an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 7, November-December 2010,
ISSN 1552-5112
The Catastrophe of the Digital and
the Fate of Photography
There is no longer anything but the energy of
spectacle and of the simulacrum.[1]
I.
Introduction
This essay draws on Baudrillard’s thought concerning
both digitality and photography and extends it into an assessment of the fate
of photography in the digital era. I begin with an assessment of art in
digitality because it is the art world that has perpetrated a hostile takeover
of photography. Today a hallmark of acceptance and legitimacy for most
photographers is to appear on an art gallery or museum’s walls. Next I turn to
specifically assess the work of seven photographers alongside of two photographs
by Jean Baudrillard. I point to two destinies of photography and/as art: 1) one
in which photography continues to survive despite the continued hostile
takeover of its terrain by “art” and 2) the more likely future where
photography dies.
II. Liberation into Digital Servitude
Art, when it is artful, creates a void which arrests
our gaze and commands our thoughts with its energetic force. The experience of
such art is a moment of near perfect singularity which can also expose the
malignancy of culture. Marcel Duchamp, who was perhaps the most important
artist of the twentieth century, did just that with his Fountain (1913), as did Andy Warhol with his Brillo Box (1964). The difference is that with Warhol it was the
final dance for energetic art as it was transformed by him into a prosthetic of
our metastatic promotional culture.
In the 1940s and 1950s abstract expressionism began
to seek the hyperreal (the more real than real), in a search for hidden
structure through a quest for truth after mimesis.[2] Abstract expressionism forced an analytical stop no
less significant than the one created by the explosion of the atomic bomb over
civilian populations. The days of the avant-garde were coming to an end. Robert
Rauschenberg was among those to erect modernism’s grave markers with his
canvases of monochrome black oil paint (the Black
Paintings of 1952-1954).
Heroism in art, dependent upon lively and vigorous
exploration, had begun its exit as did the effort to go beyond the reality
principle. With Warhol simulation would reign – infinite reproduction followed
– the stage was cleared for a signal marker of the posthuman and what would
follow was the fulfillment of the digital destiny of art. Photography, longer
under siege from art, would soon see its independent existence threatened. Art
would soon largely become image and demands would be placed on the camera as
never before (but now as a mere prosthetic of the computer) to provide much of
art’s unrefined substance. Alongside of developments such as making art from
garbage, computer generated art actually is worthless. In its quest to be real,
more real than real, it has discovered only banality – the end of artifice, and
a place where art stops at the level of appearances, lacking illusion – which is
the one other thing (along with energy) – that art must possess to be “art”.
And so art, drained of its energy by a period of great expenditure that we know
as modernism, gave way to the digital and the hyperreal.
Art was alive and well on the floor of Jackson
Pollock’s garage in
By courting the hyperreal art lost its ability to
challenge and negate the real (has art any other use really?). If art goes looking for truth it must remember that the
highest arts are illusion and challenge. Art, when it was modern, could make a
void. As it passed into the marginal spaces of the postmodern, art tumbled into
a void – the vast emptiness of the virtual. With Pollock modern art found a way
to be a part of the accursed share and provide a strong alternative to reality.
Abstract expressionism forced an eruption of unreality into reality and
provided us with a poetic transfiguration of the real.[3] Today, in the world of the digital, art can no
longer speak with this authority as it is hyperreal from the beginning.[4] We occupy an advanced phase of collapse and
disintegration when art no longer interrupts our gaze for the purpose of
contemplation, but rather, forces our gaze into the seamless computer network
which is devouring it.
1.
Adam Brown. Computer Generated Landscape
(2004)
Art once contained a vital energy whereas today in
its digitalized appearance art merely enervates. This too is part of art’s
ongoing ambivalence about the social and who today is more ambivalent than the
“artist” prosthetic of computer generated imagery? In the digital we know an
art which is less vital – an enervate, monotonous art, wanting in human strength
and spirit. With our passage into the postmodern, many artists have moved from
innovators to enervators and have, along with art, fallen into an entropic
indifference. The loss of energy implies a loss also of momentum – and of a
positive direction – therefore the digital is a fitting grave for art in the
postmodern. There are still a few who avoid this fate – Francis Bacon held out to the end as does Odd
Nerdrum today.
2.
