failing to comprehend why for several writers art history is criticism and the stakes Baxandall engages in when he writes about Northern Limewood sculpture, Benjamin Baker’s The Forth Bridge, and Piero’s The Baptism of Christ. It would also be failing to take account of the extraordinary discourses of temporality and historicity that emerged in transformed fashion in the twentieth century—Freud, Benjamin, and Heidegger. Finally, it would be failing to ask about what differentiates, and yet also intersects art history and criticism. I cannot resolve or even extend these issues here, but hopefully I have done enough to suggest that the difference between art history and art criticism has less to do with the contemporaneity or oldness of the artworks at stake than it does with the temporal and historical structures already inherent within the artworks and our attachment to them. To do more than merely suggest, however, would take more time.

Notes

Stephen Melville, “Reckoning with Kant” in James Elkins (ed.), The Art Seminar: Art History versus Aesthetics (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 225. For what it is worth, Panofsky’s notion of historical distance, as well Michael Ann Holly’s reference to art history as a melancholic science, both seemingly rely upon linear notions of temporality and historicity that seem challengeable by the Benjamin’s The Arcades Project and Heidegger’s Being and Time. My current research project, provisionally titled The Time of Art: Disjunctive Temporalities and Historicities, hopes to diagnose the different temporal models in art history and art criticism in order to develop a stronger—as well as non-linear and non-melancholic—understanding of these notions. Margaret Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art and Theory (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: MIT Press, 1993), p. 156. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, introduction and trans. by Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991 [1924-5]), p. 67. Erwin Panofsky, “The First Page of Giorgio Vasari’s ‘Libro’” in Meaning in the Visual Arts (London: Peregrine Books, 1970 [1955]), pp. 221-222. Erwin Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology” in Meaning in the Visual Arts, p. 78. Erwin Panofsky, “Three Decades of Art History in the United States” in Meaning in the Visual Arts, p.377. Stanley Cavell, “Foreword: An Audience for Philosophy” in Must We Mean What We Say? Updated Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 [1969]), p. xxxiii. Stanley Cavell, “Music Discomposed” in Must We Mean What We Say? pp. 188-189. Ibid., p. 209. Panofsky, “Three Decades of Art History in the United States,” p. 377.

23 Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 03 | Spring 2010 Photo: iStock

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Book Review

“My Name is Charles Saatchi and I am an Artoholic” Martin Boland

It took just eight minutes of furious bidding at Sotheby’s in London for Giacommetti’s L’Homme qui marche II to sell for the record sum of $104.32 million. This work of art will live forever in the shadow of its price tag. But, so blinded are we by the size of such figures, that it is easy to forget that it was an art collector (an individual or an institution) who wrote the cheque, made the money transfer. These men and women are the shadowy, nameless svengalis who linger at the ends of auction telephone lines. Collectors, if known at all, are only recognised in the secret circles of artistic freemasonry. “If Robert Hughes is right and the creation of confidence in art as an investment medium is the cultural artefact of the last half of the twentieth century,” writes Gordon Burn, “then it could also be argued that the single most important art- world figure of the past decade has not been an artist but a collector.” One candidate for this title is a collector, familiar to both the cognoscenti and those with a passing interest in contemporary art. His name is Charles Saatchi. No survey of the contemporary British Art Scene would be complete without reference to Charles Saatchi. In fact, many would argue that he dictates the dynamics and shape of visual art in Britain and beyond. Saatchi is, above all, famous for that stable of artists who came to be known in the late 1980’s as the Young British Artists (the YBA’s): Rachel Whiteread, Fiona Rae, the Chapman Brothers, Marcus Harvey and the tough and tender hooligan of the gang, Damien Hirst. Many of these artists were picked up by Saatchi while still students at Goldsmith’s College. Saatchi is an artistic cradle snatcher. He has perfected the art of grooming artists when they are young and unrepresented; making sure he is the first to get their names on his chequebook stubs. In America, he did it with Schnabel before the artist had smashed a plate and with Jeff Koons before the man and his kitsch fantasy world became a unity. Saatchi wants the first sniff of the talent. Attending end of year art shows and exhibitions that no other collector would bother to go to, Saatchi works hard at making sure he is the first on the scene with his credit card. Richard Wentworth (who taught for a time at Goldsmith’s) observes: “You’re being an assessor at the Slade, in what is essentially examination conditions, and he’ll just appear. This little figure appears in the background. He’s gone shopping, and he’s the first in line. It’s like Hitchcock... People perceive a proper collecting culture in this country, and it’s not there. There’s Charles Saatchi and there’s no one else.” Many may know the name of this supercollector but the man remains a mystery. He never gives interviews and never attends his exhibition openings. In a recent highbrow reality tv show, The School of Saatchi, art graduates, desperate for a break, produced

