Jeremy showed us how Nauman's artwork is a site of contention between his body and his media. His body gave his works form, and his works, in turn, reformed his body. Nauman was perhaps the first artist to use his body (and not just his character) as the very thing at stake in his practice.
Jeremy's talk might offer us a new perspective on the "newness" of new media. Heidegger tells us that the artwork, matter formed into a representation, holds within it the strife between the World (everything that can be represented) and the Earth (the matter that makes everything possible at all). From this we might say go on to say that "new media" are new because they are also formed from energy--light energy in the case of photography. But there are other ways in which new media are new to us, and their relationship to our bodies is one of them.
This story begins with the Romantic movement in art and literature, which held that man has a spiritual, not just a rational, relationship to nature, and that an artwork's aesthetics should evoke this fundamentally emotional experience. In a very liberal view of Romanticism, the spiritual dimension is not necessarily tied to a particular religion, but rather is a yearning for a communion with what is infinitely greater than us. Perhaps more concretely, Romantic imagery is designed to hit the spectator in the body, to give him or her an overall visceral experience that later becomes an intellectual one. Here are two Romantic works by the German painter Caspar David Friedrich, Fir Trees by the Snow (1824) and The Monk by the Sea (1806):
Note how much importance the painting places on your presence. It wants you to experience the fir grove the way you would the front of a gothic church.
The monk stands alone on rugged, windswept terrain. He is solemn as he yearns for his god, who rose the destructive storm on the horizon, and who eternally shines from behind the tempest curtain. The painting makes us feel all of these things because its dark malestrom dwarfs us, analogizing us to the monk. We interpret his spiritual, visceral experience on the rocks to be analogous to our visceral experience of the infinite in the painting.
And the story begins with the steam engine. Originally used for mining, the steam engine became the train once people realized it could pull a lot more on rails than coal. Within a few decades, after the construction of hundreds of kilometers of tracks, countless rail cars, and numerous improvements to the engine itself, the train was blazing across England, Europe, and the US. The "Iron Horse" seemed so powerful it was often called "sublime." In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, "sublime" was not synonymous with "beautiful," but was a different aesthetic judgment altogether. Numerous philosophers described it (it was inspired in part by travelers reactions to the massive, jagged Swiss Alps), and while their accounts of it differ somewhat, they all agree that it describes the sensation of unfathomable magnitude or force. Magnitude or force so great, so infinite, you are unable to muster an image of it in your mind, and it hurts. The train was unprecedentedly powerful, certainly more than anything mankind had ever built, and while it still wasn't the Alps, it was awesome.
Here's a painting by JMW Turner from 1844 about how awesome the train was. Its title is Steam and the Great Western Railway.
There are traces of sky behind the wash of yellow steam; the train, by virtue of the severe orthogonals and the visible fire inside the engine, appears to be traveling at incredible speed. Though still small on the earth, the Iron Horse's fiery plumes, not god, consume the landscape.
But its sheer power was not the only way the train changed our view of the world. As passengers we were challenged with a new kind of high-speed seeing. From behind the glass windows, for the first time in human history, the foreground of our vision became inaccessible. As the background became the focus of our vision, and seeing while traveling essentially became the apprehension of a region's topography. The smooth ride made it seem like it was the landscape, not the viewer, that moved. This has been termed "panoramic perception," and it prefigures our apperception of motion picture technology.
Because the train required a more or less level path (it didn't do so well going up or downhill), we changed the landscape to suit it. The train represented the great promise of speedy industrial capitalism, and mountain ranges that once instilled the feeling of the sublime became more or less engineering problems. The train allowed us to see through the mountain and across the canyon.
Here's William England's 1859 photograph Niagara Suspension Bridge. One of the many virtues of this picture is the way the bridge (which we see was built for the train; second-class privileges provided to those traveling by horse) destroys an otherwise classic landscape arrangement. What an odd picnic. The photograph works because it adds the train to the landscape picture with the same abandon that train was added to the landscape.
It is occasionally posited that Modernity inspires Modernism, the artistic movement that rejects the traditions of the past--perhaps the Renaissance notion that art should representation of objects in space, or the Romantic yearning for a communion with nature or the divine. New ways to make a picture were sought for an age whose ideals were formed by rapid scientific and economic development, and questioning of spiritual doctrine. We can see the breakdown of the illusion of the picture as a window, towards the picture as a pure form, in the following sequence:
Edouard Manet, French, Luncheon on the Grass, 1863
Claude Monet, French, Impression: Sunrise, 1879
Paul Cezanne, French, Mt. St. Victoire, 1885
Cezanne, Mt. St. Victoire, 1900
Cezanne, Mt. St. Victoire, 1904
Cezanne, Mt. St. Victoire, 1906
Pablo Picasso, Spanish, Ma Jolie, 1911
Jackson Pollock, American, Lavender Mist, 1950
Mark Rothko, American, No. 14, 1960
An important key to understanding modernist works is to recognize the depiction as a self-contained form. Many modernist works, particularly before the 20th century, derived meaning from the various ways they were breaking away from illusionistic depiction--we can see this in the Cezanne progression most clearly. As objects became obscured or disappeared entirely, a sensual form remained. One needed to let this sensual form hit you in the gut, to let it direct your seeing, to begin to understanding the new kind of picture. One no longer looked "through it" to see objects. The viewer was no longer a voyeur, with a claim to imaginary power.
However, as the art of the cinema developed, the viewer became ever more the voyeur, while simultaneously becoming more and more "bodily" enveloped by the picture. Here is one of the first films ever made; we can see how the Lumiere Brothers, in 1895, place their camera in front of the train to heighten the visceral effect of its massive arrival.
The early days of narrative cinema were most heavily influenced by theater; directors thought of the scene as the narrative film's basic unit, and often shot one scene with one take, often (though certainly not always) placing the camera in a "seat of the audience." We can see this in Edwin S. Porter's 1903 film "The Great Train Robbery."
However, once D.W. Griffith (directing The Birth of a Nation in 1914) figured out how to make the basic unit of narrative cinema the shot, rather than the scene, the art of cinema became greatly expanded. With "continuity editing," the camera could jump around within one scene or into a simultaneous scene without the illusion of the continuous flow of time being interrupted. With the sensation of time intact, the sense of continuous, three-dimensional space became greater than it had been in the era of the "theatrical" aesthetic. And to the extent that the viewer had to identify with the free-flowing camera (which was never to be acknowledged by the actors), the viewer's sense of having his or her own body implicated in the illusion of space reached an unprecedented level in the history of art.
Goodbye, train. http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/index.jsp?cid=21892
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