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Francesco Mazzaferro
The Dialogue Between an Artist and a Philosopher:
Jacques Monory and Jean-François Lyotard
Part Two: 1981-1985
Part Two: 1981-1985
[Original Version: November 2015 - New Version: April 2019]
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| Fig. 4) Jean-François Lyotard, The Assassination of Experience by Painting, Monory in the bilingual edition published by the Leuven University in 2013 |
In March 1981 Monory unveils at the Maeght
Gallery in Paris his new series "Skies,
nebulae and galaxies" [56]. On that occasion, with the text "The confines of dandyism", also
Lyotard joins the rank of philosophers who wrote texts for exhibitions of
contemporary art organized by the Maeght Gallery. The patron and art dealer
Aimé Maeght founds, just after the Second World War, the art magazine Derrière le Miroir (Behind the mirror),
which between 1946 and 1982 presents the works housed in the gallery, often turning
to philosophers in order to write comments on them. Before Lyotard, Jean-Paul
Sartre had published the text for the exhibition of Giacometti in 1954 [57],
Michel Foucault did it for the exhibition of Rebeyrolle in 1973 [58] and
Jacques Derrida for the one of Valerio Adami in 1975 [59].
As already mentioned in other posts on
Monory, the text of Lyotard is not the first one of the Maeght Gallery on the
painter: Gilbert Lascault had written the text on Frozen operas in 1975 [60], while Alain Jouffroy had curated Technicolor in 1978 [61]. Monory was
therefore one of the leading artists of the Maeght family, which organizes
again a retrospective on him in 2006 entitled “Monory – 1970s” [62], and an
exhibition of his new series “Tiger” [63]
at the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul de Vence, in 2009. Most recently, the
Maeght Foundation also organised an exhibition on “The adventures of truth - Painting and philosophy” [64], with
Bernard-Henri Lévy as curator. It goes without saying that Monory was
represented in that exhibition.
Sublime
Aesthetic of the Contract Killer
On the one hand, the thought of Lyotard has
been marked by a clear break with the publication of his main essay "The postmodern condition. Report on
knowledge." The essay of 1979 marks a departure from his
Marxian-Freudian interpretation of art and triggers an approach to neo-Kantian
philosophy, and particularly to the aesthetics of the sublime, which the German
philosopher had developed in the Critique of Judgment. This new phase of
Lyotard’s thought is justified by the belief that philosophy can no longer
count on any form of narrative which is legitimized (Hegelianism and Marxism
are equally considered exhausted), while the accumulation of scientific
information is now so vast that no philosophical system can be powerful enough
to offer an overall synthesis of the world. Therefore, a comprehensive reading
of the society no longer exists, according to Lyotard, and thus there is no
role for all-encompassing theories, like his libidinal economy of the preceding
years. Indeed, we are in a new phase of humanity, in which the capital of the
multinational corporations and the information collected by techno-sciences
prevail over any philosophical thought, and cannot offer humanity any hope of
emancipation. Nevertheless, art has still a role. In a 1985 writing,
entitled "Enframing of art. Épokhè
of communication" [65] Lyotard writes: "Art is the épokhè [translator's note: termination, according to the
thought of Husserl] of
"communication". It exalts the community of this default as much as
it signifies that it fails it. Which is to say that it fails to imagine it, to
put it into images, to stage it or play it. Imagination here is energeia, act (but not action). [...] Art is not communication because the latter
is only action." [66]
It should not be surprising, therefore,
that the conclusions of Lyotard’s writing on Monory of December 1981 are, in
many ways, much 'weaker' than those of the December 1972 writings, because that
'weakness' is, for him, a source of strength. Just think that the main follower
of Lyotard in Italy is Gianni Vattimo, the forerunner with Pier Aldo Rovatti of
the 'Weak thought' (Pensiero debole) theory [67]. In this
new phase, Lyotard "rejects – as
Michal Kozlowski writes – every
'politicization of desire'. (...) Instead, the artwork testifies that objects
no longer exist, that they are filtered traces (encoded and decoded by our
sensitivity and our language), of a force that exceeds them." [68]
On the other hand - with the series Skies, Nebulae and Galaxies, started in
1978 and concluded in 1981 - Monory decides to change iconographic themes and
to explore, sometimes scientifically sometimes in a dreamy mood, the skies of
astrophysics. As Monory himself writes in the title of Sky No. 39, the painting that concludes the series and shows all
5766 stars which can be directly observed without any tool, the result does not
reach the expectations: "I had hoped
for ecstasy, all I received was a supplement of detachment." Also
Lyotard comments on the evolution of painting by Monory (and in particular on
the shift from images of death to those of astronomical sky) and he diagnostics
a decreased ability of expression: "the
marks of sensibility were less numerous in the last works." [69] He
sees this change not as a weakening of Monory’s painting, but as a development
in line with his own philosophy.
