The Utopia of Attention

Following a visit to the Ron Mueck exhibition at the MCA,
a few remarks on contemporary art and the rise of
indifference.
by Jacques Delaruelle

“It was such fun!” I heard a group of children say as they left the building, and the parents to concur, enthusing more knowledgeably about the freedom with which the artist had subverted the scale of the human body upon which the humanists of the Renaissance had based their new understanding of the world… So real, yet so free, so life-like and yet so unlike anything previously seen, more real than the real; what a lovely semantic clash the artist has staged between the meticulously rendered details of his figures and their improbable size… Naturally, the concept beneath the display was to do with representation: what looks real may not be so and reciprocally what does not meet our expectation of reality, may nevertheless have real existence. So why, if at all, and how could one possibly disagree with this article of faith of our post-everything times???

By arguing, to begin with, that in the theatricality of these artworks and the reception of the public to which they address themselves a neighboring intellectual flabbiness can be found: an equivalent disposition of the mind from which both attention and “obedience” are missing. “Obedience”, I hear you say, “you ought to be kidding, it’s all supposed to be fun!” Yet “obedience” is a theme of works that so pointedly respect the photographically captured appearance of their subject and duplicate them meticulously, or seem to do so anyway. And no sooner is this acceptance to objective appearance conjured up in the hyper-realist mode, than it is cancelled by a play with scale that reveals the work as a deconstruction of conventional human semblances and a playful rejection of the rules of verisimilitude.

More pointedly, Ron Mueck’s work gently derides the view according to which thought (or art), if it is to make sense, may have to obey a legality or an authority beyond itself. To inquire, past the seductive strangeness of the sculptures, about their connection with the humanity they refer to (or lack of it) would be pointless, or beside the point since the point is precisely that there is no point. This cleverness, however, which is but an ostentatious indifference to what artistic propositions actually mean, undermines itself. By professing to ignore the necessity of a community of sense without which each one of us would remain isolated in his/her phenomenal perception, it condemns itself to the insignificance of an iconic proposition (e.g. a publicity message) that would aim at the least conscious aspects of our mind. Immanuel Kant is helpful to understand this when he suggests that “common sense” is the transcendental reference of judgement or of the experience that is constituted (quite literally) by judgement. According to him, alienation (both mental and social), mendacity or even plain stupidity coincide with this incapacity to respond to (new) experience. But such an openness to the life-world is itself predicated on a community sense best understood as a possibility of common entente between men, or the possibility that our experience of a situation or an object may be the same for others. To put it as simply as possible, here the philosopher contrasts the perception of those having abandoned common sense with the perception of those still belonging to the community of reason: “when different men live in their own world, we can presume that they are dreaming” the master reflected, and when one dreams one’s life, he added, the self becomes the only reference of judgement, at which point the reign of indifference begins.

Television, of course, illustrates a situation one no longer dares to deplore, where the simple fact of appearing coincides with the disintegration of significance: the event or the idea ceases to exist as soon as it appears and has been replaced by another whose main raison d’être is to ensure the regularity of our visual distraction, our indifference. To emerge from it requires a contraction of the intelligence usually defined in terms of attention span. A few years ago ten minutes or so was the capacity of this sporadic kind of attention, then it was five, then one and now, I am told, it oscillates between ten and thirty seconds. In that restricted sense, it may be true to say that the mass media “educate” their audience, that is, systematically erode their capacity for attention. “We live in a world of unreality and dream” Simone Weil wrote, “and it is the task of the artist, the scholar and the philosopher to pierce through the film of unreality that veils it (the world), and makes of it, for nearly all men, at nearly every moment of their lives, a dream or stage set. They ought to do it, but more often than not they cannot manage it”(1).

The reasons for such a failure are manifold indeed and completely beyond the scope of these basic reflexions. Yet when “the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience), and the distinction between the true and the false (i.e. the norms of thinking) no longer exist” (2), one becomes quite literally incapable of feeling, within oneself, the reality of the world; that is, in Kantian terms, one’s capacity for judgement disappears. One can only accept just about any point of view, any received idea concerning reality, especially if it provides an outlet for one’s frustrated longings. It was the great originality of Hannah Arendt’s analysis to disregard Totalitarian ideology -either Nazi or Stalinesque- as an intellectual corpus, a set of more or less coherent propositions, and to regard it instead as a manner of “thinking” defined by a near complete indifference to the ideas it professed. Such opportunism, argued Arendt, is inseparable from the ideologue’s contempt for the reality of the world or the concrete existence of those who live in it.

To dwell a tad longer on her analysis of this indifference permits one to understand the affinity between the totalitarian mentality and what Arendt herself called “the specific mentality of the moderns”. She refers to an early aspect of German Romanticism which, for a very long time now, has been a leitmotiv of practicing artists. Namely, the belief that the freedom to experiment coincides with a search for a lost origin (whether of language or of being) or that “originality” is of the essence when one considers art is a different form of thinking. Pace Rimbaud, Keats or Rilke, the poetic search for a first truth, could not long remain a disinterested quest for a Holy Grail residing as it were in the entrails of the artist. Soon the business of art (and this was the main import of Surrealism) would consist in flabbergasting its select audience with daring paradoxes and risky views that would ultimately celebrate arbitrariness itself. The more capricious a work seemed, the more original it would appear (e.g. Dali, or Damien Hirst today). In effect the dogmatic veneer of the totalitarian mentality and the idiosyncratic “genius” of the modern artist/intellectual represent a similar emancipation from contingent constraints and formal limits founded, at least originally, in a community based upon respect for measure and appropriateness. Late romantic artists and fascist militants have at least one thing in common. They share the same irresponsibility in their employment of ideas no longer understood as bridges between the ideal and the real, but as alibis to be exploited by the intellect in pure assertions of its autonomy. Finally Hannah Arendt argues that the romantic vision (in its generic sense) consists precisely in evoking worldly events after having cancelled their historical reality, and to discuss them from the very perspective of this negation. More important than the real is the thrill of discovery, the expression of a precious little difference which will inevitably prove to be meaningless.

The indifference to reality characteristic of our mediatised culture already formed the background of Simone Weil’s passionate attentiveness to things and humble attendance to their otherness. The self-referential obsession of a thinking which cares about nothing but its own trouvailles (findings) or the narcissistic appropriation of reality by art typifies a certain kind of production that has allowed for this endless “death of art”. Some may find this continuous swapping of ideas and opinions “interesting” or “exciting” in itself, but others will regard it as essentially unconcerned with the reality of malheur. I am thinking more particularly of a writer like John Berger or an artist like Ken Whisson whose works tirelessly remind us that it matters to be attentive, beyond the seduction of words or images, to the relationship between them, and their connection with the world. This does not merely mean that to mistreat ideas is the sign that one is ready to mistreat other people, but that contempt for ideas or indifference to what ideas actually mean is already in itself a contempt for other men.

'The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “what are you going through?”. It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen in the social category labelled “unfortunate”, but as a man exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way.
The way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all its truth.
Only he who is capable of attention can do this' (3).

Notes
1. Simone Weil, “Forms of the Implicit Love of God", Reader, p. 478.
2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, in The Totalitarian System
p. 224.
3. Simone Weil, Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies, p. 51.
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Jacques Delaruelle is Head of the Art History and Theory Department of the National Art School, an occasional writer, not quite the guitarist he wishes he was and a long-time student of Kant's Third Critique.

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