Galapagos
by Simon Baker*
Galápagos - natural history of the future
‘If art history is a nightmare then what is natural history?’ Robert Smithson (1)
In late eighteenth-century France, with the enlightenment still delivering its revolutionary payload, (but long before its dialectical character had been fully revealed), past, present and future were taking on the most impossible forms and relations. In retrospect, this phenomenon is most readily apparent in the designs of Etienne-Louis Boullée, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Jean-Jacques Lequeu: arguably the most imaginative, or to repeat the cliché, ‘visionary’ images that any degree of faith in the rational had yet produced.(2) Intent on conceiving (and delivering) a future that was as bold, radical and elegant as the ‘divine’ science of Newton, these conceptual architects struck boldly through the heart of what Walter Benjamin would later call ‘now-time’ - the historical complex by which ancient Rome, or the Egypt of the Pharoahs might satisfy, in monumental terms, the demands of a turbulent (revolutionary) present, and inaugurate a glorious as-yet un-dreamt-of future.(3)
These collapses, or conflations of temporal registers, aptly described in Benjamin’s thought as ‘the opening up of history…onto a dizzying field of possibilities’ were richly exploited in never-to-be realised enlightenment projects by Lequeu, Ledoux, and especially Boullée:(4) impossibly giant spheres and mountainous pyramids as mausoleums and art galleries, each of which demonstrate an absolute (even sacrificial) abandonment to the vertiginous pace of the imagined progress that the buildings were themselves supposed to enshrine. Their afterlife today, in tantalising graphic form, is tempered by the knowledge that these fantastic buildings proved truly ‘impossible’ as concrete things in the world, remaining only fantasies, or, more accurately perhaps in today’s language, conceptual works of art.
Cénotaphe à Newton (1784), by Étienne-Louis Boullée
It is hard not to mourn the lack of material substance that remains of this audacious imagination (like the still-disappointing absence of the Bastille); and tempting, therefore, to visualise the giant spherical buildings of Ledoux and Boullée in their very own lieux de memoire: dominating the Paris skyline, perfectly eclipsing the sun, overshadowing both the Eiffel Tower, (monument to a later generation’s lingering faith in rational progress), and the Sacré-Coeur, (monument to that same generation’s lingering doubts).(5) Such imaginary memorials must, by their very nature, however, remain strangely insubstantial; like the flickering mirage of ancient Rome that torments the ailing hero of Philip K. Dick’s novel Valis, appearing and disappearing, superimposed over present-day California.(6) To accept the incongruous nature of these monumental forms (in their past, and in our present), according to Benjamin’s complex historical formulation ‘in the time of the now…blasted out of the continuum of history,’ means nothing less than it did when Boullée first drew them:(7) revealing a fault-line in time and space that reaches over the horizon of fact and fiction. It is this same conceptual barrier, (the back-yard fence of space-time) over which a basketball might stray; bouncing from backboard, to rim, to prehistoric lake.
