Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered (1)

This essay is dedicated to the memory of
Bing Thom (1940-2016)

tossed into the white
in the heart of London, could not wait
it was seamlessly wild
when all was still milky white
all glass is still glass
never just glass
yet nothing to grasp
even at the top of its class
how vast was this space, before me
deep beneath me
high above me
all around me
white, artic white
white, ice white
white, cool white
white, dove white
dancers frozen in time
limbs miming negating time
unconsciously betraying time
to the secret scent of thyme

where was I, had I re-appeared
or where am I, had I only just dis-appeared
there was a fog

in the heart of London
Gormley materialized a vessel
full of mist and emotion

anyone who yearned
to be a performer
became a performer
unpremeditated a performance  

the body curled
the body lying
the body upright
the body bending forward

white
white
white
snow white

a molecular choreography
towards the inviolable self
or the suspicious self
that could be yourself

and the only way forward
is through touch

Preface

“The uncanniness of space is today more closely related to the invisible. It is not so much the strangeness of a form or material that generates a feeling of anxiety, but rather the composition of the air, an electromagnetic radiation, an atmosphere, and a climate. Unperceivable, yet terribly effective environments.”  Contemporary lifestyle, does not only confine us to climate change atmospherically nor just to the de-formative monstrosities in the built environment (2). We are confronted daily with a continuous stream of electrical bombardments causing disfigurements that are non-physical but highly manipulative and potentially causing physiological, psychological, and even permanent genetic deformities. This fear is here and now and possesses a fiction-like and a disconcerting daily occurrence in which the human mind cradles its existence between what could be regarded as apocalyptic and unworldly. This essay is an attempt to identify ‘the shape of things to come’ when clearly all evidence points us towards an existence that is strenuously constituted by ‘formlessness’, making all things familiar invisible.

Structure

I am knee deep into this writing and I have just discovered that my preface is on page eleven and my essay could begin on page thirteenth. Perhaps I am practicing what it is that I have been contemplating. Formlessness. Initially, I had not consciously laboured away with my writing but just being ‘in the flow’. The first half of this essay was written three weeks ago but it feels like time had been suspended and all space/time continuum has since lapsed without any record of ‘duration’. 

Such a suspension, is how Gormley constructed a space such as Blind Light as a piece of sculpture, making form, predominantly virtual and only sensed through the forms of its; “enclosure and occupation, tangible and tactile through the operation of light on moisture that is both space and space-filling.” (3)

Note: The precursor to this essay is often described as ‘automatic writing or psychography’. To have experienced Blind Light, it seemed like the natural thing to do - to abandon attachments, dissolve barriers and write in a moment of lucidity tapping on my sub-consciousness. 

Lost Coordinates

Then

Summer of 2002, in the lake at Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed a steel folly populated with thousands of nozzles that produced a fine cloud of mist that seem to hang off the steel structure which simultaneously made it appear to hover above the lake. Naturally, it immediately earned its nickname, ‘The Blur or Cloud’. The building subsequently divorced itself from all aspects of architectural space and dematerialized all construct into this veil of mist and light. Visitors to this aquatic-folly suffered severe cognitive sensibilities and even signs of hysteria were reported.  

Now

Summer of 2007, at the Hayward Gallery, London, Antony Gormley took this same experiment indoors and enclosing it in a glass cube. The cloud in this instance was ‘captured’ with devices that had integrated technologies to dispense refrigerated moisture and maintain temperatures with monitoring capabilities of the highest precision. Visitors upon entering the enclosure would gradually vanish while still remaining visible. 

Disappearance without being invisible. For each visitor, the surrender of the optic sense to their heptic sensibilities becomes a natural modification in this man-made mistified capsule. 

‘Lost in space’ became a reality. (5)

Seizing Reality

For Gormley, there is this new cosmology that begins with the rhythm of his own pulse and hands, and moves to the edges of his body, to the edges of his clothing, to the edges of his encounters with others, to the edges of the glass facade, to the edges of the gallery, and to the edges of geographical spaces such as the riverfront and the city. (6)

