Fugitive ethics, fugitive aesthetics
and the emerging marriage of these two
“If what you ‘know’ isn’t a place of contest,
a struggle, then what you ‘know’ is dead.”
- Bayo Akomolafe
from The poetics of the preposterous
“He selected the pieces on the basis of ‘visual indifference’, and the selections reflect his sense of irony, humor and ambiguity: ‘...it was always the idea that came first, not the visual example’, he said; "...a form of denying the possibility of defining art."
- Wikipedia, Readymades of Marcel Duchamp
What is art?
Fountain was a ‘readymade’ sculpture by Marcel Duchamp submitted to the Society of Independent Artists inaugural exhibition at The Grand Central Palace in New York in 1917. It consisted of an ordinary, factory made porcelain urinal. The Society did not reject the submission, since the rules were such that all who paid the entry fee would have their works accepted, but Fountain was never shown as part of the exhibition.
Apparently, Duchamp was motivated by the intent of revealing the impossibility of defining art. For generations, Fountain has been prominently displayed in nearly every art history book.
“In December 2004, Duchamp's Fountain was voted the most influential artwork of the 20th century by 500 selected British art world professionals. Second place was afforded to Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and third to Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych (1962).”
- Wikipedia
With Fountain, Duchamp is often said to have invented conceptual art, though it would not be named ‘conceptual art’ until the 1960s.
The Fourth Wall
“The fourth wall is a performance convention in which an invisible, imaginary wall separates actors from the audience. While the audience can see through this wall, the convention assumes the actors act as if they cannot.” - Wikipedia
You’re in the audience of a live theatrical performance. There are actors on stage playing roles, and you’re so into it that there is a complete suspension of disbelief of a very particular kind, one in which you momentarily forget, or set entirely aside, the direct recognition of the fact that this is a performance. You are absorbed in the story. You treat the events on stage as if they are real and natural events, not a stage show. Then, suddenly, someone in the audience stands up and shouts at one of the actors on stage — “It didn’t happen like that, and you know it. You are lying!” The actor on stage says, “Sir, can we talk about this later? Let’s meet for a beer at the pub… after the show, okay?” But the shouting continues. It becomes obvious that this is a lovers quarrel. Both men are violently angry at one another now. But then the lighting in the theatre reverses. The brightly lit stage becomes very dimly lit, and the audience is aglow in bright light. Thousands of brightly lit bits of colorful paper confetti fall from the dark rafters above the audience. A man in the audience is playing a violin. Another is playing a cello. And the angry man in the audience exclaims his undying love of the angry man on the darkened stage. He pulls out a pistol and fires a shot at his beloved. A loud pop doesn’t happen. It was a silent pop. And out of the gun appears a drape of colorful cloth, like a small flag. It has a word written on it!: BANG!
Everyone laughs. The fourth wall has been broken.
Ethics & Aesthetics
“The fugitive is a figure that is constantly moving.” — Bayo Akomolafe
At first glance, aesthetics is a philosophical inquiry into what constitutes beauty (and ‘taste’), especially in relation to the arts / art. But there is hardly any good reason to constrain aesthetics to the arts, to art. Aesthetics can equally be applied to questions about beauty in wild nature. But why constrain it to beauty (or ‘taste’) at all — or to beauty versus ugliness? If we trace aesthetics to its Greek etymological roots, we see that it’s a word referencing our sensory experience. And did you know that we have very many more than five senses? And did you know that they overlap, interpenetrate, and form a kind of synesthesia of momentary experience of the world — that we experience our embodied, sensory experience — usually — as a whole?
Aesthetics could equally be said to be about our bodily experience. And guess what? As embodied beings, all of our experience is ultimately bodily experience — of a world, ‘internal’ and ‘external’ — which we generally experience as a unified whole.
But aesthetics (like art itself), as Bayo Akomolafe alluded to in our opening epigraph, is only really alive when it involves contest and struggle — which is to say when it isn’t entirely clear how we ought properly to define it. But I’d go further, and so I think would Akomolafe. Aesthetics remains alive when it is, at least, open to the possibility of contest and struggle. But there are moments within fugitive aesthetics when aesthetics is both alive and at rest — because it isn’t clinging to the rest state. It’s okay with being unsettled, mutating, perpetually transforming — to the point that its restlessness feels like ease. Or it can—sometimes. It’s multifarious complexity and perspectivism can be restful because it dances, moves, flashes and flees — fugitive. Perspectives keep shifting. It’s their nature. Think of the elephant and the blind man. What the blind men seek is a wholeness which is fleeting, evolving, transforming—Fugitive.
This is also where ethics finds its ultimate ground, and merges with aesthetics. It finds its shifting but stable ground in an ongoing process rather than a finality or an arrival. It rests by moving on. Fugitive. It’s a living, fleshy ethics and aesthetics in which each of these two are one — in which these two complement one another in their being whole together. What is ultimately good and right isn’t anything we can say. That’s what Lao-tzu said in the opening chapter of the Tao Te Ching.
The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnamable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things.
The point here is not to remain silent about ethics and aesthetics, but rather to know that something grounded in embodied being, which is grounded in our living Earth (fugitive), which would be our best guide in moving on from where we’ve been … unmoved. Dead, if you will. The whole is learned in the dance, in the movement.
As art becomes anything an artist does, and as we’re all increasingly defined as artists, a kind of “fourth wall” is broken in our lives. The line which distinguishes life from art disappears. So what does this reveal? What are we learning? Let us find out! Let us live as artists, each in our own unique way, but with grounded sincerity and in affirmation and celebration of our living world.
Thank you, Bayo, for encouraging the movement.
Reality is relational. Bourgeois aesthetics enforces separation and duality. The fourth wall of naturalistic theatre enforces a duality of observer and observed, each in their separate domains. Theatre-in-the-round structurally transcends this. The audience on the opposite side of the auditorium are observed. In their faces we see their responses to the actors whose backs are towards us. Thus we participate in a multi - perspective, multi - directional event, rather than a dualistic performer-audience experience in which we the audience are passive. Reality is relational. Revolutionary aesthetics exists in the round, in the street, in nature, swimming in the sea. What about the aesthetics of a culture dominated by digital screens?
There is no separate word for art in most indigenous languages. Only since the so called Enlightenment, did art become separate, judged and commodified by an elite. As Lucy Lippard ( and Bayo) indicates, all current art is overlay on the incantatory and evocative forms of our ancestors . Check out "Patterns in Neolithic Art" by Elizabeth Sikie.