Lyotard's approach to the images produced
by Monory is to consider them as symbolic illustrations. In order to use the
language of the philosopher, they are illustrations of texts (inscriptions)
which are implicit to the paintings. Each image in Monory is therefore
considered as the answer to a text which is not written, but is implicitly
present. "A Monory painting is made
in such a way (technically, as one says) that it always seems like an image
taken from an illustrated magazine. It looks as though it is illustrating a
written text, which is absent. To understand the image, we are led to make up
the text it illustrates. It belongs to minor literature. When it is the ego
interrogating the meaning of life, the text inspired by the painted figures
tends to be derived from non-mainstream literature – the detective novel, the
tear-jerking photo-romance. When social or historical meaning is involved, the
painted image can suggest cheap epic serials. The allusion to the clichéd has
an almost flippant sense of humour." [70]
Lyotard goes however beyond the semiotics
and interprets Monory’s themes in an ontological sense: "The question of meaning is put by a subject
who suffers from it, and referred to this subject, me or us. The horse-race,
the New York terrace, prawns at a cocktail party, the deserted highway, a
woman’s look, the high-class dinner, the California swimming pool, the air
disaster, the bleeding opera singer ask us: what will you, individually or all
of you, have spent your life or you lives doing? The question is put in the
future anterior tense, starting from the end of life. Already dead, I am
looking at myself still alive and I weigh up meaning and non-meaning. Only a
first-person consciousness, endowed with temporal ubiquity, has this privilege
of judging what will have been." [71]
The
work of Monory between philosophy and art
At the heart of the work of Monory,
according to Lyotard, there is the "discrepancy
between presence and infinite, between existence and meaning" [72]. “Dandyism ‘knows’ that the lack of mesh
between existence and meaning is the rule, that it destroys all community, that
it must be embodied in the singularity of the special case, in the will of the
‘seer’, and that the meaning of life consists in the sombre enjoyment of
non-meaning." [73]
If in 1972 Lyotard was convinced that the
painter-dandy was the centre of a universal system of circulation of vital
energy that placed him at the very core of libidinal economy, in 1981 the
philosopher is now sure that dandyism as institution has reached the limits of
its own power. Monory’s exhibition Skies,
nebulae and galaxies demonstrates precisely, according to Lyotard, that the
world has now changed. Lyotard writes that his painting testifies to the
discrepancy between existence and meaning "always by the minor aspect, and not by the major aspect. It is not the
infinite force of Ideas which is presented there negatively, nor is it finite
reality which despairs and gets exasperated with its imbecility. It is the Idea
made real, negation made reality, death as a mode of life, which is shown
positive. Nothing ever in sense-able things can equal the infinity of ideas."
[74]
The Skies as double reality
The solution that the ancients had adopted
to bridge the huge gap between the infinite space and everyday things had been
using techniques of divination, which were part of the world of pathos. For
that direct relationship between an object – whether far or near - and those
who watch at it, Lyotard uses the term 'carnal'
[chair]. The term applies not only to
the oracles of antiquity, to whom physical sacrificial offerings were made, but
also to painting, when it creates a relationship between who represents and
what it represented: "There is flesh
in Monory’s art as in Manet’s, as in Baudelaire’s poetics. (...) The storms of
the Skies (…), the clouds, the
flashes of light, may very well be simply recordings of interactions of
physical radiation; their painted image however is not without eloquence. It is
addressed to us, its pathos affects us." [75]
There is however also a cold, scientific
dimension in the cosmic observation: in fact today - Lyotard notes - are the
machines, the radio telescopes, the knowledge of astrophysics to draw a
scientific duplicate of starry sky, whether visible or invisible to people.
Monory emphasizes that his pictorial images of the cosmos are in fact exact
reproductions of astronomical maps created by astrophysicists. Lyotard
explains: "The machines can in their
turn produce images from these sets of figures. Monory’s Skies are painted over these images" [76].
He adds: they reveal our smallness, our inability, our terror [77].
The
theme of the contract killer as ideal type
Even when representing constellations of
stars, Monory does not renounce painting his usual references to weapons.
Lyotard writes: "The exemplary act
of ‘fine arts’ is murder; its emblem is the pistol, and there are lots of them
in Monory. The trajectory of a bullet is a ballistic curve. The shot is exact
when the target is hit. When it is hit, it is destroyed" [78]. If the
original problem - both for the painter and for the philosopher - is that of
the discrepancy between presence and infinite, between existence and sense, the
path of the bullet is a symbol of a contact established between both ends of a
route. This is why in Sky 5 and Sky 29 the stars are flanked by bullet
holes, and in Sky N. 6 even appears a
revolver at the bottom of the star images.
Yet the painter's ability to establish
links between so distant worlds is now reduced. The dandy has exhausted its
power. The contract killer no longer holds the ancient divination skills that
allowed the ancients to understand the world. Lyotard refers to both the most
recent narrative texts as well as the usual iconographic themes of Monory, to
identify the ideal type of the contract killer as one who lives "in the world, not in nature. A world is a
set of events which are not finalised. Winter is come, we know that things have
no end, they outlive themselves (...). Now the catastrophe has taken place, all
that is left is tins of food for the dogs in supermarkets stuffed with rats.
(...) The expressionist criminal, the damned (...) no longer kills voluntarily,
to accomplish a philosophical destiny, where there is no longer anything to
augur, but to defend his physical life. (...) The professional killer
anticipates what life is in the absence of any experience that can be shared"
[79].
