IRENE CAESAR'S ESSAY "SISYPHUS HOWLS "OM" AT ZEUS" #2
ESSAYS ON PHOTOGRAPHY
IRENE CAESAR
SISYPHUS HOWLS "OM" AT ZEUS
The Unity of the Absurd and Meaning
Spring 2010
#2
4. Freedom of the will with its causation by the self and self-causation as the unity of meaning and the absurd. Absurd art as the highest manifestation of the freedom of the will.
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In its opposition to determinism, freedom of the will is how individuation -- the unity of the absurd and meaning - manifests itself as a special causal force in the world. De- terminism is how regularity manifests itself as a causal force. The point of determinism consists not simply in the belief that everything is caused. Indeed, freedom of the will does not really mean that if I do something, I am not the cause of it. Determinism rather states that when something is caused, it is always caused by the same cause. It posits the regularity of causes. Determinism does not reject the freedom of the will as an ability to cause events. It rejects freedom as an ability to break the regularity of causation and pro- duce a unique cause every time. Determinism rejects individuation. It opposes individu- ality, and destroys individuals.
A free man who passively refuses to comply with the regularity of causation is ridi- culed as being more than childish - he is despised as being absurd. His refusal to respond to causation is diagnosed to be simply another case of determinism. Nonetheless, he himself is his own and only cause of refusal to comply with determinism. He, as a com- pletely unique individual, is a completely unique cause of his own. Even if there are ex- ternal causes, his own individuation is always a non-alienable cause of his own existence. As long as he exists as an individuated being, man is a cause of himself non-withstanding the external causation and contrary to external causation. Self-causation is the very es- sence of individuation. The inability of determinism to accept the freedom of the will is the refusal to accept individuation. As long as men are individuated, they are free. Only when man fully realizes that he himself is the highest cause of his own existence - a free self-cause - can he play any causal role in the world. Only as a unique self-cause, he can cause unique objects to appear in the world, because the world consists exclusively of
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unique objects. Freedom of the will is the individuated causality. Freedom of the will is man’s ability to embrace the absurdity of his existence.
The more a man accepts the absurdity of his individuation, the more he is conscious of it, the more he becomes capable of the active manifestation of his free will. A free man who actively violates the status quo of determinism via the willful creation of unex- pected and uncontrollable causes is feared as being dangerous. He is feared precisely be- cause he is unpredictable. Nobody can predict from the outside the determination of his own free will. If man persists in his violation of the predetermined causality, he is taken to be a criminal or a radical undermining the very foundations of establishment - a revo- lutionary, terrorist, or a magician. This kind of man never belongs to “culture.” He freely moves through all the cultures, epochs, schools, styles, and tendencies. He be- comes Leonardo -- an enigma. The inability to explain and fully grasp the enigma of Leonardo is precisely the inability of men to share the non-shareable value of individua- tion.
Leonardo was too much individuated, self-caused, free-willed to become an object of “culture” - the product of political and social determinism. There will be always some- thing in his creations that is not fully expressible by language, resistant to “common sense,” illusive to the selves of others - and this something is precisely what attracts us to him as an irresistible magnet. This magnet is a magic power of the fully individuated self that refused to share everything with everybody, and in this reticence, became free -- for- ever desirable, and never possessed by anybody or anything. This resistance to explana- tion is the resistance to “meaning” as it exists in the deterministic “culture.” Leonardo’s openness to any contextual, or rather individuated, re-interpretation -- his escape from
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any final, “deterministic,” interpretation -- is the most refined laughter of the absurd. Men feel a fatal attraction to Leonardo’s laughter precisely because Leonardo lures men into the absurd of individuation - he grants men the freedom of the absurd.
As individuation, as revelation and as freedom of the will, the absurd is inseparable from any manifestation of man’s life - it is its very core. The most enchanted manifesta- tions of religion has the unmistakable quality of absurdism. One is forced to admit that religious men are unconsciously looking for the very uncommon, or rather, most ridicu- lous ways of dressing up and behaving in order to approach the free and the revelatory. But unfortunately, religions belong to “culture,” and can go only this far in their absurd ways. Too bad the Russian Orthodox priests will not sit in crowds on the floor howling “om” into the painted face of the murdered God. That is why any man who can joke around at his will and whim is more free and revelatory -- more god-like -- than any re- ligious man. Joking is the simplest practice of the absurd. As a conscious self-caused laughter, joking is an immediate escape for a man who cannot violate determinism in any other way. Joking is the key that locks the door into the individual mind for any external causes - it has the undefeatable power to transform in a second any grand deterministic cause into nonsense. Revelation is inseparable from laughter even if it comes through tears. Revelation is the joking that does not need laughing sounds - the joking that laughs even via tears.
