Art As “Night”

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Art as “Night”

Art as “Night”: An Art-Theological Treatise

Gavin Keeney

Art as “Night”: An Art-Theological Treatise, by Gavin Keeney

This book first published 2010

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-2401-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2401-9

To Nicholas …

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface...... ix

Part I: Spanish “Night”

Chapter One...... 3 Nightfall Into the “Night” The End of All of That Why There is Not Nothing Art as “Night” Velázquez What is Left? Art as Moral Agency What is “It”? Saturn and the Sublime What is Not?

Chapter Two ...... 21 What is Fate? Auto-Portrait of the Same The Dark Background What is “in” Titian? Next Worlds

Chapter Three ...... 43 Tenebrous Rays Ortega y Gasset Visuality Itself Art and Theology viii Table of Contents

Chapter Four...... 69 The Icon Moments The Grand Glass Coda: Parallel Worlds Calderón and Gracián Theology as Philosophy as Ideology

Part II: Universal “Night”

Chapter One...... 101 Universal “Night” García Lorca Universal “Night” Art Monasticism Bergsonisme and Surréalisme The Silence

Chapter Two ...... 133 The Apparition of the One The Apparition of the One The Body of Art The Second Coming of Art Art as Pleroma Art as World

Chapter Three ...... 155 The Art World Art in 2007 Mapping Art Worlds Art as Pure Communism Closure

Topological Glossary...... 163

Annotated Bibliography ...... 173

Index...... 225

PREFACE

These essays were written in early 2008 one year after visiting the Velázquez exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in London and just as the art world was crashing due to the recession that began in late 2007. The issues addressed are art-historical and not art-historical, insofar as the attempt to isolate a form of austere a-historical agency in painting negates many of the premises of art scholarship as a matter of principle. In early 2008, and given the soaring art market of the previous years, it was evident that a correction was underway and that art (and especially contemporary art) was headed for the hills. The evidence of this was more than obvious in galleries and art journals as both pulled back and reconsidered the relationship of capital to art, a relationship that caused much consternation among more traditionally minded connoisseurs and not a few gallerists involved in the very process of making art a second stock market. Yet what is obvious upon examining painting today, and in the course of tracking that austere something that inhabits all art that is intended to question the very foundations of mimesis, is that the idea of meta-painting has both positive and negative value. The negative value is in its support of a historicizing tendency in art-critical circles that one might suspect is an attempt to unearth what is in the course of these essays called formal agency. The historical merit of Velázquez is in many ways the same value attributed to the more rigorous practitioners of painting today, for example, Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer. In the course of arguing that such formal rigor negates both the art-historical system of placing works within an ideological or cultural frame and the actual biographical details of the artists and/or the artwork, it becomes obvious that what is at stake is a type of time that has been recently elaborated by Giorgio Agamben in The Time That Remains . Tracing influences from Italy to Spain (by way of Titian and Caravaggio), it becomes possible to situate Velázquez’ work in a theological framework that accesses the type of time that concerns Agamben. This time is the internal time of the artwork, and if this form of time embedded in the painting of Velázquez and others is argued in the context of semi-abstract forces that inhabit painting, this is not to verify various attempts to make Velázquez the progenitor of meta-painting but to x Preface isolate the idea of a type of “night” crossing his painting that is arguably the occlusion of both subject matter and historical context. The outcome of this hunt for formal agency in many ways becomes the discovery of moral agency. It is this same discovery that turned John Ruskin’s art-critical world upside down over one hundred and fifty years ago, in his case in response to Veronese (and Tintoretto). In defending Turner, Ruskin was defending incipient abstraction by some accounts or the onset of formalism by other accounts. Yet what transpired following Ruskin, at the onset of the twentieth century, was a turn into a type of formalism that effectively bracketed everything moral or ethical that Ruskin saw as the essential value of art. Today we have the fallout from the crash of the world financial system in 2007 and the subsequent crash of the art world. Both are on the mend, as of 2010, and it is quite likely that the art market will remain a parallel stock market. Yet the experiences of the last decade suggest that art has wholly other reasons for being a parallel stock market. Those reasons include the idea that art embodies more than simply a means to an end (an investment in a commodity that in all likelihood will only increase in value). In 2007 it seemed that art might actually reach that dizzying height predicted by Hegel as total knowledge ( pleroma ). It would not be lost on those who have read Hegel that he also predicted that art would come to an end in the sense that it would no longer be the privileged vehicle to embody the progression of Spirit toward full self-consciousness. As the Phenomenology of Spirit was published in 1807, it is not without interest that upon its two-hundredth anniversary we have recently witnessed perhaps one of the most spectacular approaches ever to art as pleroma . One could argue that art has arrived at a place where it is over- determined and exceeds its own historical role in embodying values and measuring the passing of time (its somewhat suspect positivist function). Art has in many senses become a form of knowledge in/for itself. It is this intense capacity to exceed all means to ends that makes it potentially a form of theology (or a-theology) – a role that it has both openly and secretly played in the past. In formulating Art as “Night,” this role is examined for a fugitive negative function that upon closer examination is entirely positive. In erasing the usual premises for judging art, and by introducing a long-standing tendency to occlude figuration in favor of other forces within art, one finds within art an entirely radical means to no end.