But there is also a deeper - ontological -
element of ambiguity: we know that both in its writings and in its paintings,
Monory identifies itself so much with the figure of the professional killer
that he equates the revolver to the brush, the art to the murder. And this
identification reveals the existence of an irreconcilable contradiction. "The killer must write his novel or paint it,
and thus testify that [with the execution of the murder] it’s finished. But if
it’s finished, what’s the point of writing and painting too? It is this tiny
paradox which conceals the artistic impetus. I say that there’s nothing to say,
I paint that there’s nothing to paint. It’s my last word. (...) Therefore,
enjoyment would be more the result of presenting nothingness through writing
and images" [80]. It is no coincidence that the aesthetics of Monory
is defined, at this stage, as "the
aesthetics of the unpresentable." What is unpresentable belongs,
according to Lyotard, to the '"aesthetics of the sublime."
Art
and philosophy in a common loss of sense
As we know, Lyotard sees a fundamental
unity between art and philosophy. The Skies
of Monory - as already mentioned - are no longer those of the Romantics, but
are the result of collecting and decoding radio waves through giant radio
telescopes. Similarly, killers are no longer the metaphor of the 'monster dandy', the super-creative who
can find a balance between energy and order, but they become mere employees:
"By focusing the narrative on the
killer, you change the genre of the narrative and you can get away from
dandyism. The jubilatory distance of the damned hero gives way to the
occupation of a job. Capital and techno-science also invest in crime. Praise remote damned hero makes room for an
easy working relationship. The capital and the techno-sciences are also an
investment in the crime.” [81] And Lyotard continues: "But the contract killer is no more accursed
than an employee, and just as anonymous. Here the murderous power of the Idea
has become almost the whole of reality. Hopes, loves, peculiar wishes, hates,
can be realised by means of payment. Hope becomes a motivation, love a
pornography, hate a strategy of murder, and wishing a programme. By finishing
them off in their realist form, capital destroys them as experience. The killer
embodies the principle of derealisation which is then the whole of reality, the
principle of the general equivalent, calculation, price." [82]
The Skies as confines of dandyism
Lyotard notes: "There is a marked decline of the subjective instance in the Skies"
[83]. If the original problem is the discrepancy between presence and meaning,
one of the ontologically so distant terms between each other (i.e. the meaning)
is no longer ruled by any subjective element. To prove this assessment, the
philosopher mentions the two works that open the cycle Skies, nebulae and galaxies. They are two particularly enigmatic
paintings, titled False exit No.1 and
No.2. The term comes from theatrical language (the actor on the stage begins to
leave the scene, and is nearly out the door when he stops and turns back; or he
leaves the scene only for one moment only and comes back). "The series is introduced by two False
Exits, 1978. The first is inscribed with
a declaration in the first person,
according to which the misery of meaning is not related to the self of
representation, but derives from time, and over the whole length [of the canvas]
it carries a double crossing out, blocking off images charged with subjective aura.
The second one even gives up on erasure,
it leaves the declaration of misery incomplete, only quoting the empty
declarative: I see ... As for the
images of this False Exit,
ice-covered mountain, nebula, rising sun, sea, radio telescopes – as usual,
they are treated like illustrations: but of what text? At any rate, it is no
longer that of a remembrance of past time. A physical world is there, only
that. If it has a time, it is not that of consciousness. With the Skies Monory takes his (popular) dandyism to the
limit, where the painter is still there and he is no longer a dandy."
[84]
The
aesthetics of sublime
The 'discrepancy
of presence and infinite, between existence and meaning' is the same
ontological question that Immanuel Kant raises in the introduction to the
Critique of judgment, where he questions himself about how to make
compatible between each other the world of pure reason, dominated by abstract
laws and a priori principles, and that of practical reason, dominated by
freedom and categorical imperatives. The aesthetic theory of sublime and
reflective judgment allows Kant to accept the distance between what is earthly
and belongs to the world of moral and what is infinite and belongs to the
immeasurable world, perceiving that distance through the sense of aesthetic
sublime. No coincidence that the inscription on the grave of Kant is: "The
starry sky above me, the moral law within me", a quote of Practical
Reason. Lyotard cites instead the Critique of Judgment: "The sublime is that in comparison with which
all the rest is small. (...) The spectator here experiences the feeling of the
incapacity of his imagination to present the Idea of a whole; in this the
imagination reaches its maximum and, in the effort to surpass it, it is sunk
into itself, and in doing this is plunged in a moving satisfaction.” [85]
Lyotard wonders if the Skies of
Monory - by their semiotic reference to radio telescopes – are not just the
representation of the Kantian concept of sublime, albeit "in his apparently minor manner"
[86], where they reveal our powerlessness to portray the cosmos, but our
capacity to be able to conceive it. The dandy cannot go beyond the recognition
of his own limitations, but the Kantian sublime allows him to recognize his own
limitations and to project himself towards the universe.
