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No Time for Art? Marc Augã©, Michael Fried, Jeff Wall

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No Time for Art? Marc Augã©, Michael Fried, Jeff Wall No Time for Art? Marc Augé, Michael Fried, Jeff Wall Emer O’Beirne In the essay Le Temps en ruines published in 2003, Marc Augé turned his attention to the place and role of art in the contemporary period he calls supermodernity. His prescription is surprisingly specific: art should address the passage of time and the discontinuities and loss it involves: ‘Les artistes d’aujourd’hui […] pressentent […] que c’est à l’art de sauver ce qu’il y a de plus précieux dans les ruines et dans les œuvres du passé: un sens du temps d’autant plus provocant et émouvant qu’il est irréductible à l’histoire, qu’il est conscience du manque, expression de l’absence, pur désir’.1 The statement surprises only for its narrow prescriptiveness; the outlook it articulates chimes fully with the elegiac thrust of Augé’s diagnosis of life in today’s western and western-style economies as he has elaborated it ever since La Traversée du Luxembourg in 1985, the moment of his professional transition to ‘l’anthropologie du proche’. Since then, Augé has described a world exemplified by the ‘non-place’ and envisaged in terms of loss (of cultural identities, histories, and relations) brought about by paradoxical excess (of decontextualized snatches of world events encountered in mass-mediated isolation rather than experienced collectively). Lives dominated by the non-lieu are lives, as he famously put it almost twenty years ago, ‘où l’on naît en clinique et où l’on meurt à l’hôpital’; between these poles one navigates a world ‘promis à l’individualité solitaire, au passage, au provisoire et à l’éphémère’.2 Of course, art need not be bound to an evocation of 1. Marc Augé, Le Temps en ruines (Paris: Galilée, 2003), p. 97. Hereafter TR in the text. 2. Marc Augé, Non-lieux: introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (Paris: Seuil, 1991), pp. 100–01. Hereafter NL in the text. IJFrS 9 (2009) 94 O’BEIRNE temporality; art historian Michael Fried has repeatedly argued precisely the opposite in relation to Modernism.3 This essay will consider how Fried’s alternative view of the place of temporality in artistic practice and reception allows for a contemporary reflection (by artist and viewer) that can be in sympathy with Augé’s social and spatial critique without being entirely subsumed into it. An artist about whom Fried has written admiringly, photographer Jeff Wall, offers, as we shall see, an example of a practice that is attuned to a pervasive contemporary experience of dispossession such as Augé’s work on the non-place describes, even as it is shaped by elements of supermodernity (image manipulation, blurring of fact and fiction) that Augé decries. Augé: Art, Fiction, and the Loss of Time For Marc Augé, an increasingly fictional quality in our experience of events is part and parcel of the lives we live (undergo might be a better term) in spatial organizations deprived of meaning and therefore unable to reinforce identity or community. The term non-lieu has expanded to cover not only physical spaces and constructions but also image-based technologies that replace direct experience of reality with pastiches or fictions. Both La Guerre des rêves (1997) and Fictions fin de siècle (2000) describe a crisis of meanings, symbols, and institutions — and thus of society as a whole — and lay the blame for this crisis at the door of the mass media, particularly the visual media, and their ‘fictionalizations’ of real events: ‘la circulation d’images à consommer passivement [est un] puissant facteur de désagrégation collective et d’aliénation individuelle’.4 This ‘forme dévoyée d’imaginaire (la “mise en fiction”)’ threatens cultural disaster through the destruction of the imagination (GR 124). Creativity (in the narrow case of fictional narrative and 3. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), passim, hereafter AO in the text. 4. Marc Augé, La Guerre des rêves: exercices d’ethno-fiction (Paris: Seuil, 1997), p. 42. Hereafter GR in the text. NO TIME FOR ART? 95 presumably also in respect of artistic invention more broadly) is in danger of disappearance in a world where ‘[la fiction] ne semble plus constituer un genre particulier, mais épouser la réalité au point de se confondre avec elle’ (GR 132). A cultural apocalypse beckons as reality and fiction converge and the author disappears (GR 158–59). The consequence of such extinction of creativity is social atomization: as the author disappears, so too does the connection between a singular subject communicating with other imaginations and thus creating with his or her public ‘un lien virtuel de socialisation’ (GR 150). Instead, as dwellers in a technological environment ‘propice aux évasions solitaires’, we are subject to ‘l’isolement relatif qu’entraîne aujourd’hui le rapport à l’image’ (GR 173). This view of art as a tool of social cohesion will be central to Le Temps en ruines and to the prescriptiveness of its approach to artistic activity. In 2000, midway between the cultural Armageddon foretold in La Guerre des rêves and the call to artistic action of Le Temps en ruines, Augé turned his attention to the question of how contemporary art is to deal with the omnipresence of the image. The essay ‘De l’espace au regard: qu’est-ce qu’un objet d’art?’ asked how the artwork might combat this endlessly proliferating competitor that fails to engage meaningfully with history, space, or alterity even as it monopolizes their representation.5 In answer, Augé outlined a double imperative for the creative artist which would be taken up again in Le Temps en ruines: to imbue the present with the historicity excluded by the simplifying image; and to subordinate the image to the social relations that should be its origin and goal. The question of collective reception is again crucial and even foundational: ‘l’interrogation sur le réel que formule l’œuvre d’art n’a de sens que si elle est partagée, que si l’œuvre est en même temps appel, acte social et création sociale’ (FFS 176). As well as reprising the centrality of social intervention to art, Le Temps en ruines elaborates on how Augé understands art’s second 5. Marc Augé, ‘Fictions fin de siècle’ suivi de ‘Que se passe-t-il? 29 février, 31 mars, 30 avril 2000’ (Paris: Fayard, 2000), p. 176. Hereafter FFS in the text. 96 O’BEIRNE interconnective function, its operation as a vehicle for historicity. It becomes clear that in emphasizing historicity, Augé is considering art from the point of view of the collector, and even of the collector of antiquities (he tells us about his baroque artefacts, TR 26). It is this perspective that shapes his reflection on the function of art in the present, and it illustrates the prominence in Augé’s thinking of a Proustian notion of conservation of the past, a thread that recurs throughout all his work. The ‘pastness’ of the artwork — ‘l’œuvre dit son temps, mais elle ne le dit plus complètement’ (TR 27) — becomes intrinsic to the artwork’s functioning as art in the present: ‘C’est ce manque, ce vide, cet écart entre la perception disparue et la perception actuelle qu’exprime aujourd’hui l’œuvre originale’ (TR 27). An articulation of temporal loss by the artwork is thus an effect of the fact that works become antiquarian objects. However unpromisingly, this antiquarian view becomes the criterion for the success of art produced in the present too, as Augé spells out an aesthetic based on loss (and heavily tilted toward narrative, the exemplar again being Proust). Thus literature is traversed by ‘ce thème de l’impossible retour au passé, où se mêlent les harmoniques du voyage, de la mémoire et de la narration’ (TR 65). Suspension of narrative — an element of much narrative writing and constitutive of much contemporary photography or figurative painting — is cast by Augé in terms of the emotions that the passage of time conjures in the artist and reader/viewer, as a ‘trêve entre le souvenir et l’attente’ (TR 66). All art is seen as an anticipation of and attempt to defeat its own destiny as relic uprooted from a continuous temporal context (‘l’art lui-même, sous ses diverses formes, est une ruine, ou une promesse de ruine’, TR 25), its author working to refine the work’s form ‘pour la préserver des atteintes du temps et donner à ses lecteurs futurs le sentiment d’un pur présent, d’un présent qui dure sans passer’ (TR 66). The primary interest of the art object for Augé seems to be to make manifest the gap between its creation and the moment (for contemporary art, the anticipated moment) of its reception, drawing attention to the passage of time in terms of an impossible recuperation of the past: ‘La beauté de l’art tient à sa NO TIME FOR ART? 97 dimension historique: il faut que l’art soit de son temps, qu’il soit historique aujourd’hui pour être beau demain. La beauté de l’art est énigmatique parce que quelque chose nous échappera toujours de la perception première dont les œuvres anciennes furent l’objet et parce que, inversement, nous ne pouvons percevoir aujourd’hui dans l’art contemporain le manque qui s’y creusera à la longue, historiquement, éveillant la curiosité à jamais insatisfaite de nos successeurs dans le temps’ (TR 134). How does the contemporary environment of a technologically manufactured ‘aplatissement du temps’, an environment in which the simplifications of the on-screen image impose ‘la tyrannie du présent perpétuel’ (TR 68), affect the attempt, which is for Augé constitutive of art, to suspend the passage of time? Not only representation, but the very landscape it inhabits and interprets, is reduced to a façade deprived of a temporal dimension.
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