Excursus on Expressionism and Realism

Specification of instrumental language is all that is needed to construct a machine and by oppostion to define the human. “ If what exactly stated can be done by a machine, the residue of the uniquely human becomes coextensive with the linguistic qualities that interfere with precise specification –ambiguity, metaphoric play, multiple encoding and allusive exchanges between one symbol system and another. The uniqueness of human behavior thus becomes assimilated to the ineffability of language” (Hayles 67). In principle, any machine can be built as long as you can specify what you want the machine to do. This means that as long as you are able to trace the set of steps needed for a certain apparatus to do an action, any robot can be built. The alternate wing of this robot/human ensemble is that anything that cannot be specified in terms of instrumental language, i.e. metaphor; poetry, sensations, feelings, sentiments, intuition, etc, belongs to the human realm. Here is the conundrum of trying to quantify language in order to make it applicable to industrial and commercial purposes such as advertising: only instrumental, unambiguous language can be quantified. I’m afraid that in the present technological and scientific stage, to quantify double meaning, irony, code switching, body language and gesture, tone of voice and eyesight expression is impractical and unviable.

Another questions open up when we take the opposites human/machine in linguistic terms to the field of art. If to be human is to be semantically unmeasurable, then art is that kind of expression that no machine, no matter how much sophisticated and advanced is, cannot do. Art is, in these terms, what only the fathomless of the human soul can express.

The default question, regarding art history and art theory is concerned with the validity of “expressionism” as a current, contemporary artistic trend. Expressionism in art today would connote the viewpoint of the struggle of the human oppressed by the machine. That was a fitting metaphor and reality of the Industrial Revolution; but it remain to be seen if the metaphor of the subjugating machine still holds and if the reality still exist in the present. Another thing is to find out what the routes of escape that would be expressionist artists today would seek. Since the routes of escape for late 19^th and 20^th Century artists were the primitive, the savage, the child and the madman; and these routes are either exhausted or they don’t represent anymore the promise of redemption they used to; wouldn’t be more appropriate to consider or explore new routes of escape such as virtual worlds, second-lives, social media, internet sex and others? I leave that question open. We need to take into account  that the human and the machine have a major, unbridgeable difference: the body and its capacity for sexual reproduction and sexual pleasure; as well as other sorts of bodily pleasures. If you escape, don’t forget to return to the human.

Here is the paradox of trying to escape post-industrial society through technology: perhaps you are not reaching the human but getting away from her/him. But this is something that remains to be seen, and the answer may lie in Gregory Bateson's question: is the cane part of the blind man? " 'We are our epistemology' is Gregory's formulation"  (Hayles 78). Expressionism in art could only make sense in terms of a dichotomy of man/machine, but not in a conception of machine as an extension of man. Choose sides and you would see if you can legitimately do expressionism or not. By choosing sides you would also fall in ether the forces of conservatism or of change, and these boundaries are not so clear-cut in today’s environment. 

Would a robot ever be able to experience the sublime? Would an artificial Intelligence or AI ever be capable of aesthetic contemplation? If the answer is no then you have to give to expressionism the merit of trying to rescue the human from the claws of modernity. The same holds true, although to a lesser degree, for Romanticism and for all those artistic manifestations that try to capture the sublime.

Realism is like the alternate wing of a modern art that was never able to make the bird fly. Realism in painting is a mock feather; one that it has been made in the name of authenticity but is composed of the same elements of a scarecrow. I’m talking about the type of photorealism and hyperrealism of late 20^th and early 21^st Centuries; not about the kind of social program realism of a Courbet or a Corot.

In his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin enumerates the elements that add to a work of art’s “aura”: originality, history and tradition, authenticity and uniqueness, and the authority that comes from these features. Benjamin extols the virtues of reproducibility and the impact that technical reproduction and above all photography and film have on society. With the advent of photography,  as Benjamin says, for the first time in history the work of art is taken out of its conventional context, i.e. museum, private collection or gallery, and is made available for consumption by the broad masses. Cinema is experienced as photography in motion with the impact of a “physical shock effect” (Benjamin 525).

“It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty” (Benjamin 522).   

Beautiful representations are most what you see in galleries today thanks to a cult of beauty grounded on commercial needs. Aesthetic contemplation is the kookiest form of consumption of late capitalism, together with all that it brings to a consumer in terms of social status and such. Benjamin saw in photography and film a redemption of the negative connotations of the original work of art. What Benjamin didn’t take into account is that the photographic product, once had reached the printing galleys and gets distributed by mass media or shown in the gallery system, acquires all the connotations that Benjamin was criticizing in the authority of the original work of art. Once is consumed by the laymen in the newspaper, or by the expert in the museum, the photographic image has acquired the use value of a totem in the ritual dimension of the art world or the mass media.

