Julian Goddard
A silent moment
There is a beauty of reality that eludes naming – a kind of space in which the absence of meaning produces hyphenation - a pause or emptiness. This punctuation in the day-to-day noise of being is evident in a particular tradition of art and photography that stands as a radical reproach to the commodification of reality. The seduction of this beauty of reality is its ability to stand, not in opposition to the commotion of contemporary life but to give us a possibility of another experience that completely negates any power of the spectacle and its concomitant rhetoric. By its dumbness and muteness this beauty refuses any sense of dialogue with the maelstrom of the quotidian.
There is a space in this cacophony in which a kind of moment distinguished by silence and stillness mounts ‘a defence of the real'. Ironically it is to be found in the evocation of the qualities of indifference and disinterest. This is a condition of the representation of reality that is a radical other story to the conventional histories and rhetoric of modernist - and conventional postmodernist discourses.
It seems ironic that despite all the noise and excitement thrown up by both of these histories it may be the recognition of the possibilities of the qualities of silence and stillness in abating the incessant desire for making meaning, that turns out to be their most important achievement. For while the conventional idea of modernism depended for its articulation and appeal on its ability to produce progressive re-evaluations of meaning, there is a more radical notion. That is, a resistance to the inevitability of meaning's colonisation of representation and experience.
I want to show this quality by presenting the photographic work of Jean Baudrillard and the photographs and paintings of Helen Smith, a Perth based artist and founding member of the Australian Centre for Concrete Art.
1 Punto Final 1997 and 2 Golden Apple 2002
3 Treilles 1997and 4 Brisbane 1994
Baudrillard's photography (or anti-photography as it has been called) resonates with silence, stillness and absence. He chooses to photograph the unimportant, inconsequential and the incidental. The stuff of everyday life that while being not meaningful in the usual sense has a fascination for him that seems to be an articulation of his personal aesthetic relationship with the world. This is a kind of practice of disinterest in which it is exactly that moment of space and time that has no consequence or obvious importance for what he calls ‘the visual universe', that bears some quality of resistance.
Baudrillard makes a clear distinction between photography that is in the service of the system of objects and another radical ‘proper(ly) photographic image that seeks stillness, silence and suspense'.
5 Florida 1986 and 6 New York 1997
His photos stand outside the conventional uses of photography that are dedicated to the production of meaning and the evocation of discussion. They do not to offer anything much at all except a record of a moment in which some impulse has directed his attention. These images are quite – almost silent, a quality he describes as ‘precious' - and necessitate some kind of concrete reading in which meaning is sidelined for a moment and replaced by a direct and fundamental relationship with the image.
This elusion of meaning gives us access to a secret world hidden behind the barrage of spetacularised living. A lost or primitive world of immediate and instantaneous relations in which there is no deferment to the seduction of representation or its desire demanded from us through the pervasion of language. Baudrillard's photographic images simultaneously capture and expel this instance. They fix a moment in which the absence of anything peculiarly meaningful turns itself inside out to produce a radical alterity to the usual mis(use) of photography.
7 Sao Paolo 1988 and 8 Frieze 1994
His images are often beautiful, or more precisely the experience of looking at them is beautiful, in as much as they are empty of anything that might distract our mediate our relationship with them. There is no attempt to tell us something, nothing is said and nothing is put forward. They have no story and no explanation and demand no dialogue. They are in a way stupid for they have no real purpose other than to be themselves. As such they abrogate most of the qualities of what we know as an object by expelling any associated subject. They become their own internalised subject and in doing so they turn their backs on our world of saturated meaning in which we seem to be drowning. Everything about us and everything we do has become meaningful to an extent that our engagement with the world is almost completely mediated by formulised ways of knowing and understanding.
9 Saint Clemant 1987
Baudrillard's photographs seem at odds with his writings which are basically pessimistic and fatalistic. For Baudrillard the system of objects and its manipulation of the real will inevitably bring about a culture of catastrophe that will lead to the eventual demise of human culture. These photos are apparently at odds with his larger millenarian agenda in as much as they seem to offer some sense of hope.
10 Amsterdam 1989
For Baudrillard these images capture a disappearing reality. One he seems to want to hold onto. His photographic practice can be seen as a type of resistance to the world of the spectacle and its inevitable inundation through meaning. This is a defence of the real in which to quote him ‘a few images (and in thought, a few ideas) can gesture discreetly to one and other across space'. I want to suggest a couple of these gestures as a way of trying to locate Baudrillard's images in a history of such an attitude.
Hopefully the images can make the connection on their own.
11 Clement 1982 and 12 Cartier bresson Paris 1967,
13 Paris 1992 and 14 CB Paris 1967
and similarly
15, Sainte Beuve 1996 and 16 Manet Rue Mosnier with Flags 1878
17 sainte Beauve 1997 and 18 M rue Mosnier 1878
Some of Baudrillard's photos do echo painted images made by Manet in the mid nineteenth century. Images as apprehended from both Manet's and Baudrillard's balconies.. What is interesting in this tentative comparison (more a coincidence) is the possibility that Baudrillard and Manet share a vision that allows for the evocation of the incidental, insignificant and ordinary in an attempt to describe a concrete relationship with the world of experience.
