II
Among the numerous photos taken in 9/11 there are several that caught my attention. They show people jumping out, in horror and despair, from the WTC.
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The quality of these pictures is not good. They were mostly shot with digital video cameras without zoom lenses. They are, nonetheless, extraordinarily aesthetic images that are also historic documents. Their historic and the aesthetic functions are connected. I think this is a feature that adds extra value to the photographic document in the age of mass media communications. The possibility of preserving a visual testimony of key events would appear to be too neutral a statement in a context in which the outrageous, the shocking and the immediate are privileged as the prime values of the image. 1
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This means that the documentary value of a photo that has mass media attention lies in its significance as a spectacle and its functionality as news. Both are conditioned by their worth as pleasure, which are more important than their capacity to convey information or to commemorate an event. In these circumstances the transcendence of the image yields to the immediate pleasure of consumption.
This is, basically, the position of the aesthetic fact in the context of mass culture.
This affects photography beyond its technical aspects and craft. Things like bad quality, narrative, grain or pixilation, which are supposed to be noise within the visual structure of photography, could become parts of the language of photography and video. This is directly related to the proliferation of technologies and media that are restructuring the appearance and consistence of the photographic medium. And this is one of the factors that influence the dissolution of photography. It is part of the transformation of its production and value codes.
The distribution of photos, videos and broadcasted images of 9/11 induce an aesthetic consumption of history. It is in this sense that I venture to say that this event helped to demonstrate the state of affairs of the Post Modern visual culture, and also to draw attention of the place of the mass media imagery within the contemporary visual culture.
It is not news to anyone that we live in the Age of the Image. But if I go back to this commonplace, it is not to reaffirm the specific historic role of contemporary imagery (its assumed usefulness to History), but to point out that History itself is subordinated to the fate -and even the whims- of the image.
One of the features of the Post Modern context is the acceptance of a lack of contradiction between History and imagination. We have been living in the fantasy of participating in History thanks to the image. Image reinforces this illusion of the synchronicity effect, of fictitious or artificial relationships. Our access to History, to the world and to reality is mostly imaginary; it gives us a sensation of comfort before reality. It is almost a prophylactic relationship.
The obvious distance between Yves Klein’s picture and the images of people jumping out of the WTC does not mean that we should put aside the equivalences. We are talking about the use of the dramatic image aiming to persuade, of the use of the image for the masses and the insertion of photography in the imagination of society. We are talking about situations that can be considered, to a greater or lesser degree, simulations or spectacles. Yves Klein’s’ photo is an example of how image -and imagination- contaminate art History. The WTC photos are an example of how historical account is determined by the use of the image and its intervention in the collective imagination.
Yves Klein’s photo is a representation that is exhibited as such, to the point of its value of exhibition surpassing its value of cult.2 I believe the cancellation of its value of cult implies the dissolution of the idea of death. The example is quite explicit: The photo is not showing a man that is about to hit the pavement, it is simply showing a man that has jumped into the void. The action is so absolutely aesthetic that is, in itself, motionless; it does not imply a past or a future. It is the present in a pure state. The pavement and the window simply exist as spatial references, as rhetorical elements that help to place the photographed subject as a sign, even as an account.
A photo of a person jumping out of the WTC does not cancel by itself the idea of death. On the contrary, it is the idea of death that helps to emphasize the drama of the account. What gives a special meaning to the picture is that we know the subject died a few seconds later; the pavement does not have to be included in the picture, the void is sufficient. However, the excessive use of the photo in the media, and the way its aesthetic (over dramatized) consumption is induced lead to a reversal of its meanings, because the values of representation and exhibition (as spectacle) are attached to death, which leads us to understand that, in the end, every cult is incomplete without dramatization and simulation. More that presenting the anticipated death of the subject, this photo would present what Baudrillard calls an “anticipated resurrection”, the transit from the real world to the world of image.3
If Lyotard is right when he states that the sublime comes “when imagination fails”, then this triumph of imagination over reality can also be seen as a symptom of the failure –or at least the recoil- of the sublime. Representation acquires a lightness that is proportional to the taming of reality performed by simulation.
There is a curious contradiction in this scenario. The dissolution of the artistic object does not necessarily imply a lightness of the aesthetic experience of art. The density of text and breadth of discourse of contemporary art sometimes seems to be too weighty, too severe. If there were an effect of lightness, it would probably have to do with a superficial representation, this meaning: On the one hand, the de-sublimation of the artistic event. The frequent possibility of art facing representation without conflict. Quoting Lyotard, the frequent cancellation of the contradiction between the representable and the conceivable, since representation is focused on the surface of things, in the most visible side of reality. On the other hand, the banalization of the artistic event -understood as a shallowness of the artist, mentioned by Morawsky as one of the symptoms of the crisis of art since the 19th Century.4 Yet, that “shallowness” can be understood as “superficiality” in the sense I just suggested, not referring so much to the artist but to the artistic object and event. In this sense Morawsky is correct when he states that the work of art has been pushed to a private world. I want to make clear that it is private meaning domestic, but also meaning self-referring. However, unlike Morawsky, I think this retreat towards privacy is no longer a symptom of exclusion or a consequence of a resistance or lack of adaptability to the laws of the market. Nowadays it has become a legitimate strategy, sanctioned by the market and the more or less institutional fields of the “world of art”.