Gavin Keeney New York, New York

PART I:

SPANISH “N IGHT ”

The messiah comes for our desires. He separates them from images in order to fulfill them. Or rather, in order to show they have already been fulfilled. Whatever we have imagined, we already had. There remain the (unfulfillable) images of what is already fulfilled. With fulfilled desires, he constructs hell; with unfulfillable images, limbo. And with imagined desire, with the pure word, the beatitude of paradise. —Giorgio Agamben

CHAPTER ONE

NIGHTFALL

Into the “Night”

Titian, Caravaggio, Calderón de la Barca, Gracián, Velázquez, Zurbarán, Ribera, Goya, Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, García Lorca . . . Such is the trajectory of something wholly unfathomable. Velázquez in Palermo? A myth? Pure speculation, but somewhere and somehow Caravaggio’s sensibility was transposed to Spain and to the court of Philip IV: the dusk and penumbra; the uneasy disequilibrium and the occasional classicism; the stable equipoise that then plunges to another ground (Counter-Reformation anti-humanism); the strident claims to the interiority of painting, notwithstanding the dual recourse to realism (to things but not symbols, religious iconography but not allegories); and the vertiginous path of escape through painting to pure speculation, specular and crepuscular dawn and dusk, at once, or, Spanish “night.”1

1 See Caravaggio: The Final Years , ed. Silvia Cassani and Maria Sapio and trans. Mark Weir and Giuseppina Lanni (Naples: Electa Napoli, 2005). “One wonders whether the young Velázquez . . . may not have been on a voyage through the islands of the southern Mediterranean, from Malta to Sicily. In Palermo he would have seen with his own eyes, as we are no longer able to, the picture de aquel de la pintura left in the oratory of the Compagnia di San Lorenzo just before Caravaggio’s return to Naples.” Ferdinando Bologna, “Caravaggio: The Final Years (1606-1610),” pp. 16-60, ibid., p. 35. Bologna refers to the now-lost (stolen) painting Adoration commissioned for the Capuchin church in Palermo and speculates that Velázquez’ Adoration of the Magi (painted in Seville in 1617 and now at the Prado) shares a similar, non-accidental aesthetic of a shambling “wonder and perplexity” consistent with Franciscan orthodoxy. Most sober scholars agree that Velázquez never traveled to Italy until 1629, three years after arriving in Madrid, and only then at the urging and intervention of Rubens, who is said to have admired Velázquez’ work immensely. He returned to Italy in 1652. Italian painting is said to have arrived in Spain ca. 1570. Regarding the arrival of Caravaggio “in Spain” in the late-sixteenth century, see Chapter 3, Note 1. As such, the years preceding Velázquez’ painting of Adoration of the Magi resemble the missing years of Jesus of Nazareth, and, as things are often quite simply in the air, what becomes important, instead, is formal agency, versus mere historical or 4 Part I: Chapter One

A powerful conflation of forces, Spanish “night” stretches well into the twentieth century by way of Unamuno’s dark passage (via The Christ of Velázquez ), García Lorca’s echo of preternatural “night” in duende , and Walter Benjamin’s reading of Gracián – all revelations regarding how to proceed to truth amidst the protocols and twisted measures of tyranny (despotism). All traces, then, of the odd dissonance of Caravaggio’s milieu: the libertine and liberal circles that supported him (saved him till he could no longer save himself); the strange syrrhesis of forces that portend tragedy and its event (the eventual acclimation and acclaim); and the victory of ashes (night). All of this, and more, somehow inhabits the “night” of painting. Until the lost inventory of Velázquez’ library was found, until Caravaggio’s milieu was unearthed and letters were discovered countering the prevailing institution of the painter as barbarous, uncouth vandal, until the dust settled and games of provenance and attribution led to archival discoveries countering mere art-historical gossip and innuendo, both painters were “realists.” Both were caught (by art-historical agency) in the net of vacating metaphysical agency, accused of lowering the veil to place it over what merely is (Friedrich Nietzsche’s veil-makers), to catch nonetheless the last rays of unnatural light that fell within the field of painting – a twilight gloom of advancing accommodations, only apparently, and only insofar as one further closes one’s eyes to what haunts these canvases, the shadowy, otherworldly “some-thing else” that is in all informed representation – that is to say, the resources and the temerity of the unnatural and the unreal, in concert (as consorts), and the locus of what after all is the entire point of taking on worlds by creating other worlds, in paint, in word, in thought, and in fact (life).

The End of All That

Since Copernicus man is rolling from the center toward x. 2 —Friedrich Nietzsche

Regardless of what Nietzsche’s “x” might signify, it would seem regardless to imply not a thing but the trajectory of humanism, and the biographical detail. Formal agency and visuality become, under such auspices, the Rosetta stone for fathoming the depths of representational verisimilitude crossing periods and haunting the artifacts of art. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Preface to The Will to Power , trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 132. Nightfall 5

