Mimesis as a critical tool within the Modernism

Rachele Burgato Matr. 276926 Visual Arts Lab Professor: Marta Kuzma Academic Year: 2013/2014

Mimesis as A Critical Tool within Modernism

Preamble This paper attempts to analyze the relationship between the work of art, reality and mimesis, departing from Theodor Adorno’s concept of mimesis as tool of critique in relation to society, and proceeding in how these theoretical applications relate to mimesis in Robert Smithson’s work.

1. Theodor Adorno’s Concept of Mimesis.

Theodor Adorno is the Frankfurt School philosopher, who wrote in Aesthetic Theory about the connections between artistic mimesis and rationality, as an analysis of a dialectic relationship that illustrates how mimesis is a critical tool in evaluation of society, that goes against the grain of the positivist tendency of modern consciousness. To analyze Adorno’s thought, one must first point out the principle of negation and the role it plays in setting up a dialectic between opposing categories, whereby a phenomenon can not be without a connection with its opposite, its negation. Mimesis is a concept central in Aesthetic Theory and Adorno claimed art’s refuge for mimetic comportment as follows: “That art, as something mimetic, is possible in the midst of rationality, is a response to the faulty irrationality of the rational world as an overadministered world. For the aim of all rationality - the quintessence of the means for dominating nature - would have to be something other that means, hence something not rational.”1 Mimesis examined by T. Adorno is described as an intrinsic process in autonomous art. Mimesis is not proposed by the philosopher as a mere copy of reality, but as a tool capable of assimilating the reality that surrounds it, and at the same time going beyond it. Mimesis is a dynamic that operates around the work of art that consists of two components that interpenetrate one another in an ongoing dialectic: rationality (also called construction, as rational process that forms it) and irrationality (expression and creative matrix of artist’s subjectivity). Adorno speaks about these features in terms of an interpenetration of two polarities, through which the work is composed, crossing them continuously. It is the mimetic quality of assimilating reality, whereby art becomes a critical tool against the rationality of the outside world, which wants to hide the false irrationality of the social order, because “art is rationality that criticizes rationality without withdrawing from it.”2 The philosopher writes about two types of rationality and irrationality: rationality and irrationality that constitute the work of art, considered as "positive" elements, and to the other side rationality and irrationality of society, defined by Adorno as faulty rationality and faulty irrationality, because tainted and not spontaneous, a product of capitalism.

Art in assimilating reality criticizes the inner workings by which faulty irrationality is concealed and, in doing so, art operates to ”maintain the image of its aim, which has been obscured by rationality

1 2

T. W. ADORNO, Aesthetic Theory, Continuum, London and New York, 1997, (trans. Lenhardt, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Ibidem.

1

(of the world), and it convicts the status quo of its irrationality and absurdity”3. Art gets a function, a type of utilitarian trajectory, as it triggers a process of awakening of consciousness (even imagination), reactivating what Adorno defines as non-identity thinking, as a process of critical thinking, which takes the consciousness of the real world and its paradoxical mechanisms, without accepting passively what society wants us to understand as the real world.

This is the power of art to reorient the thinking so that it becomes a cognitive thinking, able to turn on again the reality. Art thus becomes an instrument of knowledge because it doesn’t hide its irrationality as the social world does.

“Construction tears the elements of reality out of their primary context and transforms them to the point where they are once again capable of forming a unity, one that is no less imposed on them internally than was the heteronomous unity to which they were subjected externally.”4 An example of how art functions to reveal how society hides its faulty irrationality is proposed by Adorno in his elaborations on the concept of ugliness, as a way of criticizing capitalism. “The repressed who sides with the revolution is, according to the standards of the beautiful life in an ugly society, uncouth and distorted by resentment, and he bears all the stigmas of degradation under the burden of unfree – moreover, manual – labor.”5 Society, restricting certain groups of the population within the category of ugly, tends to separate them from the rest of the society, from the rest "of the beautiful life", and in doing so it hides the causes that create the ugliness of the world. Art, since he entered this category in its aesthetic, was able to denunciate the causes of ugly.

Society tends to masquerade ugliness, as an expression of the malfunctioning of the world and the system. Often the judgment that consensual society assumes in relation to the judgment of the ugly is a spontaneous judgment, reflecting what Adorno might refer to as identity thinking or rational identity thinking as a non-critical process, which tends to eliminate the problem, without allowing to analyze in a critically and aware way, the reasons and mechanisms by which the ugly derives. “Art must take up the cause of what is proscribed as ugly, though no longer in order to integrate or mitigate it or to reconcile it with its own existence through humor that is more offensive than anything repulsive. Instead, in the ugly, art must denounce the world that creates and reproduces the ugly in its own image.”6 The mimetic ability of art, characterized by its capacity to assimilate the reality and to bring out the irrational, has often been useful as a critical system of the ugly created by society. Art represents the ugly to analyze its causes and, taking advantage of its mimetic ability, turns the irrational rational, and in a conscious way makes known the phenomena that the capitalist world tries to hide under the category of ugly, simply deleting them, indeed to turn them away with a critical process. Paradoxically, society accuses art of being "ugly " (because it brings out the subjects that don’t comply with the rules of beauty in the world) and doesn’t accomplish the function that would make a world, already ugly enough, the better. Ugliness, for Adorno, assumes a component of social significance when it is accepted as an expression of antifeudalism, found in Rimbaud and Baudelaire’s poetry for example, and later developed into the realist movement originated in France in the late nineteenth century.

