THE INTERNET AS A DEEP ART EXPERIENCE OF LIBERATION

In an art with depth, the object is not really there. In a sense what is given in this kind of art is a specular image reflected into a third mirror (see our earlier essays on Rodrigo Garcia, Luigi Nono and Zabriskie Point). What this does is add distance to any mimicry, and, at the same time, to any complexity. Deep art should be imagined as a kind of maze which first appears as a box or room, but with invisible doors or walls that can be pushed open if one knows how. These doors lead one into more spaces of different sizes, each one with its own exits unto more seemingly enclosed systems. The richness of the experience lies in the fact that each exit can only be discovered if one can know or can discover the symbolic reference to the next space.

Could the Internet be considered an autarchic experience of deep art? In order to do so, one would need to be willing and capable of losing oneself within it, and likewise be capable of stepping away from it in order to analyse the experience from the advantage of distance. What’s more, for a deep art experience to take place, one must be prepared to pause and linger at times, so hard in the Internet which obsessively pushes any audience on to new topics, inviting, tempting, forcing us at times to leave the room we first of all settled in. The Internet experience can get so foggy that we even forget where we started from. For a deep art experience to be meaningful one must have one’s imagination firmly rooted in where one came from in the first place. It is a labyrinth in which one never completely loses touch with the original point of departure. The original room is that which allows us to navigate: forgetting where we are coming from will make it impossible for us to find our way forward or back. It is only by learning how and when to move slowly through the maze that one can dominate it and allow it to become an enriching rather than a frustrating experience.

Or perhaps the Internet is too autistic to be truly satisfying. It has its webcams and its chats, but they don’t belong to the autarchic labyrinth we are interested in here. What we are interested in is its power as a vital museum, come encyclopaedic library, come art gallery, come theatre and cinema and concert hall. But its very immersing quality robs us of the real vital experience we have when we go to these traditional spaces to witness art. It lacks the public. And here we must ask ourselves: how much does the experience of great art depend on it being a public act? Or, should art be classified into the public and private experience? Theatre, for example, is impossible to conceive without an audience (the more the merrier), whilst a novel is a purely private experience (a public reading of a novel is hardly likely to be as enjoyable as the experience of reading to oneself). Could it be said that the richest art-culture experience has to include both possibilities? Does the Internet do this, if only potentially?

Does the Internet disclose any truth? Or even attempt to disclose truth? And, what kind of intersubjectivity is unleashed in its relationship between the artist and the spectator? Only when the Internet is used in its immense folding and unfolding capacity, in a meaningful disclosing way under an artist’s control, will we be able to consider it capable of offering a deeply artistic experience. This is possible. It is certainly a potentially powerful tool for accessing information, and culture is information. What Internet does, by presenting a potential access to universal information and culture universally, is pave the way to a universal culture, which, if it is honestly expressed, must be an authentically human culture. Whilst the Internet is free from manipulation and censorship there is hope for a universal, human cultural development. In fact a free Internet is humanity’s best chance for a free world.

FINAL CLOSURE: THE END OF HISTORY AND THE THIRD PLACE

Closure – the deep psychological need to terminate the pending issue, to finish the job, to say goodbye; complicated by the loss of a loved one; complicated by death. Closure: to close. It could be symbolised by the shutting of a door that had been left open. When closure is not achieved it gnaws at us (the Zeigarnik effect), as if we have left home and we have a sneaking suspicion that we forgot to close the door. So closure becomes a necessity, something we yearn for, desperately to quell our troubled souls. As if leaving something unfinished were a crime.

On a macro-psychological level, we have seen this yearning for closure appear in various political and theological models: firstly, as monotheism; secondly, as Imperialism and the yearning for world domination; thirdly, in Marxism; and most recently, in capitalism’s globalising economy, a fantasy most clearly expressed in Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of The End of History. All of these macro-psychological yearnings have been collective desires to escape the vicious circle of historical conflict by imposing a perfect, unquestionable system. But what would happen if the door of history were actually locked?

The end of history would be a limbo, lacking the lack that movement needs in order to recycle ourselves. A world without cycles would be an exterminating angel reality, in which, a new anti-closure need to leave would be continually denied us, in which time had come to a standstill, and the only space was that which enclosed us, and which had suddenly become claustrophobically small. We are referring of course to Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel, which was an anti-bourgeois comment. But since Buñuel our capitalism has progressed to a stage where globalisation has allowed it to spread its suffocating tentacles over the entire planet. With Fukuyama’s fantasy the End of History will not just trap the bourgeoisie and all its discrete charms, but it will swallow us all. All classes. All races. All nationalities.

