The artist nobody, inventing (in) the avant-garde

Juan Antonio Ramírez

The ingenious Ulysses saved his life in the cave of Polyphemus by giving his name as Nobody, and I wouldn’t know whether Concha Jerez and José Iges had that passage of The Odyssey in mind when they discovered, inspected, and presented the terre di nessuno. Like Homer before them, they place us at the limits, at the beyond of the known world. What these artists say obliges us to split hairs. They set such strict conditions that the territories must meet to warrant consideration as no-man’s lands that they threaten to drag us towards the dangerous temptation of the ineffable. But we can’t think about the unthinkable, nor speak of the unspeakable, so we shall allow ourselves a slight unfocusedness, a minor derailing of the concept so that, without causing a fatal accident, the wheels of the idea may squeal a bit, awakening questions that are unforeseen, or even distant from what these artists are posing. We will attempt to turn this business around, flinging a few planets in its direction to see if their orbits will be illuminated with some of its conceptual resplendence.

I will leave aside a huge array of fascinating problems, such as the legal ownership of spaces, the more or less imprecise physical confines of the territory, and its possible exploitation (or colonisation), since that would drag us far from the sphere in which I have decided to place myself now. I want to approach the terre di nessuno from the viewpoint of the creator’s mission, as something that might help better explain some important aspects of the history of contemporary art. We know that the entity that today we call the artist did not always exist. What characterised the medieval painter or sculptor was his humble submission to the creative purposes defined by civil or (chiefly) ecclesiastical authorities. In Renaissance Italy a new spirit began to take hold: the cultural explosion of Humanism, the complexity of civil power (with numerous states that each required their own propaganda apparatus), plus commercial wealth, all contributed to the sustenance of a significant number of artist’s workshops. The competition amongst them might be explained in economic terms, but what interests us now is to accentuate other, less tangible factors. The fact is that every great artist found it necessary or convenient to do things better, or at least differently, than the rest.

In the mid 16th century Giorgio Vasari furnished us with an impressive account of the individual efforts made by creative artists, starting with Cimabue, to achieve the high degree of perfection of the art of his time. His Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Painters, Sculptors and Architects was a more or less intentional emulation of the accounts of the lives of the Saints, that could be read in such collections as Jacopo della Voragine’s Golden Legend. In both cases the aim was the conciliation of the individual personality, always unique and intransferrable, with the collective ideal of perfection that could not be held in doubt. And what was the artistic equivalent of the Christian doctrine propagated by the Church? Vasari suggested that it was the values, standards, and canons of the art of Greco-Roman antiquity, although he also mentioned the direct study of nature, and, repeatedly, artists’ different temperaments. He did not conceal, then, his sympathies, and described his heroes as arrogant, and disdainful of many social conventions.

Vasari asserted explicitly that the perfection of the ancients had finally been achieved, and even surpassed, thanks to Michelangelo Buonarotti, about whom he included the largest number of personal details in his collection. The fact is that it was impossible to read the Lives without feeling a contradictory impulse, as if Vasari were flinging scarcely compatible messages at artist-readers: accommodate yourselves to the standards of antiquity, on the one hand, but also copy the best of the best, and furthermore, be yourself, find your own path, a way of doing things that is not practised or known by others.

The first two admonitions were yoked together to the same academic cart, with a reasonable satisfactory result, for the following three centuries. A school, at the end of the day, can do little more than encourage mimicry. This occurs in all the sciences and disciplines: to teach, by definition, is to reify or reiterate, since we can hardly convey what does not (yet) exist, or is unknown. Thus in our own time in universities we rhetorically harp on the need to combine teaching with research. Social historians of art have made much of the public use of academic art, as European absolute monarchies so ably availed themselves. The austere, highly didactic and moralising art of the Revolution was well-suited to the adoption of recognisable idioms, ennobled with the patina of a venerable tradition of looking to antiuquity. Not that the individual genius was entirely absent from the scene during this long period of academic supremacy, such artists remained on the margin, accepted without much enthusiasm, their work consigned to the category of inventive caprices (as in the paradigmatic instances of Magnasco, Piranesi, or Goya, to mention only the best known examples).