The Stonebreakers, painted by Gustave Courbet in 1849, is an example of how mimesis served to unveil the experience from opaque. The painting depicts two workers intent on breaking stones and yet the raw and not lyrical mode in which they are represented, aimed to heighten something formerly not depicted in academic painting in that it illustrates the condition of workers. The painting lacks aesthetic elements related to the classical tradition; there are not forms of consolation for their beauty, but they are shocking for their high content of truth, revealed in a critical way. The exhibition of images that are critical about workers’ conditions, it means openly accuse the perpetrators of such exploitation, the bourgeois world that thought it was not appropriate to show images of lower social class people, within the art world. The realist painting has been able to initiate a reformulation of previous pictorial aesthetics, through the presentation of

3

T. W. ADORNO, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 54.

Ivi, p. 57.

5 Ivi, p. 48.

6 Ibidem 4

2

a style and subjects prior outcast from art. A similar process has been implemented by photography in the 20s, following the deconstruction of the medium itself, in relation to what the painting had done previously. From the practice of photojournalism in fact, photography has managed to become an instrument of critical representation of reality, following the rules of the medium, and precisely from this processes that have affected this phase, it was able, in the 60s, to get its autonomy as an artistic medium within a modernist criticism.

2. Photography as a Medium for Mimetic Inquiry and Radical Art Practice.

The mimetic property of art as a critical device is located in the conceptual photographic practices of the more radical artist working throughout the 1960. Jeff Wall in his essay "Marks of Indifference" writes about how photography was able to fit inside a critical mechanism that has affected modern art, through the instrument of auto-critique of the medium itself. J. Wall introduces the topic of photojournalism as a starting point of which serves to understand how photography rethinks its means making itself independent from pictorial, that had affected it until the 20s.

With the birth of photojournalism between the 20s and 30s, photography developed as an independent and functional mean in connection with its relationship with the publishing.

This purposes of photojournalism was imitated by photographers, such as W. Evans and P. Strand, for thinking about photography as a medium inserted in an industrial context.

But only with the researches of conceptual artists of the 60's photography fits inside a modernist dialectic of the medium, in relation to the other arts, starting from the afterthought and the creation of a new function of the reportage.

This process of auto-critique came in photography lagging behind the other arts, because, unlike painting, the photo cannot be separated from the depiction: it is the medium par excellence of the representation. In this sense, photography was missing a dialectical relationship with the medium itself, with the surface of the photograph, that simply imitating the aesthetic results of the paintings (for example, in Stieglitz’s first phase).

Reportage photography moved away from the use of pictorial photography when it was able to “relinquish the sensuousness of the surface, and relinquish any explicit preparatory process of composition”.7 In this way it was up to examine its characteristics compared to other means and it did so, making them explicit. “Reportage evolves in the pursuit of the blurred parts of pictures".8 These were the aspects to which the conceptual photography of the 60s referred for an argument that will insert photography in a modern dialectic.

As Adorno explained, referring to irrationality and rationality of the artwork, it is possible to understand how photography, while maintaining its depicting quality, at the same time gave rise to the destruction of its aesthetic, precisely because it borrowed its form from social reality, throughout mimesis.

Photography while remaining formally constituted (rational) is capable to absorb the reality that it’s representing, and, through the elimination of the search for pictorial elements, impresses reality by being explicit as photographic medium. This can also be a possible way to reconnect to Adorno’s concept of ugliness, in that photography eliminates aesthetic to get away from a pictorial model and at the same time because he wants to assimilate reality, documenting the abject in the world created out of repressive conditions and capitalism, and assimilating its conditions in order to provide a critique.

7 8

J. WALL, Marks of indifference: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art, Los Angeles, 1995, p. 33.

Ibidem.

