SIEGFRIED ZIELINSKI
DISCOVERING THE NEW IN THE OLD:
THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD AS A POSSIBLE WINDOW TO THE FUTURE?
ON MIAO XIAOCHUN’S RENAISSANCE TRILOGY
THE LAST JUDGMENT IN CYBERSPACE / H2O / MICROCOSM
I.
Concepts that dramatically announce paradigmatic changes in thought and artistic creation are short-lived as a rule. At the start of the third millennium, hardly anybody still speaks of postmodernism, which as a concept had so shaped the 1970s and 1980s of the Western world. A half-life of fifteen to twenty years is very little in the energy balance of the theory market.
When postmodernism was all the rage, critics and cultural philosophers were using this concept to react to the deep insecurity that they felt in face of the saturation of life conditions with new electronic and digital technologies. Whatever was classified as a later deposit as an identification with the material seemed impossible to rescue. It necessarily culminated in the dead-end of the zero dimension of algorithmic world construction. The consequence propagated was the complete dissolution of everything corporeal in abstraction, from which there was no escape. “The scourges of the present are not cancer, not AIDS,” as Berlin philosopher and anthropologist Dietmar Kamper summed up in an interview in 1989. “We are dying an audiovisual death, drowning in a flood of images without any longer having experienced lives ourselves, understanding sensuality with our own bodies.”I At this point in time, a video recorder in the People’s Republic of China was a valuable commodity. It cost 25 times the average monthly income in the PRC, around 2,500 Yuan. Four years later, the price went up to 6,000 Yuan, or 1,800 USD, for a single video recorder.II
Miao Xiaochun is an artist who is not left awestruck in the face of new technologies for the creation of images and sounds and in confrontation with cultural pessimism. For at least a decade, he has been taking up the challenge of understanding the zero dimension of number as a necessary passage to a possibly other quality of experience. From the abstraction of mathematical rows, in combination with machines new concretizations can be gained, even if they are not identical to those familiar from sensual perception. Vilém Flusser, a Jewish philosopher from Prague, the city of alchemists, responded in an
extreme formulation to the apocalyptic horsemen of theory with the harsh formulation that the digital image could be understood as an answer to Auschwitz. After the final death of God in the Nazi murder camps, it was possible for a new inventive power to grow from abstraction with the help of algorithmic machines, a power we still need to master. This goes beyond the concept of a post-histoire and contains at least in part the idea of the present as a prior period. It tries to react to what might still come, and not just to what has already been.
But this in turn is only possible by moving through the experience of history. A fundamental premise of an-archeology is that the avant-garde is nothing but the inventive (re) appropriation of the past. With the discovery, research, and transformation of whatever can be found in the deposits of historical processes, for centuries we have written the future from our respective standpoint. With the paintings that Miao Xiaochun has chosen for his trilogy to engage with European art of the early modern period, the Chinese artist makes clear that the transformations in Europe of the sixteenth century were from a time that was preparing for what was to come. Michelangelo, Hieronymus Bosch, and Lucas
Cranach (the Elder) were in their day courageous visionaries, not speculators turned toward the past. In visual terms, they were among the pioneers of a European modernity that were shaped by the hegemony of the natural sciences and a physics of the visible. A passage through their work allowed Miao Xiaochun to open the present for the future.
II.
The idea of the microcosm is necessarily bound to the idea of the macrocosm. In its origin and in their development, the two ideas are like two sides of the same coin. They are inseparably linked to one another, for at issue here is a mutual interrelationship. The microcosm is the projection of the very large, that which surpasses human existence, onto the Lilliputian world in the sublunary realm. Conversely, the macrocosm is the projection of the inner relationships that constitute people bio-logically and psycho-logically onto the endless expanse of the universe.