Odd Nerdrum. The Water Protectors
(1985).
Nerdrum like Bacon possesses vigor and commands
feelings of deep ambivalence. One wonders though: could it be that art, ever
fashionable, in our “green” era, has for the most part merely entered a kind of
energy conservation mode while a few radicals like Nerdrum still seek to
participate in the expenditure of excess. In Nerdrum’s case this involves the
constant reminder that evil, which can never be fully expended, lies before and
after everything. Energy is a vital part of the principle of evil.[5] Art draws on the energy of Evil and in our effort to
drive out Evil, we have largely driven out art. Evil breathes deeply in an Odd
Nerdrum work and there are few evil geniuses of Nerdrum’s kind around today.[6]
Art in the digital accelerates the hostile takeover
of photography. Digitally manipulated photographs pulse only with the
artificial energy of our cities – the catastrophe in slow motion which is the
West. If digital “art” possesses anything of art’s former energy it is now that
of the virus – a virus that is also part of the human on its way to the post
human. Our wearable computers with retinal interface will soon include digital
cameras for up to the minute manipulation of our “seen” environment. Finally,
through the digital, the brave new world will be realized through technological
means – and it will be networked. We will not need the “Soma” after all Mr.
Huxley.
The energy of the digital is the negative energy of
the simulacrum – the inauthentic – and this provides its only originality and
its (virtual) power. The catastrophe
that is digital art has come to us not from the depletion of natural resources,
but ironically, from the proliferation of runaway energy flows – a world in
which there is far more artificial than human intelligence. Never has there
been an art more appropriate for its time than digital art and computer
generated imagery. The virtual was the fate of energy as the post human is the
fate of the human. Here art performs the vital public service of propagandizing
the veracity of the digital – the obsession of our time – the lack of
distinction between the real and the virtual.[7]
Already, in some homes, masterpieces appear on
programmable screens which now frame the art of history, and each day a new
masterpiece appears. When one has virtual power what need has one of actual
art? Rather than liberation by abstraction we are now liberated by the
abstraction of energy. And so art no longer refers to contemporary science but
is rather part of it and participates in the flow of images and digitality in
increasing acceleration. Of course modern science also told us that any flow,
when accelerated, only hastens catastrophe. Ours is the first culture to depend
on the liberation of energy for its necessary attitude[8] and so it should not surprise us that energy has
also been liberated from art. Art now enters the realm of the digital, the
realm of fantasy as a kind of projection of all of modernity’s hopes (and
fears). We were told that we would be liberated from modernism and indeed we
have been. We have been liberated from a time when art was invested with energy
into a digital (technological) servitude. This is where we find photography
today – toiling in the sickly artificial glow of the impoverished light of the
digital – almost the only significant force which remains.
As the photographic image is so vital to the art of
postmodernity I turn now to address the work of seven photographers alongside
of two images by Jean Baudrillard. This analysis points to the two destinies of
photography and/as art: 1) a future where photography continues to survive
despite the continued hostile takeover of its terrain by “art” and 2) the more
likely future where photography dies as digital art pushes it past its end
point into the lassitude of the networks. In this later scenario the world of
digital-art swallows photography while a gulf is opened between both it and art
and the energy of modernism.
III. Photographies Destinies
It is not all bad news in the digital era. Rochelle
Costi is a contemporary photographer whose work captures enigmatic moments such
as in the construction of people’s dwelling places. In Tijolo a vista (2003) someone has hand painted the appearance of a
brick wall over bare plywood sheeting. Here even the reality of poverty
attempts to situate itself beneath the appearance of a more sturdy exterior. As
in Baudrillard’s photograph Sao Paolo
(1998) the cracks of ruination open as the plywood has begun
3. Rochelle Costi. Tijolo a vista (2003)
4. Jean
Baudrillard. Sao Paolo (1998)
to disintegrate. As in the vast majority of
Baudrillard’s photographs we do not see people in Costi’s photograph but merely
the objects which signify their existence. Human absence here serves to
illustrate not only disappearance but marginality – the marginal existence of
the occupant of this dwelling while pointing to the vital relationship between
people and objects. Like so many of Baudrillard’s images, Tijolo a vista indifferently
records what could easily be a understood as a politicized image, but in a
manner which is also not in any way supportive of the system. This image
records something of what Baudrillard refers to as an ambivalence which awaits
even the most advanced systems.[9] It also points to the illusory nature of
globalization (especially the myth of an increased standard of living
accompanying the spread of capitalist production) as it represents what the
majority of dwellings on planet earth now resemble. Costi’s photograph brings
home to the prosperous world of art and photography galleries other realities –
what Baudrillard refers to as “the bottom-up leveling”.[10] As we survey its deteriorating state we are reminded
of the strong current of reversibility that inhabits our world and that the
globe itself resists globalization.[11] The sun (natural light is present here, muted by
shadows) may well be setting on more than this house.
