https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=EWc7TKm9jho
It’s not surprising, you know, that this is what she’s doing. And you can understand that in some ways what she was doing in the 1970s and what she was doing back then is what would lead to things like cutting and self-harm in the modern world, because cutting and self-harm is also a desire to participate. It’s a desire to re-engage the world, right, to reawaken our engagement with the world. It’s just a very deluded and deranged version, which enters into this sadomasochistic paradigm that appears at the beginning of the modern age, right? It’s like all I can understand the world to be is either a world of power in which I inflict pain and violence and torture, or I am the recipient of violence and pain and torture. And if I can do that to myself, then I am in control of the nihilism that I’m living in, of the kind of dark world that I’m engaged with. This is Jonathan Pageau. Welcome to the symbolic world. Hello to all of you. Welcome to the symbolic world. Today we’re going to talk about art. I was really surprised to notice how many people watched my video on El Greco and Andy Warhol. So I thought we will push it a little further and we’ll look at contemporary artists like Marina Abramovich of Pizzagate fame and a few other contemporary artists. And we’ll look at and a few other contemporary artists and we’ll look at how much of contemporary art or some contemporary art is yearning for participation. Look at how they come close to it and also how they struggle to break through. And so as you notice, a lot of things have been going on in the symbolic world. We have a new website that you can sign up to. There’s a new community, a bunch of gifts even for people who sign up. And as you can see, I have behind me the beautiful mosaic that was made by my carving assistant David and was designed by Heather Paulington. And so I’m surrounded by wonderful people. Really excited to carry on with the symbolic world as we reach new levels. So what we’re going to look at is the question of contemporary art and how it moves into extremes and moves towards participation. But first, what I want you to think about is many of the modern artists were in some ways in the what I call pendulum, a pendulum of de-incarnation, you could call it, where on the one hand the art tends to move up towards ideal shapes, towards idealism, towards you know, and it also tends to move down towards either popular art or common art or everyday representations. This pendulum happens in many ways, sometimes almost contradictory. But nonetheless, the pendulum is there. And so here we’re looking at an artist named Brancusi. Many of you will know him. And what’s interesting about these artists is that if you look at what they’re doing, some of it, you know, is not a problem in itself. And so Brancusi, one of the things he was trying to do was something like distill the essence out of the art. So many iconographers, artists like Aidan Hart, who has written much about iconography, has even suggested the possibility that, you know, there’s something akin to icons in some of the modern movements. If you look at the way the face is simplified, this desire to kind of find the basic geometry of the face and to represent it, it’s something that Aidan sees happening in icons. If you look at the difference between Roman art and Christian medieval art or iconographic art, you get a sense that the iconographic art is more distilled. It doesn’t tend to show a lot of the excesses of the material world, but tends to, let’s say, rectify or simplify the forms. Now, this wasn’t necessarily done with the same drive as the modern artist that is really trying to almost reduce to an essence, but nonetheless there is something that you might want to see as akin. Now, this is true, but it’s interesting to think about how there is a, in terms of moving towards an art, of course, of participation, you have a basic issue, which is going to be in some ways the development of the personal style. And so as Brancusi or other artists want to do this distilling, they also at the same time end up creating things that are so particular to themselves that their personality is impregnated completely on it. And so it doesn’t have a kind of universal appeal, communal appeal that the traditional art would have, like images and icons. They do distill the forms, but they do that in a way that is also calling to participation in the community, whereas Brancusi is creating artists of contemplation, objects of contemplation, objects of aesthetic pleasure that would be in people’s houses or in buildings, but don’t necessarily have so much of that capacity to participate in a community. Another example is, of course, Kandinsky. Now, many people have pointed Kandinsky out to me saying, isn’t Kandinsky something akin to what you’re trying to do? He’s trying to find the meaning in colors. Kandinsky created this whole theory of color symbolism, where each color represented certain moods, certain states of human existence, and then he created this almost symbolic language of colors in his paintings, where he brought all these colors together, contrasting with each other and existing together in order to bring about this kind of symbolic language of color. There is something interesting about that, once again, in the way that my friend Aiden Hart points out, that there’s something of that in color, in icons, where in icons certain colors have a certain importance in certain representations. For example, we represent the veil of the virgin with a royal color. We use gold, we use