Review of
"Francis
Picabia, Singulier idéal"
@ the Musee d'Art
Moderne de la Ville Paris
by Joseph Nechvatal
The almost splendid retrospective
exhibit "Francis Picabia, Singulier idéal"
just opened at the Musee d'Art Moderne
de la Ville Paris. This is the first
presentation of Francis Picabia's oeuvre
in Paris since the Grand Palais
retrospective of 1976. Picabia
(1879-1953), of course, was principally a
jocund painter - but he also was a poet
(in 1918 he published a book of
poems and drawings entitled "Poèmes et
dessins de la fille née sans mère"
("Poems and drawings of the girl born
without a mother")), pamphleteer,
enfant terrible, and avant-garde
publisher of such reviews as 391 and
Cannibale.
Picabia (born François Marie Martinez
Picabia) became friendly with
Guillaume Apollinaire and Marcel
Duchamp, associated with the artistic group
which met in Jacques Villon's studio in
the village of Puteaux in 1911-12,
and later (1918) was allied with the
Zürich Dadaists, specifically
associating with Tristan Tzara. 1915 saw
the emergence of Picabia’s
machinist period when he discovered
industrial design as a pictorial source.
See for example the painting in the show
from The Peggy Guggenheim
Collection, Venice called "Très rare
tableau sur la terre" ("Very Rare
Painting on the Earth") (1915).
Picabia eventually blended this machinist
aesthetic with representations of
the human body, creating his significant
auto-erotic (and dea ex machina)
mechanomorphic period - the strongest
work in the show. By this artistic
amalgamation, prevailing
cyber-sensations were admirably hypothesized in
advance. Indeed, one immediately thinks of the contemporary paintings of
Gerwald Rockenschaub, with their
hard-edge metallic geometric renderings of
computer scenes and/or creatures. Yes,
through Picabia we may trace the
movement from mechanomorphic art into
infomorphic art.
Painting in a dry but radiant, even
combustible, style (for example in the
painting "Parade amoureuse"
(Love Parade) (1918)) Picabia raises the issue
of a bottomless contemporary dilemma -
the interface/dialectic between body
and machine. If in cyberspace our
ontologies are adrift vis-a-vis how
personal subjectivity was once
understood, Picabia's central idea in "Parade
amoureuse" leads us right up to
that slippery elocution between mechanical
embodiment and subjectivity - between
physical embodiment and machine
assistance/circumvention - where we
viractually teeter this very moment.
Undoubtedly, with the Dada
mechanomorphic period Picabia illustrates nicely
our spatialized digital paradigm by
mixing implied bodies with mechanical
schematics. Here the cyborg body
receives an ecstatic capability through the
repetitions of machinery. Of course what
"disappears" or is "disembodied" is
not the material body but an abstract
notion of the self. This
de-presentation is followed by a
reconstruction of embodiment into what is
now commonly known as the posthuman
condition.
But after viewing at length
"Francis Picabia, Singulier idéal" one wonders;
should belief in the body’s
semi-obsolescence as depicted in the
mechanomorphic period be theorized as an
expression of narcissistic
cybernetic post-flesh - or, rather, as a
refusal of technocratic control in
that the intractability of the body
would no longer be so central an issue?
Still not sure, but what we recognize in
his mechanomorphic paintings is
that by entering into the repetitions of
the machine the subject may fuse
into gyrating repeats in a complex and
cryptic way. Here flesh is no longer
the grounds for subjectivity. At the
same time the subject is licensed
through a décadent extension into
self-motorized possession as the subject
achieves disembodiment within high
technology. Persuasive simulated worlds
can exist for us as "real"
because we can perceive them through the
techno-apparatus of our body spliced
into the cybernetic circuit. I
understand this anti-materialist lurch
towards liberty in terms of
self-transcendent race and gender
collapse.
Even without citing the efficacious
theoretical influence of Donna Haraway's
cyborg-theory, the depictions of
post-flesh in "Parade amoureuse" and
"Magneto anglaise" (English
Magnet) (1922) seem to courageously facilitate
an inebriated subjectivity by
constructing an imaginative space of
accommodation for an intensely onanistic
existence. Here flamboyant
self-reliant relationships between the
protoplasmic body-image and mechanic
spatial conceptions are visualized as
self-prosthesis. This makes Picabia’s
mechanomorphic avant-garde period
impressive in philosophical terms, as
fairly recent contemporary thought has
been concerned with the
poststructuralist deliberation on the
notion of the subject in order to
question - and unlasso - its
traditionally privileged epistemological
status. Particularly in respect to the
techno realm there has been a
sustained effort to question the role of
the subject as the intending and
knowing autonomous creator - as coherent
originator. Again, Picabia’s
mechanomorphic period informs us here. In
fact, for me, this period of his
work has become emblematic of this
rigorously scrutinizing of the subject
which Jacques Derrida has described as
‘logocentrism’: the once held
distinctions between subjectivity and
objectivity; between public and
private; between fantasy and reality;
and between the unconscious and the
conscious realm.
