[Due to space constraints, the foregoing essay will be published in three instalments.—Ed.]
Introduction
The author of this text is confident that none of these reflections are timely during the war, and harbors doubts about their subsequent significance. It is difficult to escape a common remark about the impossibility of poetry after Bucha—with all kinds of art signifying something beyond the given being put in this category. In extreme cases, it questions the possibility of any art at all.
And yet the bygone era has left behind a resurgence—after a period of lull, traditionally associated with high modernism—of the semiotics of artworks, which can be found in narratives similar to those of nineteenth century realist painting, or in research-based works, as contemporary artists already largely consider the unification of philosophy and art to be a fait accompli. At the same time, what we have not been able to see is the power of artists to communicate the meaning of their works to an ordinary spectator at an art venue. In any case, the viewer learns what the exhibition is about from the accompanying text of the curator, and these texts are neither a description of the works nor a disclosure of the artists’ motivations; they serve the same purpose as press releases: to promote an event in the field of cultural production. In other words, to advertise. The claims made in these texts are not only vague and self-contradictory, but signal existence of some laws governing the artworks which are totally beyond our understanding, and, as a result of these laws, the artwork’s properties shall excel our expectations—most spectators unmistakably identify such texts as an advertisement and are at a complete loss about the extent to which these explanations are reliable in identification of “what artists actually wanted to say.” Sometimes, viewers get no other hints at the meaning of objects during an exhibition besides an advertisement at the entrance.
The starting point of this essay will be Reza Negarestani’s review of an event in the now typical genre of the curatorial exhibition,1 where more or less random objects by different authors—unfamiliar with each other, ideologically unrelated—are gathered to “illustrate” (as curators intend) some abstract slogan. For example: “Down with human perception!” A motto on the stand cannot have the form of a hypothesis, because all the exhibition space is not enough for full-fledged theses and conclusions. The convenience of mottos in place of articulated reflections lies in an opportunity to attempt illustrating them with virtually anything. Adding insult to injury, the same works can be exhibited at such events an unlimited number of times, changing their explanations arbitrarily: the managerial cocoon makes it so that today they “illustrate” the horrors of the Anthropocene, tomorrow the quadruple object, the day after tomorrow, the digital cloud. As a result, in no theme do things produce a statement. That is, they do not change or even comment on the essence of the curatorial text, even in that imaginary situation where advertising suddenly turns into a meaningful philosophical statement.
Readers will note that the word “illustrate” was deliberately put between quotes due to its inaccuracy. Contemporary works of art have been called illustrations more than once, sometimes pejoratively. Still, this is not quite right, since the images are connected to the text not by an attempt at interpretation, but by collage. To be more precise, by the “Kuleshov Effect,” a montage technique that was innovative in its time, where the same poker face of actor Ivan Mozzhukhin was juxtaposed with a bowl of soup, a languid woman, or the dead body of a child. Only the viewer determines what Mozzhukhin’s decadent face expresses: whether he wants to eat, to have some kind of relationship with the lady in question, or is extremely saddened. In other words, the viewer of the contemporary exhibition perceives only the text (the changing picture next to the face), but not the objects themselves. We would call them objects until explaining our method. But if in the case of Kuleshov this effect was programmed, the actor had a neutral facial expression, like a member of the Special Services,2 then few of today’s artists would agree that their works do not express anything by themselves.
We cannot say that the formation of a new semiotic system was interrupted by the will of orthodox historians, who preached the myth of true modernist art as the successor to non-objective art. In a process that the author witnessed firsthand, from the moment of the verdict in the Pussy Riot case (after which the artists ceased to deal openly with questions of religion), to the banning by the VAC Foundation of Olga Tarakanova’s performance with the neutral title Horizontal Veche (assembly, translated from Church Slavonic)—an event where people no more and no less gather and talk about politics in a remote historical setting;3 namely, during the process of censorship/post-release repressions—all levels of which can barely be counted—many artists were happy to shift the responsibility for their own statements onto the managers of institutions, who supposedly know how and what they have to exhibit in order to succeed on the international stage and not be persecuted. But curators found themselves in great trouble while trying to explain how a completely disjointed system of thinking about art could become a vehicle for carrying out any type of research—as seems to be the demand of the time—and hastily started to concoct content designed to fill gaps in the discipline.