The use of Kant by Monory is still
"heretic," as Michal Kozlowski writes [87]. In fact Lyotard uses him
to prove that "the discrepancy
between the presence and the idea" is the universal rule [88], but
differently from Kant, he does not draw from it any feeling belonging to the
world of a genius. "But lack of
meshing is not experienced as a feeling, and it does not require genius in
order to be expressed. It is now attested to as a pure, anonymous, apathetic
rule, which puts in order that which has no meaning. The contract killer, death
employee, is enough, if he is presented in his imbecility - to keep what has no
relation holding together. (...) A will of some kind, unknown, never
interrogated, never espoused in the project it pursues, makes the killer takes
the plane, installs him in a motel in the middle of the desert, gets him at
four in the morning to enter, via the
toilet, the room of a victim identified by means of some external sign, and
gets him to put an end to his victim’s life and his hopes with a gunshot
snuffed out by a silencer. That is what lack of meshing would be. The same
blind will sends radiation in the direction of the stars and records their
echo. That is not a matter for jubilation or for despair. “ [89]
Lyotard’s sublime is therefore a different
one from the Kantian sublime. The latter "needs, like all feelings, a temporal continuum which keeps the trace of
what is no longer, heralds what is not yet, enables what is absent to be
present at least by allusion” [90]. In the technological world of the Skies, the aura of Walter Benjamin has
disappeared. "The aura is a set of images which, rising from
involuntary memory, tend to group themselves around the object, the light
breath which envelops an object of nature or of art with its harmonics (...).
There is no aura without continuity
in the time of the psyche and of tradition. It is the same with the sublime,
whose feeling of aura is perhaps only
a particular case of it. We now assume a mind stripped of this involuntarily
memory and all of whose ‘impressions’ are analysed, dispatched, collected and
preserved in the machines. It keeps no trace of them." [91]
What is the aim of the painter? Lyotard
asks himself this final question: why does Monory show us this apathetic
reality of the Skies, that is "a reality already dead" [92],
without aura, dominated by techno-science of capital? [93] "To look at [these pictures] and be affected
by them, no need to be an art lover, to be familiar with the problems of
avant-gardes, the history of painting, or modern literature. From this point of view, the community they invoke
as their addressee is already there, a reality in the population of station
concourses, doctors’ waiting rooms, cinema-goers, TV audiences, in all the
average humanity which, in the morning metro, the station café, the Saturday
cinema. (...) And this population is in fact already dead as a community,
existing only as an image-market and expecting nothing from them, except to
pass a moment. A good moment? Yes, if the person flipping through recognises
everything he sees, immediately identifies in the image what he likes, wishes,
detests... Or if he doesn’t have to think about what it is, and get anxious.
The moment is good if it involves individual recognition. And this time of
solitude is also a time of mass communion, since the identities are
interchangeable and everyone accepts or rejects the same things as all the
others. The images are thus a vast mass-media mirror, good ones when the mirror
gives a good reflection of the anonymous spectator. In looking at Monory’s
paintings, we recognise ourselves, we are or we become their survivors. The
pictures appeal to an apathetic mass of those who got away. This mass
recognises itself in them, they are its culture. Such is their realism."
[94]
The
reasons for the title: The Assassination of Experience by Painting
What is then the meaning of the very obscure title of the book containing the two writings by Lyotard on Monory of 1972 and of 1981: The Assassination of Experience by Painting?
For Lyotard the two key terms are experience and experimentation. The first term recalls the sensations and feelings
that an individual subject (the 'I') experiences. Experience is tied to the idea of progress and revolution; it is
a typical product of the Christian world; its aesthetic is the already
described aura by Benjamin. In
aesthetic terms, the aura is
expressed in the form of epic, novel, confession, tragedy and history [95]. The
second term, experimentation, is seen
as techno-scientific expertise, it is linked to the latest version of the
capitalist world. The experimentation
does not require even a “subjective I”; it is based on the mass life in the
metropolis and production places, and on replacement devices of feelings
through market mechanisms [96].
Lyotard interprets the decision of the
artist to make constant use of the blue for his painting (the mise en bleu) as the outcome of experimentation, by the painter as 'expert in the blue'. He interprets
Monory’s painting as a conscious decision to pass from the world of feelings to
that of techno-scientific determination: "The decline of experience can always be turned back into the awakening
of experiments." [97]
The choice of Monory is therefore to move
away from the world of the past to establish itself in a present dominated by
the absence of aura, by the absence of a community, by the void of each
narrative. "Monory with his
revolvers cuts short the agony of the experience." [98] And again:
"The experimentation resulting from
capitalist techno-science leaves no place for the aura of memories and hopes. It knows only facts: blue is a fact of microwave
motion, the organisation of space a topological fact, sublime emotion a psycho-physiological fact; all of them are analysable and produced on the basis of axiomatics,
and the axiomatics are logical." [99]
Yet Monory accomplishes this radical choice
without being an avant-garde painter: "He
turned his back on artistic and metaphysical research, from the outset. It is
not painting of formal experiment. For him it is as if there never was any
avant-garde. 'Monet died' [Translator's Note: the title of a painting by
Monory; see Jacques Monory, Écrits, entretiens, récits, fig. 121], but also Cézanne. The
explorations of Malevich, Kandinsky, Mondrian have left not the slightest trace
in his manner." [100]
Here is the last break with Kant. His
Critique of Judgment was based on the difference between the sublime
(impossible to grasp, if not through the sense of inferiority of the humans to
what remains immeasurable) and the beautiful (a local and unfinished
manifestation of aesthetic judgment, which is more easily accessible to
humans). In Monory, Lyotard writes, the concept of experimental reconciles
sublime and beautiful: it is the "concentration,
under the name of experimentation, of the knowledge and know-how which are the
property of the new machines" [101]. With Monory "the sublime of immanence replaces the
sublime of transcendence" [102].