Worlds Within Worlds, graphite on paper, 76x56cm, 2009
The potential for an alien, incongruous element within a given situation to unhinge it, or provoke a slippage between realities, was at the heart of many forms of writing and image making associated with the Paris of the surrealists in the 1920s and 30s. Writing about another famous Parisian monument, Georges Bataille, noted that ‘the obelisk [on the place de la concorde] remains only so long as the sovereign authority and command it symbolises do not become conscious.’(8) The nature of the site – where Louis XVI met the guillotine - will always lurk beneath the ‘calmest negation’ offered by a geometric Egyptian form which directs attention elsewhere: the obelisk surrounded by what Bataille calls ‘a feeling of explosion and vertiginous weightlessness.’(9)
At around the same time, Max Ernst developed a series of images that engage with this version (or vision) of historical consciousness, within what he called his collage novels, such as Une Semaine de Bonté (A Week of Kindness).(10) By this point, Ernst’s collage practice had developed to the point where the final pages, once reprinted in black and white, were utterly devoid of any sign of the artist’s hand, consisting entirely of nineteenth-century illustrations cut-up and re-configured into complex but convincing fantasies and nightmares. And the forms that both disrupt and animate Ernst’s visions, which occur in series (the days of the Week of Kindness), have considerable historical specificity and symbolic significance, none more so than the ‘chapters’ of the wordless novel organised around the giant faces that dominate Easter Island, or the many faces associated with The Lion of Belfort. The latter, in reality a monument to the defence of the French state against aggression from Germany (and therefore a symbol which accrued relevance with each new incursion from the east), is introduced by Ernst into striking guillotine images, taking its place on the scaffold, as the leonine faces of executioners and their assistants. The Lion of Belfort, then, symbol of French resistance to German ambition, is smoothly absorbed by a German artist’s fantasy of French history.(11)
In an essay written in 1948, which begins with the words ‘History of a Natural History’, Ernst characterises the mechanism of collage through the notion of ‘systematic displacement, and its effects’ describing its most notable conquest as ‘the Irrational’.(12) But beyond his brilliant definition of collage as ‘the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them,’ Ernst expands his conception of collage as a practice in a truly irrational direction, to include things that were not collages at all: ‘Magritte, for example, whose pictures are collages entirely painted by hand, and Dalí’.(13)
Here, then, we might begin to understand the work of an artist like Theo Michael, for whom collage is not only a practical activity (whether in two or three dimensions), but a mechanism for ‘systematic displacement’ which extends beyond collage as a synthetic process and into ‘collages’ drawn entirely by hand. In drawings like Acropolis Museum or World Within Worlds, we are confronted with things that superficially resemble the aesthetic of the nineteenth-century illustrations, which comprise Ernst’s collage novels, (an association heightened by the presence of a scattering of Easter Island faces on Worlds Within Worlds). But any allusion of this sort also constitutes a coupling of irreconcilable realities, and operates as such, generating friction like the elements of a collage: As Benjamin put it, (speaking of an entirely different set of historical relations): ‘It isn’t that the past casts its light on the present or the present casts its light on the past: rather an image is that in which the past and the present moment flash into a constellation.’(14)
Beyond a shared (and coincidental) fascination with Easter Island, and the mechanisms of collage, Michael’s work could also be related to Ernst’s through the latter’s poetic notion of the ‘History of a Natural History’, which could just as easily describe the content, and context, for much of the material in the exhibition Smoke From the Edge of the Known. In its present-day aftermath, natural history as a concept is mired in the positivist certainties of the nineteenth century: a world of fossils and Darwinism, in which deductions drawn from appearances and resemblances circumnavigate the rational, to reach their opposite limit: each new incongruous piece of ‘evidence’ generating ever more disastrous theories about species, their origins and their destinations. Many years later, however, by the time Ernst began producing ‘fossils’ of imaginary objects, plants and animals for his own Natural History in the 1920s, both natural and historical appearances had been rationalised and internalised through the languages of psychoanalysis and dialectical materialism, which is to say, become subject to the vicissitudes of consciousness.
This glitch in the relationship between appearances and significance, the fact that connections between images, objects or ideas might in fact be illusory, formed the basis of a radical and resistant image culture in the 1920s. Bataille’s magazine Documents, for example, reproduced images of unrelated objects with superficial resemblances on subsequent pages deliberately to undermine the effectiveness of drawing conclusions from formal associations. Almost anti-collages within magazines: bronze sculptures and leather masks; prehistoric rock art and avant-garde painting; dancers’ shins and cows feet; share nothing but an inconsequential and meaningless resemblance.(15) Michael’s collages, vitrines and drawings, likewise engage in an intuitive double-bluff of association and disconnection: the misdirection central to the ‘mechanism’ of collage that Ernst referred to as ‘displacement’. The dry pages of Documents, with their dead-pan, academic presentation (whether of coins, big toes or flowers), affect the same rhetorical posture as Michael’s pseudo-nineteenth-century vitrines: laying claim to the logic of empiricism and positivist deduction even as they demonstrate, beyond any shadow of a doubt that any conclusions drawn form such a process are worthless. In a classic piece of pseudo-rational sophistry, the ethnographer Marcel Griaule produced a contribution to Documents on the word task of the word ‘pottery’ which was illustrated with examples of ‘pottery’ objects so diverse as to prove conclusively that the word was meaningless.(16) This, it seems, is the lesson to which Michael’s work returns us today, through which apparently rational rhetorical forms reveal the irrational consequences of their limits, and so contribute to the revelation of their own ruined state. For this perspective the incongruous situation of the Acropolis Museum (on the lunar surface) is nothing less than the barely glimpsed, fleeting reality of a construction haunted by its auto-internalisation of the cultural politics of alienation and displacement.