Rahm, in his essay: Worrying Conditioning of Space, speaks about how modernity has gradually reduced itself in thickness and in materiality. Heavy stones walls replaced by thin glass curtains; the smell and crackling sounds of wood-burning fireplaces have disappeared and replaced by the silent radiation of heaters. The homogenous and uniform luminosity of electricity replaced the wonderment of daylight and the flicking of candle flames. The invisible conditioning of space presents an undetermined zone, risky and unknown, apt at creating worry. Fear is no longer symbolic; it becomes physiological; it acquires thickness; it concerns space itself. Now, not only is fear submitted to our gaze, it penetrates our skin. Fears goes past our retina, invades our lungs at each breath, makes the air vibrate, conditions it and conditions us. Modernity, up until today, has created artificial physical environments. It built itself on the urban as well as domestic mastery of space and its climate. (7)

From here forth we will only see the dematerialization of space with the invasion developments in the Information Technologies. Whether invisible or artificial, this non-ionising radiation will contribute to our anxieties in all aspects of contemporary space. Space, electrically neutral in the past, is charged today and totally envelopes us. (8)

Figure/Ground 

To cite Cousins, “The figure is not a thing but a relation, and can never survive alone as itself. It relates to the term ‘ground’. They go together as “figure and ground.” The figure/ground relation in this installation is a very slippery one to grasp and becomes very complex because of the constant change in its visibility. To understand this, we need to go where Cousins would take us, to the classical discussions of the origin of art. 

Blind Light, takes the liberty of representing both the figure and ground on the vertical plane rather than the horizontal. The metaphor of silhouettes is a more accurate prognosis with a rhetorical figure rather than a perceptual given. Cousins explains as to why the figure and ground is easily identified in a silhouette because it is not the pictorial information we are seeking but an unconscious expectation. He also states that the body at all times, is a physical organism whereas the figure is a relation founded on its distinction from the ground. The high viscosity of this moisture-filled space allows for the foreground and the background to symbiotically absorb each other, to produce a space that is, in itself and for itself, truly autonomous; an autonomy that allows the silhouette to assume an alternate position, half foreground, half background and remain suspended between the two. (10) It is this form of suspension that personifies the phenomena of dis-appearance and re-appearance. In Cousins mind, without the figure and ground, we see what is there but with it we share an event. 

Blind Light endorses the Brownian dynamics in that the figure/ground is forever ‘becoming’, avoiding completion, staying undefined with a growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty. (12) Perhaps there is a direct alliance with Bauman’s metaphors of ‘liquidity’ during this time of ‘interregnum’ to Vidler’s return to animism which also suggests a return to magic, myth and shamanism, and a decided refusal of reason, science, and certain “truth” of all empirical knowledge, deeply implicated in the Enlightenment project. Digitization has rapidly brought about this special form of animism, fulfilling the dreams of the Enlightenment and its mastery of nature while bringing the human into dangerous proximity with the inhuman.’ (13) These adjacencies ‘between architectural skin and our skin, architectural facades and our faces, between the evolution of natural forms and the auto-reproduction of digital forms’, (14) induces elimination of boundaries, in which one consumes the other, where all dualities will dis-appear and a sole singular will re-appear; as the new invisible.  

Dis-appearance/Re-appearance

It is when a visitor enters the mist-filled capsule that one begins to disappear and hence the concept of the artist appears. The real must vanish into the concept! In his book, Why hasn’t everything already disappeared, Baudrilland reassures us that “everything disappears by excess of reality especially with the deployment of our limitless technology, mental and material, human beings will fulfil their potentialities and doing so will eventually, disappear – giving way to an artificial world that expels them from it. That world shall be perfectly objective and impartial since there will be no one left to see it.” There was this eeriness to the installation, in that ‘disappearance’ may have been conceived exactly how Baudrillard predicted in a global scale. It was alarmingly convincing that visitors were drawn into this dense cloud magnetically through a narrow gaseous portal with a specific desire to no longer want to be there. To become invisible to each other. It was as though one wanted to see what the world might be in one’s absence, or as Baudrillard puts it, ‘to see beyond the horizon of disappearance.’ This is when the sublime sentiment reveals itself, and according to Kant, a strong and equivocal emotion that carries with it both pleasure and pain and better still, in it pleasure is derived from pain. Pain in this instance is the growing hysteria of the invisible, the uncertainties and how to enable sight only when it is impossible to see, and it can only be pleased by causing spatial anxiety. 

Herein lies the truth: ‘modern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime, [though a nostalgic one] which is in itself an intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain: the pleasure that reason should not exceed all presentation, the pain that imagination or sensibility should not be equal to the concept.’ (16) Take for instance, Gormley’s Quantum Cloud figures composed of vectors [pins and needles] that imply the appearance of fractures violently constituted from external [imaginary] forces giving origin to our presence within our biological and psychological embodiment. 

