The Subject Machine
Stephen Riolo
‘At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act — rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or “express” an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter … Here the principle, and the difference from the old painting, is made into a formula. A sketch is the preliminary form of an image the mind is trying to grasp. To work from sketches arouses the suspicion that the artist still regards the canvas as a place where the mind records its contents — rather than itself the “mind” through which the painter thinks by changing a surface with paint.’
— Harold Rosenberg, The American Action Painters, Art News 51/8, December 1952
‘But what I believe is clearly discernible is that the entire painting comes out at us as we are participants rather than observers, right into the room.’
— Jackson Pollock
“Emancipation is the possibility of a spectator’s gaze other than the one that was programmed.”
— Jacques Ranciere
The performance of contemporary visual art, whether enacted by an individual artist or the greater productive apparatus of the art world, remains a core driving force for its actual and symbolic value. Usually reserved for the sanctity of the artist’s studio, the first act in this grand performance, the silent romance between artist and medium, is often a secret one. The birth of an object, when performed in the public sphere, has of course developed over the last century into a sanctified form. But it is the situational suspension and temporary repossession of public space — through the socially established agents of performance — that allow such sacred artistic activities to be strategically exposed for the pleasure, analysis and consumption of the audience. Antonis Pittas’s drawing performance Untitled ( ) is a contemplation of such performance. It is a work whose self-constructed mechanistic performativity generates its own theatrical aura, one that allows questions on the relationship between craft and the mechanical, the politics of subjectivity, and the role of the contemporary creative persona to surface.
If we can agree on the rising hegemony of non-personal/non-representational art, then this work can also open a window for us on the discourse of beauty. Here this discourse assumes a new role as the only tolerable focus of self-reflective art, decreed by our post-pop, consumer art culture grounded itself in the notion of purchased participation. In order to stay broad enough to accommodate such a client audience (one that perpetually seeks to acquire co-ownership or co-authorship of the artistic persona and its creative product, in order to assimilate such experiences into their own) successful contemporary art and its artists often require the primacy of aesthetic concerns to make the observer focus on the endless entanglements that only such philosophical question can offer. At best, this requires the complete erasure of any trace of a personal gesture in art, as not to upset the perceived personal ownership of the art and the artistic persona by its purchasing public but rather to re-direct their attention back towards their own reflection, their own projected desires as mirrored by the art object or the artistic persona. [i]
The perfect machine like fabrication of this work floats upon our well grounded faith in machines as the absolute masters of reproduction. The wondrous skill of infinite replication has been celebrated through out modernity, from the Suprematism of Malevich up through the geometric abstractions of Mondrian. Drifting from his self proclaimed non-representational neo-plasticism towards the more minimalist constructions of Schilderij No. 1 or Composition with Blue’s Mondrian's ever thinning and ever multiplying blacks lines carefully dissecing space into a grid that mirrors the visual logic and geometric abstraction of mechanical reproduction. But it is the performance of drawing these vertical lines in Pittas’s Untitled ( ), the spectacle of the artist’s labour (a repetitive mechanical labour) that also points us towards Barnett Newman’s outspoken writings on his vertical ‘zip’ paintings or Pollock’s well-documented performance of ‘action painting’ by Hans Namuth. The founding father of the performance of painting, Pollock solidified his art-star identity through the establishment of this self-propagating performance-object-identity loop, as beautifully document in Rosenberg’s Action Painting. These early notions of performative production techniques and the artist as a highly public persona, blossomed out of the revolutionary publicism of Newman, that combined with Pollock’s virtuosity assured the political solidification and success of Abstract American Expressionism. This in turn paved the way for the massive elaboration of the contemporary artist into a primarily performative, public persona; in effect laying the ground work which allowed Pop-Art to radically benefit from exposing in its entirety, this populist functionality of contemporary art ‘vis a vis’ media and consumer culture, a situation that had actually been in the works since the beginning of modernity. [ii]
The primacy of this works minimalist aesthetics may be an honest mirror of the re-emergence of this hegemony of the non-representational in contemporary art. It then begs the question: Is self-referential abstract art so universally celebrated, because of the primacy of its aesthetics and therefore its openness to interpretation or rather because of the absence of its inherent personal (subjective) gesture and the subsequent comfortability of its identity neutrality? Though inherent in all art making, it is often the personal that is expunged through the beautiful. It is that notable silence, which emanating from a work focuses its viewers’ attention exclusively on its aesthetics, refinement and craftsmanship. Perhaps this problematic of the personal gesture in art is actually symptomatic of that digital age social void that has cut the actual value of individual subjectivity out of contemporary society or diminished it ‘ad absudum’ to an collection of pixelated fragment of a once human entirety. In this case such performative mimicry of mechanically produced art is also an inquiry into the emerging soul of the artistic tool or machine. Perhaps it is simply the unification of the artist and his art making machines into a common subjectivity, the personal gesture hidden behind the mechanical hand. The perpetually smooth, perfect uniformity of work produced by the labour of machines would point such a technical reproduction by the labour of a human hand towards that fetishism, which as described by Marx, attaches itself to the products of all labour creating thing-like relations between persons and social relations between things, which even in their own social action take the form of the action of objects, that rule the creative producer instead of being ruled by him. In this case it is a ruler, ladder, pencil and the spectatorial gaze of the public, which hold court over the artist. [iii]
A wide curve of paper panels cuts a semi-circular arch out of the visual field of the exhibition space. Its smooth surface seems to ripple due to the irregular repetition of thousands of hand-drawn graphite lines. This vertical array produces a strong optical effect, which extends across a panoramic plane to both edges of vision. It is a mesmerising visual experience that exemplifies the sense of the ‘panoramic’. Stemming from the Greek roots pan/παν (all) and horama/όραμα (a view) or horan οράν (to see) ‘panorama’ though directly translated as ‘a complete view’ also contains a subtle set of phenomenological ideas like ‘a total view’, ‘all viewing’, or ‘a complete look" locked up in its etymology. The denotation of a ‘comprehensive survey’, ‘thorough investigation" or ‘inquiry" where added on top of these perceptual sentiments as the word entered the English language during the 19th century. Quite fittingly the work does present a total horizon for the observer’s eye and an infinite depth of field for one to gaze into. By encompassing the entire view of its observer, the visual expanse of the work, like a panoramic photograph also acts to capture and incorporate the boundaries of perceivable space, thereby limiting or at least editing the vision of its viewer. This effect puts an elegant spin on the relationship of viewer and object, as this paper panorama becomes the stage for the performance for Pittas’s creation of an illusory space through optics, and a visual curtain or drape that encircles the audience’s true line of sight.
