BR:UT Fairy Tales & What Links To The Real
Paolo Emilio Pisano London, March 2016 History and Theory Studies, Year 3
THE DOUBLE AND BAUDRILLARD
“The simulacrum is never what hides the truth - it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”
Ecclesiastes
“An unpleasant picture! A burlesque, a regular burlesque, and that’s the fact of the matter!”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Double
In Dostoyevsky’s novel The Double, Titular Councillor Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin wakes up one day to find out that someone has been following him and using his own identity. When confronting him, he comes to the evident awareness that the follower is none other than his very own doppelganger. Initially sympathising with the copy – up to the point of referring to him with a paternal Golyadkin Jr. – the original Golyadkin Senior eventually realizes with horror that what he at first treated as a pitiful copy worth of compassion has begun threating of replacing the original, becoming more real than the real one and glimpsing the end of his existence; at least on a social level, were Golyadkin Senior would be effectively stop being a real entity and be treated as a ghost – he would eventually fall in a psychotic breakdown and be dragged off to an asylum. The evolution of the opposition and replacement between the ‘two’ characters in The Double reveals an essential feat in the creation of what Baudrillard will call in the 1980s second order of simulacra. This is the mapping of a real entity and the generation of a new model of the real; similar a map of the territory, drawn in a one to one scale and lay on top of it with enough clarity as to make it look like the real thing, as the same Baudrillard puts when describing the act of the mapmaking Empire in Jorge Luis Borges On Exactitude Of Science: “the double ends by being confused with the real through aging”.1 “. . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658”2 The generation of the model of the second level of simulacra presupposes, still, the existence of a real model onto which the copy can be shaped; the same term doppelganger makes evident the necessity of an original to which the copy can resemble. Still, the doppelganger could still be modelled onto a non-existing real, an abstraction, and this is where Baudrillard’s concept of Hyper-Real comes into play.
“Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a Hyper-Real. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.”3 To put it in simple terms, the simulacra is preceding today the real, the understanding of what’s real does not come anymore from the perception of our own life, but from the creation of model taken to be more real than the real itself: TV series and film characters, videogames, Disneyland… Here evidently rises a dilemma. Here, is interesting to understand how one of the way this can be expressed is as a dilemma endangering anyone who wishes to convey a certain reality through the use, and limitations, of a media - or The Double is already a simulacra preceding the real, given that it is being formed on an abstract character and conveyed through the system of written text. That is, where representation is concerned, to bypass the precession of simulacra comes to be the loftiest possible means of achieve a reality that exists for the ‘audience’, but to do so needs to heavily rely on the audience to compose their sense of reality on their own.
TARKOVSKY AND THE ATMOSPHERE OF THE REAL
“Never try to convey your idea to the audience – it is a thankless and senseless task. Show them life, and they’ll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it.”4
“I find poetic links extremely pleasing [...] Certainly I am more at home with them than with traditional theatrical writing which links images through the linear, rigidly logical development of the plot. That sort of fussily correct way of linking events usually involves arbitrarily forcing them into sequence in obedience to some abstract notion of order. [...] Through poetic links feeling is heightened and the spectator is made more active. He becomes a participant in the process of discovering life, unsupported by ready made deductions from the plot or ineluctable pointers by the author. [...] The usual logic, that of linear sequentiality, is uncomfortably like the proof of a geometry theorem. As a method is incomparably less fruitful artistically than the possibilities opened up by associative linking.”5
Swiftly moving from image to image, Andrey Tarkovsky films leave the spectator utterly extraneous from spurious logical exposition and consequentiality. Instead, the sequence of scenes, the subtle development of an almost inexistent, though overfilling plot, reveals itself through the mere personal interpretation impressed onto it by the person watching. Closer to Poetry than Prose, the logic of linear sequentiality is overthrown, the passages are ordered by associations of images, the spectator feeling is called forth to make sense of what is happening in front of him. Here, association of words, analogies, smells, textures are brought into play; a number of sequential passages, from word to sense and back, are thrown into play and almost left unresolved. Transformation plays thus a main role, but it is strictly contained in the subject of the spectator. It is only the receiving subject that can recompose the element in a complete, rational whole; and can only do it by holding off his final acknowledgement over the reality that is represented on screen until a later moment. This has to be seen in the context of Tarkovsky idea of authenticity of represented life. The same act of representing something poses the question of its credibility and authenticity; and this can be achieved, following Tarkovsky’s reasoning, only when the subject who represent reality manages to convey his subjective impressions through an objective, understandable form. So it is that when he writes: “I think in fact that unless there is an organic link between the subjective impressions of the author and his objective representation of reality, he will not achieve even superficial credibility, let alone authenticity and inner truth.”6 What he is calling for is an assimilation of life on a reciprocal level, from subject to subject via the objective media of cinema.