travails of “all of that,” insofar as the entire operation of Reformation and Counter-Reformation ideologies may be reduced to the struggle over what constitutes truth (knowledge). And not, as one might expect today, a version of truth, but truth and its inexorable presence despite all approximations to the Real, a syntagm for truth, but also a mere empiricist-inspired approach and never what anything quite Real might actually be. If it were to be reduced further to ontological battles regarding being (Martin Heidegger et al.), this same truth would escape, as always, as long as it is not formulated as something antithetical to all humanist endeavors, despite the hair trigger one suspects is active or potential in all attempts to pull truth into line with systems of knowledge per se (epistemology, phenomenology, etc.). And it is for this reason that since the Renaissance the ideality operative within the arts and sciences has always run aground, if not amok, due to the very fact that this same quest for truth leads out of the very location of ideality to that other place we might suggest is endlessly indicted and presented nonetheless in exceptional works of art that slip past the subject, only to return with the impression but not the reality of that truth. This “slipping past the subject” is, after all, what art always does and always intends, while the after-image is what is assimilated to the art-historical archive. This self-same something darkens all utopian horizons, as it demolishes all projects that are not aligned with the project that is “what is” . . . This also is why Caravaggio, Velázquez, and (even) Fyodor Dostoevsky can be called “realists,” while each claim by others normally for such is instantly mired in the ulterior realism that is actually present in their works. This ulterior realism is an embrace and then a dodge and avoidance (if not calling into abeyance) of anything resembling realism and its putative humanist agenda, while the dangerous specter of metaphysical agency (the empty sky of all forms of rhetoric) lingers in the shadows or outside the frame, or, in the case of Caravaggio, dangling by an invisible thread in vertiginous space/time (for example, the angels of all Annunciations, but also the martyrdom attending all approaches to whatever “x” might turn out to be).

Why There is Not Nothing If Walter Kaufmann assimilates diverse figures from Søren Kierkegaard to Jean-Paul Sartre to “existentialism,” we might find also the bizarre conundrum of the making of Caravaggio into an existential-metaphysical painter of paradoxes a process of rote retrospective assimilation. This sense of Caravaggio’s majestic, mysterious otherness is carried off in the 6 Part I: Chapter One scholarship attending his rediscovery and his rehabilitation throughout the twentieth century under the guise of the paramount complex embedded in his works – for example, the auto-portraits that are not auto-portraits though he painted himself into so many of his religious paintings in a manner that has left art historians quaking in their boots, and, in turn, led them astray to profess agendas that are entirely inscrutable and wholly inappropriate given that they are also post-historical speculations regarding why Caravaggio would lop off his own head, hold it for us in a pose of mocking but tender dismay, and turn, then, his back to us while forcing all perspectival contingencies of painting “to the wall,” a foreshortening of all such resources as if they were always wanting anyway and as if they were hardly of any significance in the face of that engulfing darkness that rules every singular instance of his unwavering facing of the facts. These facts remain the chief reason why, as well, that he finds his place only as a progenitor of “facing the facts,” of drawing closer and closer to things and to a sensational depiction of the sinews of what runs aground in all such maneuvers – the tremulous, surface play of light and shadow and the aureole that surrounds not just divine personages but abject things (ropes, jugs, bread, wine). This sacramental essentialism escapes even the most rapturous commentators as they wax eloquent regarding the manner in which silhouettes emerge from darkening folds of fabric, or eyes seem alight with an expression of horror or bewilderment, tenderness and limpidity. Kaufmann’s act of glossing particulars and difference in philosophy, then, is mirrored by Roberto Longhi and others in art scholarship, an admirable estimation at the least of what cannot be assimilated, while the essential role played in the act of elision and conflation reveals that, yes , there is an existentialist something and a metaphysical something at work, if not at war in Caravaggio’s paintings, a conflagration that is also at work in all assimilations, appropriations, and expropriations of that work. This something mixed with something else is a something that remains unnamable and outside the apparatus of accommodating rhetoric while it moves closer to various maneuvers present in present-day philosophy, namely those maneuvers of a precious and prescient archaic presentiment – both diversion and renascent alterity gainsaid in newly refashioned aesthetic theory that addresses the “outside,” or in those arguments and excavations of what is nominally “archaic,” “pre-modern,” and (haplessly) confirmed by the many as “pre-Socratic.” As if this were not enough, this stylized sallying forth into the anterooms of Western thought (Western ontological speculation) circles, in ever-shortening rounds, the prey as such, and this prey remains Nightfall 7

“thought” and its formalization in image. This non-logocentric circling, while carried off by highly charged abstract and logical formalizations, nevertheless, indeed, returns slowly and methodically to the place that one always finds oneself in when under the sign of “martyrdom,” that is, Nietzsche’s “x.” In a sense, Nietzsche implies that we are all rolling inexorably toward our own crucifixion, that humanism contains its own end. This “x” would seem then to be the mark of the unnamable drift of all existential-metaphysical operations secretly allied with nihilism, the terrain so catastrophically laid out and charged with explosive descriptives in Nietzsche’s late teleology. To pass through this landscape of a withering return of nothingness upon nothingness is no less the fact or process of the trajectory charted against the same in all manifestations, formulations, and executions (pictorial and otherwise) of “Night,” as two nights collide in this “Night,” and as one falls from nothing to nothing, swinging, as it were, from empty signifier to empty signifier in pursuit of what eludes subjectivity caught in subjectivity (Fichte’s “I” addressing the “I”). The return being not so much a return as a complete annihilation, Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics serves as the measure of all that must be negotiated and renegotiated until negotiations are no longer permissible and humanist projects end once and for all, since it is part and parcel of all of the negotiations to save it (the grand humanist project), and it is part and parcel of all lost causes to bring it to a close. It is, therefore, lost causes that seem to illumine that other night that runs from Caravaggio to Federico García Lorca (from the Baroque to the Modern), a redemptive night that stands opposed and in stark contrast to all other nights including G.W.F. Hegel’s “Night of the World,” or mere night as conflagration without end (the so-called night of bloody heads).