Spanish film-maker, Álvaro Collar, has envisaged such an end of history, an end of all human cycles, and has taken it a step further than Buñuel, or, in another respect, has created his own cinematic cycle that folds back into Buñuel’s most psychological, Buñuel-Dalí cine-aesthetic, re-vindicating the power of the symbol. And this return to the symbol is deeply expressed in his tour de force series for Internet, The Third Place.

In The Third Place, the dark living room of the Exterminating Angel becomes a sleazy bar, populated not by the bourgeoisie, but by a varied fauna that seems to have seeped in from out of a leaking sewer-pipe: pimps and prostitutes, matriarchal mafiosi and their victims, transvestites and Nazis, innocent fools and two-bit faith healers, gamblers and murderers. The collection itself is surrealism and hyper realism at the same time, it’s not a dream, or is it? It is certainly a worming experience, gnawing into the subconscious. Collar folds his narrative over and around itself, creating a Baroque masterpiece, like a Bach fugue of Caravaggio imagery for the screen and the web.

What could being be at the end of history? What is reality when time has stopped; when the door is locked?

Collar’s story is narrated constantly on the symbolic level. Cycles are cycles of history, determined by planetary cycles. Marcocosmic cycles that we cannot escape from. We may fantasise about human progress but it is impossible to break out of our planetary condition. We are destined to revolve around the sun. We cannot escape that destiny, and if we did, the result would be end of time and history. The earth is not a space-ship, although in Collar’s series there are characters who have the fantasy that it should be, rocketing them away to the centre of the universe. Here we see the vanity of human dreams: that we could escape all cycles with our technology and sciences. Collar leaves us no doubt – The Third Place of human, anti-cycle desire is a nightmare.

In The Third Place the natural cycles have deteriorated: capitalism and human greed have devoured the world, and now their is no place left for expansion. Closure has been reached. The final closure of everything. The end of the task, the absolute end. There will be no new projects now. No more cycles. No renewal. No resurrections. Mother, all mothers, and mother nature herself, has closed her legs. There will be no more births and all foetuses must now perish in the womb.

 

Or, at least, that is our translation of the symbols. Yours may be very different, but if you are going to ever escape The Third Place once you have entered; if you are ever to hold the key and get out, you will have to translate those symbols yourself. Good luck.

http://vimeo.com/51429407

FREEDOM AS VISIBILITY – THE GREEK CITY-STATE AND THE INTERNET

Paradoxically, whilst we start to become increasingly aware of how undemocratic the global, neo-liberal capitalist system is, and how insignificant are our voices in the vastness of the new global empire of the IMF and World Bank, at the same time we are finding platforms to stand on and express ourselves and our points of view. These platforms exist in the Internet.

In a sense the Internet is allowing us to discover Greek-style democracy for the first time. Within our own social-network cultures we enjoy a new space in which an extended group of friends and family interact with each other, sharing experiences and opinions. The group may consist of hundreds or thousands of members, a virtual village or town that may, and often does, extend widely with group members from different corners of the country or even the globe. There is a sense of belonging and freedom in the group, a flourishing visibility and meaningfulness outside of the global, corporate-empire world in which we are reduced to nothing more than insignificant particles. And this would have been how the Ancient Greeks would have felt in their city-state enclaves away from the engulfing, dehumanising, bureaucratic empires of Asia – and later Macedon and Rome.

In the blogging experience, or in the social network communities the herd and mass dissolve and the individual is able to express him or herself more creatively and communicate on a deeper level, both emotionally and rationally. The Internet experience is allowing people to self-publish stories or novels; post their poetry and deepest feelings and thoughts; express their personal philosophies; help one another; encourage one another… The atmosphere may at times be cynical or critical but it is usually positive, We are actually starting to sound like Greeks. There is debate, there is hope, there is a feeling that here, in cyberspace, there does exist real freedom.

It was from the sense of freedom within the social and cultural evolution of the Greek City-States that allowed lyric, epic and satirical styles to blossom, and that permitted the birth of tragedy, drama and comedy. From that spirit of freedom came its expression in a political form – Greek democracy. Freedom created democracy, not the other way around. Democracy did not and does not create freedom. Even without democracy the Greek City-State citizen felt freer than the subjects of the most benevolent Persian king. They were freer because they more visible in the City-State than in the Empire.

Milan Kundera was right in associating the tyranny of our times with the lightness of being that the traditional media-culture produces. Whether in the form of communist tyranny or capitalist democracy the deadening of the individual is the same. In either regime the opportunity of standing on the stage and expressing one’s deepest thoughts and feelings is minimal. In either system we are quite insignificant, suffering the tyranny of invisibility. Poems, stories, sketches, paintings, play scripts and film scores remained hidden in drawers and only now are we starting to see them seep out.

Here lies the importance of the Internet revolution.