Snapshots of Sensation

This portion of the essay will attempt to take on a very broad and abstract look at Blind Light in relation to the nature of art, particularly in painting. Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon dwells on such comparative studies, linking his work to Cezanne’s notion to the ‘logic’ of sensation. 

Cezanne states that the figure is always a sensible form related to a sensation; it acts immediately upon the nervous system, which is of the flesh, whereas abstract form is addressed to the head, and acts through the intermediary of the brain, which is closer to the bone. (18) And if sensation is to be the opposite of facile or the cliché, than Blind Light is profound in its construct because it is one entity, becoming both subject and object, which gives rise to the sensation. Every spectator experiences the sensation of Gormley’s creation only upon ‘entry’ as in Cezanne’s words; “is when the sensing and the sensed are unified.” At this moment, I must insist that you (as the reader) perceive the ‘entry’ [in this context] into the mist-filled installation rather than a painting. Bacon has always said that for him, sensation is what passes from one “order” to another, from one “level” to another, from one “area” to another. This is why in his mind, it[sensation] is a master of deformations when every figure upon entering the ‘cloud’ becomes an instantly distorted figure [silhouette]. Every participate [figure] inside the capsule becomes a living sensation, all flesh and body. What then are these orders, levels and domains and what makes the sensing and sensed come together? 

To Render the Invisible [Blind]

“Life screams at death, but death is no longer this all-too-visible thing that makes us faint; it is the invisible force that life detects, flushes out, and makes visible through the scream.” (20)

To render is to see, one might even mean to transmit sight.  Taking clues from Paul Klee’s famous formula, it may seem that the task of this installation was an attempt to render visible forces that are not themselves visible. Deleuze says the same for music, while its attempts to render sonorous forces that are not themselves sonorous. What this implies is that in the arts; it is not about reproducing or inventing forms, but capturing forces. Blind Light is an all-glazed capsule holding a ‘fog’ with millions of molecular [nano-scaled] bombardments that are held in captivity in a captured space. It is as though the whole material construct, along with its content are in a constant stir [the natural phenomena of the Brownian Movement] with silhouettes [bodies] dis-appearing and re-appearing! And if we were to take parallel observations of Bacon’s faces held captive on canvas and Gormley’s figures held captive in their captured space, then; 

Based on Bacon’s hypothesis, we can confidently speculate that Gormley was also very much a ‘pulveriser’ when he conceived Blind Light. Like Bacon, he too acknowledged the invisible forces that would be randomly colliding with the organisms and hence cleverly creating this unity of the sensing and the sensed at a molecular level to isolate, deform and dissipate the bodies in this man-made cloud of suspended water. One only has to compare this artistic endeavour to the likes of Monet’s 1904 painting of the House of Parliament to take us all into the same realm of deformity [the fog effect] except now, Gormley has boldly added a new dimension to the formula [through cohesion and repulsion] - the forces of space-time continuum ‘bathed’ in white light. 

Conclusion

“What if space itself is not real; like when we look up and spot a large cloud, it has no significant evidence that it is actually there except for us, earthlings; it will always be a visual sensation in the sky. But only when a plane flies through it, only then do we understand its true vaporizing properties and so it actually exists. In experiencing, Blind Light, it was one of those ‘one-of-a-kind physical construct’ that begs to raise the same old question that has been persistently debated, explored and studied throughout the ages past myths and legends; a question that has bewitched, bothered and bewildered theologians, scientist, scholars, poets and society at large: What truly did happen, that at some point in time; did something appear out of nothing? 

Credits

Bibliography

E. Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

Jean Baudrillard: Simulations

C Greenberg: Collected Essays Vol. 1

G.W.F Hegel: Lectures on the Fine Arts

Jean Baudrillard: The Vital Illusion

D Hollier: Against Architecture

I. Kant: Critique of Judgement

Jean Baudrillard: From Hyperreality to Disappearance

H.Wolfflin: The Renaissance and Baroque

Boris Groys: In the Flow

Jean Baudrillard: Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?

Antony Gormley: Blind Light

Mark Cousins: Exhibition Catalogue Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey

Henning Genz: Nothingness

Zygmunt Bauman: Liquid Modernity

Gilles Deleuze: Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation

Pier Vittorio Aureli: Less Is More

Heike Munder, Adam Budak: Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered

Christopher Kul-Want: Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Postmodernists