25 Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 03 | Spring 2010 new works for Saatchi. The prize was that their work would be exhibited alongside other Saatchi pieces at the Hermitage and more importantly, they’d receive Saatchi’s priceless imprimatur. But Saatchi never appeared in the programme. His opinions were channelled through a gallery employee. Her every comment was prefaced with “Charles says...Charles thinks,” as she communicated with the other side in this perverse séance with the living. One, therefore, comes to My Name is Charles Saatchi and I am an Artoholic with high expectations. This slim book contains questions from critics, journalists and members of the public with answers from the man himself. Perhaps these answers will provide a picture of the contemporary art collector? They don’t. The only impression the reader is left with is that Saatchi is a master of obfuscation, the flippant bon mot and that he adores his wife, Nigella Lawson: I know very little about contemporary art but have £1,000 to invest. Any advice?

Saatchi: Premium Bonds...

The artist Peter Blake has called you a “malign influence” because of the way you can “make” certain artists. Are you a malign influence?

Saatchi: I wonder whether Peter Blake would consider me a less malign influence if I had bought some of his art. One thing, however, becomes clear from the book. Saatchi collects art simply because he likes it. His purchases are apparently not informed by any value system or aesthetic valency. If he likes it, he buys it. This is not so much collecting as a pathological compulsion and reminds one of the eponymous main character of Bruce Chatwin’s final novel, Utz, who obsessively collects Meissen porcelain. Chatwin writes, “[Utz] detested violence, yet welcomed the cataclysms that flung fresh works of art onto the market. ‘Wars, pogroms and revolutions,’ he used to say, ‘offer excellent opportunities for the collector.’ ”. For Saatchi the violence of wars, pogroms and revolutions have influenced the work of many of the artists he has collected; artists who, in turn, have fed his compulsive behaviour. Collecting for Saatchi is a base, acquisitive response: He wants and nine times out of ten, he gets. It is a creed that has more than a political whiff of 1980’s Thatcherism; a philosophical odour that appears to have impregnated the soul of his artists. “I blame Charles Saatchi,” Damien Hirst confessed when being interviewed about his new 20,000 square feet studio space in the Cotswolds, “ ‘cause when I was an art student, I went down to look at his space and I just wanted one. Immediately, I mean, art looks great there. Art looks great in here. So you make art for it.” This is not art for art’s sake but art as interior design. And the art that Saatchi buys to decorate his acres of gallery space is a Glasgow kiss to the classical ideals of beauty and truth. His artists smack you in the face; mug you of any moral reference point and run off laughing and mooning. This is what the American critic, Adam Gopnik, calls the High Morbid Manner where “bodies rot, faces are filled with maggots, surgical instruments and examinations are on display...

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The shock of the new, which for most of the century could reside as much in a black square as in a slit eyeball, isn’t available any longer. It’s not possible to shock any more by being new. The only way to shock is by being shocking.” Or as the fictional serial killer, John Doe puts it in David Fincher’s 1995 film, Seven: “Wanting people to listen, you can’t just tap them on the shoulder anymore. You have to hit them with a sledgehammer and then you’ll notice you’ve got his strict attention.” Saatchi has certainly grabbed our attention by, in the words of Susan Sontag, “lowering the threshold of what is terrible.” On the sleeve of this book is a photo of Charles Saatchi. In many ways it is more eloquent and troubling than the soundbites within. Saatchi, dressed in his Comme des Garçons shirt and black jacket, may look like a mild mannered aesthete but we know that this is a cover for his more bestial instincts. This collector has choreographed this danse macabre of bisected cattle, deformed mannequins and soiled lives that now fill our gallery spaces and imaginations. He has orchestrated the who’s in and who’s out; who’s on the up and who’s on the down of the artistic circuit. Saatchi watches this carnival of decay and commerce. He looks out at us with a flat eyed, accusatory stare.

