Rupturing Beauty Exhibition
Five Footnotes To An Essay Conceived While Lying on a Philosophers Couch
Jeremy Biles
The other morning, after a late night out dancing with a philosopher friend of mine, I awoke to find myself sprawled on a couch in this friend's apartment. I tried, but failed, to get up, so instead reached out for a book of Chinese philosophy that happened to be sitting on the nearby coffee table. I opened the book and, by chance, my eyes fell upon the words of Hui Shih: "Heaven is as low as earth. Mountains and marshes are on the same level. The sun at noon is the sun setting. The thing born is the thing dying."
The collapse of the ethereal beauty of mountains into the murky squalor of marshes -- no less seething with life than fulminating with decay [1] -- is an image dear to the French writer Georges Bataille. Indeed, this very sentiment is expressed with acerbic clarity in his 1929 essay "Formless," where he claims that
A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world [déclasser], generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit (Visions of Excess).
The task, the job, the action of the formless is to bring things low, to declass and declassify.[2] Moreover, it is, as Rosalind Krauss has made clear, not best thought as the opposite of form, but as an operation, a "possibility working at the heart of form, to erode it from within. Working, that is, structurally, precisely, geometrically, like clockwork" (The Optical Unconscious).
As it relates to art, the operation of the formless is perhaps most unsettling in works of apparent formal elegance and beauty. Such a claim resonates with Bataille, who states that "the more equilibrium an object has, the more complete it is, . . . the greater the disequilibrium of sacrifice that can result" (Guilty).
Equilibrium, stability, completion, and integral form are defining characteristics of classical beauty as it derives from the Platonic idea.[3] But while Bataille values these qualities, he does so precisely because they set the stage (or prepare the altar) for the thrill of transgression, the agonized ecstasy of rupture, the heated joy of sacrifice.
The formless is indeed an operation -- a sacrificial operation. In art, it can even be thought of as a method, akin to technique in sacrifice. It is a way of doing violence to any aesthetic idealism that would legislate beauty, confining it within the strictures of philosophical stability and the rigors of habit.
To say that the formless is a sacrificial operation, however, is to suggest that its effects are not only observable in works of art, but extend, contagiously, to those who encounter them. Like sacrifice, the work of the formless in art demands a risk from those who would witness it. As Bataille never tires of telling us, the victim of a sacrifice is the witness who identifies with the sacrificial object, and the joy of the celebration is available to those of us who engage in a "conscious refusal to limit ourselves within our individual personalities," our secured and integral selves, our personal forms (Erotism).
Sacrifice, in other words, delivers the victim from the world of reasoned order and calculated utility. It kills what is a mere thing in the object and returns it to a sacred realm of "unintelligible caprice," beyond all "ties of subordination" (Theory of Religion). In the domain of art, it is beauty conceived of as a mere thing, a regulatory template, that the formless corrupts, whether it be by the blatant facticity of base matter and heterogenous material,[4] or by working structurally to fissure or corrode structure.
The formless is thus analogous to sacrifice insofar is it makes things sacred. "Sacred," it is well known, means both holy and cursed; it denotes an ambivalence, even a coincidence, between high and low, attraction and repulsion. To sacrifice, to make sacred, is therefore to dissolve, in a moment as dangerous to formal beauty as it is to the witness, the limits separating high and low, to give death to that which isolates us in our hermetic forms. To witness the formless is thus to put yourself at risk, to be altered, to allow it to "break the habitual homogeneity" of your person, to be wounded for a time by a ruptured and rupturing beauty. It is to be fascinated unto exhaustion -- as Bataille says, like the light of a star annihilating the star itself.[5] It is to spend it all, to experience a little death, to fall up or down -- it hardly matters which --, to dance with toxic joy, and to collapse, again and again, like a spider or spittle, onto a philosopher's shapeless couch.