Aristotle developed the term microcosm in his thoughts on physics. He took the idea from his teacher Plato, who formulated it in the dialog Philebus. Both Greek masters were implicitly referring back to the worldview of the school of Pythagoras. He is the secret father figure of all those in Europe who generate art with algorithms, regardless of whether we are dealing with sounds or images. The composer Xenakis once said that all computer artists are basically Pythagoreans.
For Pythagoras, number was the medium through which the relationship between the small and the large was mediated. For him, both the individual on earth and totality in space were shaped by relationships of divine harmony. Well-proportioned relations are measurable between their single components; here as well as there they can be expressed in definable distances, that is, in mathematics and geometry. The core of the Pythagorean worldview is lovely simplicity, the triviality of consonance, which in music theory based on the basic intervals octave, fifth, and fourth, from which the more complicated relations of consonance and dissonance are derived.
By working with the Garden of Delights by Hieronymus Bosch from the early sixteenth century, Miao Xiaochun reaches back into the depths of European culture, the Christian Middle Ages. The abbess Herrad von Landsberg created an impressive picture for the moral instruction of her fellow sisters around 1170/80. It bears the title Hortus Delicarum (The Garden of Delights). Those hoping for eternal life, the Christian adepts, move uneasily up a ladder between the evil below and the good above. In their dangerous and difficult ascent, they are on the one hand attacked by the deadly arrows of dark demons and on the other hand protected by guardian angels and kept from falling. Seductive evil
in Herrad von Landsberg’s image simply appears in the guise of the everyday: property, comfort, and desire are illustrated with gold coins, a castle, a restful bed, and a beautiful woman. What dramatically takes place between heaven and earth, between the hellish maws of the dragon on the one hand and the stretched out hand of God as a mediator to the world beyond on the other, is nothing other than life itself.
This also defines the large centerpiece in Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych. Miao Xiaochun staged the endless facets of earthly existence not in strict verticals like Herrad von Landsberg, but, like Bosch, predominantly in the horizontal, as an exuberant dance on different earthly plateaus, or better: deceptively idyllic volcanoes that form at the same time individual dynamic thematic fields: transportation that developed from fast horsemen and with the help of technical devices mutated to a roaring, no longer controllable traffic: the natural sciences, architecture, desire, and always in this special work, war, the presence of technology as dangerous destruction.
The splendid orgy of simulated images seems initially to be formed from the firmament, out of the endless macrocosm. The Fiat lux! (Let there be light!) of the Christian myth of creation is impudently animated—here meaning so much as “given a soul”—the stars on the nightly sky transform into letters spelling out the name of the artist. With these digital letters, first the title Microcosm is formulated, and then the apple of the tree of knowledge. Adam has already bitten into the forbidden fruit: paradise is lost forever and cannot be recreated, at least not outside our imagination. This is clear from the very beginning.
God cannot be represented and cannot be written, only as JHWH (Yahweh), the name of God. Clearly, the artist Miao Xiaochun is playing God in the sense of the European myth of creation. With the help of his inventive power, computer science, and a Mac that uses the bitten apple as an omnipresent icon and trademark, he creates the world anew, at least in the image on the computer screen. The apple multiples immediately in mass production, is cloned in endless seeming duplications, like all the other figures in Miao Xioachun’s work trilogy. There are no longer any originals. From the fruit of the tree of
knowledge, we have arrived at a game with the commands written in binary code. An anthropomorphic machine can read endless series of zeroes and ones, tossing them out one after the other as commands into the sky. The apparatus generates what we call civilization to the wild applause of an anonymous audience. Powerful Wagnerian sounds announce greatness, the superman, Gesamtkunstwerk. Miao Xiaochun immediately gives this an ironic turn. Increasingly, the rhythm of taps on a keyboard comes through acoustically. Creation here means programming and typing.
