'It is not through a higher perfection that artworks separate from the fallibly existent but rather by becoming actual, like fireworks, incandescently in an expressive appearance.' - Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory.
As art is anchored more and more by the orbit of our ecological age, transience and impermanence find themselves being more aesthetically significant than perhaps ever before. One only has to think of Olafur Eliasson's Ice Watch, a cluster of ice blocks which travelled from glacial Greenland all the way to the Tate Modern, where they slowly met their inexorable end, as patches and puddles that would soon dribble into the nearby Thames. This aesthetics of the ephemeral can be contrasted with the Hegelian glorification of art as a truer expression of the beauty of the spirit, when compared to mere 'nature', engendering a historical lament from environmental aestheticians, as longevity and the putative infinity of cultural beauty is praised over and above the transience of its natural manifestation. This is encapsulated in Hegel's Lectures on Fine Art, where he comments on the ways that art dialectically morphs into 'its infinite form' out of its 'immediate natural and sensuous existence', as 'humanity' putatively 'constitutes the centre and content of true beauty and art'. Humanity therefore acts as the requisite conduit for the manifestation of true and in turn infinite beauty, which purifies, according to Hegel, 'the defect of finitude'. Finitude as defect might well be what constitutes the cleavage between art and nature in many respects, hence why the preservation of art works is such a indispensable part of aesthetic appreciation, certainly in the context of a gallery or museum, and why the conservation of nature can only last so long. This sentiment is reflected in the work of notorious 'YBA' artist Damien Hurst, for example, whose preserved tiger shark embodies the Hegelian sprit of art with the name 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.' This formaldehyde filled apex predator was caught by a commissioned fisherman in Queensland, Australia, ultimately funded by businessman Charles Saatchi, whose opulence bolstered and fuelled Hurst's career. Eschewing the defect of finitude was seemingly consolidated in the foregoing artwork, transforming this mere 'natural and sensuous' existing and decaying creature into a ostensibly permanent and in turn lucrative object.
The sheer permanence of art, however, is always tenuous, fickle like the value of stocks and shares. As Theodor Adorno delineates in his book Aesthetic Theory 'Artworks have no power over whether they endure'. As he continues 'For that can only take place at the cost of the work's relation to those contexts in which permanence is exclusively constituted'. In a world of ecological demise, Hurst's tiger shark leaves a sour taste in the mouth, as this epoch loosely termed the 'Anthropocene' makes the sanctitude of the infinite appear less and less tantalising and indeed convincing. The willingness to preserve now seems like an ill conceived effort to eschew the powers that ultimately envelop all living things. As Adorno puts it 'Through duration art protests against death' and yet 'as soon as artworks make a fetish of their hope of duration, they begin to suffer from their sickness unto death.' There is something ailing about striving for permanence, especially when these formaldehyde corpses are denied of their own death. In heavy contrast to Hegel's desire for the infinity of beauty, Schiller writes 'Weeping that Beauty must pass, what is most perfect must die', a line that expresses a nascent aesthetics of finitude, congruent for our ecological age. The finitude of beauty for Adorno 'holds not only for those who are beautiful, not simply for works that are destroyed or forgotten or that have sunk back into the hieroglyphic but for everything composed of beauty and of what according to its traditional idea was meant to be unchangeable, the constituents of form.' If beauty must die, one is paradoxically provoked to smash the glass panel display case that Hurst's tiger shark is encaged, letting it go to die its death freely in the pacific ocean. Of course, such wishes might seem trivial in the context of 'real' sharks endangered across our seas, but the freedom to live and the liberty to die are not as incommensurable as they might seem. Death is not just an event, but a process like life, as the body disintegrates like the gradual decay of an apple.
Apples are it would seem, at least culturally so, to be at the bedrock of our very concept of finitude, as famously represented in Genesis, whereby Eve's hedonistic shaking of the apple tree's bough sends fruit flying down onto the primordial couple's heads, turning their halcyon fantasy into shameful naked timidity, with Eve being the finite body and Adam being the infinite mind. A curtain of apples hang from the ceiling of a capacious room in Margate's Turner gallery, emitting a fetid aroma of death and decay, with a hint of bitter and sultry cider, fermenting into something living and dying, abject and yet desirable. Anya Gallaccio's exhibition 'Preserve' encapsulates Schiller's aphorism, as the preservation of beauty always leads to its inevitable end. Filled with organic objects including decaying trees, whose branches are slowly wilting from the weight of moss and lichen, as well as melting candles and chalk, Gallaccio creates a space that is alive and yet concurrently dead. It is an eerie, multisensory environment, but not some contrived 4-D space that forces an engagement with the senses beyond the ocular. Rather, it is one that seamlessly infiltrates the membrane of our bodies as we sense and breathe in the atmosphere of these living and dying objects. Are these apples artificial, I speculate? Upon closer inspection, I can see and smell the fungi and maggots burrowing into their tart dwellings. The finitude and decay of the organic is intuitive, not intellectual. This is a process that is as natural as our perception of the waxing and waning of the moon. We are not like David Hume, waiting for the sun to rise across the Scottish peaks to know that it will. We know this apple is dying and decaying and will one day disappear, only to leave a trace that is spectral yet not spiritual, in the way that Hegel might see it for instance. Here in this gallery, laying on the foundations of the British tradition of landscape paintings which are tirelessly preserved, is a sweltering cesspool, one that is leaking through the earth, as organic materials splinter off into minutia. This is the defect of decay, the beauty and perfection that must die if we are to truly live through this ecological age.
References
Adorno. Aesthetic Theory. Bloomsbury: London. Tr. R. Hullot-Kentor. 2024.
Hegel. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Volume 1. tr. T.M. Knox. Oxford: 1975.
No comments:
Post a Comment