But this presupposes for reality to be represented and still be treated as ‘real’. It presupposes that a media, through its limitations, should be able produce something authentic enough to bypass its status of symbol. If Tarkovsky’s aims were to represent the factuality of the event on screen, this would irreparably fall in the symbolic realm, becoming a simulacrum of reality, a false copy. Here is where the inversion of the poetic link, so praised by the filmographer, enters the scene. What is conveyed as real is the atmosphere of the act, its psychological consequences. In his piece on mise en scene, Tarkovsky writes: “You are walking along the street and your eyes met those of someone who went past you. There was something startling in his look, it gave you a feeling of apprehension. He influenced you psychologically, put you in a certain frame of mind. If all you do is reproduce the conditions of that meeting with mechanical accuracy, dressing the actors and choosing the spot for shooting with documentary precision, you still won’t achieve the same sensation from the film sequence as you had from the meeting itself. For when you filmed the scene you of the meeting you ignored the psychological factor, your own mental state which caused the stranger’s look to affect you with that particular emotion. And so for the stranger’s look to startle the audience as it did you at the time, you have to prepare for it by building up a mood similar to your own at the moment of the actual meeting.”7 In acknowledging the possibility of conveying the psychological build-up of an event happening in what is in every sense a “real without sense or reality”5 such as the filmic scene and screen, Tarkovsky is thus trying to bypass the fall into an hyper-reality by leaving to the audience the task of rebuilding their singular reality at their very own psychological level, through senses and a linking of subjective and objective impressions.
BR:UT’s FAIRYTALES
Walking along the main street, flanking the mingling of facades, one concrete block, with monumental steps, guarding lions, but no entrance door. To find the entrance one must turn into a narrow alley and approach the block from one side. When inside, vertical light raining down from a glass ceiling reveals a huge grid of cubicles, filled with houses. In the mid of the room, pending from the ceiling, a wrecking ball. This is the kind of atmosphere presented is many plates produced in a period spanning from the late 1970s to the early 1990s by Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin. These are usually A1 size etching drawn with painstakingly care and their representations generally taken to express themes of discomfort with the contemporary condition of life in the cities through a fairy-tale sort of narrative, where scenes seem to remind more of a never-was, not-too-distant past than a bright future – most of the plates were produced for architectural competitions sponsored by Japanese manufacturers of building materials or architectural magazines. Together with some other young exponents of the Russian architectural circle in their time, they were first grouped under the term Paper Architects at an exhibition at the Iunost magazine in 1984. “Paper architecture is generally credited with respect for its disdain of reality, for its courageous fantasy, for rising above the trivial, which most everyday practicing architects cannot afford to do. Thus an architect who draws the non-existent, for whom pragmatism and routine is alien, is a hero. This elevates the architecture graphic itself to a higher level, placing it in the category of art. In this moment, the role of architectural drawing is changed. It becomes a means to an end in the struggle against pragmatism. This is why techniques become more complex – they demand more effort and more artistic proficiency. In some cases, like that of Brodsky, techniques need to be entirely invented for the architectonic subject in question. What happens however, when Brodsky’s Paper Architecture is anything but the attempt to rise over the trivial or dismiss reality; when it rather embodies ordinary sad reality, the unspectacular routine, everyday landscapes and the mediocrity of daily monotony? One would question this is it were not for the feeling of magic, the enchantment which accompanies his work. Reality does not often provoke this effect – though it exists. It emerges through Brodsky’s very techniques.”8 If it’s true that their etchings have an underlying feeling of never-was in them, is also true that these very etchings always contain a sense of underlying reality ingrained into them, utterly impossible to shake off. “As it is worked with wax, resin burin, acid and ink, then skimmed not quite clean, an etched plate gathers traces of existence like those decaying Venetian palazzo that Joseph Brodsky saw, where ‘every surface craves dust, for dust is the flesh of time’.”9
