plastic arts

Plastic spirit and depth. by Gerardo Muñoz

In an issue of The Listener in 1935, the renowned British art historian Kenneth Clark penned a short article titled “The Future of Painting” that can be read as an early eulogy to the tradition of the pictorial craft. As a provocation – this was still the high tide of Modernist art – the ‘future’ of painting for Clark was undeniably reaching a point of irreversible exhaustion, at least in the Western tradition. In a phenomenological reduction of two major strands of modern painting – what he called “pure painting” that included Impressionism and Post-Impressionism; and, on the other, “super-realism” as the artistic consciousness that bypassed  “spiritual salvation”, such as that of Surrealism and other visual experiments – Clark’s indictment deployed an indictment on what he sought as the end of the “plastic spirit”: “We must keep in mind the possibility that in the western world the plastic spirit is really exhausted and that art will be lost for many decades” [1]. 

For Clark, it was not that art ceased to exist as an autonomous practice of sensorial activity; it was rather that its imaginative and spiritual endeavors had a future only if mediated and “linked up” (sic) with the evolution of a “new social economic system” driven by the standards of productivity and mass spectatorship. Unlike Clement Greenberg’s reflexive plea of modernist painting as the triumph of the dialectical inversion of flatness over depth, for Clark the convergence of pictorial relation with social objectivity resulted, in the tradition of a post-Cezanne world, in draining the inherent sensible communication of painting and myth. This meant that modernist painting tout court was devoid of any mythical relation. In fact, one could very well claim that the outwardly material support (the flat canvas) of the picture became its most dramatic corroboration. Modernist painting was the triumph of social symbolization insofar as it served as a reminder of the objective space that could only be taken as unserious gratification of its own objectivity.

It does not take too many readings of Greenberg’s large claim on modernist painting to see that behind “flatness”, its very surface, lurks variations of the aura of subjectivity, expressed in “success of self-criticism”, “resistance to the sculptural”, and the drive towards systematic consistency viewed in the mirror of the “convergence of spirit with science; their concern does show the degree which Modernist art belongs to the same historical and cultural tendency as modern science” [2]. Or so writes Greenberg in his landmark text. If Greenberg goes out of his way to invite modern science into the field of aesthetics it is precisely because Modernist art has been able to spell out the potential for representation into an autonomous surface that has given up depth to the conscious effort of its material limitations as its primary concern (imagination, the divine, the liturgical theatrical aura are all secondary). It is perhaps against this backdrop that one can understand what Clark means by the exhaustion of the “plastic spirit” that underpins his prophetic understanding of the decline of painting. 

But what is, ultimately, the “plastic spirit”? It is not referring to sacred representation nor artistic inspiration of the artist, but rather the receptive affinity of the pictorial gesture with nature without ever being reducible to its material support (flatness). If painting exists, it is because its lovely being “is neither sensuous nor spirit, but rather the ungraspable, diffusing over the figure…this being is ungraspable yet perceptible to everyone is what the Greek language called [kharis] and we call grace” [3]. What the ‘plastic spirit’ discloses in its suspension of judgement through very disclosure of appearance is the imperturbable space, and by extension ungraspable, where figuration arrest an instance of eternity. In this sense, it always resists any assertion towards the future, because it dwells in the opening of a space “there” that fails to coincide with the material extension and limitation of the canvas.

This is what perhaps Walter Benjamin had in mind in an early fragment where he reflected on painting as an art of paradise or a state other-than-being grounded in visual contours: “Painting, too, generates space spiritually; its generation of form is likewise grounded originally in space, but it generates space in an­ other form. Not the dimension but the infinity of space is constructed in painting. This happens through the surface, in that, here, things develop not their dimensionality, their extension in space, but their being toward space. The depth yields infinite space. In this way, the form of concentration is given, but this now requires for its fulfillment, for the allaying of its tension, a presentation of the infinite in itself and no longer as dimensional and extended” [4]. Was not this the ungraspable caesura between depiction and nature already pointed out by Schelling?

Painting is depth, or at least it is about a certain way to accout for depth. And depth, fundus, before it takes the form of a flat spatial region in ‘thereness’, it is eminently the display of the figure that emerges from it. This “space otherwise” – that is not just a different spatial arrangement or geometrical calculation – is something of the infinite that makes both flatness and the diachronic arrow of time collapse in its unattainable rigor brought to bear in the affection through figures and colors. Every painting shows therenesss, but that is only possible through the depth of interiority that remains invisible. This can illuminate what Osip Mandelstam said of the plastic spirit when writing that “painting is also much more a matter of internal secretion than of apperception, that is, of external perceiving. To appreciate a picture you must go through a process making of restoring it” [5]. It is in this renewal that the imperturbable depth of painting fulfills before the abdication of the future. And from the “depths of nature” into the blossoming manifestation of appearance, painting recalls, beyond words, what in the sequence of time is understood, and yet often neglected, as the ungraspable. 

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Notes 

1. Kenneth Clark. “The Future of Painting”, The Listener, October 2, 1935, 578.

2. Clement Greenberg. “Modernist Painting” (1960), in The Collected Essays and Criticism (University of Chicago Press, 1993), 91.