Art as “Night”

The stars, as if knowing that no one could see them now, frolicked in the black sky, now flaring up, now going out, now quivering, they busily whispered among themselves about something joyful but mysterious. 3 —Leo Tolstoy

3 Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace , trans. Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Knopf, 2007), p. 1096. Tolstoy presents a serious problem in the form of the apparent pity and compassion that animates and deepens his novel, while the sarcasm and didacticism are held in tension by the same. That said, it is his recourse to abstract particulars that signal a vast, unrelenting moral (not moralistic) tonality, the most famous of which is perhaps the simple observation, the singular sentence, “Drops dripped.” 8 Part I: Chapter One

One finds, therefore, in Spanish “night” all other forms of night called into question and submerged in another night (estranged). This other night illumines other things by negation, and it is the proverbial apophatic path of certain religious traditions that animates the foreground while the highly abstruse particulars go unheard and unseen or worse, in the latter case turned into bibelots and tracts, citations and epigrams, epitaphs and postcards from somewhere else, some time else and someone else, but never here and now. For this, too, is the path of avoidance and the will of assimilation, at once. José Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno both seem singularly out of sorts (in bad company today) in contrast with the speculative praxis of the order of posthistorical criticism endlessly compromised by unresolved humanist agendas, as all postcontemporary art sadly illustrates. Today (late 2007), for example, artists are invited to García Lorca’s country house, La Huerta de San Vicente, to install interpretive works as homage to the best-known patron saint of Spanish “night” (gloom and pessimism), an event curated by curator-extraordinaire Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and an event duly reported in the New York Times .4 This formidable recycling of the detritus of humanism is perpetuated by the historicist machine plus the plenitude of the ravenous, the machinery of assimilation and negation hardly approaching or even acknowledging the implicit limits and stupidity of all attempts to ignite damp “ordnance” (ordinance and ordonnance) in public. Thus things darken further. This darkening further is the secret, reverse teleology of the plan that is not a plan, and the time that is not of time. This secret not-plan is that other sensibility that hides in all representations of the primordial resources of mere being – in the antechambers of thought, for sure, and in the remotest regions of pictorial space-time as well. It is to reach this place that artists strive against all restrictions and slowly distinguish the same as they, in turn, are extinguished by it. It is Art as “Night” that reveals the strenuous, rigorous claims of a pre-ontological something on all glorious and vainglorious attempts to prefigure and embody in the name of the Body of Art the same, highly elusive non-

4 Dale Fuchs, “Chasing a Shadowy Imp, García Lorca’s Muse,” New York Times , January 1, 2008: p. E6. The article closes, after surveying the various works installed at La Huerta de San Vicente, including in the bedroom (as if to titillate), with the eminently dark passage to god knows where, “Through the empty archway a wind of the spirit enters, blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, seeking new landscapes and unknown accents.” This more than confirms García Lorca’s knowledge of Unamuno’s darkest work, the monumental poem The Christ of Velázquez (1920). The passage is from a famous lecture on duende first delivered in Buenos Aires, in 1933, by García Lorca. Nightfall 9

thing, truth. It is this goal and this promise and this deferred elegant mystery that “lights up the control panel” at any given moment, announcing itself, presenting what remains, and exiting, at once, to leave behind the ruins of that event and the smoke and ash of that annunciation. 5

Velázquez

If Velázquez’ ascension to court painter in Madrid in 1623 placed him in the position of being principal propagandist for Philip IV, he executed his role with exceptional skill. The several paintings he dashed off for the Hall of Realms at the Buen Retiro, 1633-35, merely attest to the proficiency of his cast of mind to secure the historiographic center of attention, while one, The Surrender of Breda (1634-35), seems to confirm that he was also well on his way to inverting conventions of the day to make explicit mayhem of singular instances of capitulation (the Dutch defeat, but also the vagaries of that defeat oddly overturned a few years later). When in 1652, after a second trip to Italy to buy works of art for Philip IV, Velázquez was made palace chamberlain; his star, indeed, rose to its zenith in worldly matters and his place was secure in that his new duties included “arranging for important ceremonial acts and the staging of plays and festivals.” 6 Yet the canonical investment in the ideological pageantry of the court has led many to place in austere reverence Velázquez’ exceptional utility with paint and pictorial gravitas versus this allegiance, or in concert with this allegiance to the royal program. And it is now almost as common and ritualistic, if not acceptable, to draw Baltasar Gracián y Morales and Pedro Calderón de la Barca into the advantageous sweep of intellectual and philosophical intrigues as if to qualify Velázquez’ miraculous autonomy while enthralled (willingly no less) to one of the most splendid (but nearly broken) despotism in Counter-Reformation royal Europe, Svetlana Alpers perhaps bringing this astonishing perspicacity to light in late scholarship, but casting as long a shadow as one might imagine in the process, proving in passing that what lies at the heart of Velázquez’ mastery of painting is a quality of late called meta-painting, or a quality distinguished by its