The
link between painting and media: the 1982 recorded dialogue between Monory and
Lyotard
The National Centre of Scientific Research
commissioned Lyotard and Monory a reflection on the relationship between
painting, photography and cinema. The dialogue between the painter and the philosopher
on the role of media in art is thus documented by the media themselves. The
tenor of the conversation between the two – recorded as part of a movie
directed by David Carr-Brown in 1982 - abandons however the formalized and
often enigmatic language of the philosopher and becomes therefore suitable for
a non-specialist audience. The linguistic leap is truly huge.
The agreement between the two is really
perfect. It is the only interview in the recent volume of Monory’s writings
[103] in which the interchange between speakers is continually characterized by
a feeling of understanding. The exchange of views is characterized by a very
dense conversation. Let's see some examples.
On
the role of pictures taken from media and their relationship with modernity
Here is how the idea of Monory as the
painter of modern life comes back in the conversation. Lyotard asks: "Why would a painter draw most of his images
from the media: scientific journals, photos of films, reproductions of images
from news reports? What do you lack in painting that you feel the need to
complete, if I may say so, your work with moving pictures?" "You mean, why I do not make a pure painting?
The painting that is called pure painting?" "No, I do not say that. Why are not you happy with painting?"
"In fact, I prefer painting to
anything. But I cannot be satisfied." "But this only aggravates the problem. Why do you do something you do
not like?" "Because I need,
for my painting, all other elements. I need pictures of the world. And I cannot
catch all pictures of the world alone, I cannot be present when there is a
terror attack in Japan. If this attack interests me, I have information through
the media, and then I use it. It is the vision of our time, it is the raw
material of our age" [104].
The dialogue continues on the relationship
between the choice of images and modernity. Lyotard takes note of the frequency
with which Monory introduces in his canvases "the theme of the machine, and therefore the car, the motorcycles, the
aircrafts, the large radars in the sky, the surgical instruments and of course
also the instruments of death, finally guns and similar things. In you, the machine is always associated
with the loss of sense. In short,
everything moves forward on its own, there is no purpose in it, it is simply
functional and, to the extent that people are themselves completely subordinate
to machines, then they too lose a sense of purposes, and their lives lose that sense." "Yes, but there
is always, in everything I do, this contradiction. In fact, I am afraid of
death and I love life. Having such a big fear of death, you have to represent
it."
Implicitly, the discussion falls on the
problem of the relationship between art elements which are inspired by either vital
impetuses or stimuli of death:
"But,
for example, you are saying: 'Today, people do not look any more at trees, but
they look at the images of the trees; they no longer look at the sky, but at
the images of the sky that the observatories of Mount Wilson can reproduce as
soon as they remember them'. Does this mean that, in that case, you consider
the fact that we do no longer observe things, but the images of things, as
something that belongs to the side of life or to the side of death, in modern
life? Since it is a real crap." Monory responds: "It is a way of life. It is our life"
[105].
On
the impossibility for art to recover the whole unit of the world, if not
through the viewer
The conversation also reveals the idea that
the artist's task is not only to show the many contradictions in the world, but
also to offer moments of synthesis. However, in the modern world, the synthesis
function is now to be performed by the public, not by the artist anymore. Thus,
differently from the art at the time of Renaissance, the art of Monory does not
create a synthesis by itself, but offers to the spectator only a mere
opportunity to catch it, with his own means.
Monory begins: "I believe that the greatest the number of contradictions in a work, the
most different things are integrated and reproduced in its entirety, the most
interesting the artwork is" "Yes."
"You agree too”.
"Absolutely,
and that is why it is interesting." "The ear here and the angle of the lip there, do not go well at all..."
"Yes, yes." "The fact is that people - Lyotard
continues - are contradictory in
themselves. So, this contradiction
can be reproduced effectively in a thousand ways. I would say that in your work
the contradiction is exposed. It is exposed before its opposite, namely, before
the synthesis in a human face, for example. With Holbein, to the contrary, we
first see the human face and later on the contradictions that are hidden in it.
In your painting, the contradiction is exposed from the very beginning, so the
question of unity (...) is a problem that must be solved by the viewer."
"In
classical art - continues Lyotard - the
painter provides a summary, which is a bit like a trap, because basically
people can be content to recognize. They say: ah, but this is Anne Boleyn.
Well, very well. And then, actually, if you look at it longer, then you see
that all of this is a world that speaks. You display the world first and later
on the question of which unity remains suspended. One does not even know if you
think there is one."