We now know that the Romantic Age changed all this, and that the artist, left to his own devices (good or bad), no longer enjoyed the protection of the new bourgeois states. Their very existence seemed too fraught with problems to dream of ideal, remote worlds, with heavens and hells never before trodden by a human being. Since the known paths of art were now blocked, new ones had to be opened, or, rather, to be invented, in the dual sense of discovered and devised. Consider Turner, freely remaking Claude Lorraine’s landscapes, exaggerating the luminous effect to the point of paroxysm and ghostliness. It is not physical light, not sunlight or artificial light, but rather a strange compound that operates only in the inner consciousness: the artist aspires to carry us beyond the world, to a supernatural (or an infranatural) realm. Neither is it a Positivist light that is found in his paintings with modern subjects, such as the well-known Rain, Steam and Speed: the viewer feels himself floating in a limitless universe where solids, liquid and gas have the same amorphous substance. It is a metaphorical universe: the artist seeks another world, leaping into a no-man’s land in hopes of creating, i.e. of giving birth to, the non-existent.

Thus there occurred the systematic exploration of the inalienable individuality that long before had also interested Giorgio Vasari, as we have seen. Every artistic genius, from the time of Romanticism, would aspire to highlight his difference. And indeed, no one could come to be regarded as truly great without showing the ability to invent new idioms and expressive resources never before seen, in order to elicit strong emotions: grief and laughter, voluptuous pleasure and anguish. Ultimately it was the artists themselves who discovered a sensation appropriate to the new times: that of trembling. Take for example Géricault’s great pictorial machine The Raft of the Medusa, where there seems to be another prodigious allusion to the Terre di nessuno, with a group of humans lost in an immense ocean, on the verge of finding dubious salvation, scarcely visible amongst the waves. And what of Caspar David Friedrich? We view his boat trapped in polar ice like the image of the artist detained in his heroic search for the beyond, a martyr fallen in the battle of the unknown. But I would like to call especial attention to those characters who keep their backs turned to the spectator as they look towards an infinite universe of seas, lonely mountains, and unfathomable mists, belonging to no one, and promising a Wagnerian universe of vague yearnings. Dissatisfaction is the mother of 19th-C. opera (the longed-for total art work), with its inevitable sentimental boils, like the enchanted and enchanting castles of Louis II of Bavaria. Paradoxically, this Romantic art, which seeks to place itself at the antipodes of Gemütlichkeit, at the forward column of the unfathomable, can easily fall into the abysses of kitsch (as Visconti showed us in his film Ludwig). Here is another terra di nessuno, as seductive and dangerous as the reefs from which the mermaids threatened Ulysses’ ship.

A pool and synthesis of all this was l’art pompier. Predictable and smug, at once Sanchoesque and virtuoso, the art world in the second half of the 19th century was so subdivided and colonised that we might well regard it as the antipodes of the Terre di nessuno. Soft-core pornography disguised by the seven veils/flags of edifying patriotism. And all of it was carried out by individuals whose prodigious craftsmanship surpassed that of many giants of the Renaissance and the Baroque period. One can comprehend the desire to escape from that bureau of creativity which inspired those who were to set off the storm of the avant-garde. Against the superficial prettiness of the paintings, against the vacuity of technical perfection, there came the attack of the Impressionists. Real light, the physical light of actual places at precise moment, became the absolute protagonist. And how does one define or mark out the territory of something so impalpable? To whom does this luminous (in)substance belong? The camera obscura is a territory for shade, a cage of the instant brightness (the flash), that remains trapped forever, thanks to chemical artifice, on the photographic plate. Did Impressionist painters seek the same thing? While the aims and ends of those artists and of the photographers may have appeared to be similar, there was a notable performative difference: the painters abandoned the overloaded and oppressive atmosphere of the studio and headed for the outdoors. The light grasped in the painting was the same that had surrounded the painter. Once again, painting was the proof that something ungraspable had been successfully captured.

