“For me, the primary function of cinema is to make us feel that something isn't right.”
- Pedro Costa
André Malraux, in The Voices of Silence, proposed that photographic reproduction played a crucial role in decontextualizing artworks into a “museum without walls.” Reproductions detached art from location and scale (to say nothing of their acheiropoetic origins, based in ritual). Art forms like stained glass and tapestry took a backseat to the more comparatively portable forms of pictures, such as paintings.
Certain kinds of art, those more amenable to portability and market sales, came to epitomize “art.” The portability and the marketability became naturalized. Then, in the age of mechanical reproduction, came these new technological artworks which had no original (and no more “aura,” as Benjamin put it), but were instead all copies. True, the individuality of the copies ensured that each was still an analog wretch subject to aging. However, when an artwork is turned into information, it is one step closer to the limit of a different kind of truly abstract art. (This is masked by what Nick Montfort calls “screen essentialism.”) The movement creeps closer toward an immaterial basis: “content.” It exists, theoretically, on any platform. Content’s pure expression is liquid, fungible, and unaffected by material constraints. Art’s longer historical role has been the gradual expansion into new terrains, away from the local, ritual, and specific, into that which can be acquired in a transaction and accessed smoothly in reference to the material world.
The smooth expansion of commercial access can hit other, newer kinds of roadblocks, like digital rights or paywalls or technological access. In the past, one couldn’t see the great art of an ancient civilization unless one shared the time and/or space of that civilization and took part in its rituals. Then, eventually, one could buy a piece, or go into a museum or collection, or at least look at a book of reproductions. Spatial and geographical and even historical-temporal barriers diminished in the face of markets and capital accumulation and mechanical reproduction. Gradually, artificial forms of rights and copy access replaced old barriers with new.
Malraux states that “neither museums nor reproductions give any definitive answer,” to the definition of a masterpiece, “but they raise the question clearly; and, provisionally, they define the masterpiece not so much by comparison with its rivals as with reference to the “family” to which it belongs.” (A masterpiece, or a canon, can be conceived also as a kind of social technology prompting imitation.) Compare this with Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblance, and the recognition of group belongings; recognition of ‘society’ of belongings, and how that relates to the ‘society’ or ‘tribe’ of those who see things one way, vs another, for instance. The age of content positions people to see things smoothly on a monotonous screen, or numerous iterations of The One Screen.
I love this meme, by the way. Its gentle cruelty today is that the lines between good and bad screen are blurred just as lines between work and home are blurred. In today’s work/life blend “flexibility,” which applies to many information workers, the home expands, and opens up to the world in new ways. To recycle a tired observation: in the Covid-Zoom Era, how many people’s physical homes did we glimpse, that we hadn’t before? More than that, however, navigating Zoom or Skype or Google Hangouts became, for more people than ever, familiar in the way that walking down one’s hallway in the dark was. It’s habit; it’s normal.
I sometimes wonder about the effects of aggregated and homogenized screen interface experiences. I wonder how the very particular design of emojis might nudge people’s emotional expressions in this or that direction, or how they might naturalize or neutralize very artificial and non-neutral representations. These are not novel questions. People have spent a lot of time thinking about them. On a more everyday social level, however, it all remains ignored territory, like the junk and cobwebs beneath a front porch.
At home and in the world, the virtual pours into the physical. If the experiences corresponding to “art” continue to migrate toward a liquid screenworld, so that the curation or cluttering of these screenworlds becomes our most palpable expression of agency, I think we will continue to see re-enchantment or sacralization of these pixel icons and second-order events. We will see further behavioral modifications, as well: new growth on the religiosity of things blessing the timeline, keeping away evil with the atavistic powers of the CW or the TW, performing rituals of good tidings and good news (“pleased to announce,” “so excited to share,” et cetera).
A person might go through these rituals and habits with the zeal of the converted fundamentalist, keeping close tabs on the family resemblances and allegiances of likeness: who observes which rites? Maybe they already are …
To the extent that we live on the Internet, of course, it makes sense we’d want to grasp for some amount of control over the cleanliness or cozy messiness of our abodes. (Take your pick: the minimalism of ‘inbox zero’ or the maximalism of countless browser tabs?) I think also about how physical homes, too, have been featured on our screens.
In social media influencer aesthetics, people’s environments—houses, furniture, consumer goods—are often new and clean. Influencer homes look very blandly nice. Sometimes people will then make big messes or break things as part of their bit. There’s a playful wastefulness. (Tip of the iceberg examples: here, here, or various episodes recorded here.) This strikes me as a form of conspicuous consumption; the underlying idea is to communicate an extended experience of youthful comfort and lack of responsibility. It’s the leisure to play. Make a mess in your kitchen! Someone else will clean it up. You can destroy a light fixture—just buy a new one and hire an electrician. Goods are replaceable, because in our market existence, goods are cheaply made and people worth paying attention to have the means to replace them.
(Of course, many of those who would call themselves influencers are not actually rich, but instead accumulate debt to produce an image of slick moderate affluence in the hopes of amassing an audience which would then be their ticket out of debt.)
I suspect that the above idea is connected to some of the pleasures people get out of making or watching unboxing videos. Novelty, antisepsis, consumption, and lack of concern for waste: these are anthropocene luxury values. Imagine ordering and wasting gallons of guacamole, as I once read hedge fund jokers did back in the day. I recall Michael Haneke citing the money-flushing sequence being the part of his film Seventh Continent that most disturbed audiences.
That all said, there are certain kinds of destruction and disregard that are emblematic of the status quo, and certain kinds that represent opposition to it.
In Themroc (Claude Faraldo, 1973), where grunts replace spoken language, the sense of breakdown is mirrored in the slow demolition of an apartment. Michel Piccoli’s destructive urges are tied to his libidinal force.
Around the same time, The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) famously pictured a justifiably paranoid protagonist tearing up his apartment.
These two examples both seem to me re-enactments of forms of refusal in modern dwelling; they are not for their habitats in some important way. Themroc is a worker; Hackman’s Harry Caul is a freelancer—both are dependent on the sale of their labor to live in structures shared with other people, yet not people they can trust. Walls restrict Themroc; they might harbor danger and sabotage for Caul.
In Mo’ Better Blues (Spike Lee, 1990), Wesley Snipes’ nice apartment is marked by the mildly Tiepolo-esque illusionistic wall painting of arches, columns, and clouds.
In the same film, Denzel Washington’s long recovery from a violent attack coincides with personal reclusiveness and, seemingly, a drive to disregard order and cleanliness in his own nice apartment. He just listens to jazz, unwinds tape, leaves newspaper and vinyl sleeves strewn across the floor.
In Exhibition (Joanna Hogg, 2013), the couple host a party to celebrate their impending move from their chic home, with a cake made to model the house. There’s nothing “oppositional” about these characters, but the film prompts us to think about, and feel, the forms of transaction that structure our life stories, and the kinds of exchange that animate our deepest experience.
I haven’t tied this all together yet, but I am intrigued about the way we organize the audiovisual museum, how we in fact live in it, and how our homes (our structures of belonging) are virtual as well as physical. Compelled to kneel in the algorithmic great hall, under the banner of Content, we are learning to be more subservient the next steps of the world, just like factory workers learned to tell time and to separate work from leisure, or paid from unpaid labor. And yet we will also see signs of revolt.
A few portions of this installment were pulled from a draft of my li’l media theory manuscript, which I’ve not made as much progress on so far this year as I’d like. Other things have gotten in the way. But I’m still working on it.