On the possibility of an avant garde
Exhibition text for Mikael Gregorsky's Apocatastasis at Erratum Gallery, Berlin
Back in the late summer of last year, photographer Mikael Gregorsky invited me to write a text to accompany a photo series he had shot with stylist Alessia Ansalone, to be shown at Erratum Gallery in Berlin. The series, created in collaboration with A.F.Vandevorst and drawing pieces from their archive, was the last before the cult fashion brand announced they were to close after 22 years. It became a de facto memorial marking the closure of a chapter of avant garde practice. They titled the exhibition Apocatastasis, after ‘the belief that everyone – including the damned in hell and the devil – will ultimately be saved’1.
Written after relocating to the remote Pembrokeshire coast, taking refuge from the year’s grief and traumas, the text became an opportunity to reflect on time, our place within it and the faith in possibility necessary for progressive practice. As I said to Mikael upon turning it in, it’s a mood. An elegiac prose poem written besides the bleak beauties of a deserted shore at dawn, the following has been edited for length.
Against Apocatastasis
‘…will a time come in which all free creatures will share in the grace of salvation’
What is the end of a beginning, the closure of chapters still rolling, title credits passing before our eyes with the camera’s red dot staring us down unblinkingly? How little we really know of time, lived from the observer’s cockpit, rear mounted, the moment’s cutting edge a fade on the edge of our sights, a penumbra of wakefulness. We, the sum total of extant beings in an event field of potential occurrence, upon awakening fall ever onwards, reaching into the river’s torrent to grasp at a wash that could be ours, a moment where we could be… could be what exactly?
Ideopathic epilepsy is a scourge. While they, the neurologists in white, or loose fit perfect ts and jeans, or disembodied voices remotely directing one episodic trauma or the next through modulations of the merits of diazepam IVs vs rectal infusions, phenobarb half lifes and bile acid secretion curves, all the metrics of collapse, say that the grand mal is a painless unconscious fugue, we bear witness to the rupture, read the tensions and torments that wrack the body as literally it is seized, wrested away upon the quakes of its own fragility, the delicate tension of the whole tearing itself apart in waves of convulsive twitches and torsions that rend the spine back upon itself in a rictus of the agonies of all ages. In another time those beset with the affliction were seen as special, equally feared and revered, the devil was in them, but this same monster, the curse of our own awakened incorporation, promised access beyond what we could know — to fall out of the dream of life and into the tumultuous ravaging storms of brute existence, a taste of timeless thoughtless existence.
Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky has lived with us for more than half a life. At the close of its first part, where Port dies, the European man fleeing into the desert, fugitive of his guilt, his infidelity, and the hollowing out of his marriage, for one passing moment in between the dried ink printed on pulped wood treated and flattened and bound we intimate the great maws of the universe, an infinite void crackling alive with empty souled teeth, as it swallows him whole.
This is our moment, we hanging men strung up on the rack across the abyss as Ulysses to the mast, with what passes for wakefulness to stop our ears to the hollows howling. At times our ears ring, they sing, tone poems of bell knolls as the world edges away further towards silence. To reach beyond this, out into the waters for the possibility of a future is both to be ruined and the only promise of grace.
An age can be known by its monsters, by the shadows in which it hides its face. Wonder at what great deformations of spirit we refuse to see in ourselves, and that those to follow would look upon with quaint bemusement. What are our monsters today? The visionary artist Paul Laffoley proposed a scheme linking the aesthetic registers, experiences of beauty, sublimity and kitsch, with the monsters that inhabited their thresholds: vampires, doppelgängers (or clones), zombies, artefacts of the event horizons of the aesthetic limits of subjectivity2. What phantoms express our fissures and limits today? Ghosts, hauntologies, holy guardian angels, daemons, avatars… Alexa? We are overcome, on all sides, great onrushing torrents of ourselves, endless waves of information, light and noise, blink and you missed it, come up for air and you might as well be dead. There is no up, no down, just the ever ever on, ever ever, on, ever ever ever.
It is said, Liebnitz may have been the last of us to truly have had a grasp on where we were, the completeness of it all, at least for what we could be said to know, to stand upon the glowing edges of creation’s revelation and drink it in from all sides. The polymathic master of art, science, religion, philosophy, mathematics, alchemy, each register of the epistemes of the day. Now to drink from two feeds at once is to inhabit alien worlds. Incomprehension stalks us. And the ever rising pitch of noise that threatens to drown us sets our bodies atremble, we cannot sleep, we convulse, we cannot look away, trained to keep clicking and swiping and looking and feeling and opening ourselves out for another drip drip drip of dopamine. From far outside all of this, what would we look like? All heightened states and hyperactive cortical stimulations, paroxysms of emotional distress, triggering and triggered, a trigonometry of surveillance capitalism and panoptic-social control colonising our limbic-libinal-lodes. Convulsives wracked with fits, tormented into dance by a song we cannot hear?