white, we use black and darkness to manifest certain characteristics. It’s not as typified as in Kandinsky, and it’s not as typified as sometimes people want to think, but there is definitely a basic symbolism of color that exists in the icons. Now, once again, the issue with Kandinsky, and this of course happens also with people like Piet Mondrian. Piet Mondrian is an artist who was trying to do something similar. He was a theosophist, and so a kind of a spiritualist in the early sense, something akin to what a new ager would be today. He tried to create these simple images of proportions, mathematical proportions and primal colors in order to create this kind of spiritual experience of the painting. Now, one of the issues with both of these is that, for example, with Kandinsky, you have the problem that his forms and his colors create a very idiosyncratic language. So in the desire to actually create something which would be universal, devoid of cultural hooks, that it’s not this or that person, it’s not this or that scene, it’s a universal language. What ends up happening is rather the opposite, is that Kandinsky creates a language which is completely idiosyncratic to himself, and that, you know, unless you’ve read his book on color, you would struggle to find any meaning in his paintings, even in terms of impressions. The impressions that his paintings create on the viewer are not really exactly what he would think they’re doing with his whole very complex theory of color. Now, the same happens with Piet Mondria, is that, you know, although his mathematical proportions, they are universal, they are very much, once again, void of the capacity to participate. And so these images, you look at them, but what are they doing? What is happening with these images? And what’s important to understand in terms of the pendulum is to understand how in the early modern age, and this is something which will be repeated early modernism, not modern age, say at the beginning of the 20th century, something which will be repeated over and over, is that you end up having movements of artists that represent things that look very similar to each other, but for completely opposite reasons. This happened, especially in Russia. So in Russia, you had two movements, you had a movement that you could call supremacism. You see this in Malevich, of course, Malevich, who was kind of continuing Kandinsky’s line of representing these pure mathematical forms, these pure shapes, these pure colors on canvases in order to create a supreme kind of platonic experience of the forms in the paintings. And so there was almost like a spiritualism which is devoid of body, and you see that, of course, in Montgriens as well. It’s trying to create these pure patterns, pure patterns that are are spiritual but that don’t land, that don’t incarnate in the world the way patterns actually usually incarnate in the world. You don’t perceive mathematical proportions, you perceive them, if you look at the golden mean, for example, the golden mean appears as different proportions, the proportions of the body, the proportions of buildings that are participated in. You enter into the building and the fact that your body is made of certain proportions connects with the proportions of the church. And so there might be a little bit of that in the painting, but the painting is something that you stand in front of and you look at. That weird activity of just visual experience is something which is not integrated with other aspects of reality. So now what is interesting about Russian supremacism is that it gives birth to a movement that is its opposite, which is called constructivism. And the constructivists are also using these geometric shapes, but they’re using them in an almost reductionist manner, in a Marxist way. So on the one hand you have this kind of idealism, this high spiritualism in the supremacists, and now this landed very, very practical use in constructivism. Now you look at this and you might think, okay, so what’s the difference between this, which is constructivism, and this, which is supremacism? And that’s my point. My point is that these extremes manifest themselves in a very surprising way, where people, on the one hand someone who wants to create idealistic spiritual forms, and the other person who wants to create Marxist working class, reductionist objects that are made of real things, that are completely material for even the reason of their being, will end up making something similar. And so for the same reason, what you end up seeing is the constructivists end up using the tools of modernism and the design tools of simple geometric forms in order to create propaganda, whereas something like creating propaganda out of abstract geometric forms is something that the supremacists, like Malevich, would have found completely abhorrent and the total opposite of what it is they’re trying to do. Now this of course will continue on into the modern age, and when you get to the 1960s and 70s, you have the exact same problem. In the United States, and in Europe as well, you end up having two movements, one which is called conceptual art and the other which is called minimalism, and what happens is you have these two extremes. And so conceptual art, this is supposed to be very smart. So Joseph Kossuth, you know, he puts a chair in the gallery and then puts a picture of the chair and then puts a definition of the chair to kind of help you understand that, you know, how these objects are actually ideas and that the idea is what is more important than the physical instantiation of the object. And so, you know, it’s