The lightness of representation seems to be part of the “aerial” quality of Post Modernity. Ironically this “pneumatic” attribute of Post Modern culture seems to give continuity to the Neo vanguard ideal of an artist such as Yves Klein. In any case, the use of photography to represent his “jump to the void” implies avoiding the conflict between representation and imagination. When Klein suggested that the artist of the future would express himself “through eternal silence”5, perhaps he was proposing a disproportionate and theatrical way out of the sublime. But when he published his “jump into the void” he was proposing the paradox of a silence that could only be fully performed with a touch of scandal and showmanship -a false silence. The great discovery of this action is the possibility of using photography to provoke a crisis in the ideal of the sublime within art.
1. For comfort, I use the term “image” to refer to the photographic object, with the risk of creating confusion due to my own use of this concept in the context of the “imaginary” or the “imagination”. In such cases, I understand the image as something essentially subjective. I must confess this second meaning is the one I’m more satisfied with and the one I think suits better my analysis of photography.
2. In Walter Benjamin’s concept of “aura” there was a chief position for the ritual function he attributed to the artistic object. The ritual (in his view the equivalent of the cultural) would place every artistic object in relation to a past or tradition, but above all, connected with an origin: “…the only value of the authentic work of art lies on the ritual in which had its first and original value”. So when Benjamin defined the aura as “the unrepeatable manifestation of a distance”, he was talking about both spatial and temporary references. The distant is the origin of the work and its maximum value would rest in connecting with that distance. Benjamin himself completes his definition of aura by stating that such distance “does not represent other thing that the assertion of the cultural value of the artistic work in space-time categories of perception…”
For Benjamin, to talk about a crisis of the aura would imply to talk about a crisis of the cultural value of the image. Such crisis would take place in the conditions set by the mass culture, which provokes a ”secularization” in which the object of cult becomes merchandise. However I still consider that the value of exhibition of an image structures other mechanisms of cult, perhaps too sophisticated for the ideological, social and cultural conditions of Modernity and Post Modernity. Maybe they are not associated to the quest for a mythical origin, but possibly to the desire of constructing an authenticity based on the origin of the work. Nonetheless its most evident manifestation is its emphasis on the present, in that sensation of immobility, in that effect of non-transcendence that apparently is shared by most products of the society of masses. See La obra de arte en la época de su reproductibilidad técnica. In Walter Benjamín. Discursos interrumpidos I. Madrid. Taurus, 1973. P. 15-58
3. “The reality will never happen again. Such is the vital function of the model in a system of death or, in other terms, the anticipated resurrection that will not grant any opportunities to te very phenomenon of death” See Jean Baudrillard. Cultura y Simulacro. Kairós, Barcelona, 1994. P. 11-12. A very different philosophical and poetic perspective is offered by Jose Lezama Lima who seems to have anticipated Baudrillard reagrding the issue of a relationship between image and resurrection. Lezama finishes his “Prelude to Imaginary Eras (1958) stating that the image is where “the susbstance of resurrection” gets life . In a 1960 poem he says : “The man that dies in the image wins the overabundance of resurrection”. We also found in “The Historic Image” (1959) the concept of the image as a promise: “·The image extracts a glance that can help us penetrate -or at least live in the hope of- resurrection”. Hope and expectation, resurrection and redemption. Those are the keys that Lezama uses tu bulid his concept of image. This mysticism, vulgarized by mass culture brings us, in tis age , a simple formula for substituting rality with imagination. See José Lezama Lima. Confluencias. Selección de ensayos. Letras cubanas. La Habana, 1988..
4. “The paradox –present to this day- lies in the fact that the more the cultural goods are democratized, the more uncertain the place of the artist becomes. The artist has to abide the laws of the market, if he does not accept such a pact; his worked is pushed to a totally private world. As a consequence, an attitude far more drastic and dramatic than the bohème and the representatives of l’art pour l’art from the end of the 19th Century up to the 1930’s has appeared in the field of the arts. We are talking a bout the superficiality of the artist”. Stefan Morawsky. Las variantes interpretativas de la fórmula “el ocaso del arte”. “Criterios” Magazine. No. 21/24. Tercera época. January 1987-December 1988. P. 129
5. "Would not the future artist be he who expressed through an eternal silence an immense painting possessing no dimension?" Yves Klein. The Chelsea Hotel Manifesto. Consulted in Yves Klein-Art Minimal and Conceptual Only.
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