Walking through the cold Atlantic surf, bare feet chilled and attuned, that first rushing shock long past, save for the odd rising surge of a wave against bare ankles or calf. Watch the waters of each broken wave crest gently upon the sands, as their surge ebbs to fall away, drawn back into the tide’s retreat. A simple uneven monotony, calming to the core. Looking down, each slow stride forward as it moves through the liquid, perpendicular to the sea’s gentle fore and aft, creates splashes around the ankle as it, within the moving whole, bisects the water’s surface. The submerged foot in turn generating small waves with each step and rising turbulence that sprays droplets all about. Some are thrown ahead, imbued with an escape velocity that carries them beyond our plodding surge and the forward wake of steps, in an arc that ripples the waters like the first rains on a stilled pond. We rarely think of the forward wake of our lives, how our bows don’t simply cut the waters ahead, but in some infinitesimal way change them thus before we arrive, before we catch up, or catch on to them, rippling the futures of our arrival. These may be inconsequential thoughts. The futures we deserve will catch up none the less, great legacies of the imbalances and inequalities, rank iniquities and simple arrogances of our proclaimed superiority over all about us.
At the end, in the fin de siècle, what possibility is there for an avant garde? A temporal social construct, progressive or simply other, of a piece with the outside, at peace with the abyssal. Must one believe in grace, in angels, try to picture the monsters on the edge of thought, the eschatologies of a final form, or simply honour the promises of ruins and wreckage, of fallen monuments and the hopes in a dream? Are we all each angels of history, a great host out of heaven, each its own bubble of creation, forming a dirty foam frothing the surf? And that we, thus beset with great purpose, unique existence, and animated with some divine spark of destiny, are yet forever inconsequentially, irrelevantly alone? Fallen in incommensurable relativity, to solitude in society, that all we share is but soliloquy and our crippled souls lust mutely locked in an inane metaphysics of solipsism?
It is telling that Gustav Metzger entombed the angelus novus into a replica of Adolf Eichmann’s box-cage from Nuremberg, a conveyor belt mechanically churning and piling up scraps torn from tabloid newspapers into a mountain of crap and debris at its end. Artist and author Tom McCarthy offers us another angel, a parachute shorn of its cargo, released from the bonds of men, governed by the logics of new intelligences and agencies to rise in the world beyond the possibilities of human experience, drifting away on the updrafts towards the sun with its lines dangling like some impossible canvas octopus as we plummet below in horror, no longer the agents or authors of history. Another temporality of grace, for McCarthy, emerges where three roads meet — perhaps also in Burroughs’ place of dead roads — in the intersecting planes of the pattern, the living and its repetition. This cross section of Heraclitean portents — a father, son and holy ghost, or script, actor and avatar — is more Beckettian than Benjamin. A worm-like peristalsis ambulating through the mulch and muck, contracting and extending about itself again and again. And again.
The same shore we walk, a vast and wide expanse, far to the left the distance roar of waves beating themselves still and to the right green topped cliffs bear millennia of strife in the silent folds of their blackened stones. Footprints curve out across the sands, stretching ahead into a shimmer of distant incongruity as light gleams and glints up off the wet, their pattern and meaning all a loss. We make our way, sometimes following loosely without intention a path imprinted below, other times we verve off wildly, as the pedal reliefs spin and curve and double-back under unfathomable logics of forgotten dance and occult choreographies, or simply disappear and fade into the soft. Shadows in the far hint of others, but we are alone, and no sound carries from them, only birdsong drifting over the cliffs, momentarily magnificent.
The sand is littered with shells, little clapping angel wings, or spiralled fair lady hats or the splintered husks of razor clams, each carving out a halo in the sands around it, a dragging wake, its shadow in the tide, like a thousand meteors and comets, celestial conjunction of the moving spheres and the passages of falling stars written in a hidden code for all to see. A crab’s hewn carapace cracks satisfyingly under foot and all this is but dust crushed down over the centuries into beach.
The late Genesis P-Orridge spoke of always having a violin onstage when performing, that if they felt the energies and mood were right, one night they might seize the instrument and through some inspired accident of improvisation and intuition stumble upon a sequence of notes that, as the legend of the great C17th violinist Paganini would have it, opened a gateway to another world, another dimension. Another time. That in a moment of unfathomable alignment within the inconsequential, all may become apparent, the world fall into order, and some revelatory salvation bequeath deliverance — a time of grace for all?
All images courtesy of Mikael Gregorsky.
Laffoley diagnosed the subject of each of these aesthetic experiences as if wrecked upon its object, overcome, denuded, emptied. Phenomena of the boundary, barrier or horizon.