Acropolis Museum, graphite on paper, 76x56cm, 2009
In Dick’s Valis, the appearance of ancient Rome in California heralds a collapse in the ability to distinguish between forms of consciousness which signals either the end of false consciousness (a religious revelation) or the onset of psychic disturbance (schizophrenia): neither seeming more or less desirable. That schizophrenia fascinated Dick is well known: standing, paradoxically, for the only rational refuge from the impossible demands that the world made on its ruined subjects. But Michael’s projection of a destination for the Acropolis Museum (the result, perhaps, of some drastic compromise to regain the Elgin Marbles), embraces an schizoid logic of incommensurable difference, which sets him aside from the rational fantasies of the romantic tradition which the image might seem to engage. When Joseph Gandy painted his epic Ruins of the Bank of England in 1830, for example, he assumed, for the vantage point of his imaginary cityscape, a fixed (if cataclysmic) future moment from which to consider the present.(17) The shock of recognition for nineteenth-century Londoners could be likened to twentieth-century New Yorkers, confronted with the half-submerged arm of the statue of liberty at the end of The Planet of the Apes: but although both envisage civilizations in ruins, cultural history returned to natural history, neither conceive of the ruin of history itself – when all is said and done, there still remains a ‘then’ from which to look back.
For history itself in ruins we must return to the future of Paris: or more accurately, to the future of its natural history, as imagined by the surrealist poet Benjamin Péret in his 1939 essay Ruins: ruin of ruins, published in the magazine Minotaure:(18)
‘One day’ Péret wrote, ‘when the memories of churches, which survived from the past as complements to the prisons, and banks, without which neither could have survived, have disappeared from the minds of men, perhaps one might find the gigantic fossil of that unique animal, the Eiffel tower.’(19)
This fantasy, as well as ceding Paris, capital of the nineteenth-century, to nature, its ‘ruins, bristling with thorns and chirping birds’, posits a hybrid anthropomorphism through which monuments become fossils, and ruination evolves in perpetuity. For Péret, history, in its ruined, overgrown state, regresses backwards into natural history; its repressed, irrational ‘other’. Confused by their desire for buildings, with which they mistakenly identify, humans and the spaces they inhabit succumb inevitably to the same ruined condition: ‘Man, that hermit crab, sees no life in the ruin where the animal that he still denies being, hides…and…Ruins are disowned by those for whom life is nothing more than a ruin, of which nothing remains but a glob of spittle.’(20) In these terms, the inexorable process of ruination, as well as functioning in physical terms as a bizarre reverse-Darwinism, infects (and connects) all human history:
‘the caverns of prehistory are the fossils of the ruins of castles…one ruin follows another; that which precedes it, is killed by it. From the collapsed fortresses of feudal knights flows a thick lava with fills forever Roman arenas and circuses…what remains of the middle ages…are the castles whose mosses have consumed their battlements, whose armoured ghosts shake their collapsing rooms, trying in vain to bury themselves in the rubble…’(21)
Ruination, in other words, far from being some distant future possibility (the worst case scenario), is the permanent, ever-present backdrop against which civilizations mistakenly think they are progressing: either unseen, unrecognised or simply ignored. Ancient Rome is indeed manifest in modern day California, if anyone has the eyes to see it, and the Eiffel Tower is indeed a fossilized trace of nineteenth-century organic life.