To cross this territory that belongs to no one, to conquer it for art, was in itself a remarkable feat, although surely a less important one than the dynamics of exploration that it ushered in. The sacred cows of Post-Impressionism were problematical creatures, tormented by the desire to reach unknown worlds. Social and personal utopia was the goal pursued by Van Gogh and Gauguin: to commune with the poverty of the miners, to flee towards Arles, or to the South Seas –what difference? The point was to go far, to another place, in search of primordial innocence, that heat and colour that restore sense to the suffocating life of the civilised. Gauguin lamented bitterly that the innocent existence of the primitive Polynesians was already seriously damaged by the abuses of colonists and officials, and by the destructive action of the missionaries; not here either was that terra di nessuno that we may glimpse only in the inventions of his paintings. The earthly paradise, in flat colours, shines like Medieval stained glass.

Art was not, then, a reflection of social life, or at least not in the strictly reductionist sense imagined in the 1950’s by certain, well-intentioned but narrow-gauged Marxists. On the contrary, art spawned non-existent worlds, supplying patterns for a hypothetical evolution of humanity. The final decades of the 19th and the first of the 20th century starkly evinced the impact of the great scientific discoveries and colossal technological advances. It was the era of the iron transatlantic steamer, of the motor car and the first aeroplanes. There were also major social revolutions in Mexico, Russia, and elsewhere. People felt a strong impulse to go further, at a greater speed, with the ardent desire to find alternative models of social organisation. But art, more than passively reflecting these trends, took part in them from a privileged position. It was something more than the advance force (to borrow the military terminology so often used to speak of the avant-garde) of an army of discoverers of different stripes, for it made up an autonomous universe with great intensity of its own. A parallel world, a genuine model of the alternative.

There were really no scientific or economic revolutions to match the accelerated dynamics of the artistic avant-garde. Did something transcendental take place in 1906-7 that can explain, in social terms, the appearance of Les demoiselles d’Avignon and the sense of early Cubism? Is this really equivalent to the theory of relativity? Historical correspondence is only a fantasy whose lovely symmetry is pleasing to philosophers and moralists. We can speak of the history of art precisely because the ingredients that it contains are silhouetted against a much more stable (although also changing) cultural and social backdrop. To revisit the era of the first avant-garde from the perspective of the terre di nessuno can be a very rewarding exercise.

It seems obvious that their is a romantic feeling in the Fauvist colour revolution: no contact with the hypothetical exterior reality; the painting is an autonomous entity made in accordance with and internal logic; its territory is untransferable (it belongs to no one), pertaining only to the painter that created it and that colonises it on this sole occasion. Luxe, calme et volupté is another metaphorical work: it also alludes to the artist’s familiar search for a world (still? forever?) that doesn’t exist. Its large and discontinuous brushstrokes made it appear to have been painted in the air, in a vacuum. We know that it was to illustrate a well-know poem by Baudelaire, but it me it seems that Matisse squeezes it, distorting it, to extract a meaning quite different from the literary text: the poet’s nostalgic decadentism yields to a material vibration of colour within the insubstantial ether of the canvas.

To whom belongs the world discovered by Picasso and Braque? Cézanne is cited as a forerunner. That ugly duckling of Post-Impressionism, many of whose contemporaries (including his friend Zola) found clumsy and a failure, was interested neither in the light nor in any lost paradise. Where the devil was he trying to go? If Cézanne had been able to rationalise his leanings he would have said that he wanted to situate himself in an interstitial sphere. He behaved like someone who blurs and misinterprets everything known and tried before his time: drawing, colour, perspective, idyllic subjects, etc. Too many solecisms together to be coincidence. The fact is that his path had no return and that things moved along the paths of Cubism and Expressionism towards the deconstruction of geometrical order and of the very system of Renaissance representation. But there were several Cubisms, quite different from each other, as Apollinaire shrewdly recognised. The departure from the analytical stage to the collage, whether flat or three-dimensional, represented an absolutely radical historical watershed. The work of art was not constructed as an imitation (replica or copy) of an eternal reality, as with traditional sculpture, but as something that fully achieved its own existences, if such a thing can be said. The artist broadened the scope of the world, pushing its limits outwards.