The creative drive of the computer and its sorcerer’s apprentice at the keyboard is increasingly running amok. What were once paradisiacal idylls are becoming nightmares, traffic collapses, bows and arrows mutate into helicopters, bombs, and rockets, desire is locked in fatal lethargy; in brief, an earthly hell develops. Referring to the Human Genome Project of US doctors, the human body is cut slice for slice like a salad cucumber so that it can be decoded entirely into its genetic code. Music, dance, play: the media of entertainment are invented and formatted to compensate for the constant
experience of lack. At the end of the audiovisual marathon, everything that technological intelligence has created is tossed onto the struggling individual, including the framed painting of Hieronymus Bosch and a kinetic structure of monitors that seems like an early robot by Nam June Paik. Media art too has long become part of the cosmic trash flying through space.
But the video does not end with this apocalyptic vision of a failed technical rationality. Everything that exists in extension is ultimately transformed back into the cosmic egg, the original material of the Hermetics, before it was analytically segmented and mixed. This is a powerful image from the world of alchemy. The prima materia symbolized by the egg in Europe is called tai chi in the Chinese tradition. The digital has become the analog pendant to the alchemistic formula of gold. Paradise as an invention of the mind disappears, dissolves with its implosion. This is the actual conclusion of the video work.
Material returned to the origin can undertake new divisions and mixtures: separation seems possible at anytime.
With his Microcosm, Miao Xiaochun has created a huge sound-image in time. Over 15 minutes long, this exemplary story of civilization develops from the machine and spits carefully out hundreds of millions of organized pixels. Microcosm exists in visual elements, as frozen moments in the form of analog and digital drawings. But the rapid movement can only finally develop as a large projection in an endless loop and in generous space. I saw the work in this format in 2009 in the huge belly of the Oriental Pearl Tower, the 468-meter high radio and television tower in Pudong, Shanghai’s new busy center. On the skyscrapers outside, electronic messages for new commodity worlds, services, and artificial paradises of all kinds flicker in the nocturnal sky over the powerfully heat up metropolis in the far east of China.
“The everyday video fever is spreading unnoticeably in Shanghai”: these words appeared in Xinmin Wanboa, a Shanghai evening newspaper, at the start of 1988, twenty years before Miao Xiaochun’s Microcosm emerged. “It was a dream to see yourself in the future in a picture from today.”III
III.
Art critics and art historians have a hard time in light of simulated worlds like the one Miao Xiaochun creates and which he has been teaching for ten years at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts. Although they have learned to think about the mutual relationship between mathematics and painting or sculpture, the shameless surfaces generated from algorithms are highly suspect to them. Established art history tried to appropriate these new phenomena in international art by way of a ruse. It simply claims that artists who work with advanced technological means of production are not creating anything really new, but something already notoriously familiar is only being given new clothes.
Images in which the beholder can immerse him or herself from various perspectives, so-called virtual realities, what a laughable concept! This echoed from Florence, Rome, Paris, and Madrid, where the treasures of Europe’s cultural identity are carefully guarded. Michelangelo Buonarroti realized just that in the ceiling fresco of the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican five hundred years ago, and much more perfectly, and most importantly, more beautifully! Total immersion has always been the declared goal of an aesthetics based in Aristotle.
But these are primarily despairing gestures of self-assertion made by a special intellectual caste. By the early 1990s, at the latest, art history and art criticism found themselves quite behind when it came to an experimental artistic practice that they slept through entirely and that raced past them like a speeding train. They already had significant difficulties when they were confronted with the time-based art practices of Fluxus and performance, because these phenomena could not be slipped into a slide and analyzed as a two-dimensional surface. They were just barely able to recognize film and photography as artistic media. Now images emerged that needed no reference in the world outside the frame, that do not even need a standard material to be able to express itself to others. Monitors, a fleeting projection, loudspeakers would suffice. With antiquated thought prostheses like the propagation of an iconic turn or visual studies as a new master discipline that would be responsible for all that has become pictorially visible in two, three, or four dimensions, they tried to rescue themselves into the future.