Art is more absurdist than even religion. And the more culture unwillingly gives way to individual freedom, the more ridiculous art becomes - to the degree that we are offered to enjoy, as the most artsy pieces of art, how an artist paints with menstrual blood on a canvas, or packages his shit in metal cans. But the machine of “culture” still works too
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well, and even such “menstrual and shitty” art is forced to decorate or convince according to the fashion or agenda of the moment. Nonetheless, if art is created for something be- yond itself - for the pleasure of decoration or for the utility of political agenda -- it be- comes self-destructive. It becomes a product. As “the product of culture,” art is a deadly weapon for eliminating individuals. That is why, the most important concern of an artist is to remain ridiculous as long as it is possible. An artist who succeeds in this is an Ab- surdist. He drives the absurdity of art to the extreme, resisting a persistent inclination of “culture” to define absurdism as simply another style, school, or tendency of art.
Absurd art, which I have outlined, is the highest degree of the necessary and inevita- ble absurdism of individuation. It drives individuation to the extreme via conspiring the peak states on purpose. It creates context and continuum for a peak state, in which man fights with the absurd for the genuineness of his existence. It makes individuation self- conscious. It is the strongest manifestation of the freedom of the will precisely because it is most self-intentional: it does not posit any causes or any purposes beyond itself. It is its own most complete and final cause and purpose. The contrary is true as well: as soon as art accepted the motto “l'art pour l'art,” art became thoroughly absurdist. Fovism, cubism, dadaism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, pop-art, op-art are simply more or less self-conscious manifestations of absurdism, with absurd art as such being simply the most self-conscious of them all. And the difference between the absurd art I defend and the kinds of art above is precisely the degree of self-containment. Non-absurd art, even when it is created as “l'art pour l'art,” takes some of its context out of itself into the con- text of its art theory. It is not immediately self-explainable and self-justifiable. The true absurd art has the immediacy of laughter - it has its meaning completely in-itself, encap-
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sulated in the absurd that it overcomes. Laughter does not need an art critic to justify it- self. Absurd art collects and concentrates all the spontaneous manifestations of laughter in its absurd individuation, and perfects them. Via the laughter of absurd art, man creates his own analytical discourse (with new definitions) in the most radical way, and changes the empirical reality to such lengths that the prior empirical regularities apply no longer in the most unrecognizable ways.
5. On the roots of my own absurdism
Now, let me talk in more detail about my own absurd ways: the origins of my absurd- ism and my practice of absurdism. Being Russian to the marrow of my bones, I always tell my actors that I continue the tradition of the theatre of Stanislavsky, which makes ac- tors cry and laugh on the stage with real tears and real laughter. The psychological thea- tre of Stanislavsky belongs to the tradition of the 19th century critical realism in Russia. In this tradition, an artist is speaking not only from his own name - but also from the so- ciety as a whole. He speaks not only with his own voice - but also with the quisi-voice that is the polyphony of different and opposite voices. These voices belong to men who either express only this or that class of the society, or are capable of moving through the social hierarchy and away from it - thus becoming individuated and free. Among the lat- ter, the social realist is most able. A critical realist is hovering on the height of a bird’s flight -- seeing the entire human cosmos at once; and his plays, novels and paintings are the ideological maps of what he sees from that height.
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In critical realism, the polyphony of opposite voices is irreducible to one, dominating voice of an author, as it happens in the literature, painting and theatre of the dualistic hi- erarchical system, from classicism to romanticism. In its thorough unity of space, time and action, classicism transforms live people into types and characters - the representa- tives or, rather, prisoners of a certain class within the rigid social hierarchy. A romantic hero revolts against this prison of culture, but, in reality, represents simply a type of his own - locked in his character as in a prison. He is but lost among all these Arlecchino and Piero, Susanna and Count Almaviva, who, all of them, are simply the animated dolls of a manipulative “culture.” Because they are just “dolls,” they cannot cry or laugh with real laughter or real tears.
The art of any social hierarchy is a thoroughly monological art. Its “pointing hand” opposes meaning to the absurd in the most categorical manner, creating a role, type and character of The Fool. The Fool is the lowest character. The author is opposed to The Fool, as Camus’ Sisyphus is opposed to Zeus. Everybody under Zeus is simply the greater or the lesser Fool, going all the way down to the Complete Fool. Thus, the sub- lime airs -- deductive or romantic -- of the social hierarchy are completely deceptive. Ei- ther classicism or romanticism are more profane than the most vulgar cursing of a slum scum. They transform free men into the different manifestations of the Sisyphus’ charac- ter. In this sense, the thoroughly “meaningful” hierarchical system is simply the flip side of the thoroughly “nonsensical” absurdism of Camus. Both degrade men to the level of marionettes manipulated by a higher power. Both make men inferior to Gods of this or that kind. Both deprive men of the ability to be self-determined, i.e., independent from the hierarchy of meaningfulness. In one word: both transform men into slaves. “Sisy-
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phus” is simply a polite expression to designate a slave - a Fool that cannot revolt against Gods even in his mind.