3

“Photography could emerge socially as art only at the moment when its aesthetic presuppositions seemed to be undergoing a withering radical critique, a critique apparently aimed at foreclosing any further aestheticization or “ratification” of the medium”.9

3. Robert Smithson’s Monuments of Passaic.

An artist working in a critical and autonomous manner throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s before his untimely death, was Robert Smithson who first used photography connected with land art and sculpture. Smithson enabled the use of photo inside of his artwork along with other elements, in a process that prior had been seen related closer to the artifact, rather than with the cultural. Mimicking the processes of reportage, Smithson integrated, in an ironic way, unconventional elements that have not yet been institutionalized by the art world: maps, instructions, texts. Integrating these elements, Smithson denies their original function, for reframing them within the art work. The utilitarian aspect of the individual elements is transformed by the relationship of the elements to each other, to create a certain aesthetic that reformulates them in an artistic way.

Smithson’s “A tour of the monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” of 1967, is an example of how the work of art has been a mean of "de-skilling and re-skilling of the artist in a context defined by the culture industry”10.

Smithson’s project is an investigation of the cultural landscape of the area of Passaic in New Jersey, an important area for the textile industry, which landscape had been modified by this activity. He took a trip to some areas not yet fully urbanized. Like many other artists of land art, he concerned to intervene in natural areas, where human intervention was minimal or absent. He looked at the landscape from the window of the bus that is transporting him, he kept a diary where he recorded his experience and then he photographed the “monuments” (an ironic and reverential way to named the bulldozers and the industrial objects that he saw on the landscape) abandoned during the work-off days, in order to analyze the industrial landscape and its particular form of entropy, through which read the paradoxes of the territory, for example in its manifestations of chaos and order. It was a correlation of experiences, triggered by elements that formed different levels of the work: the quality of the photographs of the newspaper that he was reading, mediate the perception of the landscape outside, while the travel diary, describing the experience, was an equipment of the photographs that he took in a scientific manner.

“Smithson the journalist-photographer accompanies Smithson the artist-experimenter” 11 , as pointed out by Jeff Wall, he was using the technique of reportage, and keeping a diary of the trip, he was able to interpret, in parody, the role of the journalist, in a process of enactment.

Photographs were taken in a very scientific and detached way, deleting any aesthetic reference (as he wrote “photographing it with my instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph. The sun became a monstrous light bulb that projected a detached series of stills through my instamatic into my eyes”12), meanwhile the diary, accompanying photographs, gave a new interpretation to the landscape. The montage of all this layers has a spatial and dimensional scope and the whole process is a kind of performance enabled by the artist (as he will do with the land art intervention in Salt Lake, the Spiral Jetty in 1970), a process that does penetrate the three dimensions, of

9

Ivi, p. 35.

J. WALL, Marks of indifference: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art, op. cit., p. 32.

11 Ivi, p. 37 12 R. SMITHSON, A tour of the monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, in Robert Smithson: the collected writings, University California Press, Los Angeles, 1996, p. 70.

10

4

photography, writing and experience. Smithson framed his processes without succumbing to make the text a work of art in itself, as some minimalist artists had done, such as Donald Judd.

Its performative action against sculptures, that he recorded in the landscape, provoked a relationship between "time and process, narrative and enactment, experience, memory and allusion."13 Mimesis here attended in two ways: by assimilating (also in an ironical way) scientific and technical processes of photojournalism and then absorbing reality of which the project aims to analyze the changing (landscape changing into a cultural landscape).

“Art photography, as we have seen, had already evolved an intricate mimetic structure, in which artists imitated photojournalists in order to create pictures. This elaborate, brought photography to the forefront of the new pseudo-heteronomy, and permitted it to become a paradigm for all aesthetically-critical, model-constructing thought about art”14.

Summary Starting from the analysis of Adorno about mimesis, this essay has tried to illustrate how mimesis turns art as autonomous tool of analysis to the society. It’s determined, in this way, a function of art, which is tragic activity, because tragic are social problems that it complaints. Were taken for examples G. Courbet, which highlights the exploitation of the labor of the workers in 1849, and R. Smithson’s project about the transformation of the cultural landscape by the capitalist society in the 60s. Both are examples of the ability of art to denounce hard situations, through an independent language, efficient in creating in the viewer a critical reaction to the problem. In order to maintain its function, art must implement a process of self-criticism, that puts it into an independent dialectic of the medium.

They have been shown here only some of the examples that affirm how art, as a place of mimesis, can be a critical tool of knowledge and awareness of the society. Mimetic power of art allows it to enter into a temporal short circuit: art assimilates the present, and criticizing it at the same time projects it toward an ideal future. Art then, is revealed as a filter of reality, which has the quality to transcend it in an autonomous way, because relating to an experience that goes beyond reality itself.

13 14

J. WALL, Marks of indifference: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art, op. cit., p. 37.

Ivi, p. 36.

5

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. W. ADORNO, Aesthetic Theory, Continuum, London and New York, 1997, (trans. Lenhardt, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann).

R. SMITHSON, A tour of the monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, in Robert Smithson: the collected writings, University California Press, Los Angeles, 1996.

J. WALL, Marks of indifference: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art, Los Angeles, 1995.

6