Costi points to some the most interesting of all
photographic objects in recent years – the waste areas and fragments of the world’s
decline which call out to us. These photographs record a reversibility which is
stronger than any conception of reality.
Such photographs as Zoe Leonard’s take photography a long way from the
culture of promotion where so many of our values (including those of
photographers), are now market values. Leonard does not seek a kind of
minimalism within the cities of the “first
5. Zoe Leonard. Wall (2002)
world”. Her eye for detail (Leonard’s work is akin to
the American photographer of urban ruins Camilo José Vergara), is for the maximal effect of the modern ruin
as part of postmodern daily life.
6. Jose-Camilo Vergara. Columbus Homes, Newark (1994)
Leonard, like Vergara, makes photographs which are
well suited to the politically indifferent times of our transpolitical
circumstances. Wall (2002) is also a
recording of a building which is as indifferent to us as we are to it. This
dual of indifference between subject and object, mediated by the photograph,
operates as a kind of enigmatic memento-mori.
Our own death and decay, and that of the system, are always just beneath the
surface of such photographs and it is here that they make their challenge felt.
Leonard’s photograph, like many of Vergara’s,
show a talent for understanding the ruined object’s demand to be photographed.
In the place of meaning these images provide us with evidence of its radical
loss. Leonard’s photographs of the fragments of urban deserts, especially the
bricked up and boarded over windows she photographs, are metaphors for the end
of former visions of progress. They are also, like Vergara’s photographs of
urban decay, memories of the inevitable and ongoing process of decay. In a
strikingly optimistic and Baudrillardian manner, melancholy is here elevated to
an ecstatic form of jouissance. In them we find the end of modernity as surely as we
find the end of modernism in Warhol’s work.
These works show us that energy remains in
photography even in the era of the digital. Photographers like Costi, Leonard,
and Vergara point to a possible future where photography continues to exist as
Nerdrum points to one where painting can exist separate from the digital.
However, others who travel under the name “photographer” participate more
actively in the hostile takeover of photography by art and attempt to convince
us that photography has no future other than as a digital art, [is there a more
a more postmodern oxymoron than “digital art”?] I turn now to the work of four
of these digital “artists” who use a camera to push photography beyond its
endpoint, and art into the network, where the former energy of art is not to be
found: Rut Blees Luxemburg, Florian Maier-Aichen, the AES+F Group, and Luchezar
Boyadjiev. Here we find four “photographic artists” working to remove the
primary energy which has informed photography since its inception: the light /
energy of the sun.
The most important aspect of photography, as
Baudrillard has argued so very well, involves how well it engages with the
object under conditions of natural light. Photographs record not only the
fragments of the world but fragments of light as it breaks against the surface
of the object (including the human object).[12] At the heart of the photograph which interests me
more than most others (as in Barthes concept of punctum)[13] often rests the magnificent energy of natural light.
Whatever else photography may be said to be, it is a record of the moment of
poetic convergence “between the light from the object and the light from the
gaze”.[14] The effect of natural light on objects often makes
the world all the more enigmatic as is the case with Baudrillard’s photograph
7.
Jean Baudrillard.
the photography of fragments of the world as the
energy of natural light breaks upon them – revealing forms which destabilize
our sense of reality. This cannot happen in such an energetic manner under
conditions of digital manipulation as the image by Rut Blees Luxemburg shows.
8.
Rut Blees Luxemburg. In Deeper (1999)
Luxemburg’s In
Deeper (1999) is not a photograph under natural light but one taken at
night where the light comes from portable lighting. As such it constitutes a rigorous
challenge, and an interesting one, to mine and Baudrillard’s understanding of
the place of natural light in photography.