‘My Name is Charles Saatchi and I am an Artoholic: Everything You Need to Know About Art, Ads, Life, God and Other Mysteries and Weren’t Afraid to Ask’ Phaidon Press Ltd (Aug 2009) pp176 ISBN: 978-071485747-3

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Interview

Private Public Interface: An interview with the artist Lan Yuan-Hung

Robert Priseman

Robert Priseman: On a practical level, what kind of equipment do you prefer to use to make your images with? Lan Yuan-Hung: I feel more competent with digital media, and most of the time I really just use what’s available for me. Right now I have a passable pc laptop and a basic DSLR. When I am working on a 3d CGI project, I can sneak back into my old college for more computer power. I’d say if opportunity is provided, I’d like to try to shoot on large format film camera.

RP: What do you feel you are trying to communicate with your work? L Y-H: Initially my work is the response to the insufficiency of words. While I still very much rely on speaking and writing, I always feel limited by what one can say with words. This awareness creates an anxiety for me, and so I turn to visual forms for better expression. Some people say there’s always a sense of “quietness” in my images, and I think it’s related to this anxiety. In a way my pictures represent the opposite state of my anxiety, they soothe me and have become an obsession which drives it away.

RP: What do you find creates anxiety for you? L Y-H: Back in college, I wrote a paper on two kinds of anxiety that I thought were influencing my generation. One was about the political state of Taiwan and how we are not really China but we are also not quite an independent nation. The other was the speed of modern society and how we need to be constantly updating to keep up with the world. The former caused the issue of historical and cultural identification; the latter created information anxiety.

But then if I exclude these factors, I know I will probably still feel anxious. It’s the disturbance of the needs of human beings, something not so much about the outer world. It’s much more personal - the needs of companionship, expressing oneself, love & sex, etc. I guess my inner anxiety is how I find it difficult to fulfill these needs. This raises issues of communication.

In a way, I also use my work to probe life. Very often in the process of working, I come to understand why I feel the way I do. And I guess the subjects which really concern me, what I am unable to put into words, are my thoughts on human emotion and desire, or maybe more specifically, the failure to express emotion and desire fully. I have this feeling that people can’t live together as a whole; they live separately with the urge to communicate with each other. So it’s a bit contradictory, a constant struggle and unstable state.

RP: This idea of living separately yet wishing to communicate is fascinating - communication being the binding glue - could you elaborate?

28 Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 03 | Spring 2010 Bedroom II : Lan Yuan-Hung

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L Y-H: When I say people live separately with the urge of communicating, I mean it in a pessimistic way. I think that what people wish to achieve through communication will never happen, for it’s never truly transparent and neutral. However, I still feel people are always trying to express themselves as best they can and don’t give in. I see a kind of beauty there, a strength against the solitude and fragility of human existence.

This perhaps explains the settings and atmosphere of my images. I prefer private spaces because I am fascinated with a sense of intimacy and I always seem to approach this intimacy with a sense of exposure. I guess I am trying to reveal something inner and ambiguous, something that could correspond to that incapability of communicating.

RP: So there is a juxtaposition of two forces at work in your images, the isolation of the individual against the group dynamic of society - is this the core idea? Is this a metaphor for you? L Y-H: Yes, I like the juxtaposition. I think the reason it speaks to me is because I spend a lot of time in my room and communicate with people through the internet, not just friends, but total strangers too. I’ve been doing this for a long time and I imagine what others are like in their rooms too. I’m fascinated by how people today can reveal their private selves in the public arena from the most private of spaces. I often wonder why it comes to be like this and how it affects our minds. Of course I don’t have the answers but it certainly gives me a feeling that there’s this huge emotional flow among people that’s invisible in everyday life.

A story occurs to me here: one time I had a chance to photograph an exhibitionist, as he jokingly labeled himself. He told me he volunteers to be a nude model in art classes and he enjoys it; the gaze of people makes him feel strong instead of vulnerable, and he explained to me that it is probably because he receiving a lack of attention when he was a child. It seems that he is getting in touch with his past self by exposing his body now.

Another aspect of my work is my own personal sexual desire and fetishes, and my thinking on those of other’s. To me, sex (in the broad meaning) constitutes a major part of human existence and yet it’s so primitive and wordless. That really interests me. Maybe in the work I’ve done, this aspect didn’t show much but I can see a trace of this and it will be a direction for me for my next project.

RP: Would you care to elaborate on the theme of human sexuality? L Y-H: Most of the time, I have really scattered and confusing thoughts. Sexuality is probably what’s guiding me in my work. Fetishes though, are something I see as a doorway to explore on the theme of sexuality. They are like the characterization of sexual desire as well as the means to satisfy it. I once read this term “late-onset fetish” in a psychology book. It’s saying that most fetishes grow out of us as we get older and are influenced by our lives. So if I were to say sexual desire is something really deeply personal and inner, then fetishes are like its interface with the world, and vice versa.