super interesting because this is a very, very boring thing. It’s a very boring statement and it’s also a cold clinical action that, you know, is supposed to create just this reflection on the relationship between different representations of an idea in the world and different, you know, putting out there in terms of the creation of an art object, right, because this is the problem. Now this chair, you know, is not an actual chair, right? It’s not a chair that you sit on. It’s a fetishized chair that is used in the gallery in order to create an artistic experience, I guess. And so, although, and so again, you have this problem of the alienation which the art object end up creating in the world. And so, and then you end up having all these tropes of trying to kind of break free, break through the issue that the gallery space provides and, you know, the art space provides the most extreme version of this kind of conceptual art that is trying to be revolutionary. If you remember my last lecture on Adel Greco and Andy Warhol is of course Piero Manzoni who did the, you can read it for yourself, he created cans of art that contained his own excrement. We don’t even know if they really did, but that was the point. The point is to have these cans that contained the excrement of the artist and put them in the gallery. He was kind of taking Duchamp’s gesture to an extreme, but Manzoni did all kinds of things like that where he would take a vial of glass and fill it with air in Paris, you know, just have a vial of glass open in Paris, close it and then show it all over the world and call it, you know, air from Paris or something. It was this desire to kind of expose in some ways, almost, the very mechanisms of art and the very mechanisms of how art is a fetishized representation of something that has lost its purpose. So it’s not clear exactly what his point was in the sense that is he denouncing it, is he participating in it, maybe he’s doing both at the same time, but he can perceive the problem of participation and the problem of the space, the art space itself, as this strange space where we put things there in order for us to just look at them and they don’t have a kind of integration into the world. And so this conceptual art, this high conceptual art, will at the same time exist with other artists that are doing what we call minimalist art. And here we’re looking at pure reductionism. So if you look at an abstract painting by Frank Stella, for example, and so, you know, abstract lines on a canvas and it might make you think that this has more to do with Malavitch, but someone like Frank Stella would be the very opposite of Malavitch. He would say that my paintings are just paint on a surface. That’s all they are. They have no meaning. They have nothing except for just being paint on a surface. Now, obviously, you know, at this point, hopefully everybody can understand that this is a, of course, a ridiculous gesture. It’s a ridiculous gesture to think that you can have just paint on a canvas. The whole question of relevance and of wondering why I would care about paint on a canvas and not care about paint on a wall or not care about, you know, whatever it is, is of course re-engaging and is a kind of strange, almost blind spot of an artist like Frank Stella where, you know, the putting in the gallery of this canvas with abstract painted lines on it cannot avoid entering into the whole question of meaning, of prestige and of relevance and the question of culture and why we would have these objects that we elevate above other objects and that we see as being kind of fetishized as culture objects rather than just everyday, common day objects. And so, you know, you can see how the pendulum calls each other, right? The pendulum just calls one extreme to the other and sometimes even in the same object. And so, without the whole structure of art and the whole structure of culture and this whole idea of these objects of contemplation and that are fetishized and put above common day objects almost in a religious way, Frank Stella could not be making his paintings. And so, even though he makes a reductionist move, the very fact that we care about his reductionist move, you know, makes his art participate in the other extreme all the time and you see the same thing with any of the minimalist artists. Here are more examples, Carl Andre and Donald Judd who created these simple materials. They would just create these forms and, you know, the Donald Judd, his boxes are made out of plywood. They’re made out of very common materials and put up in galleries in a very simple way in a very reductionist gesture. Once again, you know, it’s very difficult for them to avoid this pendulum. Now, one of the things that happens and it’s interesting to start thinking about is that there is, in the 1960s especially and it’s then in the 1970s, you have almost like a breakout where I think many of the artists started to realize just how sterile a lot of this abstract art was becoming. This conceptual art, these minimalist art, how sterile and just, can I say, fetishized in the weirdest way that these objects started becoming. And so, what you have is artists that almost try to start to break out and in that group you have performance artists who start to use art almost in a ritual fashion. This is what I mean by the question of ritualization. So, this is Joseph Beuys. Joseph Beuys was an airplane pilot in World War II and his plane crashed and he has a whole story about what happened to him. And so, his art tends to deal with these issues, right, with the issues of the war, the issues of