the (anti)material imagination

One has to admit that modernism in art is, for the most part, a pain in the arse. It's too often not the dissolution of the imaginary border between art and life, but rather a series of put on weirdo gestures: a contrived wounded bird act that only serves to stress by contrast the elevated actressy qualities of its producers.

This apparent division: between primary qualities and secondary qualities; the ideal and the real, that art sometimes promises to abolish but really cannot, for political reasons: this apparent division follows so closely the style and rhetoric of advertising as hardly justifying enquiry into its other possible sources.

The rules of advertising are of necessity simple. The pure colours of advertising surely indicate the divinity of the commodity, (necessarily material but) somehow free from the depredations of time that afflict all thing material.

(the influence of these ideas could be tracked alongside technological advances in printing)

But this same metaphysical system is (naturally) applicable universally, and one can imagine the consequences: a wonderfully pure sphere of interpersonal communication (inevitably) undercut by an ugly insistant materiality.

(something Lyotard gets very well: the interplay of the concept ordering matter and the materiality, so to speak, of matter: the grain of the voice etc, like all problems a political problem)

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, exiled in Switzerland, writes of the first Cubist painters:

"In the words of Locke, these painters distinguish between primary and secondary qualities. They endeavor to represent the primary, or most important qualities, as exactly as possible. In painting these are: the object's form, and its position in space. They merely suggest the secondary characteristics such as color and tactile quality leaving their incorporation into the object to the mind of the spectator"

In my opinion Kahnwelier has the right terminology but applies it inexactly. The point, surely, is as much to stress the real richness of materiality against its induced reflexive evasion.

1908: Picasso is going to attempt to undermine this upstart Primary. Marie Laurencin is looking at things from a different angle.

braque attack

Who can now recall the allusive, vaguely prissy style of Jean-Francois Lyotard?

"What then, is the postmodern? What place does it or does it not occupy in the vertiginous work of the questions hurled at the rules of image and narration? It is undoubtedly part of the modern. All that has been received, if only yesterday (modo, modo, Petronius used to say), must be suspected. What space does Cézanne challenge? The Impressionists'. What object do Picasso and Braque attack? Cézanne's."

"In an amazing acceleration, the generations precipitate themselves. A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant."

And in fact Lyotard is here close to recapitulating the historico-philosophical system his work sets out to undermine: the graduated unfolding of the Western Spirit: pontiff upon pontiff: each stage in turn precipitating the substrate of its successor, formally:

Maggot - Caster - Maggot

(a system that incidentally erases the influence on cubism, for instance, of non-western art and mass-market kitsch art)

Lyotard's work, in contrast to this, is understood to exemplify "incredulity towards meta-narratives". But is this really an attack on something fundamental? Or rather a grandiose way of querying the persuasive but ultimately faulty metaphysics of television? That by its academic nature cannot but eternalise a problematic that is very much historically specific?

these bits and pieces

"...for certain I am sending you the pictures I told you about yesterday in my letter ... there are three of them the biggest a violin on its side and then a still life done at Druetrx the hotel-keeper's place with the letters Mazagran armagnac cafe on a round table a fruit bowl with pears a knife a glass. The other still life Pernod on a round wooden table a glass with strainer and sugar and bottle written Pernod Fils with in the background posters mazagran cafe armagnac 50..."

- Pablo Picasso

"The Architect's Table is cluttered by objects that had traditionally been either hand-made or produced by relatively simple, if not pre-industrial techniques. That is to say, the 'object-world' evoked or depicted by this and other such Cubist paintings is the precisely object-world that was -- at that very time -- being rapidly destroyed, and replaced with a new one, by mass industrial production. Every conceivable object -- no matter how 'aristocratic' or 'banal' in past times -- was then beginning to be mass-produced and widely distributed by huge industrial combines. The reign of the spectacle-commodity had begun. Tables and carafes and posters and pieces of furniture and glasses and calling cards and knives were mass-produced by complex electrically-powered machines. The skilled artisans of the past were now unneeded, obsolete; the relatively scarce objects formerly reserved for the bourgeois alone could be increasingly be purchased by anyone, anywhere."

"Clark notes that 'viewers of Cubism have always relished the sheer banality of the things it does denote,' but is unable to rise above this banality himself. He asks, half-rhetorically, 'What could we find to say about them?' If this were the T.J. Clark of the chapter on Pissarro and anarchism, the answer would be: 'These bits and pieces are fragments of the world hated and bombed to pieces by Seurat and Ravachol.'"

- Bill Brown

Already we can do more to categorise the object-world of cubism.

Firstly the recapitulation of the baroque ensemble that itself registers delight, fascination and horror with regard to the passage of time:

(Kautsky: "we see that identical words change their meaning over the centuries, that ideas and institutions that resemble each other externally have a different content, because they arise out of the needs of different classes under different conditions")

so, perishable precious items: fruit, flowers; stringed instruments;

(Plato: "for harmony is not like the soul, as you suppose; but first the lyre, and the strings, and the sounds exist in a state of discord, and then harmony is made last of all, and perishes first" )

objects mass-produced through the factory system and consumed straightaway, or nearly: newspapers; tobacco;

objects petitioning for an alternative use of time: aperitifs; the calling card.

cubism

"I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in connection with modern painting" Pablo Picasso says in a 1923 interview, coolly anticipating Daniel-Henry Miller's latest fulgurescence. But how does cubism work?

You can imagine:

accepted the cinematicity of consciousness,

the minimum that a film needs to do to stress its involvement in (what we are obliged to call) a three-dimensional world is that it captures an object in rotation.

Now, the film here would consist of many (notionally) two-dimensional images, the aggregation of which merely give the impression of three dimensionality.

But each of these images outside its sequence could equally represent no possible real object.

Simultaneous to the realisation of objectivity in (notionally) three dimensions is the complementary realisation of the object in time.

Consequently the forced thwarting of three-dimensionality of the object of cubism simultaneously thwarts the temporality of this object.

Cubism as such is, for the first time in the history of western art, able to capture the metaphysics of commodity production.