Whether this grain is produced by the same real consistency of the etching, the fact that the reality of the etching plate is what the paper lies upon so as to make a map of it offers a recall to the fable of Borges, where empire and map start being mistaken for the other. Is then by way of pressing the abstract (paper) layer on top of the original plate (model), that a new real object is born, ready to replace the original, and in any case incommensurably more real than the former. Only through this process, though, it is possible to reach a level of refinedness such as the one Brodsky and Utkin offer us, where thin, precise lines overlay each other offering glimpses of something that in the original copper plate was not quite there, coming together in the production of compelling architectural sceneries. While describing with cinematic clarity the scenes, the plates produce a sense of refinedness and loftiness; if only for the punctilious use of technique of etching and chiaroscuro. The definition of cinematic sense in the scenes is important also to understand as the same impossibility of the scenery in BR:UT plates can be compared to how a track shot in cinema works; spaces clash with each other constantly, presenting themselves in different angles, proportions, scales, conveying the perception of a broken scenery, where the underlying idea of architecture is anything but clear or finite. Eventually, the space of the architecture is deformed to such an extent to become impossible, if not seen from the particular perspective by which it is being presented to us. Nevertheless, the care in the representation conveys the full possibility of the idea, and it’s true then that “[t]heir competition successes stemmed from their gift to endow definitely architectural ideas with both graphic and tectonic credibility.”10 Scale, Juxtaposition and analogy are then some of the main terms that the two architects use, in their series of works, to explore how to convey an entirely subjective reality in objective, widely understandable terms. The necessity of an accompanying story becomes a mere decoration, where the text sometimes recounts something widely different from what is expected, with frequent biblical references and incomprehensible scribbles, and the link between images, even though it should be guided by the criteria of beaux-art panel composition, is essentially subverted in the way in which each representation subverts the inner order of the panel itself; through a play of subtle analogies and non-sensical humour. By sub-diving an objective reality into system of broken signs that the reader can decipher and make his own, BR:UT can be read as the attempt to create a sense of the real that relies not on the formation of a map of non-existing places preceding their own reality, but an abstract, psychological map in which the sense lies; through a careful representation of the life embedded in it and the consequences of it. “The function of the image, as Gogol said, is to express life itself, not ideas or arguments about life. It does not signify life or symbolise it, but embodies it, expressing its uniqueness.”11 By recomposing the image then, initially disorienting elements like scale or long winded blocks of scribbles made to resemble a finite text acquire a new meaning and feel completely at ease in the whole; the representation acquires the connotations of surreal atmospheres, but the reading becomes ingrained with reality. It is through the use of analogy and a ‘poetic’ mode of linking pieces together similar to the one described by Tarkovsky that a reading of these compositions reveals the possibility of appropriate an objective reality that is being passed down without falling into what Baudrillard called the Hyper-Real, even though constantly staying in the realm of the real.
(1) Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, c1994). (2) Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions (New York: Viking, 1998). (3) Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. (4) Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time : Reflections on the Cinema (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1991). (5) Ibid. (6) Ibid. (7) Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. (8) Alexander Brodsky, Alexander Brodsky - Works (Tchoban Foundation, 2015). (9) Ibid. (10) Ibid. (11) Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time.