survival, the issues of the human person put in contact with animality. And so, some of it is a little simplistic because it’s almost like his own process of healing through what he went, you know, like the felt blanket that he would have had in the military, the sled, a flashlight, you know, there’s a sense in which he’s creating these spaces that are just putting things together in a way that is, let’s say, remembering participation, right? So, it’s the object in the gallery is obviously just fetishized like all the other art objects, but because he’s trying to bring about a memory of the war, a memory of, you know, how these objects participated in his own life, then there’s something going on. Now, we’re going to get back to Joseph Beuys, but of course, the most famous of the performance artists, especially right now is of course, Marina Abramovich. And it’s interesting to think about her and her work and what she was trying to do because in some ways, you know, she was also trying to kind of break through the problem of art, art especially, you know, represented as here’s the art and here’s the public. And now we go in and we are these passive, these passive almost, you know, consumers, and we just look at these art objects and there’s no form of connection to the world and to life. And so, what she was trying to do, you know, she was trying to do a lot of things, but one of the things she seems to be trying to do is to try to break through that problem. So, she did very strange performances. One of her most famous performance is shown here where Marina Abramovich stood in a gallery for six hours and she put on a table a bunch of objects. And all those objects were objects that a certain amount of people in the space with her were allowed to use on her. And so, you had feathers, you had paper string, you kind of see, but you also had more dangerous objects like a gun, like a knife. And she just stood there for six hours. She wasn’t allowed to react. She just had to take it. And then everybody in the gallery was allowed to do whatever they want. They were absolved of any responsibility legally. Of course, probably some of this is quite staged. You know, I don’t want to question her method. But of course, as you can imagine, the situation starts very lightly and then accelerates and it ends in moments where, you know, she’s very much in danger, where a knife is used on her. You know, there’s a, she’s stripped, she’s put on the table, all these things are happening to her. You know, someone’s, you know, kind of threatens her with a knife. And so in the end, someone tries, pulls a gun out and then someone reaches for the gun, takes the gun away. And so, you know, it’s like in Tentative, a nice Hollywood movie. But what it seems like she’s trying to do is trying to break through the problem of this passive relationship to the art object. Now she’s doing it obviously in a very modern way. She’s doing it in a way which tends to reduce human. Human, no, she now becomes passive and the viewer becomes active. And the whole relationship is one which seems to be framed on the possibility of sadism and a kind of passive masochism. And so of course, the relationship that she brings about is a very tortuous, modern relationship. But she’s trying to bring back, you could say something like the stakes, like the stakes of art. Like what are we doing? Imagine in the ancient world where you built a church and people would go and worship and there would be, the relics would be taken into the church and people would light candles, you know. And then people would, people when they were angry at the king or whatever, they would deface the statue and there was this whole relationship of art which was seen as participative and connected to life. And so it seems like she is trying to re-engage that in a very perverse way. But nonetheless, you can see that there’s a sense that there’s despair in the art world, that we realize that this is a problem. What are these paintings? Like what is, you know, there’s nothing wrong with decorating decorative art. But is that what it is? Is that all that these paintings are? I don’t, most of the modern artists don’t think so. They think they’re doing something extremely important. But in the end, these art objects end up just being passive objects to look at, you know, to trade, to exchange, to make money off of. And so artists like her try to break that with this type of activity. And so she’s famously known for doing all kinds of weird things. You know, here’s a performance where she’s holding a bow and her friend is pulling on the arrow. And for six minutes he just holds the arrow stretched out. And if he would let go, she would die. Of course, the arrow would go into her heart. And so it’s all about, again, the same weird problem of how to represent a kind of, you know, and this is not just entertainment, right? This is not just a performance in the sense of a play, right, or a ballet or something that is without stakes. And it’s just people doing things and we watch it, then we go home. There’s a sense in which she’s putting herself in danger while she is creating this performance. Of course, you know, like I said before, the relationship seems to be reduced to a kind of sadomasochism, which is very close. You know, it’s funny, people don’t realize to what extent sadomasochism is related to modernism and to what extent in the Enlightenment, at the birth of the Enlightenment, appears both characters, right? Marie de Sade and Saussure Mazoc, the two originators of what we could call sadism and masochism, because there is already a problem. Once