The Russian critical realism of the 19th century is an ideological revolt of Fools against Gods, which culminates in the actual political revolt in the 20th century. It is pre- cisely the art that becomes conscious of the system as a whole with its existential totality of all the dualities. It expresses the existential collection of all possible meanings, that is, of the unity of absurd and meaning, otherwise hidden in the hierarchical system. It does not operate with one “dominant” culture, but rather with the plurality of sub-cultures. Because each man is entitled to his own truth, opposite meanings co-exist next to each other, all fully justifiable in virtue of their individuation. This acceptance of opposite meanings is a contradiction, sacrilege and the absurd from the point of view of the ana- lytical system of hierarchy, norm and regulation. Thus, the Russian critical realism of the 19th century is one of the strongest manifestations of absurdism, which has simply one more step to make to become “absurd art.”
Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are the elder brothers of Beckett and my own. In his theory of a hive mind, Tolstoy expresses the shock of individuation and the passionate rejection of the historical class-and-type-determinism, that is truly absurdist. His concept of the hive mind defines, for the first time in human history, the existential totality and fluidity of all the dualities in the human cosmos - trans-historical, trans-political, trans-cultural, and trans-religious. Pierre wanders through all the layers of society -- from the Masonic top to the lowest bottom, finally arriving at the revelation that the simplest wisdom of the most humble peasant, who is all-loving and all-accepting, being himself unattached and most minimalist in his life, is all that he, the count Pierre, needs to survive as a free man.
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Platon Karatayev - a peasant - is most free precisely because he accepts and loves all - all the individuals contradicting each other in their opposite beliefs. He shares himself with everybody and with no one. A humble Platon is more individuated than the edu- cated but egocentric members of the upper class, because, in his all-acceptance, he pos- sesses this universal, cosmic vision of the society - from the height of a bird’s flight. Only because Platon placed himself in the loving distance from all the other human be- ings, he can be his own.
This distanced all-acceptance, thoroughly absurdist, immediately separates him from the peasant-type, or any type or class of the society, and from the crowd -- as a unique individual. In Platon Karatayev, the hive mind acquires its own self-consciousness. What a scandal: it is a peasant who arrives at this cosmic vision. His acceptance of each man is the unique, contextual experience that is non-shareable via analytical discourse of science or politics. This acceptance is love. Platon proves that individuation, revelation and freedom are all based on love, and that love is the absurd inseparable from meaning. I take from the 19th century Russian critical realism this truly absurdist polyphony with its rejection of uniformity, of hierarchical divides, of conventional wisdom, of norm and regulation. I admire its ability to accept and love all men in their contextual, individuated and only partially shareable absurdism. My series “A New History of Ideas in Pictures” is precisely the encyclopedia of human ideas expressed in the individuated, i.e., absurd experiences.
I believe that human society is analogous to a crystal, with each facet representing an opposite vector of power. Creator, be he an artist or a politician, can become an individ- ual force -- a Caesar -- and influence the crystal of society, only if the crystal of his vision
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coincides with the crystal of the society. Any crystal shines because it refracts light, fo- cusing light in its center. Crystal is capable of refracting light precisely because all the opposite vectors of power are simultaneously present and interlocked in the same contin- uum. The focus in the center of the crystal - its shining - is the unique vision of a Cae- sar, an individual creator. A Caesar can change the entire crystal of the society via changing the crystal of his own vision. The critical realist approaches the power of a Caesar. Only one step remains for him to become a Caesar - a complete absurdist.
6. On the methods of my own absurdism
I do not do photography per se. I create experiences. These experiences are indi- viduated, meaning that they are absurd. My actors act for the sake of acting - their own experience, and not simply for the sake of creating still photographic images. Because individuation is possible only in a peak state of revelation, all my images are highly dy- namic. And dynamism here has the nature of not simply the physical expression, but also of emotional and conceptual expression. Action acquires the meaningfulness of lan- guage. Every image is an enacted linguistic unit, pronouncement, confession, message. Participants act for the sake of saying something very important about themselves. They act in front of my camera not because I asked them, but because they have a need to ex- press themselves, to reveal, to communicate some truth they treasure. For these perform- ances, I have chosen photography over video precisely because of the shocking effect the still representation of the most intense action produce. The still representation of concep-
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tual action resembles written language in comparison with spoken language in the sense that it acquires more meaningfulness and intensity in its inherent need for compression.