The more they did, the more obvious it became that the number of transcendent laws and entities that they outline by far outweighs the number of things that we are entitled to speak about, and the more the system trying to adapt to science is becoming a mythology. Curatorial texts appeared here and there in Russian self-published media, distorting the key postulate of speculative realism—that there exists something beyond our reach—into a monster of “artworks exist in their own universe, have their own life (in the crudest sense), showing us only a glimpse of their goodness.” Such was the case throughout the later part of the previous decade, and these texts were seen as a debatable but largely innocuous content, until an increasing number of authors associated with so-called speculative realism started to base their promotional strategies on an ambivalent, or rather, even love-hate attitude towards the far-right successor of the most conservative strain of Soviet ideology, popularly known as nazbol (national-bolshevik).
One may accuse this correlation between an intellectual and a political strategy of tendentiousness, yet both of these strategies imply a reluctance to make ethical (and intellectual) decisions and an opportunistic behavior towards the market realm. Taking into account a virtual non-existence of true conservatives among regular spectators of contemporary art—judging by the content of far-right Telegram channels focused on culture even though these are mostly devoted to theater—this curatorial move attracted a negative attention.
But still an attention, converting “speculative realism”, in a particular case “speculative traditionalism”4 into a new Russian official art: a black hole vacuuming in by association most of art production, previously attempting to catch up with global trends rather than blending into the local ideological context. However, as customary as it is for us to imply conservative ideologies, when speaking about irrationalism, art-related thought has never elaborated on the links uniting its important parts into a working system, which is why its rationalism in general has been only superficial, and it is increasingly relying on premodern practices to hide the lack of coherence behind a holistic picture.
After studying several approaches to iconology, or the discipline in humanities, trying to define the meaning of what we wrongly call images, we will come to a conclusion which seems highly debatable at first: the Kantian revolution. By which we mean an understanding that during any investigation of an artifact we are dealing with the phenomena of our perception rather than with any external object as is, while at the same time, we impose the laws that we stipulate on an object. This, rather than some mystery, is the scope of our investigation, and it has never fully occurred in the areas of research concerning visual art.
All historians dealing with images end up with a variant of a postulate that the “truest” way to represent an artwork is to demonstrate it indexically: Point a finger in the direction of a supposed artistic object and shrug off any wordplays around thereof. Even the post-Kantian hermeneuticians will deny any direct and tangible relation between objects of art and the discussions surrounding them. Their version of the indexical thesis is that the discussion concerning an artwork is ultimately about some previous discussion, and an art historian turns into a literature worker. Art practitioners likewise valued the objects much more than any possible explanation. They do so by understanding objects in an archaic sense of quasi-handicrafts, rather than today’s extended meaning of the word, ranging from a set or a formula in mathematics, even the notion of objecthood itself, to global warming on the materialist end of the spectrum.
What we will see in art history, most noticeably in the twentieth century, are circular motions between attempts at designating meanings exterior to the perception of the formal structure of an artwork, and a refusal to explain—a reification of pre-Kantian objecthood. Contemporary attempts to reverse Kant do not achieve the goal of liberating art from semiotics, because no Kantian turn has fully taken place ever in the history of this human praxis; all these philosophical works really achieve is an emphasis on the current state of affairs. Likewise, philosophy of symbolic systems—which gives us a clue in translating art into natural languages—has historically been based on a particular understanding from the philosophy of language: the assumption that speech behavior precedes and shapes a language, entailing that symbolic systems, while being non-speech and not being immediately suitable for the human body, are not language-convertible.
The research programs concerning visual arts and language have been headed in opposite directions throughout their entire history, and the reason is that it is easier for an animal, and in particular, a human body, to emit sound than to transmit visual data. Hence the depressing intuition shared by many researchers that visual art is not connected, at least directly, to the progress of thought ultimately depending on the sound-producing system of a human organism. At the same time, the attempts to link the visual and sound-based symbolic systems are seen as too radical and unacceptable, and the reasons they are banned, although described at times in this text on Freudian terms, are mostly political. As for the plan of action to overcome today’s situation, it will consist of both speculative and practical parts. The author of the text conscientiously undertakes the first part; what to do on the political level is the subject of a separate and long conversation, or better, a polylogue among practicing artists and curators.