the Enlightenment and its pendulum starts to swing, you can see the first fruits of that in this reduction of relationships on the idea of acting purely on someone, right? Being the complete actor where the other person is a complete passive puppet for your desires. And on the other hand, the opposite of becoming that pure puppet for someone else’s desires, of just becoming a passive recipient of other people’s desires and violence. That that is something which would inevitably happen at the birth of modernism. And so Marina, whether she knows it or not, is putting on the scene this relationship, this kind of weird sadomasochist relationship that the modern world has in a desire to re-engage the stakes of art and re-engage, I think, a kind of participation, at least the stakes of art. And so much of her art is… And so she became very famous because she’s ditching weirder stuff. Now this is one of her performances where she just sits in a galley space with a bunch of cow bones and she spends six hours a day or eight hours a day, whatever, trying to wash the blood from the bones. And so that’s all she did. She would sit in the galley and she would just try to wash the blood off the bones for hours. And it creates, again, this very dark image of what it is to be human, what it is to participate. Is that what human life is? Is that what human life is? To try to wash the blood off of bones. The imagery is quite stark and it is quite… It’s actually a very good image of what contemporary life is and what the contemporary world is. This is what the world of participation in the modern world, the analogy or the metaphor for participation is. Now she got herself in a lot of trouble in the last few years because she did a lot of weirder stuff, things that are closer to the occult, things that are closer to rituals. Now you can understand whether she’s sincere or not, like whether or not she’s doing it on purpose or not, how what she’s doing is coming closer to resembling rituals. Because intuitively we understand that ritualization is a form of participation which is closer to the way that we understand art, what art is. That is, it’s a reduction of the world, a compression of the world into a kind of dance, a kind of ordered gesturing, ordered object making. It’s a reductive object. We compress things into images. We compress the cup that is used in the liturgy. It’s a kind of compressed cup. It’s like the cup of cups. It’s a ritualized cup. It’s not just a cup you use every day, but it is a condensation of cup. So there’s an inevitable almost sense that what will happen is as there’s this desire to break out of the just a passive relationship to art, things that people are doing, these performance artists will often start to look like ritual. Now whether they themselves conceive what they’re doing as rituals, nonetheless it’s participating in the same aesthetics. And there’s no surprise that the rituals that they will engage with will be rituals which will reflect the sickness of the modern world. And so she got of course also into a lot of trouble with these performances she did where there were spirit cooking or whatever. She’s done a lot of things. She would write up all these absurd recipes that look like magical formulas using human fluids and stuff mixed together in order to create food. And she did a lot of things with pain where she would film herself just putting her hand over a candle or whatever and just burning herself. It’s not surprising that this is what she’s doing. And you can understand that in some ways what she was doing in the 1970s and what she was doing back then is what would lead to things like cutting and self-harm in the modern world. Because cutting and self-harm is also a desire to participate. It’s a desire to re-engage the world, to reawaken our engagement with the world. It’s just a very deluded and deranged version which enters into this sadomasochistic paradigm that appears at the beginning of the modern age. All I can understand the world to be is either a world of power in which I inflict pain and violence and torture or I am the recipient of violence and pain and torture. And if I can do that to myself then I am in control of the nihilism that I’m living in, of the dark world that I’m engaged with. So you can kind of understand why this is happening. It doesn’t reduce from how dark it is. But of course the most important thing that Marina did recently that kind of shows us an image of the modern world and what is going on is the event she did at the Museum of Modern Art in LA. I think that’s where it is. And so she did this performance with the singer Blondie of all people where now we had a full-on scale desire to re-engage participation. And so she created an art event which was also eating. And so remember all the things that I’ve said about eating as an act of participation and communion especially as the kind of highest ritual act and the highest act of participation. But that is a form of ritualized eating because eating is so close to our engagement with the world. And so now what she does is she creates a feast of eating. And I’m not going to show you all the pictures because they’re quite disturbing. Where she engages all the tropes of cannibalism and all the tropes of human sacrifice into her event. So she had these cakes made of herself and of the Blondie singer and the cakes came in on these tables and now with a knife they stabbed them and cut them and cut pieces and handed pieces of their cake to the people. And you can see how it’s a parody of course obviously of communion. A parody of the Lord’s Supper but done in