Any conceivable relation between past, present and future, which is to say, any history, (natural or otherwise), is subject to the disruptive potential of this alternate vision, which is precisely the rational-irrational dialectic at the heart of Theo Michael’s practice. The ‘rip in the fabric of reality’ that Philip K. Dick calls ‘madness, pure and simple’, Georges Bataille describes as the rupturing of the façade of historical consciousness through the power of images: ‘images that a kind of lucid dream borrows from the realm of the crowd, sometimes bringing to light what the guilty conscience has pushed back into the shadows, sometimes highlighting the figures that are routinely ignored’:(22) Worlds within worlds indeed.
‘I have written these words in air – with the tip of the index finger of my left hand, which is also air. My mother was left-handed, and so am I. There are no left-handed human beings any more. People exercise their flippers with perfect symmetry…Would the pelts of modern people have made nice fur coats for their ancestors in olden times? I don’t see why not.’
Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos.(23)
1. Robert Smithson, , in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam, University of California Press: California, 1996.
2. See, for example, Boullee. Ledoux. Lequeu: Visionary Architects, Hennessey + Ingalls: Santa Monica, 2002
3. For the best account of Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the concept of history’ see Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm, translated by Chris Turner, Verso: London and New York, 2005.
4. Ibid., p107.
5. The basilica of the Sacré-coeur was constructed ‘in expiation’ for the ‘crimes’ of the commune, and was built on a site of fierce communard resistance, a fervent anti-clerical neighbourhood. A popular cartoon from the time of its construction describes as a ‘Nouvelle Bastille.’
6. Philip K. Dick, Valis, Bantam Press: New York, 1981, pp32-33.
7. This formulation of Benjamin’s theory is proposed by Neil Cox in his essay ‘A Painting by Antoine Caron’, Papers of Surrealism 7, 2007, online at: www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk
8. Georges Bataille, ‘The Obelisk’, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, edited and translated by Alan Stoekl, University of Minnesota Press: Minnesota, 1985, p213.
9. Ibid., p217.
10. See the facsimile Max Ernst, Une Semaine De Bonté: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage, Dover Editions: New York & London, 1976.
11. For more on this material in relation to revolutionary history see Simon Baker, Surrealism, History and Revolution, Peter Lang: Oxford, 2007, chapter 1.
12. Max Ernst, Beyond Painting, Wittenborn Schultz: New York, 1948.
13. Ibid., p17.
14. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theoretics of Knowledge, Theory of Progress’ in Philosophical Forum 15, nos. 1-2, Winter 1983-4, p8.
15. For more on this, and examples of these pairs of images, see Simon Baker, ‘The Appearance of Things’ in Dawn Ades and Simon Baker, Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS, Hayward Gallery: London, The MIT Press: New York, 2006.
16. Marcel Griaule, ‘Potterie’, Documents 4, 1930. See also Ades & Baker, Undercover Surrealism, (op. cit.), p29 & p38.
17. This painting is housed in the Sir John Soane Museum, London.
18. Benjamin Péret, ‘Ruines: Ruine des ruines,’ in Minotaure 12-13, Paris, 1939, pp57-65.
19. Ibid., (author’s translation).
20. Ibid., (author’s translation).
21. Ibid., (author’s translation).
22. Philip K. Dick, Valis, Bantam Press: New York, 1981: The flyleaf of the book contains these lines – which may or may not be Dick’s: ‘A rip in the fabric of reality had opened. It was madness pure and simple. BUT WHAT IF IT WERE TRUE?’ The Bataille quote is from ‘The Obelisk’, op. cit., p213.
23. Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos, Flamingo/Harper Collins: London, 1994, p233.
