OPEN CALL
/seconds issue 12: Archetype: Going Underground / The Cruel Scene of the Image
Being an artist doesn’t take much, just everything you got. Which means of course, that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But it’s no big deal. They are one and the same and cannot be avoided or denied. So when I totally embrace this process, this life/death, and abandon myself to it, I transcend all the gibberish and hang out with the gods. It seems to me that that is worth the price of admission. - Hubert Selby, Jnr
The virtue of transcendentalism does not lie in rendering realism illusory, but in rendering it astonishing. i.e. apparently unthinkable, yet true, and hence eminently problematic. - Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude
The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid. - Antonin Artaud, The Theatre of Cruelty, in The Theory of the Modern Stage (ed. Eric Bentley), Penguin, 1968, p.66
TRISTAN
[…] today with a bleeding wound
I will capture Isolde!
Ha, my blood!
Flow joyfully!
She who will close
My wound forever
Comes to me like a hero,
To save me.
Let the world pass away
As I hasten to her in joy!
ISOLDE
Tristan! Beloved!
TRISTAN
What, do I hear the light?
The torch, ha!
The torch is put out!
To her! To her! What, hear I the Light?
-Richard Wagner, Tristan and Isolde
Marcel Duchamp: I went to a conference. A round table, which took place in Philadelphia, where I was asked, “Where are we going?” Me, I simply said, “The great fortune of tomorrow will hide itself. Will go underground.” In English it’s better than in French - “Will go underground.” It’ll be necessary that it dies before being known. Me, in my opinion, if there is an important fellow from now in a century or two - well! He will have hidden himself all his life in order to escape the influence of the market… completely mercenary [laughs] if I dare say. - Marcel Duchamp, in interview, Jean Neyens (RTBF 1965) 1962
Desublimated: in some cases, however, a condition of ‘repressive desublimation’ results. Excess and sexual abandon are marshalled towards soporific ends of entertainment culture and organised leisure, and the appearance of freedom is accommodated and indeed, actively cultivated as a substitute for more potent forms of genuine protest. Mess, filth, scatter and decomposition in this case are mere scatological regressions, rather than emancipatory gestures. - Eva Diaz – A Critical Glossary of Space and Sculpture from Unmonumental, The Object in The 21st Century, Catalogue, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York
…Will go underground…
Underground, madness, psyche, soul, dream, vision, and death: the subterranean or dream world presents the ‘scene’ of disarray, animating the formal intelligibility of the phenomenal world as an image of beauty in monstrous forms. As Slavoj Zizek writes in The Fragile Absolute, (2001, Verso), “Beauty, the last veil that envelops the Monstrous […] falls in resignation, at the magic moment when the absolute appears in all its fragility”.
These encounters are archetypical ones enacted in the tearing open of a void and the cultivation of the imagination. The image disrupts / disobeys, yet mirrors / amplifies the corresponding supraliminal stimuli of the day world. It is only in such disarray, that an excitation might occur. In the archetype we find courage. The ‘mundus imaginalis’ offers an ontological mode of locating the archetypes of the psyche, as the fundamental structures of the imaginative phenomena that are transcendent to the world of sense in their value if not their appearance. That the fundamental nature of the archetype is accessible to imagination first and first presents itself as image. Its exposition must be rhetorical and poetic, its reasoning not logical, either towards its social adaptation, or the personal, private individual, but rather as the work of the image in restoring the imaginal space.
A psychic screen, protecting and denying phenomenal perception from acknowledging bad history, (also depriving access to the archetype), might reflect cruelty as the absence of an imaginal existence, in bloodless, bodiless simulations – more devastating than Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. Artaud names the ‘unpower’ as an apparatus (dispositif) of the underground, the source of an inspiration of dramaturgy (of love). As subjects of love, the theatre (of cruelty) is an act of love. With the extreme gift of lucidity, what is exposed is an exigency of disruption that puts into question the givens of every culture, and in particular, those of the contemporary world. The imagination of death is replaced by injunction to be reread as the death of the imagination. The radical corruption of love, and the imaginal cruelty of the image, move where, Jean Baudrillard suggests, all has but disappeared. The apparatus he speaks of, in the ecstasy of a total exposure, is held captive too, witness of an irrevocable astonishment of cruelty in the co-dependency, for example, between hostage and terrorist. Co-dependence marks the scene of the image with a symbolic value for art’s new territories. The artist as subject is obliged to perform at another register of social exposure, the proper ethical dimension, to either consent to the Law, Society or not, like Antigone; and in affirmation…will go underground…
Peter Lewis