a kind of dark carnivalesque way. But that is nonetheless trying to like in their own perverted disturbing way trying to break through the problem of the passivity of the art object and the passivity of the entertainment culture and of representation culture. And so during the event on the tables they had actors artists who just stuck their head through the table and their heads were like the centerpiece almost like in like a pig with an apple in its mouth. In the middle of the table as people were eating they would just sit there and stare blankly and they had naked women lying on tables with like skeletons on them and you know just very dark and disturbing things right. And so close to ritualization that of course you know during the 2016 kind of frenetic thing around Pizzagate people started seeing these images and freaking out and the thing is with good reason you know it’s so funny that someone like her engages with tropes of occult cannibalism all these very very dark images and then defends herself and says you know oh I’m just an artist this is just art. But her whole project is about breaking through the just art like breaking through the idea that artists are just like innocent people who represent things. She’s trying to break through she’s trying to re-engage she’s trying to use images of her own self-harm and her own you know doing all these these very dark disturbing gestures and then she’s surprised when it breaks out and then people react in a way that links it to the very things that she’s using as her source material in order to create these things. And so whether or not she’s an actual Satanist or an occultist like I’ve said often in these videos like I don’t have access to that and to be honest I don’t care but the tropes that she’s using are those if you use tropes of cannibalism and you use tropes of human sacrifice and you use tropes that are magical spells and magical formulas in your recipes and whatever then don’t be surprised if people react to that as if that’s what you’re doing. So anyways it’s just funny to see how she she she then she tried to play the victim and you can see there’s all these articles you can find them online where she’s playing the victims like oh stop harassing me I’m just an artist you know all these conspiracy theorists that are saying that I’m doing these dark things well you are doing these dark things you might not take it seriously maybe you’re just doing it you know to be an artist whatever that means but the like I said the tropes you’re engaging those are the tropes those are the tropes so you know obviously I don’t want people to harass her or whatever I wouldn’t want I don’t want that to happen but you know nonetheless this is what is this is what is going on in her work now one of the things I want to do is return to Joseph Boyce because Joseph Boyce you know understood what he was doing very much as ritual and and he was almost using kind of shamanistic shamanistic thing he did these performances where he would lock himself in in a room with uh with like wool with a wolf and he wore this felt blanket and would like engage with the with the wolf in certain ways and was trying to almost create these rituals and one of the problems that were they were trying to deal with these artists was of course world war ii and you know Joseph Boyce was a german artist how to deal with the scandal of world war ii how to break through the guilt and the shame and the the guilt you know the all the things that happened that he did as a soldier that germans did and so trying to create these almost rituals of atonement in order to get through that and so he did all kinds of stuff uh you know uh kind of absurdist things now of course the problem with this is is the same problem as with kandinsky is that you can totally understand the desire to re-engage rituality you can totally understand the the desire to also feel like there’s no way to atone for the sins of your people for your own sins and try to create rituals of atonement and of transformation but but when you do it in a gallery and you do it you know in a space that is just there to to hold art objects when you do it in a language that becomes so idiosyncratic that nobody can participate in except for you that people are looking at you ripping up pieces of paper and you’re writing on billboards and skinning a hair like he did all kinds of stuff you know playing the piano absurdly um that you you might think that you’re kind of doing something that’s breaking through but ultimately this will remain with you right it it will not become a true language of participation another artist that i personally enjoy and like i said it’s just because each of these artists has a little hint that there’s a desire to move away from a kind of fetishization and and and uh of the of art and a you know and the kind of meaning not meaninglessness but you know this idea of art for art’s sake that this pure art that just exists is is an artist called ansom keifer so ansom keifer did things that were similar to what joseph poise was doing um and but his whole uh let’s say theme is about the possibility of using art as a a kind of medicine where the representation of the images could take let’s say culture and break it down or bring it down uh into the dark place and then try to have it rise back up and so you know he would represent some of these nazi uh nazi building arctic this nazi architecture and would cover it with tar would would try would cover it with like all with uh actual material not just paint you know he would he would have ash and he would put sand and and straw and