* Simon Baker is Curator of Photography and International Art for Tate Modern
Galápagos - natural history of the future
‘If art history is a nightmare then what is natural history?’ Robert Smithson (1)
In late eighteenth-century France, with the enlightenment still delivering its revolutionary payload, (but long before its dialectical character had been fully revealed), past, present and future were taking on the most impossible forms and relations. In retrospect, this phenomenon is most readily apparent in the designs of Etienne-Louis Boullée, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Jean-Jacques Lequeu: arguably the most imaginative, or to repeat the cliché, ‘visionary’ images that any degree of faith in the rational had yet produced.(2) Intent on conceiving (and delivering) a future that was as bold, radical and elegant as the ‘divine’ science of Newton, these conceptual architects struck boldly through the heart of what Walter Benjamin would later call ‘now-time’ - the historical complex by which ancient Rome, or the Egypt of the Pharoahs might satisfy, in monumental terms, the demands of a turbulent (revolutionary) present, and inaugurate a glorious as-yet un-dreamt-of future.(3)
These collapses, or conflations of temporal registers, aptly described in Benjamin’s thought as ‘the opening up of history…onto a dizzying field of possibilities’ were richly exploited in never-to-be realised enlightenment projects by Lequeu, Ledoux, and especially Boullée:(4) impossibly giant spheres and mountainous pyramids as mausoleums and art galleries, each of which demonstrate an absolute (even sacrificial) abandonment to the vertiginous pace of the imagined progress that the buildings were themselves supposed to enshrine. Their afterlife today, in tantalising graphic form, is tempered by the knowledge that these fantastic buildings proved truly ‘impossible’ as concrete things in the world, remaining only fantasies, or, more accurately perhaps in today’s language, conceptual works of art.
Cénotaphe à Newton (1784), by Étienne-Louis Boullée
It is hard not to mourn the lack of material substance that remains of this audacious imagination (like the still-disappointing absence of the Bastille); and tempting, therefore, to visualise the giant spherical buildings of Ledoux and Boullée in their very own lieux de memoire: dominating the Paris skyline, perfectly eclipsing the sun, overshadowing both the Eiffel Tower, (monument to a later generation’s lingering faith in rational progress), and the Sacré-Coeur, (monument to that same generation’s lingering doubts).(5) Such imaginary memorials must, by their very nature, however, remain strangely insubstantial; like the flickering mirage of ancient Rome that torments the ailing hero of Philip K. Dick’s novel Valis, appearing and disappearing, superimposed over present-day California.(6) To accept the incongruous nature of these monumental forms (in their past, and in our present), according to Benjamin’s complex historical formulation ‘in the time of the now…blasted out of the continuum of history,’ means nothing less than it did when Boullée first drew them:(7) revealing a fault-line in time and space that reaches over the horizon of fact and fiction. It is this same conceptual barrier, (the back-yard fence of space-time) over which a basketball might stray; bouncing from backboard, to rim, to prehistoric lake.
