Allegory of the Cave Painting
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ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE PAINTING Edited by Mihnea Mircan & Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei In which Celan’s time-crevasses shelter ancient organisms resisting any radiocarbon dating, forming and reforming images, zooming into the rock and zooming out of time. But are they indeed images – of bodies afloat between different planes of experience, of mushroom heads, dendrianthropes and therianthropes, of baobabs traveling thousands of miles from Africa to the Australian Kimberley; are they breath- crystals, inhaling and exhaling in the space between the mineralogical collection of the Museum and the diorama of primitive life, are they witness to and trace of the first days and nights of soul-making; are they symbioses of mitochondria and weak acids, one-celled nothings, eyes and seeds, nerves and time and rock walls. Another humanity was possible and we are what it did not become. 12 89 FIGURE 1 SYMBIOTIC ART Mihnea Mircan AND SHARED NOSTALGIA 56 Ignacio Chapela INTERVIEW Jack Pettigrew Tout s’efface, or everything fades, What do we read yet Blanchot may assist in grasping, and when we read, and which desires willing into language, what it is to grasp in the or anxieties preclude us from actually reading: paintings: a character before any signification, an act allegory here opens towards symbolic dispossessions, of production before memory, a regression groping in the figures of thought that are with their subject, bacterial darkness of the cave. Do those lines demand chronological and human colonies, eviscerated geologies and Western fixation or attribution, or do they point to a beyond or a below chrono-colonization. There, another hand, Steven’s “palm of art history, where the first imager– our “forgotten dream” of the end of the mind,” though “not a docile slave,” – turns away from what had been the gesture before the first apprehends: “the absolute hand of poetry.” An absolute image, its object or support, touches, intoxicated with the worlds hand but also, and perhaps significantly so, a white-skinned of vision and possibility that thus open, the boundary or screen hand, stroked, manipulating black bacteria, that blacken that separates image from non-image, and human from its marble monuments – the horror – the same that elsewhere antonyms. Demigods, half-human slaves, rituals of inauguration, is the monument, there were cannibalism is productive, enlightenment, and replication articulate a chronological scenario a metabolism that directs its toward somewhere else, marked by allegorical points of entry and disciplinarian oblivion, an elsewhere that is the market, perhaps, or of identities fabricated, granted and withdrawn, of positive and modernity itself. negative hands, vying for the same truth. These strange images – shadows – call upon us to turn around, apprehend their 55 55 reality, and overcome them, overturn them, like a student ALLEGORIES OF LIVING PAINT, EVEN superseding his master. This ispaideia . But it is also play, KNOWING AND THE AFTER THE DEATH the cave painting as feeling and experimenting DESIRE FOR MEANING OF THE COLONY “hands.” We will return back to this. Brenda Machosky Khadija Carrol 55 55 55 55 TO PRESERVE GEORGES BATAILLE: THE ABSOLUTE HAND THE FABLE OF EFFACEMENT UNHINGING PREHISTORY, OF POETRY THE BACTERIA Christopher Fynsk UNBECOMING HUMANITY Adam Staley Groves Marina Vishmidt Lucy Steeds 55 LONELY ROCKS 55 Adam Jasper ‘A STRANGE IMAGE YOU SPEAK OF, HE SAID’: CAVE PAINTING AND THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield Foucault wondering about Cave and a truly socialist governmentality and other paintings, excavations Agamben’s monastery rule readings, a Rauschenberg of excavations, burials and blindingly erasure and a gender- and border-crossing with Pasolini, glowing resurrections. A story of paintings a genealogy of biopolitics in which fungi consume Freud, as painting and not, of graves rebuilt and un- Dawkins is obscured by memes and genes, Thucydides foresees built, of sculptors destroying sculptors and of LOLcats, Bök works with bacteria and Hobbes; the same but cosmologies revealed in marble, of images trying to not the same story over and over again, but also a gathering of keep up with themselves. Chapels of bones, stone, these copies and ordering the copies of copies, and talking about grass and sand, between two historical bookmarks ordering them, an ethnography and anthropology of delirious – an image abuzz with humans and one seemingly replications, of returns as farce and tragedy, of what does not indifferent to their present, us constructing a end and what does not begin in a copy. These juxtapositions and world and the thought of a world without us, conceptual relations, tentative but active in the mind of scholar mastery over time, organisms and micro- and the artist alike, point to more substantial connections organisms and the melancholy of a between the procedures of the humanities and conceptual broken Linnaean order. art, a relation that perhaps should be read through the human, the anthropos, the an-tropical, without trope, 55 55 endlessly producing them. INCIDENTS OF TIME- THE TREE, THE TRAVEL IN THE LONG STONE, THE DOG, THE 55 55 ANTHROPOCENE BEE, THE MAN: RETURN TO READING COLONIAL COPIES Alexander Nagel ON “SOCIAL Vincent van Gerven AND ETHNOGRAPHIC SCULPTURE,” JOSEPH Oei CONCEPTUALISM: 55 BEUYS, AND PIERRE ARTISTIC DESCENDING HUYGHE WORKS. 