all these things on the paintings and would you know and and trying to in some ways you know rebaptize or or refound these buildings that are there right what do you do now you have these nazi buildings that are there in berlin or in other places in germany and how do you get through this like do you destroy them do you you just get rid of them and so his sense is that there’s a kind of deep duplicity in his art where he he is trying in some ways to recast uh very uh with a hesitation these objects and almost trying to act like a kind of traditional healer and heal these art objects now once you understand that what he’s doing his art the key to his art opens up very simply he represents you know these lead wings or sometimes you represent a lead artist uh palette painter’s palette that will be stuck on top of his of his uh images he represent airplanes sometimes war airplanes as this dual symbol of something which is both dark but also rises up and so there’s this ambiguity about his work and but the ambiguity seems to be wanting to kind of push through and to to to to break through the problem of modernism and the problem of world war two um the iconology that he uses is actually quite uh it’s a little simplistic you know it’s a little it’s a little over the top so here’s a simple example right he a man lying on his back and then out of him is coming this thing a flower uh you know a kind of stream and this is going up now becoming a flower that dies and the seeds now fall back on the earth and so you can kind of see this cycle of death and rebirth that he’s trying to show in the image here this is actually the louvre um you can see that there’s a bunch of books right and the books are kind of stacked and and piled and they they’re made of lead and so they’re dead you know in some ways or they they’re kind of like the problem of uh you know i talk about this the problem of culture and the problem of uh the problem of uh of art as this supplement as this kind of dark aspect to culture in general and so he gets that um and then he shows out of it you know a nonetheless kind of leaden flower and so if you had seen this in person the very center of these dead flower is gilded it has gold on it and then a few of the seeds that have fallen back onto the trees onto the books uh are also golden and so a lot of it is leaded but you have this kind of little hope piercing through right this dead this dead culture see the same uh you know in this image as well so the sunflower comes up and then the sunflower drops its seeds back onto the ground and you hope that some of it will be reborn the sunflower seeds are also stars in his kind of imagination you can understand you know here is something like the milky way uh this idea of like the principalities coming up and then acting back upon us you know so there’s something about his work which is obviously a little kitschy a little new agey a little simplistic in its uh in its kind of basic um imagery something that you might find in a in a kind of second rate union type of thinking but the desire to represent this this kind of decadence and this breakdown of culture and the weight of history and how you know in this death that there might be something that is reborn i think is a desire and a hope that for sure i share and and so i do find some resonance in in his work in that sense and i think that understanding that is something that has pushed me towards some of the things that i’m doing now the problem of course with keifer and just like the problem with joseph boyce or the problem with marina brownwich is that the spaces in which they create these things they are artificial spaces themselves right the museum the gallery the these are are kind of fetishized spaces they aren’t spaces of they aren’t the public square they aren’t the church they aren’t the the civic buildings they aren’t the things that we kind of recognize as holding our identity holding our participation um and and although the artist you know created these gallery spaces not the artists but first the art dealers created these spaces just for art in order to sell art then those those spaces became uh you know like just places to see art and to to to visualize it um is its desire to break through now i don’t think they succeed i don’t think they succeed because they’re trapped inside the art world they’re trapped inside a weird like keifer for example his his paintings are very much on the art market they’re they’re objects of speculation for for art dealers and art collectors you know and so just like all the other artists he probably manages how many pieces he puts out in the market he calculates his moves in order to make sure to make the the best killing in terms of selling all of these things are inevitable in the in the art world um and then collectors will let’s say want to see shows by this artist in order to make their collection be worth more so there’s this strange uh this whole strange things in which they participate and the same thing with marina abramovich you know she’s she she has these this this art foundation and then she has it funded by these elites in order to make performance art that exists only within the space of the artist and the space of art and doesn’t really land right it doesn’t it doesn’t turn into folk dances it doesn’t turn in to things that people imitate and in some ways she probably doesn’t even want that to happen because she she doesn’t totally understand the way that patterns embody themselves in the world and so but what you can see is at least the desire to kind of break through and i think that once you see that