Monory concludes: "Yes, but all this fully corresponds to our
times. It is the feeling, in general, that unity is impossible. Instead, if you
refer to the late Middle Ages, to the Renaissance, there was a feeling of unity
in the world." [106]
This dialogue ends with a reflection on the
combination, the presence of several images in the same image. Monory considers
the juxtaposition of the images within the same framework as the characteristic
of life. To the question "For you,
is that aspect life?" he replies: "Yes. Because in life - when I speak to you, you talk to me – we are
thinking about other things. True, it is full of mechanisms. There is the whole
complex of images, which one can transfer from a distance, and then an image is
preferred out of tens (not to exaggerate) of images that are present at the
same time. So, that's life: it is life, when you get to put together these ten
images and these ten images bring together a single image."
"For
example, with the system of 'poly-screens' in painting - Lyotard reiterates
- you can see more images that are often
framed themselves by television screens (...). According to you, this multiplicity of images in the same image is on
the side of life or is it on the side of death? Unless this multiplicity of
screens, or frameworks, frameworks is not in fact an allusion to the graves?"
The answer is simply: "Yes." [107]
In conclusion, the dialogue shows once
again that the painter and philosopher discuss on all themes of Monory’s art. And
above all, it is a dialogue that becomes, in itself, the media object to be
documented for future generations, as proof that painting and philosophy can understand
each other.
Monory
and the aesthetic thought of Lyotard on immateriality of art in 1985
 |
| Fig. 5) The poster of the exhibition “The immateriaux” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1985) |
Our analysis of the relationship between
Monory and Lyotard would not be complete if we did not refer to the exhibition
"Les immatériaux" organized
by Lyotard, along with the art critic and curator Thierry Chaput (a scholar of
industrial design), at the Centre Pompidou in 1985.
Compared to the previous stations of the dialogue
between Lyotard and Monory - where the aesthetic theory of the philosopher was
fully based on the art of the painter - the exhibition marks a critical step.
As Sarah William explains, the aesthetics of Lyotard had been sharply criticized
for not being sufficiently diversified and systematic, being based only on
Monory [108]. In reality, Lyotard’s vast literature on contemporary art had
ranged across very different artists, from Baniel Buren to Barnett Newman, from
Joseph Kosut to Karel Appel. The exhibition at the Beaubourg allows the
philosopher to display a very large and diverse group of artists, in order to elaborate
on the immateriality of art. However, it would be illusory to try to extract
from the exhibition any systematic reflection, a reference to conceptual
criteria of reference. Lyotard hates Plato and all systematic philosophers
after him; his method is to accompany, through continuous series of linguistic
associations, his readers from order to disorder, and from disorder to order.
The same happened also to the visitors of the exhibition of 1985.
The exhibition was in fact one of the most
innovative, but also least loved, exhibitions by the Parisian public, for many
aspects (the almost total lack of an easily recognisable route to follow in the
exhibition; the combination of very different materials, techniques and
concepts; the bold use of new technologies, which however often did not work in
the showrooms; the absolute pursuit of conceptual intricacy, to the point that Paul
Crowther explains that the exhibition was assigned specifically the goal of ‘not being pedagogical’ [109]).
Thirty years later, however, that event
still attracts the interest of scholars of contemporary art. The Tate Modern in
London dedicated a conference on the exhibition in 2008, which was followed by
the publication of an essay always by the Tate Modern in 2009 [110]. In 2014 a
conference was held in Germany, at the University of Lüneburg [111]. This year
a conference was held at the Courtauld Institute of Art, also in London [112], in
occasion of the thirty year anniversary of the exhibition.
That was, in fact, the first exhibition which
discussed not only the question of the relationship between art and new technical
materials, but also between art and virtual reality (a theme already present in
the 1981 writing of Lyotard on Monory) and between art and the new immaterial
world of information. During the exhibition, conferences were held on the topic
and essays were published. The exhibition wanted to call into question the entire
system of Cartesian rationality; it did it with the help of different
disciplines (this was one of the shows which best complied with the mission of
the Beaubourg to integrate concepts and contributions from various
disciplines). The term "Immatériaux – immaterials" on the one hand
wanted to refer to 5 key reference words derived from the same Indo-European
root māt (matériau, materiel, maternité, matière, matrix), but on the other
hand to reflect on the immateriality of
the art message (which explains the negative prefix 'in-' at the beginning of
the neologism Immatériaux). Paul
Crowther explains that the reflection was not only linked to the relationship
between art and the latest physical materials, but the more general
relationship between art, new materials and intellectual processes, through the
interaction between five factors: "(1) The origin of the message (maternité; (2) The medium that supports
it (matériau); (3) the code in which
it is written (matrice); (4) what it
refers to (matière); (5) the
destination of the message (matériel)" [113] [114].
Monory
in the 1985 exhibition
Antony Hudek of the Tate Modern says [115]
the inclusion in the exhibition of
Monory’s polyptich Explosion was
specifically due to Lyotard's intervention. It is the painting already
mentioned in the filmed conversation between Lyotard and Monory of 1981, when
the painter refers to the need to draw from the media for his paintings and
refers to a terror attack against Japan. It is an event I well remember, even
if I was only ten years old: in 1973, the Japanese Red Army high-jacked a Japan Airline airplane in the Netherlands, freed passengers and crew in Lybia
and let explode the plane in the Tripoli airport.