Art that works with progressive media necessarily has a discursive character. It also deals with the understanding of the arts and their various perceptions. Just as every good artistic film is always also a treatment on the cinema and tries to add something to its history. With his trilogy on the resplendence of European images from the early modern period, the Chinese artist, who in the second half of the 1990s studied art in the Documenta city of Kassel, walks right into this discourse and comments upon it with the confidence of a young intellectual who comes from a culture whose deposits of civilization reach much further back in history than those of Europe. A camera obscura, for example, with the help of which objects illuminated with light can be projected from the outside world into a dark chamber, and whose invention the European Renaissance still claims as its own, was described quite precisely in the text canon of the Mohists in the fourth century before Christ.
The Last Judgment in Cyberspace opens Miao Xiaochun’s trilogy in the middle of the first decade of the third millennium of the Common Era. Already in the title, the artist reveals that his artificial world is at least threefold in historical terms. It has the obvious reference to the high art of the late Renaissance, one of the most outstanding frescoes of art history, The Last Judgment, which Michelangelo worked on for eight years until utter exhaustion (1533–1541). At the same time, it operates quite within the worldview and technology of the present; and it points with a clear gesture towards a time still to come, when computers are as self-evidently part of our environment as electricity is today.
Miao Xiaochun’s attitude to art history stands for the radical reversal of the boring premise of the old always already contained in the new. He turns this perspective around, discovering the new in the old. He undertakes a form of prospective archaeology. In moving through the past, he shows us how the world someday might look.
The consummation of Renaissance painting and architecture that Michelangelo’s late addition to the staging of the dome of the Sistine Chapel represents becomes in the interpretation of the Chinese artist at the same time the starting point for a notion of the subject as it began to develop in the seventeenth century with the beginning of modernity and the hegemony of the natural sciences. The many figures that populate the scene are already in Michelangelo well-proportioned phenomena of the manifold only on first glance. The master interprets the day of the Last Judgment as one of vengeance and fury: Dies irae, dies illa. The figures that populate the scene are despairing and rejected. The merciless wheel of divine power (and its representatives on earth) did not allow these figures to become new sovereigns, but subjects in the direct sense of the word: subjected, subordinated. Rene Descartes formulated his concept of man as divine automaton around one hundred years later: they function and suffer monstrously in their functioning, an endless cycle of violation/sin and punishment. At the foot of the painting, behind the altar of the Vatican chapel, each new pope has been elected for the past 130 years.
By taking his own exact measurements and inserting a calculated image of his physiognomy in place of Michelangelo’s painting—a kind of geometrical physiogram—Miao Xiaochun has taken the dissolution of the Renaissance ideal to its radical extreme. In the world of clones, there are no longer any originals. Behind the masks of sameness there remains only a suspicion of something consistent that, however, can no longer be identical with itself. Always the same, but never myself, to reverse an advertising slogan from the past fin des siècle that the advertising experts of Calvin Klein had invented for the brand’s existentialism from the bottle—in a campaign featuring of all people Kate Moss,
the princess of artificial paradises, as Charles Baudelaire called the world of drugs. The time after the subject has recognized that it was never was complete and assumes that it never will be whole. The only originary aspect of Miao Xiaochun’s Last Judgment is the possible relationship of the individual cloned characters to one another, a relation that the artist can randomly alter. The particular, the sensational has slipped to the relational, become flexible, black and white, an abstraction. From here, after the Last Judgment the artist will push forward to the equally colorful Garden of Delights, and finally rejuvenate
himself in the Fountain of Youth.
The classical subject begins to dissolve entirely in this process: Miao Xiaochun stages this in a dimension that he refers to as that of the future. “Where will I go?” is the essential video component of his Last Judgment in Cyberspace that sums up the silent work. The large format computer prints (C-prints) freeze time, like photography. They are momentary shots, gained from a complex movement. This is paradoxical for the computer, because it is a time machine par excellence. Everything that is seen on the monitor takes place in the moment of beholding, oscillates: it is frequency, a processed image in time.