Worlds Within Worlds, graphite on paper, 76x56cm, 2009
The potential for an alien, incongruous element within a given situation to unhinge it, or provoke a slippage between realities, was at the heart of many forms of writing and image making associated with the Paris of the surrealists in the 1920s and 30s. Writing about another famous Parisian monument, Georges Bataille, noted that ‘the obelisk [on the place de la concorde] remains only so long as the sovereign authority and command it symbolises do not become conscious.’(8) The nature of the site – where Louis XVI met the guillotine - will always lurk beneath the ‘calmest negation’ offered by a geometric Egyptian form which directs attention elsewhere: the obelisk surrounded by what Bataille calls ‘a feeling of explosion and vertiginous weightlessness.’(9)
At around the same time, Max Ernst developed a series of images that engage with this version (or vision) of historical consciousness, within what he called his collage novels, such as Une Semaine de Bonté (A Week of Kindness).(10) By this point, Ernst’s collage practice had developed to the point where the final pages, once reprinted in black and white, were utterly devoid of any sign of the artist’s hand, consisting entirely of nineteenth-century illustrations cut-up and re-configured into complex but convincing fantasies and nightmares. And the forms that both disrupt and animate Ernst’s visions, which occur in series (the days of the Week of Kindness), have considerable historical specificity and symbolic significance, none more so than the ‘chapters’ of the wordless novel organised around the giant faces that dominate Easter Island, or the many faces associated with The Lion of Belfort. The latter, in reality a monument to the defence of the French state against aggression from Germany (and therefore a symbol which accrued relevance with each new incursion from the east), is introduced by Ernst into striking guillotine images, taking its place on the scaffold, as the leonine faces of executioners and their assistants. The Lion of Belfort, then, symbol of French resistance to German ambition, is smoothly absorbed by a German artist’s fantasy of French history.(11)
In an essay written in 1948, which begins with the words ‘History of a Natural History’, Ernst characterises the mechanism of collage through the notion of ‘systematic displacement, and its effects’ describing its most notable conquest as ‘the Irrational’.(12) But beyond his brilliant definition of collage as ‘the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them,’ Ernst expands his conception of collage as a practice in a truly irrational direction, to include things that were not collages at all: ‘Magritte, for example, whose pictures are collages entirely painted by hand, and Dalí’.(13)
Here, then, we might begin to understand the work of an artist like Theo Michael, for whom collage is not only a practical activity (whether in two or three dimensions), but a mechanism for ‘systematic displacement’ which extends beyond collage as a synthetic process and into ‘collages’ drawn entirely by hand. In drawings like Acropolis Museum or World Within Worlds, we are confronted with things that superficially resemble the aesthetic of the nineteenth-century illustrations, which comprise Ernst’s collage novels, (an association heightened by the presence of a scattering of Easter Island faces on Worlds Within Worlds). But any allusion of this sort also constitutes a coupling of irreconcilable realities, and operates as such, generating friction like the elements of a collage: As Benjamin put it, (speaking of an entirely different set of historical relations): ‘It isn’t that the past casts its light on the present or the present casts its light on the past: rather an image is that in which the past and the present moment flash into a constellation.’(14)
Beyond a shared (and coincidental) fascination with Easter Island, and the mechanisms of collage, Michael’s work could also be related to Ernst’s through the latter’s poetic notion of the ‘History of a Natural History’, which could just as easily describe the content, and context, for much of the material in the exhibition Smoke From the Edge of the Known. In its present-day aftermath, natural history as a concept is mired in the positivist certainties of the nineteenth century: a world of fossils and Darwinism, in which deductions drawn from appearances and resemblances circumnavigate the rational, to reach their opposite limit: each new incongruous piece of ‘evidence’ generating ever more disastrous theories about species, their origins and their destinations. Many years later, however, by the time Ernst began producing ‘fossils’ of imaginary objects, plants and animals for his own Natural History in the 1920s, both natural and historical appearances had been rationalised and internalised through the languages of psychoanalysis and dialectical materialism, which is to say, become subject to the vicissitudes of consciousness.
This glitch in the relationship between appearances and significance, the fact that connections between images, objects or ideas might in fact be illusory, formed the basis of a radical and resistant image culture in the 1920s. Bataille’s magazine Documents, for example, reproduced images of unrelated objects with superficial resemblances on subsequent pages deliberately to undermine the effectiveness of drawing conclusions from formal associations. Almost anti-collages within magazines: bronze sculptures and leather masks; prehistoric rock art and avant-garde painting; dancers’ shins and cows feet; share nothing but an inconsequential and meaningless resemblance.(15) Michael’s collages, vitrines and drawings, likewise engage in an intuitive double-bluff of association and disconnection: the misdirection central to the ‘mechanism’ of collage that Ernst referred to as ‘displacement’. The dry pages of Documents, with their dead-pan, academic presentation (whether of coins, big toes or flowers), affect the same rhetorical posture as Michael’s pseudo-nineteenth-century vitrines: laying claim to the logic of empiricism and positivist deduction even as they demonstrate, beyond any shadow of a doubt that any conclusions drawn form such a process are worthless. In a classic piece of pseudo-rational sophistry, the ethnographer Marcel Griaule produced a contribution to Documents on the word task of the word ‘pottery’ which was illustrated with examples of ‘pottery’ objects so diverse as to prove conclusively that the word was meaningless.(16) This, it seems, is the lesson to which Michael’s work returns us today, through which apparently rational rhetorical forms reveal the irrational consequences of their limits, and so contribute to the revelation of their own ruined state. For this perspective the incongruous situation of the Acropolis Museum (on the lunar surface) is nothing less than the barely glimpsed, fleeting reality of a construction haunted by its auto-internalisation of the cultural politics of alienation and displacement.