The polyptich consists of four panels that
show precisely the same picture of the explosion of the airplane, in different
versions of monochrome colours ranging from deep blue to almost white. Three
panels reproduce a photograph in different colours, while the last is a
freehand drawing. Under the polyptich, the audience of the exhibition is
confronted with a puzzling question by Lyotard: "The painter compares two ways. Catastrophe of painting?" The
two ways are (possibly) oil painting from photography and free drawing: Hudek
interprets the question by Lyotard as an attempt to refute the texts of Adorno
on the death of art as a result of new technologies. The two ways which Monory
compares show, according to Hudek, that the different procedures may allow the
painter to represent two times: "the
time of capitalism (measurable in accounting, predictable) and the libidinal
time (free, excessive, unable of forecast and memory)" [116]. Art is
not dead.
A
sardonic question of Bernard Henri-Levy
The time of post-modern philosophy has passed
quickly, since already in the Eighties the new philosophers had conquered the
centre of attention in Paris. And one of them, perhaps the most famous,
Bernard-Henri Levy, was recently given the task by the Maeght Foundation, in
2013, to be the curator of a comprehensive exhibition on painting and
philosophy: "The Adventures of
truth. Painting and philosophy: a narrative." [117] If Maeght had a
long tradition of dialogue between philosophy and painting, this was the
largest exhibition ever staged by them.
The philosopher worked for two years to
select themes and works, and chose (among 120 artworks to be exposed) also a
picture of Monory (Dream Tiger N. 4) to document his relationship with Lyotard.
It is one of the paintings owned by the Fondazione Maeght, which had a long
tradition with the painter. The text by Levy in the catalogue, however, is full
of doubts on the contents of their dialogue, and above all on Lyotard.
"I
see again Jean-François Lyotard, in the year of the publication of his 'Signed,
Malraux' [1996], standing, already ill, in the great hall of the press office
of the publisher Grasset, telling me that Monory was not only a great painter,
and a master dandy, but above all one of those 'regenerators of look' [régénérateurs
du regard] whom Malraux (in a text which I have never found and maybe Lyotard
had just invented on the spot) expected since long and of whom he hoped they
would ever materialize. At whatever did Monory teach him to look again? What
'drift' has ever inspired? Of which killings they were ever - really -
accomplices? " [118]
The exhibition also includes a section where
Bernard-Henri Levy shows recordings of all living painters exposed, while they
read the page of a philosopher. Monory chooses not to Lyotard, but Foucault.
What
is left?
The rhetorical question of Bernard
Henry-Levy seems to mark the (provisional) sunset of the interest in the dialogue
between Monory and Lyotard in France. Another example: the 190-page catalogue
of the recent retrospective exhibition in Landernau on Monory, organized by the
Foundation Hélène and Edouard Leclerc in 2014, contains only two pages [119] on
the relationship between art and philosophy. More generally, the image offered
to visitors of the exhibition in Landerneau omits any reference to any
controversial issues such as the political role of sexuality (the libidinal
economy) or the critical discussion of the capitalist system. It is obvious
that the exhibition aims to provide a much more soothing image of Monory, not
as a painter-philosopher, but as a "painter-filmmaker". Possibly,
this ‘normalised’ interpretation is more consistent with the kind of Leclerc Foundation,
founded by the owner of one of the largest commercial distribution chains in
France, who probably has the need to offer a product, even cultural, that can be
easily addressed to the average of the general public. Edouard Leclerc is also well
known in France for having created and led a political movement with a strong catholic-
conservative matrix, even competing for the presidential elections (for the
truth, with little luck). This may also well explain why the list of
exhibitions of Monory, in the catalogue, omits for instance any reference to
the Aosta exhibition of 1990 entitled "Sade
- revolution - impossible."
In short, it seems that Paris intellectuals
forgot the dialogue between Monory and Lyotard, perhaps being a little ashamed
of having been a leading subject in the relationship between avant-garde
painting and philosophy.
Yet many themes at the centre of their
dialogue seem – at least to me – much more relevant today than they were thirty
or forty years ago. Obviously the language now seems in some respects too
ideological and in other cases overly naive. However, if we reflect today on
the concept of libidinal economy, on which Lyotard wrote in 1972, one can only
think about the role which pictures – very often with a strong sexualised
meaning – have in the economy, in social relations, but also in people's lives
(including their emotional relations) thanks to social networks led by very
large companies. Today’s Immatériaux
are Google and Facebook. Even the insight that the success of the capitalist
system is not tied exclusively to the production of material goods, but also to
the creation and management of what Lyotard calls a surplus of enjoyment,
stresses the role that the media industry has had as a stabilization tool and source
of legitimacy of the political and economic system. True: the painters and
artists are not certainly at the centre of the production system, but we should
not forget that we live in a world so dominated by electronic narrative that
even the terrorists of the Islamic state are forced to make use of it.