When the computer is turned off, the phenomenon disappears. In electronic and even more so in digital video, an art that sees itself as a temporal art is at one with itself. The figures become temporary existences in perception as well. The space expanded into the endless between them becomes a mechanically generated eternity Aion, as the Greeks said, or GOD as the fastest way from zero to infinity, as the paraphysician and eccentricdramatist Alfred Jarry put it.
Cyberspace is not a reality that can be called objective. Created by algorithms, after its transformation into the sensually perceptible it is an experience in the first person, that is, of an entirely subjective nature. To be able to move within it using our dull senses, we need crutches, technical aids. Just as for example Christian religion needed the heavenly ladder as prosthesis to provide an image of the ascent of the human soul to the heavenly and the descent of the angels as messengers of God. The floating figures of Miao Xiaochun have long since lost the floor beneath their feet. They too used prostheses in continuous space, the ladder, the cog as a master artifact of mechanics, the boat, the bundled arrows that in European mythology stand both for the power of destruction as well as the capacity for insemination and can be found in countless allegoric representations of electricity, especially in the founding age of the newest media, the late nineteenth century.
IV.
The reference in art history for the 2007 series of computer-simulated visual sequences on water—H2O—is Lucas Cranach (the Elder)’s painting The Fountain of Youth from the mid-16th century. Forever young: the scene represented here tells of the longing to dispose of the cumbersome physical shell of one’s own existence and to be able to immerse oneself in eternal life.
The image of Cranach’s painting is divided into three parts, without taking on the form of a triptych. In the left part of the image, decidedly old women are being carted to a bathing pool. The basin is occupied by Amor and Venus, who lend the water the transmuting power of rejuvenation. On the right hand side, the figures emerge from the bath as young women. They enter a time in which they are newly clothed and adorned for the pleasurable sensations that they now can experience once again.
The pool or fountain with the water in the middle fulfills the function of a medium par excellence. Transformation is only possible by passing through the fluid element as prepared by the gods of love. Water takes on a function similar to that held by electricity in the media discourse of the Enlightenment. At the limit of materiality and its dissolution of the same, it embodies the power of transformation. It is the central phenomenon and original life elixir. Once electrified, bodies can become immortal, quite in the sense that Juliette emerged at the zenith of the Enlightenment in de Sade’s famous double novel
from 1792 (Justine et Juliette)—constantly electrified by immersing herself in evil and moral depravity.
In cybernetic space, there can be constant youth, because this space knows no physicality. It can constantly be created anew in image and time and animated with figures, so long as the current flows. Here, paradise can reemerge as painted by Hieronymus Bosch. In cybernetic space, the Last Judgment has already taken place.
But in the artistic fiction, H2O represents the logical conclusion of Miao Xiaochun’s trilogy. It envisions a time after the media. The electrical no longer provides any sensations for the living. Water is the most valuable raw material of all that is Bios [βιοσ]. The earthly Lilliputians have disregarded it across the centuries, allowing it to become an extreme scarcity. The People’s Republic of China today is already starting to suffer from this.
Miao Xiaochun’s idiosyncratic adaptations and interpretations of masterworks of European art from the early modern period are shameless in a direct sense. With no shame, he parades our own art history before us and at the same time opens our own present in a playful manner for a possible future of (art) history that might have already been its past. Only an artistic personality that comes from a culture rooted so deep in time like that of China and—despite all the references to the European—one that also works with this awareness can achieve something of this kind.
I
Das Auge: Zur Geschichte der
audiovisuellen Technologie. Narziss,
Echo, Anthropodizee, Theodizee.
Dietmar Kamper im Gespräch mit Bion
Steinborn, Christine v. Eichel-Streiber,
in: Filmfaust 74 (1989), 31.
II
According to a study by Ling Chen,
which I commissioned in 1988 a Technische
Universität Berlin. The author
based his estimate on information from
Xinhua, the Chinese news agency.
III
Quoted from Ling Chen’s study,
March 1988, 3.
【Editor：jen】
