Wanna See? --Some Thoughts on Contemporary Visual Culture

Its apparent that visual culture today insists on revealing the ‘real’ underneath the artifice, until the real becomes the artifice. Increasingly, we are compelled to strip away the skin of artifice to reveal its “sticky contents,”[1] but while the outer skin and all of its signifiers are stripped away, its meaning is stripped away too, because, well, its artifice, and skin is all there is. Just ask Andy Warhol. Visual culture, aided by critical discourse wants to play doctor on a manikin—there’s nothing but air in there (unless we put it in there). We are only pseudo scientists, dissecting a dummy. There is a definite masturbatory appeal in this, which I know most artists would attest to. As amusing as this scene is for both the artist and the onlooker, in the last century, its activity has taken a distinctively sinister turn. As Virilio suggests in A Pitiless Art, we have bee only practicing on our limitless probing on dummies, but soon we will and already have begun using ourselves as guinea pigs. He suggest that art itself in reflecting its creator’s destructiveness, will eventually destroy its creator, as we have done ours-- the proverbial Frankenstein’s Monster.

But we mean so well. Why not strip away the artifice? In the age of the spectacle, when all is excess and fabrication, of course we should want to shuck off the husk of the unreal to reveal the truth. We are only like the idealistic young Dr. Frankenstein, who will sacrifice even his own happiness for the pursuit of his project of science, of truth.
Sounds good in theory, but in practice—especially in the practice of art, the results are not what we hoped for.

What starts out as a seductive strip tease winds up being a cervical exam. Once the novice anatomist gets past the initial ‘shock of the real,’ there is little left to do with the except play with variations of the same forms. Its analogous to the way in which sex without love or some kind of transcendent concept or aim gets old fast (for some at least). There is only so much you would want to do with all these empty parts. That’s one description that seems to be a hallmark of contemporary art – emptiness, vacancy. Virilio says the art of this past century is “contemporary with the shattering effects of mass societies, subject as they are to the conditioning of opinion and mass media propaganda…”[2] In other words it is massive, malleable and empty. Once form and meaning is reduced primordial substance, the contemporary artist, like the contemporary lover—or fucker, more accurately, is reduced to scatology. Instead of conceiving of new life we distractedly occupy ourselves by making mud pies.

Of course, there is something inherently scatological in painting, sculpture in any art making. The accumulation and arrangement of base materials and parts. What more could there be? Aren’t we just precocious children indulging in our own fantasies of perversions and variations of nature? Isn’t the violence and pitilessness of contemporary art akin to the twisting of ones features in front of the mirror, pulling the legs of crabs and tying cans to the dogs tail? The grotesques have always been with us in art, but now these ideas are no longer relegated to our secret diaries and to our dark carnival side shows and to our private viewing booths. Thanks to the spectacle, the ever present eye/I, these private asides have taken center stage. What was private is now public.

The motives of the dominant visual culture have changed. The role of art may have at one time been the adornment and costuming of the figure in power, as in royal portraiture and production of elaborate ceremonial garb, but now art seeks to overtly strip the ruling figure of its power signifiers.[3] Note the significance of the tabloid fascination with British royal family for example. Now we are no longer satisfied with exposure of the Princess’s flesh, we want to see her gore, her entrails. If we could we wouldn’t stop at squishing it between our fingers and making new little fake princess figures out of the minced meat. And we have already begun to do just that sort of thing in contemporary art.

We might try to ennoble the idea of all this gory destruction by calling it alchemy, the dissolution of the body and of meaning being just a phase in the creation of a new and better body of meaning. But real alchemy works only in secret. Thanks to the presence of the spectacle, there are no secrets.

The question that seems to hang in the background is, where are we supposed to draw the line?[4] Just like the neurotic or sensitive child through his endless assaults and perversions of nature, always within view of an audience, is seeking the line, the boundary. In our society where technology’s ever present eye/I has rendered us virtually omnipresent, everywhere and nowhere, we can’t help but react like latch-key children, acting out, desperately trying to find that life giving, moral boundary line. But if Nietzsche is right, and our cosmic parent is dead to us, who or what will provide that guiding line? Will we continue to act out our anxiety on inanimate objects, nature, and ourselves as neurotic, bereaved adolescents do?

A private aside: kids who are like me that can’t or won’t make a unreserved effort to raise God from the dead have a tendency to blow their brains out once the drugs stop working.


[1] Georges Bataille, “History of Eroticism,”149.
[2] Virilio, “A Pitiless Art,” 35.
[3] Lynn Hunt “Pornography and the French Revolution,” 306.
[4] Lynda Nead, The Female Nude, 106.