Perception: Helmholtz’s Representation as Mimesis and the Uncertainty of Empirical Inquiry
The ultimate reason why the global art world embraced particular readings of speculative realism—claiming an in-principle knowability of the empirical qualities of works of art in tandem with a full unknowability of the laws and ideas governing them—is that art history as a discipline is built on foundations of empirical enquiry appearing to never lead into unambiguous conclusions. As a result, historians would often try to adapt data obtained inductively into readymade view systems found in the philosophy of their time. In cases of combinations of several such systems in a single research program, the failures of this approach will become apparent.
In John Berger’s acclaimed educational television series Ways of Seeing, in which he unites historical materialism and phenomenology, we hear a comment at the start of an experiment with children. It can be rendered thus: Before being corrupted by ideology, people see works of art in accordance with their experience, phenomenologically. The argument sets Berger in trouble several minutes after the experiment begins, when a girl says that a Christ in a painting by Caravaggio is a woman “because she has got curls”—a remark that today’s feminist Marxist viewer would judge on Marxist rather than phenomenological terms, and explain that there is no age at which gender ideology would not affect its subject.
The phenomenological approach, on the other hand, unfortunately assigns a modest role to the human eye as an organ. It is quite possible from this viewpoint that Berger saw in practice what Herman von Helmholtz’s physiologist disciple, Johann von Kries, theorized about. The connection between our physical ability to see surrounding reality with our eyes and the world of ideas is limited by the fact that the human eye is nothing more than an organ fulfilling a practical purpose.5 The eye is not designed to contemplate abstractions, but because the human mind thinks in abstractions, it organizes all the optical information it gathers into symbolic systems. Information which has accumulated in human memory is more important in the process of perceiving new things than the data which enters consciousness directly at the moment of seeing. In the third edition of the Treatise on Physiological Optics, Helmholtz and von Kries said that the symbolic system is entirely within the human mind, with the following caveat: Some incoming information may structurally resemble one of the elements of this system by matching at least one feature, and so it is built into the symbolic system, making it more and more complex and branching out each time. However, we will also see that the very structure of this structural resemblance remains unexplained, and never quite grants inductive analysis the status of knowledge reliable in making generalizations.
Helmholtz’s Treatise was opposed against for its positivism—noticeably, the part that he himself wrote before von Kries undertook to supplement his theses.6 Indeed, Helmholtz was much more interested in the capabilities of the human eye than in the definition of “image” (Bild) as understood by Kant—namely, a direct representation of concepts to intuition (in opposition to symbols as an indirect one). In his book, Helmholtz described optical illusions based on mimesis, the similarity of the Kantian schema to an object. For this reason, it is possible to refer to Helmholtz with the caveat that in the Treatise, intuition is vastly different from the Kantian one—although this was not an intended consequence. Such is the case, given Helmholtz’s intuition is primarily shaped by the external world and only secondarily by “heterogeneous concepts” of reason; and what Helmholtz did not explain was whether an intuition of a scope limited from beyond could reject concepts as incompatible, or if it could grasp any law-like regularities from the external world, rather than from the reason of a subject. It was also left unexplained how, if it did, such intuition operated in conditions of a double limit.