RP: This resonates beautifully with what you are trying to express through your work – the flow of a deeply personal state of experience out into the world of the public arena and back again. L Y-H: Yes. Thank you.

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Review Kimsooja Art Monthly: ‘Talking Art’ interview series, Tate Modern, 20 February 2010 Laura Earley

Kimsooja (b.1957 in Korea; lives and works in New York) recently gave a fascinating and insightful presentation of her work as part of Art Monthly’s ongoing Talking Art interview series, at Tate Modern. In discussion with film historian Maxa Zoller, Kimsooja presented video clips and images of various works made since 1992 so as to draw parallels across her artistic practice and explain its non-linearity. Kimsooja’s practice functions by using many dualities, such as vertical and horizontal, the self and the other, but most centrally it focuses upon stillness and movement. Trained as a painter, Kimsooja now predominately uses performance, film, three-dimensional objects and installations. Formal concerns with colour, texture and space have remained a constant throughout her work, and she has consistently made use of needles, sewing, breathing and mirrors as physical metaphors. During this performance piece Kimsooja talked about the needle as a metaphor for the body and its ability to symbolise both the male and female through its form. She also referred to it as a tool that can be used to heal and attack. Kimsooja then went into detail about her iconic work A Needle Woman, which exists in two versions (1999- 2001 and 2005). The first version was recently presented at the Baltic contemporary art centre in Newcastle. It is an eight-channel video piece and each film was made in a different city: Tokyo, Shanghai, Mexico City, London, Delhi, New York, Cairo, and Lagos. In 2005 the work was shot in more overtly troubled places, locations of violent and contested borders: Patan, Jerusalem, Sana, Havana, Rio de Janeiro, and N’Djamena. Both versions of A Needle Woman are identical in framing and composition. They depict Kimsooja from behind, wearing the same plain grey jacket and trousers with her long dark hair hanging in a straight line down her back. In each city Kimsooja is shown standing completely still. She is a fixed point in the midst of the metropolis and its daily hustle and bustle. Some people walk past her obliviously, others stare at the camera or try to provoke her. It is as though her body is a needle inserted into the fabric of the city. It has the potential to simultaneously rupture and unite. The films in A Needle Woman all document the conclusion of a walking performance undertaken by Kimsooja which is not part of the screened work. During discussion Kimsooja described the process of making these pieces. She talked about the overwhelming energy she feels when amongst a crowd and how this gives her the momentum to make the work. Through a dedicated repetition of this walking and stopping action she has learnt how to remain still despite her surroundings. By

31 Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 03 | Spring 2010 controlling her breathing to produce a meditative state, she can undertake such a performance without feeling vulnerable or self-conscious. She keeps a neutral face throughout, and does not make eye contact with passers by. The resulting work is completely silent and extremely powerful to watch; when you consider undertaking such an action yourself it becomes even more impressive. As an extension of the needle metaphor, fabric has appeared regularly within Kimsooja’s work. She began making her ‘Bottari’ works in 1992 whilst in residence at PS1, New York. ‘Bottari’ translates to mean bundle; they are made from cloth, either sewn together fragments or new fabric, and are often highly colourful. An everyday object in Korean culture, the Bottari is used as a form of luggage when people move. As objects they imply travel, but not necessarily travel that is planned or desired; instead they can be read as objects of urgency, separation, dislocation, and as a method for carrying only what is needed. Some of Kimsooja’s most recognisable pieces comprise multiple Bottari. For the 49th Venice Biennale (1999) she installed Bottari in Exile, comprising a 2.5-ton truck filled with Bottari, in the main biennale venue - the Arsenale. In her earlier work Cities on the Move (1997) Kimsooja travelled atop of a truck filled with Bottari for 11 days as it journeyed around Korea. This performance was also documented in film and her role within the piece is as anonymous as that presented in A Needle Woman; she can be read as a Bottari herself. The body and the Bottari share ideas of wrapping, covering, moving. Bottari also reflect life - travelling with Korean women through birth, marriage and death as both object and the fabric they are made from. Seeing the self in the other is a persistent thread in Kimsooja’s practice and one she discussed during the talk. As part of Bottari in Exile Kimsooja installed a huge mirror within the space, directly in front of the truck. During her talk she explained how she considers mirrors to be boundaries that reflect everything but themselves. Mirrors enable a visualisation of the self as the other, which is a duality that is as circulative and repetitive as the in-and-out motion of sewing.