Benjamin compares the consumption of cinema to that of architecture and in opposition to painting, “ A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction” (Ibid 525).  This may hold true for public architecture, which is consumed through the several ways in which we enjoy ourselves while outing. But in the case of private architecture or the places we rent or purchase and live in, the most fitting explanation of how architecture is consumed may be found in Heidegger’s concept of architecture as dwelling.

For Heidegger, architecture is an existential condition that is located in the fourfold of the earth, sky, the divinity and the body. “But ‘on the earth’ already means ‘under the sky’. Both of these also means ‘remaining before the divinities’ and includes ‘a belonging to men’s being with one another’. By a primal oneness the four –earth and sky, divinities and mortals, being together in one” (Heidegger 327). While for Benjamin architecture is consumed by habit since “buildings has been man’s companion since primeval times (…) Buildings are appropriated by a two-fold manner: by use and by perception --or rather by touch and by sight(…) For the tasks which faces the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are gradually mastered by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation” (Benjamin 526).

Habit is the devil’s way of building non-individuals since cinema’s consumption is the way of shaping perception and public opinion. By the same token, public architecture is also a tool of propaganda as much as cinema is. “ The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of the visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert” (Italics are mine). And also “ Thus, for contemporary man, the representation of reality by the film is incomparable more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanic equipment, an aspect of realty which is free of all equipment.” (Benjamin 523). (The hell what did he smoked?)

I’m more inclined to side with Theodore Adorno when he, talking about what he saw at Neuebabelsber, says that “ rather, reality is everywhere constructed with an infantile mimetism and then ‘photographed“ (Adorno 529). Everything that filmmakers today do is to give representation to their inner fantasies. Perhaps the high popularity of Internet home made video is due to that they are more close to reality than professional filmmaking.

Going back to the monkey artists, those who are experts at mimetic painting, they come in several kinds or groups. First, the ones who make their paintings themselves and struggle to surpass photography in depiction of detail. This is a tendency that started since the advent of photography in the 19^th Century when academic painters were at pains competing with photography in the representation of reality. Of course photography won the race fast and furiously but the tendency persisted throughout the century reaching its climax during the 1970’s hyperrealist trend. These painters have the highest place and esteem among the monkey painters.

Behind them comes those who can achieve the same effects than the original hyperrealists but by hiring a crew of assistants to do their work for them. Most of the time the assistant or assistants who do the actual work are more respected and appreciated by their peers and connoisseurs than the public figure and name under which their work is cloaked. Such is the case as when a famous artist with a hefty bank account has a show a venerated public institution and shows a work of art that all the art world insiders know it was not painted by him but by one of his assistants, who is appreciated and admired but to whom credit is not given.

In the third group of the monkey painters come the lowest of the rank. If the ones in the first group could be compared to silver back gorillas, and the ones in the second group to funky chimpanzees, those in the third group are more like macaques.  They strive to paint like they are in the 18^th Century. They lower window shades, shut down electric lights and light up candle bars in their studios. They crave for regressing back to the times of monarchy and the comfort of copying silky plaids, hairy furs, shiny jewelry and humongous hats. Their creations are made of dead, yellow, varnished flesh –longing to achieve the effects of time. Their paintings populated by cadavers craving to come back to life by eating the effects of photography. Projections and grids are the primary tools of the trade and compositions are only reproductions of theatrically assembled arrangements. They all try to achieve all the connotations of the original work of art and its aura by devouring the fleas out of photography and pooping on the achievements of modern art. All in the name of money-making and public reception.

We have to give to them that not all is their fault,  because the ground seed of the good public reception of photorealism and hyperrealism is to be found in the excesses that made expressionism the new academicism of the 20^th Century.

What we have in the first decade of the 21^st Century is a situation in which photography and even film, through mass media consumption and expert digestion has acquired all the negative connotations that the original work of art had in Benjamin’s eyes. On the other hand, painting fools itself by using photography while sequestering it from its promiscuous nature. Benjamin’s hope for the revolutionary capabilities of photography and the printed image are shattered by this use of photography as a fish hook for the bourgeoisie. Photography, and film, has lost its revolutionary quality by kneeling to the altar of political ritual, its use value being politics. Photography based painting doesn’t even get close to being political but only serves as an idol in the religion of beauty. While painting in general is caught in the politics of the machine and the human and that is something of which I only can hint to as what evolution has in storage for us.

Works Cited:

Adorno, Theodor. Letter to Benjamin. Harrison, Charles & Wood, Paul. Art in Theory. 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Malden, MA. Blackwell Publishing, 2006.

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Harrison, Charles & Wood, Paul. Art in Theory. 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Malden, MA. Blackwell Publishing, 2006.

Hayles, Katherine N. How We Became Posthuman. The U. of Chicago P. 1999

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Heidegger, Martin. Building and Dwelling.