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[1] The language of flowers. Bataille was fascinated by Van Gogh's choice to paint his sunflowers not at the height of their brilliance, but rather after they had fallen from their apexes, wilted by the sun. Bataille also made much of the fact that while the exterior aspect of the flower corresponds to a human ideal of beauty, what the lovely petals hide is the "sordid tuft" of the sexual organs. That Marie Krane Bergman paints the dismantled petals of wilting flowers within the structure of a grid says less about the organizational capacity of the grid than it does about the corrosive function of the organs that these petals had once concealed. Is it thus any wonder that the petals that had formed the flower's symmetrical corolla have fallen from their former height into a heap -- a heap that remains, like a glaring affront to any categorical imperative, at the level of the groin?
[2] Horizontality/declassification. The etymology of "entomology": F entomologie, fr. Gk entomon insect (fr. neut. of entomos cut up, fr. en- + temnein to cut). There is a side of entomology that dedicates itself to classification. It is this side of the science that Bataille, whose notion of the formless functions to declassify, would have disdained. One finds an expression of this disdain in Frances Whitehead's setting board, modeled after those used for insects, but dis-proportioned to human size. Hardly an accommodating piece, however, this rack is one that undercuts the erect posture of humans, and functions to cut away at the vertical (one might say "phallic") columns to which classification is married. One imagines these columns toppling like agitated obelisks at the very moment that a person lies upon the rack as on an altar. The remnant of such a sacrifice would be only a frock coat -- moth-eaten, riddled with holes, devoured by the hungry mouths of a thousand insects that are no longer a class, but a swarm.
[3] Insubordination. In elaborating the notion of a dialectic of forms, Bataille cites a study in which a series of exposures of different human faces onto photographic film reveals a composite image of a formally perfect countenance -- a Platonic, ideally beautiful face. This kind of beauty, he notes, remains under the aesthetic thumb of a classical, common measure. But each individual face, deviating from the standard of the composite, is to some degree monstrous. Michael Kiresuk's works operate on a similar logic, but in the opposite direction, a direction in which Bataille would have delighted. Layering screened acrylic on a plexiglass support, the artist develops a thick accumulation of superimposed grids. The layering has the effect of suppuration, with the excesses of the medium causing deviations from the typological perfection of the screen. This insubordination of material facts, to use Bataille's terminology, swerves from the formal pattern, issuing in a moiré, a delirium of trembling crosses -- structure sent wavering by the forces of its own medium. A single grid may appear as Platonic perfection, but the accumulation of many gives birth to monsters.
[4] Desublimation. Bataille once wrote, "I think like a girl taking off her dress." Jocelyn Nevel evidently thinks like a woman taking off not only her dress, but her bra and pantyhose, as well. The bras which, one imagines, might once have been used to keep certain things in their proper place, now lay on the floor in a limp and elegantly reticulated weave, like a spider web which, having succumbed to gravity, can no longer trap anything. And one can hardly help but think of Freud when coming face to face with the crotches of pantyhose that span the embroidery hoops like a series of blank, ecstatic eyes. Freud will tell you that civilization is possible because of an upward displacement of the genitals in the guise of the eyes: sublimation. But what if the eyes themselves appear parodically, as these ocular swatches which have erupted from below? Return of the repressed -- as a return of the undressed.
[5] Centrifugality. The tattoo on Shane Huffman's arm . . . a lunar cycle . . . affirming Bataille's pronouncement: . . . "there are no vibrations that are not conjugated with a continuous circular movement" . . . tears in the form of scatterblown glyphs . . . a vertiginous fall toward the sky . . . dirt on the ground a parody of the planets . . . rubble of "planetary systems that turn in space like rapid disks, and whose centers also move, describing an infinitely large circle, . . . away continuously from their own position in order to return to it, completing their rotation" . . . an eclipse . . . "a subterfuge of memory" . . . as high as your feet, as low as the sky . . . stars strewn like pages torn from a book . . . a dizzy clutter in clockwork ebb and flow . . . "the simplest image of organic life united with rotation is the tide" . . . swimming in an onanistic sea . . . words flung in ever widening circles . . . a spiral . . . "the two primary motions are rotation and sexual movement" . . . the earth eroded beneath a vault of forgetting . . . "beings only die to be born" . . . again . . . .
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