The reigning tech aesthetic is all about gleaming smoothness (1) and instantaneous sensations, with algorithms creating a digital universe tailored to our impulsive needs. (2)
The book laying before me, was, on its own, a formidable
counter-weight (3) to the fleeting lightness of our virtual lives. It weighed
at least 3 kilos, its cloth cover was rough to the touch and its pages made of
heavy paper were stitched by thread. Merely
leafing through the book was a slow tactile experience of a reassuring gravity.
This weighty book had been very patient, before at last getting
my full attention. Published in 1964, I
has acquired it in 2013 in a second hand bookshop, where it has seduced me by
its title, “Le message de l’Absolu” (4) and by its bulkiness, giving weight to whatever
message it might convey.
The book had been close to being discarded as ballast last
summer, during one of those fateful fits to get rid of too many accumulated things in
order to create a tabula rasa, if not in
one’s life, then at least in one’s home. Those are perilous moments, when one might disavow everything
one ever valued - throwing it out a as being irrelevant, no
longer in tune with the times. (5)
But the book had survived the clean-up rage, and on this
stormy autumn day, it proved to be just the grave companion that I needed in
these uncertain times.
Written in 1964 by Germain Bazin, a French art historian
born in 1901, the book combines a classical erudition with a very modern sense
of anxiety and doubt.
Having studied with the eminent French art historians Henri
Focillon and Emile Mâle (6), and having gone on to make a distinguished career as
curator at the Louvre, Germain Bazin was of course well placed to tell once
again the fascinating story of western art from its earliest beginnings, as a
succession of different formal expressions of human meanings & longings, each
capturing the essence of an era, and all part of a single history of art (7) … until the 20th Century.
Having lived through two wars and witnessing a rapidly changing
world, Germain Bazin combines an understanding of the inevitability of modern
art’s radical break with tradition with the nostalgia of someone who realizes that all he has valued most during
his life is disappearing fast. He
captures the implosion of western art mirroring the upheavals of the 20th century.
He evokes the perplexities of art, and of all humanist exercises in imagination
& understanding, in an era in which science has lifted as it were the lid on
the world’s phenomena – confounding our intuitions. And finally, he
wonders about the contemporaneity of our lost belief in transcendence (be
it of the divine or humanist kind) with the end of high art’s pursuit of harmony
and beauty.
« de la figure humaine éclatée comme par l’effet d’un explosive, le peintre rassemble les morceaux ne suivant d’autre loi que l’incongru.
Ces puzzles ricanant sont peut-être les expressions les plus typiques de cette discontinuité chaotique […]
que des fragments de formes en liberté que rien ne convie à l’unité d’où naît l’harmonie » (8)
Que des fragments
- « Sauvons
le beau: l'esthétique à l'ère numérique ; l’esthétique du lisse» de
Byung-Chul Han / « Saving beauty » – « aesthetics of the smooth »
- algorithms do not second-guess our needs as humans might do – they systematically crunch our behavioural data, compare these with huge pools of other peoples’ data and then predict what we’re most likely to click on, what will most likely grab our attention. These algorithms weren’t designed out of a disinterested motivation to get to know us, nor in order to deepen the understanding of human behaviour – but with a purely commercial motive, selling advertising with the most views and the highest click-through rates. See the blow-by-blow , page-by-page dissection by Shoshana Zuboff in «Surveillance Capitalism»
- Germain
Bazin – « Le message de l’Absolu »
- The message of the absolute …. lacking a religious belief in the divine, the slumbering human longing for transcendence, has long pinned its hope on human art or ethics to transcend our struggling condition.
- Western civilisation at large has often had these destructive moments, if only to afterwards expiate the destruction & oblivion by painstaking historical research and the building of museums.
- in the early chapters one still can catch that whiff of lyrical art history, seeing the artist as a sublimation of human longing : “du fond de sa nature exilée dans l’imparfait, il entend sourdre l’appel vers la perfection”[…] “pour évoquer en eux un élan vers les sublimes clartés”. But there’s also of course the stern admonishing of a rigorous ageing art historian defending the seriousness of his trade against purely subjective art appreciation: “ […] se fiant à son goût elle exerce son choix par la sensation pure. […] sentir ne suffit pas pour aimer, encore moins pour connaître et lorsque l’âge amenuise cette faculté de sentir, il ne reste plus dans l’âme que la cendre des souvenirs »
- in a way art history has invented itself , producing an after the fact synopsis, a string of meaningful variations on a fundamental human ‘kunstwollen’ , instead of a mere accumulation of random trials & errors .
- “ of the human figure, which is shattered as if by the effect of an explosive, the painter brings together the pieces following no other law than the incongruous. These sneering puzzles are perhaps the most typical expressions of this chaotic discontinuity [...] as fragments of loose shapes, which nothing invites to the unity from which harmony is born”