5 See Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness , trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 217. 6 Dawson W. Carr, “Painting and Reality: The Art and Life of Velázquez,” pp. 26- 53, in Velázquez , ed. Dawson W. Carr (London: National Gallery of Art, 2006), p. 46. 10 Part I: Chapter One veracity; that is, its truthfulness to itself , or its heavily laden cargo that is inordinately not of its time or milieu, lending question upon question to the problem of Velázquez, his reception, his biography, his legacy, and – especially – his completely uncanny status as wild but steady illusionist, spinning yarns but also unnerving gods and masters, The Fable of Arachne (The Spinners) (1656-58) as emblematic in this regard as Las Meninas (1656) of the supremacy or the supernal nature and anti-nature of art over fiction (history), or might we say, as many are wont to say, that his long- suffering craft (painting in Spain, as opposed to Italy) in fact “arrived,” as he arrived, Order of Santiago bequeathed to both artist and artwork, at a rare moment when nobility of spirit and imagination met mere nobility in itself (Philip IV), or, fact met hyper-fact, in -itself met for -itself, as Hegelian rationalist discourse might reduce the same. And in that reduction, what met what was frozen in paint, left to the ravages of time, but nonetheless vitally provocative and immortal, to this day, at once problem and solution to long-standing questions of what constitutes the Real and how the Real compromises what is nominally perceived as authentic – the exact problem invoked in all arguments, then, of what is authentic and what is artifice. If Velázquez inverted the conventions of his day, it was done to tell a bolder and more prescient (forward-looking) truth. This veracity in painting undermines painting. Painting in the hands of Caravaggio and Velázquez underwent a revolution. This revolution was in the far interior of the image, not in the exquisite technique or facility. The technique and facility are red herrings, though without both the game (or hunt) is lost. What matters most of all is that the meta-language (autonomy) of painting finds its voice, and that the artist delivers that “word,” and that the painting defies translation such that the painting is that word.

What is Left?

Thus, if we demolish and destroy the contingencies, the excurses, the apologies and excuses of art, what is left? Are we left with art without artists? Are we left with Art as Event (Alain Badiou’s dictum)? If we skirt the ravages of ontologies and resist presence, the “temptation of presence” (again Badiou), do we not end up with Parmenides’ gorgeous but static universe, or Baruch Spinoza’s proof of God’s existence with no sight of human existence? Is this “pre-Socratic” enough for us? It would seem so, but it is not so. What we are left with is what remains after the reduction, the elimination of the art-historical, interpretive machinery, or what is left after the anthropological machine is mostly silenced, and what that Nightfall 11

something left is, truism or not, is simply art. The resources of art are art’s time . This time is not the normative time we find superimposed in narrative form in art-historical scholarship, nor the peremptory and summary judgments of critical reflection (the non-historical, formal apparatus of meta-critical operations). Instead, the resources of art portend the resources of what lies before thought, or what is anterior to thought. This anteriority is not a metaphysical something so much as what comes to reside in metaphysics. It is art as moral fact – as rule and model, but before all rules and models. This fact is pre-ontological and nominally primordial, except that it is also futural and mark or “crossing” (“x”) of the unknown and the originary. It encompasses all of the spectral factors that haunt cultural production, and all the factors that are immediately assimilated to no end whatsoever, caught in mathematical and contingent expression, in that such has no real register, or resists all registers and finds instead the archive and tomb of art history as temporal home. In removing the artist we do not remove the fact of art. In erasing the historicist agenda we arrive at the moment when art arrests that very process and delivers something in itself (a factum that is without parallel). This simply amounts to an annunciation of the sort Caravaggio felt compelled to capture in Mannerist-Baroque angels spinning in sheer space, hanging by a thread but spinning nonetheless in a vortex embedded in the representational field – human models, after all, suspended in his studio ready to collapse from exhaustion, crashing to the floor. Such leads to the conclusion that what is common to all forms of Spanish “night” is the induction of this mysterium tremendum into the cessation and suspension that is representation set against representation. This mysterium is “night-like” in that it is the closing of space to open another space. Its negation of the normative perspectival practices of Renaissance art and architecture is legion – as much ink has been spilled unveiling Piero della Francesca’s demolition of mathematical space by way of mathematical precision as has been spilled on the singular extravagances of the work of Caravaggio and Velázquez. Why? If Piero confounded all expectations, after the fact mostly, it is because he worked and reworked the space or distance in representational orders to provoke a crisis in liminality (in thought as a register that registers what passes as objective order). He introduced the chiasmus into painting that has been played out (exhausted) over subsequent centuries. If the same geometrical and mathematical logic is used by Velázquez to produce the apparent structure of cognition in two-dimensional space, and the typical recourse to optics explains exactly nothing, the very same chiasmus appears in the complex of disruptions placed in the way of that same 12 Part I: Chapter One assimilation to order. If there are immense, intense hidden geometrical and mathematical models (diagrams) in Nicolas Poussin’s landscapes, as there were but the suggestion of in Giorgione’s, we might surmise that Velázquez (who may or may not have met Poussin in Italy) is conscious of the exact problem of “singularity,” of making something authentic and original out of an amalgam of influences and conflicting orders – of lighting a fire without telling anyone. This even seems the summary of the philosophy of Gracián, as it has come down to us – or, at the least, it introduces the very model of the idea of painting as a methodology for catching that wind that blows over the heads of the dead “seeking new landscapes and unknown accents” (García Lorca). For this reason alone Velázquez is immortal (was “sacrificed” to art).