Luxemburg’s challenge points to the possibility that night-photography
(understood in the Baudrillardian sense as “light-writing”), can be used to
contribute to the enigma of the world. For me Luxemburg’s image ultimately
fails in this regard as we see when it is placed next to Baudrillard’s which
relies on the even more enigmatic qualities of natural light. The problem I am
raising for Luxemburg’s fascinating image is that it possess a human-made
aesthetic quality which is constructed by the photographer rather than the
object recorded by the photographer as in Baudrillard’s photographs. While I
appreciate that all photography (like all theory) is a simulation of an
enigmatic world, Baudrillard’s photograph succeeds in accentuating this
enigmatic quality without attempting to manipulate / aestheticize the scene.
Today many digital photographers seek to replicate
the stunning colour effects which occur in photographs such as Baudrillard’s
9.
Florian Maier-Aichen. Untitled (2005)
Baudrillard, Costi, Leonard, or Vergara, understand
it. Indeed it may be seen as a case of “anti-photography”[15] which is an essential aspect of what Baudrillard
referred to as the hostile takeover of photography by aesthetics and science.
Maier-Aichen takes an iconic
If Maier-Aichen is trying to show us that photography
cannot be trusted it is a banal lesson today as it is one we have learned long
before the digital. If however Maier-Aichen is attempting to make art, then he
has succeeded. The one price that must be levied however is that we can no
longer call this art “photography”. For photography to exist the object must
remain a powerful part of the process demanding our attention as light-energy
breaks across it. In digital manipulation the object loses its force and
natural light is usually eliminated. Perhaps the most profound outcome of the
pictographic age that is the digital will be that it once again leads to a
separation of “photography” and “art”. Photography may, in the end, prove too
energetic for “art” to contain but at present there exists only diminishing
hope as photography is reduced to a handmaiden of the computer.
Digital manipulation and computer generation have
enabled the construction of many fantastic scenes. The AES+F group[16] has supplanted Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao with
Islamic architectural features. While this work of digital collage raises
interesting questions about Western and Islamic art, it is, in the end, an exemplar
only of the banality of computer generation and its sickly pale tones. ![AES + F Group Guggenheim Bilbao (2006) [Islamic Project]](catastrophe_files/image022.jpg)
10.
AES+F Group. Guggenheim
11.
Jean Baudrillard.
In contrast to Baudrillard’s “light writing” in
12. Luchezar Boyadjiev. Billboard Heaven (digital collage, 2005)
Baudrillard once told an interviewer something that may
be of help in understanding the work of Luchezar Boyadjiev. “All that remains
to be done” he said “is playing with the pieces, that is post- modern”.[18] Boyadjiev‘s collage is already an outdated idea (his
effort to juxtapose life context and advertising culture) as advertisers in
Europe have already begun to spread large perforated screens covered in
advertising over buildings under renovation – including many apartment towers.
If Boyadjiev sought to be original – the construction industry beat him to the
punch. It is however, an interesting example of the kind of “play” that has
replaced a focus on the object as light breaks on it which was once the serious
concern of something that was known as photography.
IV. Escape Velocity
The work of Luxemburg, Maier-Aichen, AES + F and
Boyadjiev, stakes a significant challenge to the continued existence of
photography despite the efforts of Baudrillard, Costi, Leonard, or Vergara. The
true importance of the digital “image makers” is that they usher us into the post-photographic
age. This is the image of the future – it may be art – but photography dies
here. Digital image making is an art form but a less energetic and vital one
than we knew only fifty years ago. When it tumbles into digital manipulation it
opens the question: Can photography survive digital art?
The catastrophe of the digital is its lack of vital
energy and the substitution of energy with the banal enervations of the screen and
the program. This is the disaster in slow motion (without end) which we now
face as we achieve escape velocity from the margins of postmodernity out into
the boundless hell of the digital networks. When energy in art disappears
enervating forms dominate and servitude becomes the meaning of the expression
“our digital destiny”. Do we prefer the “exile of the virtual” to the
“catastrophe of the real”?[19] And why are we so eager to volunteer for this
particular form of technological servitude? In the programs and networks of the
postmodern the artistic and photographic energy we knew not so long ago is
being reduced to digital lassitude.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 7, November-December 2010,
ISSN 1552-5112
Notes