Masked

, 

Three Graces Masked, watercolour, 2012



I remember reading a good book years ago that owed its main perspective to  Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation". Unfortunately, I can't recall the title or author, but the book explained very powerfully how the seamless simulation of reality we experience daily on TV, for instance, creates a reflective surface, like a mirror, which prevents us apprehending the actuality beneath, behind or beyond.  It likened the simulacrum to a surviving twin, the other entombed in the womb. The Chicago School of Media Theory website says "It is only when the viewer of the simulacrum penetrates the surface that he can tell that it differs from the thing it imitates."  Magritte proposed this pretty well, I believe, in his painting “The Human Condition”, painted as long ago as 1934!

That was prior to the pervasive intrusion of the internet upon our lives and the constant streaming of video and photographic material. Increasingly we know about the world via the deadening illumination of the screen, the surface of which becomes invisible when operative and cannot therefore be penetrated by the simulation displayed.  The performances are intuitively ‘live’ - we may observe their replication on our screen shortly if not minutes after the event - and it is hard to resist the impression that we are actually witness to the original in space and time.

Contemporary artists working in video do successfully challenge the apparent replication of life via the screened imagery by disrupting its seamlessness and thereby reminding the viewer to be conscious of its artificiality and question its 'reality' or 'truth'.  Yet, personally, even though I find such theoretical exercise intriguing in brief doses, I absolutely hate those blacked out holes in galleries where one is subject to tedious minutes of ‘challenging’ video experience. It is as if fine art has fled from competition with rival producers of imagery in the creative industries and secured itself within its academic citadel, drawn down the blinds, pulled up the drawbridge and thrown away the key!  There is nothing to do but obsess over its demise.  In trying to hone itself down to the 'pure' kernel of sigificance, it has gone about anaestheticizing, amputating, deskilling, reducing, reducing, until there is little left!

When it comes to interpreting the world in an intelligible and beautiful manner, one is tempted to look not at the work of 'fine artist's but that of those artists who produce the computer simulations with which science delights both eye and mind.   In astronomy, such images are often awe inspiring -, surely one of the prime tasks traditionally assigned to the 'fine arts'. How refreshing is the unselfconscious aestheticism applied to these simulations: but I suppose it is the age old format: when form meets function, beauty follows. We know they are artificial images but we understand the artificiality and how we can use it to read and marvel at the information coded into the image.

The printmaker Jude Lockie recently lent me "Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps" by Tzvetan Todorov.  In his section entitled "Life of the Mind" Todorov enquires into forms of intellectual and aesthetic morality in the Soviet and Nazi camps.   Todorov's analysis of witness from those who experienced the camps is richly multi-layered but coherent. Perpetrators and victims alike valued the arts, both as practitioners and audience: there is no given morality in engagement with the life of the mind.  Nor can a discussion of ethics in those circumstances be about traditional moralising, or about justice.  It is about individual moral choice, one where the virtues of heroism are relevant, but not more than the ‘ordinary’ virtues of caring, dignity and empathy, the giving of self in face to face encounters with others, and accepting the risk of doing so. To try and précis this subtle, questioning text would be to do it injustice, suffice to say that it is immensely thought provoking and it sheds a sorry light, I propose, on some of the occasionally complacently ironic masks with which the supposedly self-challenging gaze of postmodernism has been diverted.