Art as Moral Agency

As subject, substance is pure simple negativity, and precisely thereby it is the splitting of the simple in two, or an opposition-setting duplication which again is the negation of that indifferent difference and of its opposite: only this self-reconstituting identity [ gleichheit ], this self- reflection in being-other – and not some original unity as such, or an immediate thing as such – is the true. The true is the becoming of its own self, the circle whose end is presupposed as its goal and constitutes its beginning, and which is actual only through its development and end. 7 —G.W.F. Hegel

If art is art, and art is truth, then art is also moral agency – except it is not at all a matter of mere moralizing, or of making moral points, or of dictating morality as it is commonly understood. Instead, art as art (the ineluctable truism) reveals and discloses what simply is – not what “was” or “what might be” (the logico-grammatical as such and the as if of philosophy) but what simply arrives (the point of Badiou’s cataclysmic ideal of Event) as not theological or onto-theological catastrophe, but as something wholly authentic and, therefore, more real than real . When such arrives we have no choice but to become it (honor it), as all such historical and art-historical instances prove. If Badiou erases the artist, he yet requires that the artist (poet, painter, philosopher) remain faithful to the Event; and he configures this faithfulness to that event as one might resign oneself to what is already

7 G.W.F. Hegel, Yirmiyahu Yovel, Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit , trans. Yirmiyahu Yovel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 98-99. Nightfall 13

accomplished, the fait accompli , evident in all matters that seem decided only after they are decided (have arrived). To discern the origins is almost against the point, or at the least pointless. That said, what seems categorical is that such occasions say the unsayable, and as Badiou ( pace Heidegger) is willing to admit, there are certain events when the unsayable is said, and one such secret occasion is when art (or, let us say, poetry) and philosophy (rational inquiry) say the same thing (reveal that they are, truly, not mortal enemies but allies in saying this unsayable something). Moral agency as art (and vice versa) translates, then, to the specter and quiddity of moral beauty, and it is here that all speculations regarding intellectual and philosophical capital return momentarily, as if such might account for that beauty. And, as a terrible beauty (moral agency), the work of art offers no solace, nor any purchase on actual circumstances, no ideological offerings, and no purely heuristic or edifying principles. The end result is always The End (the disaster and catastrophe of “what is”), the outcome as the Body of Art ( art qua art ), and, therefore, all the brilliant legerdemain of painting and writing, arguing and disclosing (positing), all the traces of reading and thinking, the memberships in elite academies and the privileged travels, disappear into the reduction, into the work as what it is, and all attempts to extract the very same origins and/or causes merely recuperates what was the path or arc of the something that has nonetheless arrived and now holds its ground, as armies hold their ground before battle, before the one thousand small decisions that decide battles (Tolstoy), decisions on the ground, made in the moment, while the generals merely watch and issue moot orders (most disobeyed or ignored), thinking they control the outcome by genius or by strategy; a process that resembles what historians and art historians reassemble afterward (as historicizing critique), and a process that misses entirely the genesis of all outcomes, not chance per se but the inexorable decisions made in passing, but an “in passing” that includes in some manner the immemorial (forgotten) ground of all possible decisions – that is to say, artistic, military, moral, and pre-ontological “decisions” formalized in Tolstoy’s worldview as the war between free will and fate, a vast misunderstanding of how anything at all comes about. It is for this reason that the elemental and the catastrophic appear to take precedence in the most acclaimed works of literature, music, painting, and sculpture (and why Adorno premiates music, especially the late-Romantic extravagances of Gustav Mahler) – or, it is for this reason that this “archaic” (pre-rational) whatever can appear in both modern and late-modern art, but why it is also absent as well in all hyper-conscious forms of conceptualizing nothingness (over- idealized and/or over-conceptualized art), and it is for this reason that 14 Part I: Chapter One

Badiou can lecture for hours on Marcel Duchamp and then admit he does not “love Duchamp” (seeing Duchamp as a logician of art), but when asked who he loves (who embodies the Event of Art), he can stop, think for a moment, and answer “Anselm Kiefer.” 8 There is a time and place when one will see this as true, as the auratic truth in things (as John Ruskin saw in both exceptional natural and unnatural things), as the primordial but futural matter that matters, and till then one senses such in both things and extraordinary instances of art without quite knowing what it is that one senses. But when that annunciation is made, in fact and in event, one is transformed by it, and it is unequivocal and unavoidable. Most meet this end in things quite late, or at The End; and Caravaggio and Velázquez met it along the way, and at their respective ends quite literally became it . What remains, then, to be proven, is that Spanish “night” is but one example of a confluence of interests and ends that appeared in Counter- Reformation Europe and continued for centuries as an elective approach to the paradigm that elucidates this near cosmological stalemate, a prefiguration of all that came “before,” once upon a time so to speak, but always pre-exists anyway in certain formulations of “what is” and “what might be,” while also premiating a certain ennui and distaste for what simply is accepted as “what is” – a prefiguration and presentiment, of course, of a certain light in “night,” and a general foreboding of that something unnamable and unsayable quite often reduced to the ultra- paradoxical concept of parousia (coming into being) .

What is “It”?

What is “it” then (“x”), the nameless thing that is comprised and compromised, at once, by a range of inscrutable factors denoted as