It is worth noting that beyond the direct descriptions of Helmholtz’s experiments with numerous “white sheets of paper” and the contemplation of suspended needles with one and two eyes, von Kries’ own development of the former’s ideas is equally interesting, if not more. In such sections, von Kries already explains where Helmholtz saw the connection between the physics of vision and the Kantian faculty of judgment. Although neither Helmholtz nor himself ever challenged the idealist position that the interpretation of the “meaning” of images is a phenomenon entirely in the domain of psychology, the disciple goes on to claim:
The fundamental thesis of the empirical theory is: The sensations of the senses are tokens for our consciousness, it being left to our intelligence to learn how to comprehend their meaning.7
Helmholtz devoted much of the theoretical part of his Treatise to arguing with Kant, by saying that the subject’s access to objects of observation is not entirely dictated by their capacity to understand, that is, by the psychological framework of the subject. He claimed that the Kantian synthesis of apprehension, our perception of material reality, does not lie entirely in the synthesis of apperception, our representation of the object of thought. According to von Kries, Helmholtz changed the meaning of Kantian term “perception.”8 The physiologist understood it as a wide range of phenomena, preceding judgment and dictated by the physiology of the visual apparatus. Such, although not stated directly in his text, implies distinguishing this phenomenon from Kant’s apperception, where the synthesis of imagination dictates the conditions of perception. In various parts of the Treatise, such pre-judgment refers to the perception of pigments (more or less similar from person to person, except for subjects with non-standard vision), luminescence (luminosity) and localization of the image on the retina (local sign). But it does not stop here, as there are physical mechanisms of motion perception (about which von Kries was somewhat cautious, saying that the influence of eye’s physical apparatus on it might be insignificant) and binocular depth perception, also dictated by the physiology of the eye rather than by reason. All of which, according to the scientist, refutes Kant’s claim that space is an illusion of consciousness.
According to Helmholtz and von Kries, one determines the distance to an object by whether or not it is double in one’s eyes, and what accommodation of the gaze is required for the object to stop being double. In other words, by the horopter effect. Regarding this effect we know that the image doubles both nearer and farther than the accommodation distance when looking with two eyes. For this reason, accommodation gives a fairly accurate picture of the distances of objects in the real world. The issue of whether accommodation precedes Kantian judgment, as the physiologists said, or is impossible without thereof, being a result of a muscular movement, at times voluntary, is a matter of debate. Still, von Kries insists that all physiological functions precede all psychic ones because they are “simpler”:
Briefly stated, the characteristic thing about this conception is that the action of the body on the mind consists in the production of sensations, which would therefore constitute for mental life that which was given to it immediately; whereas all higher and more complex psychic forms, especially the judgments, would be produced and determined by the utterly different laws of mental life itself.9
At the same time, without judgment in the Kantian sense, the subject cannot distinguish themself and their body from surrounding reality, since this requires their self-representation. Von Kries goes on to say that seeing the depth of space is highly dependent on the subject’s experience. He cites the example of the lunar disk, of which only a knowledgeable person can tell how distant the prototype of this avatar is.
The stumbling block between Helmholtz and the neo-Kantians, in particular Ernst Cassirer—whom we mention multiple times later on as the founder of the theory of symbolic expression of concepts—was space. The physiologist approached it ambiguously: on the one hand, as an empiricist he relied on the thesis that our perception conveys space in general correctly; but he also made important reservations about the fact that without consciousness, the very fact of perceiving space is impossible. According to Cassirer, Helmholtz did not want to lose sight of the proposition that spatiality is a mathematical and logical operation that only the mind can produce. By radically insisting on this position, we would consider the data of the senses as something irrelevant. Cassirer himself did not deem this an obstacle and, as can be seen from the third volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, rejected the light-wave theory of color in favor of the position on individual perception as promoted by Goethe. He did so while extremely annoyed by the then recent scientific discovery that colors are to a certain extent an objective fact, since they are formed by refraction of light into different wavelengths. At the same time, Helmholtz’s Treatise did not change the philosophical status of data obtained empirically: it did not provide an account of how subjects share their symbolic systems and make inferences based on objects never seen before. Since Helmholtz himself acknowledged that symbolic systems are at the core of adult perception, the largest part of it remained obscure.
The Treatise will play an important role further in this investigation, when we dispense with the notion of the object as something we perceive directly, and enter the murky waters of distinction between Kantian schemata, as presentation of concepts to sense organs, and image, as presentation of concepts to intuition in the form of space and time. At that moment, we will find out that schemata may be described in Helmholtzian terms, while images are merely available for presentation to sense organs but have nothing visual about themselves, apart from being made dimensionally and temporally fit for such presentation. The terminology we will be dealing with in art theory would be misguided by the common use of the word “image” and will repeat a theory—nowadays largely considered as a philosophical fallacy—of a double gaze: a physiological one; and an internal, psychological gaze, which may divide symbols into types, without participation of the eyes.
[To be continued in Part II – Ed.]
NOTES