you can understand why you know there are ways to do it you know that there is a a possibility of re-engaging and you know at least in my vision it starts with liturgical art because the liturgical space the church is still a true space of participation it is not although in some churches in in europe it has become a fetishized museum most churches at least are still and sometimes the ones that are the least beautiful or that aren’t as beautiful as the great cathedrals for example are are spaces of true participation and so the possibility of creating objects within that that world you know can anchor them in terms of their beauty but then also in terms of the participation now in order to give you a bit of hope it’s not like these contemporary art movements were the only movements to exist in the modern world there were movements that tried to also integrate the different forms so there are art movements that tried to you know resist this fetishization that happened in the in the modern world you know you can see that of course in in movements like the arts and craft movements and also art nouveau which tried to link you know the the architectural the object printmaking that tried to kind of integrate that into the into the world now i think that the arts and craft movement and art nouveau succeeded much more than the modern artists in avoiding the extremes now of course one of the issues with with the arts and craft movement and art nouveau is there was nonetheless this kind of um how can i say this there was a a lack of of anchoring a little bit in terms of form you know there was a fantastical movement especially art nouveau where we kind of moved through these fantastical shapes that moved into extremes and it were very hard to embody in the long term for example so it’s not surprising that art nouveau was like a flash that really tried to integrate but then didn’t really succeed in the end it ended up kind of falling apart and also because they there was so much emphasis on ornament you know you see that with william morris and the and some of the arts and craft people there was so much beautiful ornamentation you can see that you know in the uh you can see that in these interiors for example where there’s a there’s a rich use of fabric of ornamentation trying to kind of integrate these things into the common life beauty into the common world so not just beauty for beauty’s sake but but beauty in a chair beauty in a beauty in a in a curtain and something that is part of the everyday life um and so you know there’s still some of that people can still kind of hold on to that a little bit but uh there was such a there was such a kind of excess you could say in the in the aesthetics in terms of i mean here it’s like gilded peacocks on the wall you know this type of of gilded surfaces and extremely you know designed surfaces are things that maybe should be reserved for civic spaces for um for churches but of course because art nouveau was a modern movement it got focused on homes and you know it’s okay for your home to be beautiful but if you push it too much and you create these excessively lavish homes that aren’t for a king for example that are that are trying to be a model for the way in which we exist it’s going to be difficult to kind of hold on to that but there are some things from these movements that we can nonetheless capture and kind of vision in order to think differently about how art participates in life and to understand that you know the possibility of integrating beauty into the everyday into the everyday object is something which is not uh it’s not impossible because the the arson craft movement and the art nouveau movement was able to make beautiful lands beautiful pots beautiful you know different objects of just participation uh in the world and so there is a bit of access and so you can understand why you know the modernists tend to think that because of industrial um the industrial process that these types of ornamentation have become impossible that we should really you know move towards uh you know a kind of uh simple simple simple geometric forms so hopefully this was just a bit of fun for you to kind of understand and see that the not only does the modern world and modern art really emphasize these extremes often this pendulum of abstraction you know high high abstraction but then also materialist very reductionist concerns but that there were desires and there’s artists that tried to break through you know this just passive weird uh art object tried to re-engage participation but would often do it in a way that would nonetheless re-engage these extremes extremes of idiosyncrasy extremes of of sadism and masochism in the terms in the case of abramovich um you know and and create these obscure languages that nobody understood although there are some like ansom keifer that i showed you who were re-engaging images that you could recognize right a wing artist palette a human body these things trying to be reintegrated a little kitschy maybe a little new agey uh but but at least you can perceive the desire right this desire to break through and uh ultimately i do think that uh that liturgical art is the way out at least for you know not to become a famous artist and to become uh and to become known and to be shown in magazines or whatever and in in different uh publications but but in order to really participate in in a community beauty making meaning making within the community this seems to be at least the anchor of a way out and so thanks everybody for your attention i hope you enjoyed it um and uh i will talk to you very soon you