Left to right: Bottari Truck in Exile (1999) 2.5 ton truck stacked with Bottaris, 20m x 6.5m, mirror structure. Installed at 49th Venice Biennale, Arsenale, Venice. Photo by Luca Campigotto, Courtesy of Kimsooja Studio A Needle Woman (1999-2001). Still from Lagos (Nigeria), part of 8 channel video installation, silent, 6:33 loop A Needle Woman (2005). Still from Jerusalem (Israel), part of 6 channel video installation, silent, 10:30 loop

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Interview Stephen Carley: 12 x 12 Andrea Hadley Johnson

Stillness is not evident here.

Stephen Carley is not still. There is no sense of stillness in Carley’s work.

His studio is static but not still. Pause and hesitation are replaced by a stinging visual energy. Space is filled with thought, image, text, sound. An atmosphere of receptive alertness hangs within the room. Stephen Carley is a UK based artist. Over the course of the year he is opening up his studio to create twelve intimate and unique site specific exhibitions. I went to find out more. As I walk through the studio door I experience an overwhelming sense of the artists urgency to project ideas. Surfaces are gouged and materials burnt, paint is sprayed across wood and dust is fixed onto rubber structures. Sounds trickle from a corner of the room and images blink and flicker on the floor. There is a discordance to the sheer quantity of media used here, and yet a preciseness of hand connects the work, pulling it together to dilute the chaos and sharpen the tone. Within the visual cacophony of 12x12x8 I find a text piece that articulates this perfectly. Liberty, is written in water on the studio floor. Not fluid and without boundary but captured precisely and ingeniously (see question seven), distilling a chaotic, multi layered concept into a most simple and beautiful end. The diversity of material and the way that the work is presented reflects the way Carley talks. The work on display links with the way he behaves in my company; sharing ideas emphatically, projecting every thought and responding to each fragment of a comment, editing and rephrasing a sentence to ensure that it’s received in a particular way. He is rarely still and I’m wondering whether all artist’s studios are so autobiographical.

To gain an insight into the urges and choices that define his practice I asked Stephen Carley some questions.

AHJ: Are there areas within your practice that you wish to conceal from the viewer? SC: Only the stuff that’s rubbish, the things that go wrong or appear naïve. The series that I’m currently working on shows what I wish to communicate, how I do it and why I do it. Because the conceptual and practical elements happen in the same space that the public wander into I have been thinking about what is implicit, explicit and what might remain coded or ambiguous in my work. One of the intentions of my practice is to create a link with someone else, a point of departure, a point of controversy and conversation point. So in that respect I need to be relatively transparent...

33 Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 03 | Spring 2010 but then if it was that obvious it would be pointless. Where is the interaction if it is spelled out? I think that there is a fine balance between blindingly obvious and ‘poetically obscure’.

AHJ: Did you excel at art as a child? SC: Art and running were the only things I was any good at when I was young. My primary school teacher seemed to teach every lesson through the medium of drawing and I still have a drawing he made for me when I left. My teachers at secondary school were very proactive and encouraged and enabled me to try printmaking, ceramics, photography and life drawing. I loved art at school, but failed my art exams. I was very good at drawing and loved process, hence printmaking. I didn’t have anything to say back then though, so the school work was very academic.

AHJ: What ignites your creativity? SC: It’s difficult to be precise – sometimes the simplest things can make a connection that seems very powerful. I suppose I try and remain open and aware.

At the moment the thing that ignites me is the question of whether the war in Iraq was legitimate and the huge question marks that hang over the presence of British troops in Afghanistan. I come from a ‘services’ family, my father was in the RAF for the whole of his working life and one of my brothers has been in the Royal Navy since he was 16. I think this anger and frustration that I feel is palpable within my work because it’s informed by very direct and personal experience.

Looking at the work of other artists always has an effect – positive or negative. I remember seeing Jeremy Dellers work for the first time, ‘Acid Brass’and the ‘Battle of Orgreave’, and being determined to strip away the artifice from my work and become more connected with my immediate and wider ‘community‘.

Music has always fired me up. As a 17 year old in 1978 the whole empowering DIY scene around punk was influential. And of course, teaching; if nothing else it keeps me fundamentally connected with process, experimentation and the joy of discovery.