Acropolis Museum, graphite on paper, 76x56cm, 2009
In Dick’s Valis, the appearance of ancient Rome in California heralds a collapse in the ability to distinguish between forms of consciousness which signals either the end of false consciousness (a religious revelation) or the onset of psychic disturbance (schizophrenia): neither seeming more or less desirable. That schizophrenia fascinated Dick is well known: standing, paradoxically, for the only rational refuge from the impossible demands that the world made on its ruined subjects. But Michael’s projection of a destination for the Acropolis Museum (the result, perhaps, of some drastic compromise to regain the Elgin Marbles), embraces an schizoid logic of incommensurable difference, which sets him aside from the rational fantasies of the romantic tradition which the image might seem to engage. When Joseph Gandy painted his epic Ruins of the Bank of England in 1830, for example, he assumed, for the vantage point of his imaginary cityscape, a fixed (if cataclysmic) future moment from which to consider the present.(17) The shock of recognition for nineteenth-century Londoners could be likened to twentieth-century New Yorkers, confronted with the half-submerged arm of the statue of liberty at the end of The Planet of the Apes: but although both envisage civilizations in ruins, cultural history returned to natural history, neither conceive of the ruin of history itself – when all is said and done, there still remains a ‘then’ from which to look back.
For history itself in ruins we must return to the future of Paris: or more accurately, to the future of its natural history, as imagined by the surrealist poet Benjamin Péret in his 1939 essay Ruins: ruin of ruins, published in the magazine Minotaure:(18)
‘One day’ Péret wrote, ‘when the memories of churches, which survived from the past as complements to the prisons, and banks, without which neither could have survived, have disappeared from the minds of men, perhaps one might find the gigantic fossil of that unique animal, the Eiffel tower.’(19)
This fantasy, as well as ceding Paris, capital of the nineteenth-century, to nature, its ‘ruins, bristling with thorns and chirping birds’, posits a hybrid anthropomorphism through which monuments become fossils, and ruination evolves in perpetuity. For Péret, history, in its ruined, overgrown state, regresses backwards into natural history; its repressed, irrational ‘other’. Confused by their desire for buildings, with which they mistakenly identify, humans and the spaces they inhabit succumb inevitably to the same ruined condition: ‘Man, that hermit crab, sees no life in the ruin where the animal that he still denies being, hides…and…Ruins are disowned by those for whom life is nothing more than a ruin, of which nothing remains but a glob of spittle.’(20) In these terms, the inexorable process of ruination, as well as functioning in physical terms as a bizarre reverse-Darwinism, infects (and connects) all human history:
‘the caverns of prehistory are the fossils of the ruins of castles…one ruin follows another; that which precedes it, is killed by it. From the collapsed fortresses of feudal knights flows a thick lava with fills forever Roman arenas and circuses…what remains of the middle ages…are the castles whose mosses have consumed their battlements, whose armoured ghosts shake their collapsing rooms, trying in vain to bury themselves in the rubble…’(21)
Ruination, in other words, far from being some distant future possibility (the worst case scenario), is the permanent, ever-present backdrop against which civilizations mistakenly think they are progressing: either unseen, unrecognised or simply ignored. Ancient Rome is indeed manifest in modern day California, if anyone has the eyes to see it, and the Eiffel Tower is indeed a fossilized trace of nineteenth-century organic life.