Theatre, which sprouts from the Greek theorein/ θεωρείν (to consider, speculate, look at) inherits its meaning from both thea/θέα (a view) and horan/οράν (to see). What is fascinating about this term is its close link to Theoria (a conception, mental scheme) imported from the Greek θεωρία (contemplation, speculation, observation, or those things observed), Theoros/θεωρός (spectator), and Theorema. A rather cryptic technical english term for intellectual proposition, Theorema is borrowed from θεώρημα (spectacle and speculation). It is interesting to note that the form of this work appears quite like the traditional shape of an amphitheater, which of course lends itself to representation as a place of spectacle, but the actual arch that we associate with this ancient theatrical space was never used as a stage but rather the raised seating of the audience. So the visual embrace of the works near amphitheatrical form is experienced by the viewer from the position of the performer on stage, gazing back into the infinity of his audience. The repetitive rows of raised platforms, theoreio/θεωρείο (theatre boxes), which the audience perches on to observe the performance, have in this situation been replaced by the undulating linear graphite space drawn by the artists. It is the artist then, or more precisely the mechanical labour or creative product/object of the artist which has been placed in the position of the true observer, absorbing the guest audience into its dizzyingly beautiful visual abyss, subjugating its viewer through their gaze of awe and inquiry. The performative action of the artist, whose labour included the slow and repetitive task of incrementally moving a ruler with a hammer, produced a secondary acoustic effect. This gentle repetitive sound, referenced by the audience as the ‘soundtrack of the piece’, was the repetitive beat of the artists performing his task. These sounds of creative progress set a living pulse for piece and offered the audience a metronomic rhythm to punctuate their observation of the works creation.
We can also observe a more brutal converse relationship occurring here, if we are to compare this work to the form of the ‘Panopticon’ (all observing, all watching space) instead of the embracing ‘Panorama’. Developed by Jeremy Bentham, the idea of the ‘Panopticon’ was to produce spaces that can hold the ‘sentiment of an invisible omniscience’. The term was applied most successfully to the shape of spectacularly futuristic prisons where a central watch tower allowed observation into all the cells that encircled it, providing the watchman with ‘a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind’ through the politics of vision. Seen through this arrangement the viewer of Untitled ( ) would be returned to the dominate position of the omnipotent observer, standing in the central position probing the encompassing work with their gaze. In this case the work would be forced to offer its self up to the complete scrutiny and visual domination of its audience. As such, we begin to unearth the deeper subject-object relationships provoked by the scale and subtly of this piece, nuance gleaned from its mental conception and performative construction in a public art space. [iv]
The ‘Panorama’, ‘Amphitheatre’ and ‘Panoticon’ are all designated forms of monuments to observation. These are the stages on which subject-object relationships can be formed, performed and deconstructed. ( ) is just such a site, structuring and codifying narratives of performativity, while clearly functioning as testament to its own construction. Starting with its name, ‘( )’ offers us an open expanse in which we might project any of our spectatorial desires, needs for personal association or co-authorship. The work, as an object/performance replicates this expansiveness and inclusiveness both in form, presentation and as testament to the observational experience of its joint construction by the audience and the artist.[v]
Antonis Pittas’s Untitled ( ) was presented at Den Helder, The Netherlands, 7 March 2009.
[i] Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Diagram’, Constantin Boundas & Jacqueline Code (trans.), The Deleuze Reader, Constantin Boundas (ed.), Columbia University Press, New York, 1993.
[ii] See, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Hannah Arendt (ed.) and Harry Zorn (trans.), London: Pimlico, 1999. Theodor W. Adorno, Asthetische Theory, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970. Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (1959), New York: Da Capo Press, 1994. Piet Mondrian, Interview from Zeitung De Telegraaf, 1926. ‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock’ (1958), in Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, Jeff Kelley (ed.), Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003.
[iii] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, chapter 3. See also ‘Jacques Ranciere and Contemporary Art’, Artforum, March 2007.
[iv] Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, Verso, London, 1995.
[v] Theodor W. Adorno, Asthetische Theory, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970.