I want to spend a few moments with Marcel Duchamp, whose ready-mades constituted an interesting turning point in the story we are trying to tell. Until 1913 (the year of the Bicycle Wheel the artist edging towards the terre di nessuno was making something new (paintings, sculptures, etc.), and in so doing he increased the objectual density and disposition of humanity. But Duchamp abruptly curtailed this tendency, in proposing the recognition and the re-use of what already existed. Objects took on a new life in the realm of art, and hence suggested the discovery of a new territory, belonging to no one, that was superimposed, one might say, on the one already recognised by the manufacturer or the hypothetical user of the original thing. It is a supplanting. The ready-mades revealed the new uses of physical reality, parallel worlds. It was no coincidence that Duchamp was quite interested in n-dimensional geometry, a subject that heralded, from a philosophical viewpoint, many of today’s lucubrations about space and virtual entities.

Related to all this is the Duchampian idea of inframince, which is to say, the infrafine (I wouldn’t want to translate it as infralight. We are familiar with some examples of what the artist wished to say with this, such as the difference in the weight of a shirt before and after laundering; and the most famous: when the smell of tobacco meets the smell of the mouth that exhales it, the two smells merge via the infrafine. The infrafine cannot be measured nor weighed nor broken down chemically. This unconquered (and unconquerable) territory, is however, something that exists in physical terms; something real, in the normal sense of the word, and this fact should be underlined in order to distinguish it well from the creations of conceptual art, which was invented by the same artist. There are photographs showing the young Duchamp with a cut-out star in his hair, and its has been suggested that this might be a play on words in franglais A toile, meaning a canvas, the cloth of a painting, could also be taken as étoile, a star. We already see how the star of salvation guides his brain (like the one that guided the Wise Men to the gates of Bethlehem), which is the most unconquerable land of all, the least physical and the least graspable.

This is not necessarily the end of the story. The contemporary artist has explored many other paths, and I would not wish to fail to point out the importance of some of them, such as body art and performance, where we observe an interesting shift of the territory of art away from the object and towards the artist’s own body. The artist is both the creator and the created, the explorer and the chance victim. The artist/art belongs to no one else. Installations, sound sculpture, and art made with (for, from, towards) the Internet are also diverse attempts to elevate to a paroxysm the irrepressible longing to operate in the Terre di nessuno. And perhaps in the heterogeneity of contemporary art we can find a common denominator: for all the variants of art one needs a real or intellectual space to sanction its artisticity. Art exists in the form in which it has been baptised. This evidence should have fostered creative work with institutions, appropriating things as disparate as politics, the press, the banks, the courts, the military, etc. And, of course, the museums. Instead of inventing new institutions, the business is to catch them off guard, and to alter their original mission, making them do things that their administrators or sponsors never expected. The principle of the ready-made applied on a social scale –or to the social ladder.

And that is what we are doing. It seems that Concha Jerez and José Iges make much of the technological aspects of the concept that they have invented. It is natural that as artists of the 21st century they should use the instruments (including the economic and media resources of institutions) of their time, and that they should use them to enter their own no-man’s lands. But that doesn’t mean they are attempting to limit or reduce the concept. I appears to me that, perhaps without intending to, they have brought to the surface an immense hidden iceberg that surpasses their intentions and their current scope for manipulation. Adrift, searching for some Titanic. In the best tradition of the avant-garde: the true artist advances towards the terre di nessuno. This advance is unstoppable. And, I would venture, nobody will be saved.