AHJ: Which other artists have influenced your output? SC: I would say Helen Chadwick, especially her ‘Of Mutability’ installation. I was drawn to the combinations of media and the re-drawing of myths in a contemporary context. It was simply beautiful. Also, Anselm Keifer – the scale, the sheer enormity of it all. The taking hold of his cultural identity by the balls and giving it a bloody good shake. Christian Boltanski, who I first happened across in Paris and was deeply moved by how somber and analytical his work was. An art that can be made out of anything.... but what that is can have huge symbolic attachments, for example, dust.

AHJ: Do you consider how people will eventually engage with your work? SC: Yes. This tends to be at the forefront of every decision I make. In the end it isn’t for me, it’s for an audience - if it’s exhibited in a gallery or on a website or in a book. The process is all me and that’s what I love doing, getting my hands dirty. But, once I’ve made it and it ‘goes live’ it has to function in that context... it’s sort of back to your first question - what shall I hide!

34 Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 03 | Spring 2010 Stephen Carley: 12X12X8

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The decisions are always different though, at the moment I’m thinking about how subtle I can be before the audience doesn’t notice the work. Past shows have been about things like ‘how difficult can I make it for people to move about the space before they get disinterested or angry’ or ‘can I engage or repel the audience with this sound’ or ‘will this smell make them remember their childhood’.

Years ago I made a piece for the ‘National Review of Live Art’ at the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow – it was a ramp that was rigged up with contact microphones fed through a delay box and a huge amplifier... when someone stepped on it there was a few seconds of nothing then a huge bang would come back at you – it was called ‘Tread Lightly My Child’. Audience engagement is at the centre of many of the ‘12X12’s either in a ‘cumulative blackboard’, origami structures or fake voting slips. You can have so much fun with the audience!

AHJ: Do you like to work in silence or to a soundtrack? SC: I can’t listen to music when I work. I get too absorbed in the songs and stop thinking about what I’m doing. If I put the radio on, it has to be a current affairs or news station. The current affairs stuff seems to just drift in and out of my thought patterns as I’m working – I have the volume low and it might simply function as a voice in the room to keep me company. If I’m reading it has to be silence. If I’m having a serious debate with myself about some material or mark or word, silence again.

AHJ: Tell me about Liberty and how the piece was conceived? SC: The phrase ‘liberty, fraternity, equality’ formed the focus for ‘12X12X8 three little words’. I wanted to use the words without being illustrative or overtly political, to strip them back to something poetic and contemplative. I chose dust for ‘fraternity’ and wet clay for ‘equality’ - materials in their current state that would change dramatically if touched or breathed on.

I was working out how to approach ‘liberty’ when I spilled my coffee, as the liquid pooled, its meniscus held it between grease marks on my work bench. I ran my finger through the liquid and it simply sprang back into the shape it had previously occupied. Then I had the light bulb moment, shapes could be letters, liquid could be water... It was a spontaneous process from there to create a stencil from Vaseline and pool the water inside to form the letters. The fact that the water could evaporate over a few hours added to the piece, that it had to be continually topped up and never left to run dry became a powerful subtext to the conceptual thinking behind the piece.

AHJ: How do you harness your thoughts when you’re developing ideas? SC: I have a cupboard and several bags full of envelopes, bits of paper, letters and other paper bits. I don’t like sketch books because they suggest linear development and don’t give you the opportunity to cross reference (without ripping all the pages out and re-arranging them!). I don’t often wake up with an idea – I always find I’ve literally exhausted my brain by the time I crash out. And I don’t trust dreams as a basis for making anything – I don’t buy into that surrealist sub conscious thing, it’s not something I feel comfortable with.

I doodle, draw, sketch, and write to remember fleeting thoughts that will one day become a more fully fledged ‘thing’. These can happen at work, on the phone, on the train, walking down the

36 Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 03 | Spring 2010 street, listening to music. Because they are only fragments I’m happy to let them be like that and then revisit them in a more controlled and analytical frame of mind later on. I have to do this; as Brian Eno says in his ‘Oblique Strategies cards – ‘the most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten‘.

AHJ: thank you Stephen for sharing your thoughts so freely and generously.