Today we understand that these
distinctions are breaking down under the
pressure of our speeding and omnipresent
computer communications network
technologies. We are now part of an
automated technologically hallucinogenic
culture that functions along the lines
of a dream, free from some of the
classical strictures of time and space;
free from some of our traditional
earthly limits which have been broken
down by the instantaneous nature of
electronic communications (particularly
with its crown jewel, immersive
virtual reality). The modernist
existential concept of the singular
individual has been supplanted by the
electronic-aided individual, in a way
liberating the body from linear time and
vaporously placing it in a
technologically stored eternity
(simulacrum-hyperreality). This quality of
phantasmagorical and perverse
displacement has for some signified a
tightening spiral which formulates a new
vision of existence - a vision
which Jean Baudrillard has called
‘pornographic’.
But too, I think that what interests me
in the mechanomorphic Picabia as
harbinger was his connection to Raymond
Roussel's mechanical line of thought
(in 1912 Picabia, along with Duchamp and
Appollinaire, attended a
performance of Roussel's play
"Impressions of Africa"). With them, it seems
to me the post-bachelor machine was
already there, waiting for Deleuze and
Guattari to hook it up to the
body-without-organs, to plug it into the logic
of the desiring machine so as to achieve
a calculated interconnectivity with
the infoworld through
schizo-capitalism. Yes, Raymond Roussel
too because
in his work he invents crazy machines
that produced ecstatic results through
the use of repetitions and
combination/permutations. An obsessional
machine-like logic provided his art with
a seemingly pure spectacle of
endless variety of textual games and
combinations flowing in circular form.
I see this trend in the Dada
mechanomorphic Picabia also.
I think that Roussel relates to
Picabia’s search for a self-machine-location
beyond genital-identification because
Roussel's themes and procedures
involved cryptograms and torture by
language - all formally reflected in his
working technique with their
inextricable play of double images,
repetitions, and impediments; all giving
the impression of the pen running
on by itself through the dreamy usage
and baroque play of mirrored form.
Picabia’s mechanomorphic technique and
the process he developed also lends
itself well to the creation of
unforeseen, automatic and spontaneously
inventive movements which give me the
feeling of prolonging action into
eternity through the ceaseless,
fantastic constructions of the work itself,
transmitting an altered, exalted and
orgasmic state of mind which after the
initial dazzling creates one predominant
overall effect - that of creating
doubt through mechanical discourse.
Also, like Roussel, the image of
mechanic enclosure is common with Picabia
in his Dada mechanomorphic period where
a secret to a secret is held back,
systematically imposing a formless
anxiety through the labryrinthian
extensions and doublings, disguises and
duplications, which makes vision
undergo a moment of annihilation. For
me, Picabia presents to us the model
of silent perfection of the eternally
repetitive mechanical machine, which
functions independently of time and
space - pulling us with the artist into
a logic of the infinite. Yea - Picabia
is the mastermachine because his
mechanomorphic human-machines map out a
mental infospace which is circular
in nature and thus an abstract attempt
at eliminating time.
In Picabia’s mechanomorphic period the
body - through a dismemberment of
traditional narrative subjectivity - is
undone by a proscribed clamor it
cannot contain. Here trans-crystalline
notions of the self reflect the
formational effect of webbed high
technology. Here the kind of top-down
logic (with which we are all too
familiar) is opposed by an intricate
interplay of complexity. There is no
Debordian spectacular society where all
people are advertisements for the status
quo portrayed here. Rather, Picabia
traces the tensions between human
narrative and the mechanical spectacle.
Thus Picabia is the mythic oracle
pointing us to an indeterminate but
artistic resolution between the two
competing categories of being today –
the mechanic and the organic. For
Picabia, mechanical penetration achieves
and performs direct bodily engagement. The
subject's existence is enhanced
by his/her disappearance into
technology-induced realms. The body's
dissolution may be empowering then.
But is Picabia just being Dada
disingenuous by proposing this posture? Given
the period’s death, or explanation of,
the mythic Father/God - alongside the
enduring wish of Western modern thought
to trundle exterior reality - I
think not. Here, in the mechanomorphic
operation, the paradoxically
simultaneous experiences of death and
immortality that is fundamental to
Western religious practice is laid bare.
Having explained God, Picabia
creates a post-flesh art by virtue of a
relocation of
body/machine/consciousness. Actually,
Picabia seems to address here how
technological consciousness infects
people like a virus. That such a
semi-programmed Dada philosophy engages
our contemporary fixations today is
not remarkable. All told, Picabia
remains quite formidable in his versatile
span; a span which leaves many current
cultural producers looking dismally
ethnocentric.
"Francis
Picabia, Singulier idéal"
Musee
d'Art Moderne de la Ville Paris
November
16th, 2002 – March 16th, 2003
11, Ave du
President Wilson