8 Alain Badiou at Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, New York, November 16, 2007. See Alain Badiou, “The Event: Intervention and Fidelity,” in Being and Event , trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005). “Such is the intervenor, such is one who knows that he is required to be faithful: able to frequent the site, to share the fruits of the earth; but also, held by fidelity to the other event [the storm] able to discern fractures, singularities, the on-the-edge-of-the-void which makes the vacillation of the law possible, as dysfunction, its crookedness; but also, protected against the prophetic temptation, against the canonical arrogance; but also, confident in the event, in the name that he bestows upon it. And, finally, thus departed from the earth to the sea, embarked, able to test the fruits, to separate from their appearance the latent savour that they draw, in the future anterior, from their desire to not be bound.” Ibid., p. 261. Nightfall 15

singular thing when it arrives? Is it the semi-sinister background of all things, as Arthur Schopenhauer saw it? To be sure, there is as much Counter-Reformation mysticism in Spanish “night” as nascent science (Galileo, Kepler, or Giordano Bruno), but that so-called science was then natural philosophy (as “science” in Hegel’s time was hardly anything resembling present-day science), and natural philosophy had split off from moral philosophy but a few centuries earlier. Regardless, at the close of the Medieval, and with Renaissance humanism, arrived the de-sacralized universe since scrutinized by heretics and humanists alike over four to five centuries. The intellectual pursuits of the cognoscenti (including Caravaggio’s circle) while engaged in proto-scientific observations and deductions were matched if not wed to the hermetic (neo-Platonic) philosophies of the age, consistent with Renaissance humanism (Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola et al.), and these abstruse undertakings did not so much clash with as complement theological speculation. In Spain, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and Ignatius Loyola (founder of the Jesuit order), no less than Francis of Assisi, Tomasso Campanella, and Girolamo Savonarola in Italy, constitute the theological embrace of “it” (“x”), nominally forms of “heresy,” given that this internalizing force (not vitalistic but catastrophic) reigned in all activities aimed at transcendent, not contingent (worldly) truth. If Ficino and company tried to reconcile Christianity with paganism, by the seventeenth century it was a matter of reconciling nascent positivism and empiricism with theology. Regardless of which form of “heresy” one chooses to embrace, arguably, “x” is present as the chief de-stabilizing “power” (factor). It cuts both ways toward and away from “worlds.” If we circle the prey thus, while there are differences in all cases noted, and these differences are as manifold as the cases cited, we are still left staring at the cipher of “night,” or dark knowledge, dark disclosure, and what has come down to us as the somewhat curious locution “the dark imaginary.” 9 But it would be an immense mistake to conflate this dark

9 Kevin Hart, The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). “We have to be careful in talking of the unknown as an object since, if Blanchot is correct, the distance between subject and object collapses in inner experience to reveal, at the last possible moment, a distance in being itself; a fissure that allows for the production of images. This distance (as Blanchot insists on calling it) cannot be traversed by a gaze but ‘is’ a dark gaze that cannot be borne. To have appeared before it is already no longer to be an ‘I.’” Ibid., p. 27. “Let us pursue a little further, if it is possible, the movement marked out. Existence simulates, it dissimulates, and it dissimulates, even when 16 Part I: Chapter One

“night” with what perhaps Schopenhauer saw when he closed his eyes; that is, the vast, Schellingian rotary drive of abstract Will against which individuals struggle (to emerge and announce themselves for themselves). But what saves this formulation is that no matter how diverse all experiences of the divine imaginary are, the truth is found out as much by staring into things as staring into nothing, and this truth is present in theological, artistic, scientific, philosophical and similar disciplines that approach the “outside,” or the world as such, while generally what is key to ascertaining anything at all, the Kantian formal laws (or pure rationality), is what can be called nothing other than revelation. It is the equivalent of Immanuel Kant’s moral law (his sublime gift) that we find at the heart of all inquiries into truth (and all dark mysteries that embody truth) – that is, we find that such, pure revelation and/or imagination, is wholly not determinate, and that practical reason falters at the encounter with this internal law out of pure insufficiency. What is ultimately necessary is that this law (moral agency) and its representations (art and science, or art as science, and vice versa) be understood to inhabit a different space-time than any normative space-time, or that all explicit and implicit formalizations of this law (the Absolute) be consistent with the fact that they quite literally create space-time. It is then that it matters not at all where one looks for such formalizations – for example, Ruskin sketching a bird or crab, or Velázquez painting Las Meninas . It (moral and formal agency) seems to find nothing quite below or above it, and the divine imaginary begins to speak not so much in riddles but in things.

dissimulating and playing a role, it continues to be authentic existence, thus binding the simulacrum to genuine authenticity with an almost unravellable malice. A challenge to the principle of identity and the identical I, the moment that belief in God, guarantor of personal identity, falls away (profane atheism), or else when with ‘an impiety of divine inspiration’, the thought of a single divinity is replaced by the foreboding that the Other is still present then in God or in the pleroma of the divine space inhabited by the simulacrum; this other who is but the distance from the Same to itself, a distance that, in its difference, makes it like the Same, though nonidentical. Such a doubling, which sets before every being and at odds in every being an infinity of likenesses, – without having the right to identify the original of the image, the unique sign and the equivalents in which it divulges itself – is translated existentially, by a renunciation of personal primacy (others will say madness, fragmentation of personality), theologically, by divinity conceived in some manner as plural, metaphysically, by the idea of the eternal rebeginning.” Maurice Blanchot, “The Laughter of the Gods,” in Pierre Klossowski, Maurice Blanchot, Decadence of the Nude , trans. Paul Buck and Catherine Petit (London: Black Dog, 2004), pp. 184-85. Nightfall 17