I think this is partially evident in the follow association.
19 Corbieres 1994 20 M Pinks and Clematis in a crystal vase 1882 21 Paris 1986
22 m A bunch of violets with a fan 1872 23 Bastille 1998 24 M Bunch of asparagus 1880 25 Trielles 1996
If we accept the conventional argument that modernism begins in the mid nineteenth century in Paris and that Courbet and Manet are its first real protagonists we can begin to understand the history of this argument. For while these two modernist artists are triumphed as ‘engaged artists', as would become the avant-garde model for the next 150 years, there is another possibility in the objects of both their production that needs reconstruction. Both artists were as much as anything committed to still life painting. A private commitment that held just as much radical portent as their better known and celebrated works that engage the social. Indeed there is a not-to-subtle tension between these two artistic tropes. One, the aggressive public figure emersed in the everyday politic, and the other; private, contemplative and representative of what I call quietitude.
At the heart of the importance of Manet's contribution to the history of still life painting is his recognition that, at its most fundamental, painting was about the arrangement of specific areas of coloured paint into a device that in some way replicated a similitude of reality. 1 Maurice Denis' famous statement made in 1890; ‘ We should remember that a picture – before being a war horse, a nude woman, or telling some other story – is essentially a flat surface covered with colours arranged in a particular pattern' 2 was written in acknowledgement of Manet's still life paintings and his awareness that it is through the use of the material of paint that painted images are made.
And likewise the Cubists. Norman Bryson notes the appropriateness of still life for the metaphysical ambitions of Juan Gris when he says “What is shown is art itself, as something which in the presence of an everyday world grows impatient; it is not content to be subverted to the prior world, and seeks autonomy and escape'3. The next move to a pure non-representational art seems obvious. Russian Constructivist art was the logical outcome of this drive towards an art divorced from symbolic representation. Its development marks an exceptional point in the history of the image in which the expulsion of all traditional pictorial languages produces a silence and space that most Concrete and later Minimalist artworks echo. Minimalism, monochromatic painting, Concrete art and all their variations all are indebted to this dramatic desire for reduction, absence and silence.
However while Manet may have initiated this drive to reduction of meaning it is important that we acknowledge what Manet chose to paint in his still life paintings; not only how he did it. His beautiful simple images of domestic objects – a vase of flowers, a bunch of asparagus are basically that which connects him with the larger project of contemporary private life. At the heart of the still life tradition is an articulation of the experience and interpretation of a certain condition of private being. For Manet and possibly for us it is in the domestic sphere where we can practice the private negotiation and contemplation of living; hopefully away from the bombast and force of the commodification of contemporary life. The quite moments of contemplation and reflection that private life affords can be wonderous and it is this that Manet tried to articulate.
I would now like to show some works by Helen Smith whom I believe shares a similar concern as Manet and Baudrillard.
26 HS maggies 2002 27 Lounge 5 2003 28 Questa Casa 2003
As with Baudrillard and Manet, Helen Smith is interested in the oppositional possibility and qualities of the representation of silence and the absence of profound meaning. Like them she allows images and moments that have no apparent importance to be given the freedom to be in the world for us to make of them what we like.
29 Madam Mandarin 2004 30 Stella's Red House 2003
For the past five years Helen has been taking these images of brothels in Australia and around the world. By their sheer indifference she manages to elude any moralising or description that might evoke some kind of documentation. The incidental and the insignificant allow us to see through these representations into a world saturated with colour and light that cannot be given any firm social position. They are just images. They are not trying to tell us anything or to persuade us to act in any way. They are mute as to their context and do not represent it.
31 Stella's Red house 2003 32 Stella's Red house 2003
These photographs exist in themselves and can only be experienced via a kind inter-subjectivity in which we respond to them not as aesthetising reality but as aesthetic objects in their own right.
This quality might be best illustrated by showing a couple of Helen's paintings that she produces in tandem to her photos.
33 Pink Dyptich #8 2003 34 Pink Dyptich #9 2003 35 Green with pink folded dot 2004
These works act in a similar way to her photos in that they do not have anything to tell us, they have nothing to say other than what they are. There is no proselytising or direction. They are simple quite objects empty of meaning and devoid of rhetoric. While they occupy space and direct light they really are pretty banal and mundane. However, what they do accomplish is the possibility of directing our seeing in a way that we may evoke some value in that which is indifferent to the context of its being. This incidentalness allows for pleasure in the stuff of life that plays around us while we are busy being distracted by the significant and important.
36 Ka cilhas 1993
Behind the world of meaning and representation is a concrete world of lived experience that may be quickly disappearing from our consciousness. The act of seeing through representation, to fix the gaze on something behind the reflection of meaning, can be a radical and reconstructing moment both outside and inside of the day-to-day fabric of living. A moment of quitetude set in silence and visual contemplation.