Instead the second written in 1981, the one
where Lyotard is inspired by the theory of the sublime by Immanuel Kant to
conclude that nothing substantial can be communicated and understood, that art
is presentation of the unpresentable, that Benjamin’s aura has gone lost for
ever, that there is no empathic community receiving art, and that the sublime
can from now onwards only be immanent, recalls the theme of the absence
of any substance and feeling in much of the current information system, where a
huge part of the network resources used do not include any content and express
any real empathy. The victory of experimentation on experience is perhaps our total
collective dependency on mass technology: a total energy black-out would not
imply the almost total elimination of any recent picture?
Why instead a so lively interest for Monory
and Lyotard in London, while in Paris everything is silent? How comes that the exhibition
on them in 2013 took place at the Institut
Français of the British capital, and not in one of the think tanks in Paris?
To what owes the interest in the exhibition "Les Immaterieux" by Lyotard at the Tate Modern in 2008? Maybe
in London, it is easier to overcome the legacy of the past. To present again to
the cosmopolitan London audience the documented memories of the interaction
between philosophers and artists in Paris, and on how they entered into a
dialogue on the essence of art, does not place – on the banks of the Thames –
any risk of reopening painful wounds of old ideological battles of decades
played on the shore of the Seine.
NOTES
[56] Monory. Ciels, nébuleuses et galaxies, Text by Jean-François Lyotard, Derrière le miroir N. 244, A. Maeght Publishing House, 1981
[57] Les Peintures de Giacometti. Text by Jean-Paul Sartre, Derrière le miroir, N. 65, A. Maeght A. Maeght Publishing House, 1954
[58] Paul Rebeyrolle. Text by Michel Foucault, Derrière le miroir, N. 202, A. Maeght Publishing House, 1973
[59] Valerio Adami: le voyage du dessin. Text by Jacques Derrida, Derrière le miroir, no. 214, A. Maeght Publishing House, 1975.
[60] Monory. Opéras glacés, Text by Gilbert Lascault, Derrière le miroir, N. 217, A. Maeght Publishing House, 1975.
[61] Monory. Technicolor, Text by Alain Jouffroy, N. 227, A. Maeght Publishing House, 1978
[65] Lyotard, Jean-François – Enframing of Art. Épokhè of Communication, 1985 in: Textes disperses I / Miscellaneous Texts I: Aesthetics and Theory of Art, edited by Herman Parret, 2012, Leuven University Press, pages 177-193
[66] Lyotard, Jean-François – Enframing of Art. (quoted) p.193
[67] Vattimo Gianni, Rovatti, Pier Aldo - Weak thought, Albany, SUNY Press, 2012, 271 pages.
[68] Kozlowski, Michal - Lyotard - Un penseur du siècle?, in Critique d’art, N. 40, 2012 See: https://critiquedart.revues.org/3327
[69] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, Monory, Introduction by Herman Parret, postface by Sarah Wilson, Translation by Rachel Bowlby, Jeanne Bouniort and Peter W. Milne, Leuven University Press, 2013, pp. 288. Quotations refer here to the English text. Quotation at page 166.
[70] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 163.
[71] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 171.
[72] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 157
[73] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 167
[74] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 157
[75] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 159
[76] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 159
[77] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 161
[78] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 161
[79] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 161
[80] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 165
[81] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 169
[82] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 169
[83] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 171
[84] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 171
[85] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 173
[86] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 173
[87] Kozlowski, Michal - Lyotard - Un penseur du siècle ? (quoted)
[88] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 173
[89] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 173-175
[90] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p.175
[91] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p.175
[92] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p.183
[93] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p.181
[94] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p.181-183
[95] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 55
[96] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 57
[97] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 57
[98] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 57
[99] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 191
[100] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 185
[101] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 191
[102] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p. 193
[103] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, récits, editions établie par Pascale Le Thorel, preface par Jean-Christophe Bailly, Paris, École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, 2014, 382 pagine.
[104] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, récits (quoted), p. 73
[105] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, récits (quoted), p. 89
[106] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, récits (quoted), pp. 70-80
[107] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, récits (quoted), p. 90
[108] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, (quoted), p.251
[109] See: Crowther, Paul – Les Immateriaux and the postmodern sublime, in: Judging Lyotard, edited by Andrew Benjamin, Londra, Routledge, p.193
[110] See: http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/over-sub-exposure-anamnesis-les-immateriaux
[113] See: Crowther, Paul (quoted), p. 193
[114] See also: Bamford Kiff, Lyotard and the ‘figural’ in Performance, Art and Writing, New York, Continuum, 2012, 224 pages.
[115] Hudek, Antony - From Over- to Sub-Exposure: The Anamnesis of Les Immatériaux, in: http://www.tate.org.uk/download/file/fid/7267
[116] Hudek, Antony - From Over- to Sub-Exposure (quoted)
[117] Lévy, Bernard-Henri, Les Aventures de la vérité. Peinture et philosophie: un récit, Fondation Maeght/Grasset, 2013, 390 pages
[118] Lévy, Bernard-Henri, Les Aventures de la vérité. (quoted), p. 376
[119] Jacques Monory, Catalogue, Edited by Michel-Édouard Leclerc, Editing direction by Pascal Le Thorel, Fonds Hélène and Édouard Leclerc pour la Culture, 2014, 191 pages. The section on art and philosophy is at pages 112-113.
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