Saturn and the Sublime

The saturnine temperament is said to rule artistic genius and folly (Erwin Panofsky, Raymond Klibansky, Rudolf Wittkower, and Fritz Saxl have done the heavy lifting here), and certainly it is telling that the most famous depiction of this temperament is Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514), wherein the temporal position of instrumental reason collapses under the strain of something momentous and monstrous, something intensely inward and something intensely not of this world, of the picture plane and its conventions or of its accoutrements and shamming instrumentalities. Much has been made of Velázquez’ inverting the standard, predictable conventions of Baroque history painting, a genre after all, placing in the foreground what was commonly secondary to the main event or main protagonist (the putative subject of the painting). This may have come over from Dutch painting, with its foregrounding of quotidian life, but it also portends the excavation of painterly painting Velázquez is renowned for, inclusive of his dashing brushwork and all subsequent efforts to bring painting to its knees and secure its renown in Spain. The plasticity of pictorial space is legendary, and it is the tormenting of that space that misleads one to conclude that formal operations alone account for the highly charged, synthetic innovations attributed to such old masters. But this invocation of the tonalities of spatial orders, plus the tonal nature of expression and gesture in figure painting, is but part of the answer to how Spanish “night” made its way into the work of Velázquez, Jusepe de Ribera, and Goya. This intentional de-stabilization of pictorial space is but a signpost to an “else-where,” as Dürer’s own highly crafted compositions (especially the natural histories and the auto-portraits) clearly lead out of the picture plane toward an idealized, anterior zone complicit with but independent of painting itself – a zone that is self- evident in the act of seeing and thinking the image, or in cognition as spatial and formal operation wherein the event that is the artwork returns as mnemonic something, leading to other like things, till vanishing and leaving the residue of something akin to smoke and ash, testament perhaps that all art leads through wasteland upon wasteland, battlefield after battlefield, to a possible apotheosis as vapor and ether (so-called abstraction by way of J.M.W. Turner), one or the other, as signal form for what is the unnatural ethos of what merely exists. One might like to take the leap, then, and see Caravaggio in not just one or two paintings (for example, quite literally inserted into David with the Head of Goliath or The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula ), but, instead, in all 18 Part I: Chapter One of his paintings (especially The Seven Works of Mercy ), as Panofsky saw an iconographical/iconological self-portrait of Dürer in Melencolia I . One might concede victory (for Caravaggio), in this manner, given that each electrifying canvas registers the domain of his precise relationship to the act of painting and the disposition of the tension within those paintings as vast meta-language for the time and place of the exultant Baroque, already fading nonetheless toward neoclassicism, but a time and place caught in paint (a last battle), suspended in a type of “night” that has, in turn, been explained away as a self-indulgent assault on painting by a savage and unruly Lombard malcontent. This all-purpose, art-historical excuse, in passing, and as if to confirm the verdict of self-inflicted tragedy, brings to mind the other Michelangelo’s Porta Pia (ca. 1562-65), with its grimacing faces (masks of Goths and Vandals, John Dryden’s “rude Northern race”), positioned strategically as warning, as one leaves Rome – a cunning and no doubt ironic gesture from the first Mannerist that there is no good or official ( authorized ) reason to “leave” the sanctity and safety of the Holy City (though Rome was sacked shortly after anyway). In finding Caravaggio in especially his late paintings, one finds the storied visage of the artist haunted by “night” (death/crucifixion) – and the advantageous glory of that haunting is not the tragedy of Caravaggio but the victory, to which we accede to in conceding that in his case defeat was victory after all.

“What is Not”

“X” (“x”) is, then, “what is,” and the knowledge (dark or otherwise) that embodies “what is,” plus the knowledge that leaves off with “what is not,” though “what is not” may portend or pretend to be “what is.” Not- being in such a formalization is what merely appears to appear (“X,” Truth, the Absolute), and Hegel was right to disown by mocking, pure subjectivity, while Kant was correct to denote its austere, formal operations. This “what is” is also “what might be” insofar as it is constituted of/for the Real – or, that it arrives obliquely out of that Body of Knowledge that is aligned with “what is”; and this Real, while nominally of things, is connoted in primordial “night” as unreal (irreal, phantasmatic, uncanny, etc.) in relation to the very process of its arrival (for example, in the works of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Žižek). But, this same “what is” remains maxim and truth in the apparent verisimilitude of its production and its event. Art facilitates and embodies such, bringing such to “what is,” as “what is” begins and ends in “what is not.” Nightfall 19

The success of any excursion into “night” (here, Spanish “night”) necessitates knowing how this something comes about, how it resides in particular instances (times and circumstances), how it eliminates the unnecessary (the not-real, the pointless), and how its possibility engages the so-called impossible, or how it arrives at all. In accessing this “night,” one finds its accentuation of moral agency (universal truth) as both ruthless and precise resort to “what is.” This resort, in turn, is how one acknowledges or recognizes the inordinate reduction to things that is the hallmark of its procession in becoming (not so much in time, but in the cataclysmic annunciation of “what is,” after all). That said, in tracing its path through Spanish art and philosophy, starting, as it were, in Lombard “night,” it is also highly self-evident that this formal something is heedlessly not teleological, but only apparently so in retrospect. It is when the very same truth is acknowledged (witnessed) here and now, in art and other concurrent forms of epistemology, that its formal and august laws are seen as what remains (what is always left behind as world) – and what remains being all that comes into being through time and its ravages. In “night,” we might say then, becoming returns to being. It remains, then, to trace the formal laws of “night” for the present moment , and for the implicit futural event that is implied in all occasions left behind, inclusive of this occasion after the fact. The fact of paradox underscores that this excursion through a territory notoriously obscure and daunting is less a matter of discerning historical facts and situations than a circling and an evocation of absolutely non-historical laws that somehow produce “what is” out of “what is not,” or, formal laws that somehow produce “what is” out of “what might be” (this self-same chiasmus emblematic of the tragic nature of mere temporality and its endless fall into singular, phantasmatic things).