3. F.W.J. Schelling. “On the relationship of the plastic arts to Nature” (1807), Kabiri: The Official Journal of the North American Schelling Society, Vol. 3, 2021, 146.

4. Walter Benjamin. “The Rainbow, or the Art of Paradise”, in Early Writings 1910-1917 (Harvard University Press, 2011), 225.

5. Osip Mandelstam. Journey to Armenia & Conversation about Dante (Notting Hill Editions, 2011), 79.

Antelme’s smiling angel of Rheims. by Gerardo Muñoz

Among Robert Antelme’s posthumous writings the short text “L’ange au sourire” has a decisive place if we are to explain the transfigured theological experience of the French writer. To anyone familiar with French  architecture history the title should sound familiar, since the ‘l’ange au sourire’ was already a common expression used by French scholars of architecture during the interwar years. Charles Sarazin, arguably the most important scholar of the architecture of Reims, penned a separata titled “Le Sourire de Reims” (1929), in which he celebrated the mysterious smile of the angel Gabriel that was severely damaged due to shell fire of the Cathedral during the fall of 1914 [1]. But a decade prior to the destruction, art historian Arthur Gardner, in a detailed essay on the sculptures of the facade of the Rheims Cathedral, also took note of this angel’s gaze writing that: “…the angel Gabriel of the Annunciation in which the French smile has almost become a grin, the beginning of the contorted expressions frequently found over the border in Germany.” [2]. The particular aspect of this unique angel’s face that Antelme undresses from the cloak of authority is also wonderfully documented in the photographic book by Pierre Antony-Thouret, who also showed pictorial interest in the way that angel Gabriel was chipped in a large area of the right frontal relief (image 1) [3]. 

Image 1. Reims au lendemain de la guerre (1928), plate 52.

This curatorial context informs the historical background of Antelme’s reference to destruction and what he references as the crushed: “But not crushed by this building, or by that event, or by some power. It has always been crushed, crushed forever” [4]. For Antelme the tenuous, almost imperceptible, smile of the Angel of Rheims is what outlives absolute destruction because to be destroyed cannot be executed absolutely. It is the soul of existence that, because of its exteriority to history, is powerless “to have forever to be”.  Even if this being has become petrified and immobile from its original plastic appearance auf vif of sacred art. This is what Malraux captured in his brief mention of the  “L’ange au sourire” in The Voices of Silence (1951), where he also compares it to the Buddhist faces of Oriental sacred art (image 2): “The Smiling Angel of Rheims is a statue whose “stiffness” increased with every century; but at its birth it was a similar incarnate, a face that had suddenly come alive – like all faces sponsoring a discovery in the field of the lifelike” [5]. In order words, to see in the muteness of the face the nothingness that allows expressive relations to emerge in the open. This holds for Antelme’s description as well: “Radiant or hidden, inevitably it is there. Word, image, music: everything expresses it, and nothing. It lies at the heart of that realm where all relations are born. Forever starting anew. Possessing nothing, capable of nothing, it must be there, forever”. 

Image 2. Angel of Rheims in The Voices of Silence (1964).

But what Antelme was able to capture through the smiling angel of the Rheims Cathedral was not a problem of iconology of art forms, but rather the very essence of the theological problem of angels as it relates to the poetics of life itself. The angel is not a promythical figure scaled to a specific historical moment, but an instantiation of the divine appeals to the withdrawal the possibilities and modes of the human being. This is why Antelme can state that “the only transcendence is the relation between beings”. Even in its muteness, the theologica depth of the angel is the poetic speech of divinity through a surge in language that has no end, but only celebration or hymnology.

This is why Erik Peterson writes towards the end of  “The Book of Angels” about the intimate relation of angels in human existence: “A human being can draw near to the angels because the angel too – as its name already indicates – can draw near to humanity. […] The angels are more than poetic ornamentation left from the storehouse of popular fables, they belong to us. For us, they stand for a possibility of our being, a heightening and intensifying of our being – but for the possibility of a new faith…as a passion for mental clarity and an authentic existence” [6]. It is fair to say that, although the figure of the angel does not show again in Antelme’s work, all of his vision and witness accounts in the face of political horror must be placed in the endless vigil of a nocturnal life that is shared with the ethos of angels (utirur vigilis, angelorum vitam procul dubio meditatur). 

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Notes 

1. Charles Sarazin. “Le Sourire de Reims” (s.l.n.d, 1929). 

2. Arthur Gardner. “The sculptures of Rheims Cathedral”, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, V.26, 1914, 64.

3. Pierre Antony-Thouret. Reims au lendemain de la guerre: la cathédrale mutilée, la ville dévastée (Jean Budry, 1928). 

4. Robert Antelme. Textes inédits sur l’Espèce humaine (Gallimard, 1996), 14.

5. Andre Malraux. The Voices of Silence (Secker & Warburg, 1964), 317. 

6. Erik Peterson. “The Book of Angels”, in Theological Tractates (Stanford University Press, 2011), 139.