Any conceivable relation between past, present and future, which is to say, any history, (natural or otherwise), is subject to the disruptive potential of this alternate vision, which is precisely the rational-irrational dialectic at the heart of Theo Michael’s practice. The ‘rip in the fabric of reality’ that Philip K. Dick calls ‘madness, pure and simple’, Georges Bataille describes as the rupturing of the façade of historical consciousness through the power of images: ‘images that a kind of lucid dream borrows from the realm of the crowd, sometimes bringing to light what the guilty conscience has pushed back into the shadows, sometimes highlighting the figures that are routinely ignored’:(22) Worlds within worlds indeed.
‘I have written these words in air – with the tip of the index finger of my left hand, which is also air. My mother was left-handed, and so am I. There are no left-handed human beings any more. People exercise their flippers with perfect symmetry…Would the pelts of modern people have made nice fur coats for their ancestors in olden times? I don’t see why not.’
Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos.(23)
1. Robert Smithson, , in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam, University of California Press: California, 1996.
2. See, for example, Boullee. Ledoux. Lequeu: Visionary Architects, Hennessey + Ingalls: Santa Monica, 2002
3. For the best account of Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the concept of history’ see Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm, translated by Chris Turner, Verso: London and New York, 2005.
4. Ibid., p107.
5. The basilica of the Sacré-coeur was constructed ‘in expiation’ for the ‘crimes’ of the commune, and was built on a site of fierce communard resistance, a fervent anti-clerical neighbourhood. A popular cartoon from the time of its construction describes as a ‘Nouvelle Bastille.’
6. Philip K. Dick, Valis, Bantam Press: New York, 1981, pp32-33.
7. This formulation of Benjamin’s theory is proposed by Neil Cox in his essay ‘A Painting by Antoine Caron’, Papers of Surrealism 7, 2007, online at: www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk
8. Georges Bataille, ‘The Obelisk’, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, edited and translated by Alan Stoekl, University of Minnesota Press: Minnesota, 1985, p213.
9. Ibid., p217.
10. See the facsimile Max Ernst, Une Semaine De Bonté: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage, Dover Editions: New York & London, 1976.
11. For more on this material in relation to revolutionary history see Simon Baker, Surrealism, History and Revolution, Peter Lang: Oxford, 2007, chapter 1.
12. Max Ernst, Beyond Painting, Wittenborn Schultz: New York, 1948.
13. Ibid., p17.
14. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theoretics of Knowledge, Theory of Progress’ in Philosophical Forum 15, nos. 1-2, Winter 1983-4, p8.
15. For more on this, and examples of these pairs of images, see Simon Baker, ‘The Appearance of Things’ in Dawn Ades and Simon Baker, Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS, Hayward Gallery: London, The MIT Press: New York, 2006.
16. Marcel Griaule, ‘Potterie’, Documents 4, 1930. See also Ades & Baker, Undercover Surrealism, (op. cit.), p29 & p38.
17. This painting is housed in the Sir John Soane Museum, London.
18. Benjamin Péret, ‘Ruines: Ruine des ruines,’ in Minotaure 12-13, Paris, 1939, pp57-65.
19. Ibid., (author’s translation).
20. Ibid., (author’s translation).
21. Ibid., (author’s translation).
22. Philip K. Dick, Valis, Bantam Press: New York, 1981: The flyleaf of the book contains these lines – which may or may not be Dick’s: ‘A rip in the fabric of reality had opened. It was madness pure and simple. BUT WHAT IF IT WERE TRUE?’ The Bataille quote is from ‘The Obelisk’, op. cit., p213.
23. Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos, Flamingo/Harper Collins: London, 1994, p233.
* Simon Baker is Curator of Photography and International Art for Tate Modern