55 EXPERIMENTS AT THROUGH DENSITIES Raphaël Pirenne THE CUSTODIAN AND THE INTERSECTION Haseeb Ahmed THE FIXER OF ANTHROPOLOGY, 55 (ON PETROLIO) HISTORY, AND LETTER Rosalind Nashashibi SCIENCE Tom Nicholson Jonas Tinius 55 FORTY-EIGHT MILLION YEARS OF BIOPOLITICS Justin Clemens What paintings can When marine fossils do, other objects can do too: reveal themselves at the top of consider that sacred shroud, where an mountains, earthquakes are first felt in bodies imprint desired and figured through multiple and only then in tectonic plates, when radioactive scientifically and theologically structured gazes stones imprint their non-mimetic, a-visual likeness outgrows the confines of the imprinted body to on photosensitive paper and two screens stare at each become a text, the fifth gospel, of its passage. Take the other and reflect a progressively distorted image of the entire library of Plato, shot through with philological same stone that is also a part of the same constitution, the filiations, broken into papyrus fragments that may or mineralogical sends its petrifying tentacles closer to what we may not say something about themselves and how they hold to be the confines of our bodies, the boundaries between should be treated, composing so many Republics that solids and liquids. But then “a new image costs humanity we cannot wrest, from their dissonant multiplicity, the as much labor as a new characteristic costs a plant,” and one Republic. Take a Greek cave and attempt to respond, there it is – an outburst, the opposite of an excavation, a in exhausting symmetry, to all the time into which slick, rainbow-like coating of the sea, propagating at the the remnants it holds shatter Time. We are listening same rate as each of its molecules reflects another death, to debris, buried under and to be resonated through another passage, another tiny step towards another regime different densities of dust, convinced that, in time, of representation. Alchemies, then, or rather alkahests: objects will tell us something: on condition that we forms that, were we able to invent, we could not hold rid them of contamination, that we clean them and make our own, images of control that are out of the surplus of fungi, bacteria, and false of control, images spilling onto our screens or assumptions. pages, screens or pages spilling onto themselves. 55 55 THE INDEX OF THE NO PAST BUT WITHIN 55 55 ABSENT WOUND THINGS: THE NEGATIVE THE DISTANT PAST (MONOGRAPH ON A A CAVE AND FLOATS: QUESTIONS Susanne Kriemann STAIN) ARCHAEOLOGY IN THE OF EARTH Georges Didi-Huberman FORM OF A DIALOGUE INHERITANCE 55 Christopher Witmore Vivian Ziherl and SLICK IMAGES 55 Natasha Ginwala Susan Schuppli PHILOLOGY OF THE CAVE Sean Alexander Gurd ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE PAINTING 165 LIVING PAINT, EVEN AFTER THE DEATH OF THE COLONY Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll “The colonies were more melanized in the contact zone, thus protecting and shield- ing themselves from the source of a stress factor.”1 Bare rock surfaces are the oldest habitats on earth and rock surface colonization is a starting point in the de- velopment of many terrestrial ecosystems. The micro- scopic fungi that can survive on desert rocks are seen to hold clues in the search for life in extraterrestrial environments.2 But looking back, rather than forward, this chapter is ultimately interested in the ur-terrestrial culture of Aboriginals and their painting. The language that the biologists use for the micro- colonial “contact zones” of “pioneer settlers on bare rock surfaces” has an anthropomorphic tone. The behavior of the bacteria sounds political to the postcolonial histo- rian. The astrobiologist winces at such imprecision, but replies that it is necessary to be visual in order to make ideas stick in the mind; hence science resorts to ekphras- tic language.3 In turn, the matter-of-fact account of scien- tific truths is tempting to mimic. To display and thus estrange the passive prose voice that reports: this or that was done, and yielded this or that insight. The scientists’ own relationship to the object of study is betrayed by the intimacy of terms that increasingly anthropomorphize the microbiology.4 Black fungi and cyanobacteria are protagonists that produce an ur-story about life on earth. A biology 166 KHADIJA VON ZINNENBURG CARROLL LIVING PAINT, EVEN AFTER THE DEATH OF THE COLONY 167 apparatus, the microscope, gives us a glimpse into the properties of life, the whole of life, in miniature. My essay here and its filmic counterpart Ore Black Ore are a biohistorical study of how life is transferred by painting parasites, chisel-breathed organisms.