37 Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 03 | Spring 2010 Photo: iStock

38 Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 03 | Spring 2010

FilmTheory La Caméra-Stylo Today: David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006) Sam Ishii-Gonzales

More than sixty years ago, the filmmaker-critic Alexandre Astruc wrote an article entitled “Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-stylo” (1948). It is a text in which we find, in nascent form, many of assumptions and arguments that would lead the critics at Cahiers du cinéma, a few years later, to formulate the notion of the auteur. Astruc argues that something qualitatively new is happening in the cinema: cinema, he argues is “becoming a means of expression”, by which he means a means of personal or individual expression and this, he argues, is allowing the filmmaker to develop into an artist akin to the painter or novelist. Film is becoming a language that the artist can use to “express his thoughts [...] or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel.” For this reason, Astruc calls this development “the age of caméra-stylo (camera-pen)”, for the filmmaker now has the ability to establish a relation to the camera that is equivalent to the novelist’s relation with his or her pen. Thus, in the modern cinema Astruc envisions there is no longer what was called a “scriptwriter” because “the distinction between author and director loses all meaning”: “Direction is no longer a means of illustrating or presenting a scene, but a true act of writing. The film-maker/author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen.” This last point is important to stress here because Astruc is not saying that film should become more like painting or literature; rather, he is addressing the potential of film to become – in the hands of a filmmaker – an expressive medium in its own right: a medium with its own way of articulating ideas and emotions. He is also reminding us that a script should never be confused with a film because words written on pieces of paper are qualitatively distinct from the images and sounds that the filmmaker harnesses, in the production stage, and then shapes, in postproduction, into a cinematic work. Although Astruc’s examples are all feature-length narrative films – he mentions the work of Bresson, Renoir and Welles – he is also thinking here of the proliferation, in the postwar period, of 16mm cameras and how this more wide-scale availability of film cameras can facilitate the continued growth of this new mode of cinematic writing. (Here too we might recall that cinematography literally means writing with movement or writing in movement, and that photography means writing with light.) Indeed, it seems to me that Astruc’s comments are most relevant for considering not only the explosion of experimental cinema in postwar America – this was a cinema that was made possible precisely because of the wider accessibility of 16mm cameras manufactured during the Second World War and then sold in second-hand shops or at discounted rates in the 1950s – but also more recent technological developments such as the emergence of digital cameras as well as the availability of software systems that allow one to edit films on one’s home computer. All of these developments should, as Astruc says, lead

39 Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 03 | Spring 2010 to a proliferation of cinemas; a proliferation in the ways one approaches conceiving a film, in the ways one approaches writing a film with the camera. If this proliferation has not actually occurred with the advent of digital film it is because most young people who pick up a camera seem more interested in the business end of cinema than in its artistic side. Or, worse, they confuse one with the other, as though the best film were simply the one that made the most money. They confuse the interrogation of form with the mastery of formulae. The assumption is that the forms of cinema have been discovered and inventoried. Now all one needs to do is fit one’s ideas in to one of these pre-fabricated slots. Press this button, press that button, and, voila, you have a film! So that just when there should be a proliferation of styles and ideas in film we are seeing the reverse. The “digital revolution” is quantitative, not qualitative: it has allowed more people to make films without actually doing much to expand the possibilities of what a film can be.

One of the few filmmakers who can be said to have embraced digital film as a means of exploring and extending the possibilities of cinema is David Lynch. (Another I might mention in passing is Abbas Kiarostami.) For Lynch, the relative cheapness of digital video – and the fact that one can own one’s own equipment – allows him to embrace a mode of production that he could otherwise not pursue: the making of a film in which the writing of the film and the shooting of the film become one and the same process. Knowing that he would never be able to get financial assistance from Hollywood to make such a project, he decided to proceed, at least initially, without outside funding (to get funding you need to have a script because producers want to know what they are getting themselves into – this is true whether you are a young, untried filmmaker or a thrice-Oscar nominated filmmaker such as Lynch). Using his own relatively low-end digital equipment, Lynch shot material for Inland Empire over a two-year period, figuring out the “story” as he went along. The impetus for this kind of experimentation can be related to his early training as a painter. From the beginning, Lynch sought a way to transpose the open, intuitive process involved in developing the image that he learned as a painter to cinema. Why, he would ask, can’t one discover an image through a system of trial and error? Where might a narrative lead if there is no pre-determined limit or end point in place at the beginning of the journey that is the making of a film? The closest that Lynch had been able to come, in cinema, to such an open-ended experience of crafting the image – prior to Inland Empire – was his first film Eraserhead (1977), which was shot very slowly over a five-year period and mostly late at night, when Lynch and his small crew of technicians and actors finished their day jobs. Of his first feature Lynch would say “Certain things are just so beautiful to me, and I don’t know why. Certain things make so much sense, and it’s hard to explain. I felt Eraserhead, I didn’t think it. It was a quiet process: going from inside me to the screen. I’d get something on film, get it paced a certain way, add the right sounds, and then I’d be able to say if it worked or not [...] Creations are an extension of yourself, and you go out on a limb whenever you create anything. It’s a risk” (p. 64). The film evolved – as did Lynch and his cast and crew – over the course of the shoot.

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Inland Empire is thus a return to Lynch’s artistic origins as both a painter and as an independent, underground filmmaker, and like his earliest cinematic work there is, in Inland Empire, a complete commitment to his art, a complete commitment to getting the image right, regardless of audience response or comprehension. It’s not that Lynch doesn’t care about the audience, as his detractors would like to claim; rather, he has faith that a successfully realized work of art will attract a following in its own time, in its own way, and at its own speed. It is the path that one takes towards a certain destination (which, until one reaches it, remains unknown, remains unknowable) that is – for Lynch – the purpose of art. It is the mapping of a terrain, hitherto unforeseen, hitherto unknown. And far from being incoherent or purposefully vague, Inland Empire reveals, particularly through repeated viewings, an evocative “musical” structure in which visual and audio motifs go through a series of complex repetitions and variations, alongside or along with the film’s heroine Nikki Grace (played by Laura Dern with consummate skill and ease). The use of the term “musical” is not merely a metaphor in this case, since Lynch co-wrote the original music for the film as well as conceived its sound design, along with serving as its director, producer, writer, editor and cinematographer. Equally remarkable: having made the film without any studio funding or interference, Lynch then decided to distribute the film himself. He has also included on the DVD of Inland Empire a fascinating addendum to the work, entitled “More Things that Happened” and featuring an additional hour-and-fifteen-minutes of material shot for the film. Some of it – in terms of la caméra-stylo – strikes me as good as, if not better, than the footage that made it into the three-hour feature film. In each case, Lynch’s goal seems to be to create a haptic image, an image that fuses the perceptual with the affective: an image that we both see and feel, at one and the same time. He achieves this through a new intimacy between the camera and his own body, as well as the related technologies that allow him to discover, in postproduction, the perfect combination of image and sound (so that each resonates with the other or within the other). Is Inland Empire as bleakly funny as Eraserhead, as thrillingly strange as Blue Velvet (1986), or as heartbreakingly sad as Mulholland Drive (2000)? Probably not. It still seems to me a remarkable achievement from a filmmaker who, in his sixties, proves to be as fearless as ever in his deployment of the cinematic medium (digital or otherwise) as a site for individual expression and experimentation. There seems little doubt – Inland Empire is proof of this – that digital film has the potential to carry on the type of work heralded by Astruc all those decades ago. All it needs are practitioners.

Notes

Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo,” in Graham Peter (ed.), The New Wave (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968), pp. 17-18. Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde,” p. 22. Emphasis added. David Lynch, Lynch on Lynch, ed. Chris Rodley, revised edition, London: Faber and Faber, 2005, p. 64.

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Contributors

Fr. Martin Boland is the Dean of Brentwood Catherdral and writes ‘The Invisible Province’ blog at http://theinvisibleprovince.blogspot.com

Matt Bowman is a Contextual studies lecturer in Art, Design, and Media Department at Colchester Institute. He is also the Co-founding editor of Rebus: A Journal of Art History and Theory.

Laura Earley is a curator based in Colchester, Essex. She currently works for firstsite, a contemporary visual arts organisation in Colchester, which is due to move into a purpose built gallery in 2011. She holds a BA (Hons) in History of Modern Art from the University of Manchester and an MA in Gallery Studies from the University of Essex.

John Finlay studied Art History and Theory at Essex University (1989-92) and received his doctorate from the Courtauld in 1998. He is an independent art historian of French history and culture, specializing in twentieth century modern art, and is a regular contributor to Apollo, Sculpture and H-France . He is also a cultural commentator and currently writes a weekly art column for New Zealand’s national newspaper, The Press.

Andrea Hadley-Johnson was a stylist for the Conran Group and is now Curator of Fine art at Derby Museum and Art Gallery, UK.

Sam Ishii-Gonzales is a Principle Faculty Member in the Department of Media Studies and Film, The New School in New York City

Robert Priseman studied Aesthetics and Art theory at the University of Essex before taking up Painting full-time in 1992.

Ramesh Ramsahoye studied Art History and Theory at Essex University (1989- 92) and received an MA from the Courtauld in 1993. He is an independent art historian specializing in seventeenth century Dutch art. He is also a scholar of Italian Renaissance Art and Architecture. He lives and teaches in County Wexford in the Republic of Ireland.

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