I never force upon people my preconceived social and political ideas. I simply offer my actors some continuum to bare themselves, in which they feel compelled and com- fortable to go naked. To be compelling, this continuum should be very intense and re- freshing. That is why I create fictional situations in which I use objects and locations in an unusual, counter-ordinary and extra-ordinary way. I define my style as “if you have seen my photograph once, you will never forget it.” As a kind of shock therapy, my methods of imaging help my actors get out of the stereotypical, forgetful and deceitful modes of consciousness that are accepted in everyday life, more as a way of concealment than as a way of expression and revelation. Also, my way of using locations, objects and situations are very ambivalent. Not only because they do not create new stereotypes and dogmas instead of old ones, but also because they aim at showing any event as embracing both sadness and joy, the profane and the sublime, ridiculousness and seriousness, good and evil. Essentially, my interpretation is an absurdist, open-ended interpretation which allows for contradiction and creates more questions than answers.
That is why I get embarrassed when people refer to me as a photographer. I am a conceptual image-maker. And image-making is simply my most intense way of thinking, my most conscious and charged way of living - my own way of arriving at the peak states of individuation. Every time I shoot, I wish that I and my actors forget about my camera, about the artificiality of the setup, and live through the shoot in a more intense way than they do in the ordinary way of everyday existence. Usually, it takes ten to fif- teen minutes for warming up, and, then, the magic moment happens, and everybody in-
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cluding me become completely overwhelmed with action. My actors cry or laugh with real tears or real laughter, and not for the camera. Not only once had it happened that I cried behind my camera so hard that my vision was completely blurry from tears or I laughed so hard that my camera was shaking, and I was thankful that I used automatic focus.
In other words, to create, I do not rape reality and my actors. My creations are born as a result of a consensual act of love between me and my actors, culminating in the state of ecstasy similar to orgasm. That is way I feel as if I give my actors a few extra years of life, or another life, which they live in front of my eyes. And it is so powerful, that when they live in this super-real way in the lightings of my strobes, I feel as if I am a God who creates a new world, beautiful and meaningful, out of nothing. From my early childhood, I noticed that my mind is similar to the studio set; that my mind has the ability to pro- duce, collect and then emit with lighting speed the strobe-like pumps of light that illumi- nate people and objects from all the sides, good and bad, funny and sorrowful. These strobes in my mind get reinforced with the light emitted by the mind of my actors in our mutual coincidental and condensed revelation of something vital for us both - as intimate as coitus. I lived all my life with a strong conviction that people emanate more light than heavenly bodies. That is why, when I painted, I never worked with shadows. In my paintings, subjects and people look not as if they are illuminated, but as if they illuminate the world around with their own intrinsic light. Now, when I do photography, shadows for me are the sign of the light fall-off in the sense of losing life energy, the sign of de- struction, suffering and death.
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This act of love happens not only on the individual level - with this or that actor, but also on the social level. My art is my way of connecting with people. I would never be interested in so many people if not for my being a conceptual image-maker. My own life energy depends on my camera, as if I sail the waves, and wait for the wind. And alas, here it comes, and fills my sails with its unstoppable impetus, and pushes me forward by its overwhelming energy. Money and popularity have never inspired me to the degree I am inspired by this raw grandiose force that fills me and drives me to ecstasy when I hold my camera as my third eye, and my actors see it as my sacred mask, or my true face. My art is reducible to my ability to build devices for catching the ideological or conceptual winds in society.
My devices go beyond my technical knowledge of camera-use and studio lighting, and beyond my ability for cheerleading. I can define them precisely as stage sets. None- theless, my stage sets are extremely minimalist. Because my images are highly emo- tional and dynamic, for me, the elaborate decorations are impossible and repulsive. They would symbolize the dominance of objects over people. Usually, I use only one object or prop. I call it “a symbolic object.” Here is my concise theory of a symbolic object. There is a commonly spread belief that a “portrait” which expresses the most inner core of a person should represent this person in a repose - in a still position, as if a person is an object in a still life. The person is taken out of any intense context and left to himself and the painter. This goes back to painting, which is in principle capable of catching the constant flow of a psyche only via turning the subject into a sitter. You look at all these Raphael’s portraits on the walls of the Pitti Palace, and you see how many hours the sub- jects were sitting for their portraits, sinking into senseless boring stupor. My art is a re-
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volt against modeling for a viewer, against the transformation of people into objects. I believe that when a person is overly conscious of the viewer, he or she unwillingly or willingly transforms him or herself into an object. And I think that often photography with its fixation on modeling or reportage plays a cruel role of aiding the society of mass consumption in transforming persons into objects that are sold and bought, consumed and disposed of, when they are not useful anymore as means for utility and pleasure. I be- lieve that American preoccupation with models and modeling and with repostage and documenting is the sign of the infantilism of the American culture that still plays dolls and learns the alphabet.
In my images, the symbolic object plays two roles. My actor starts manipulating with an object in a conceptual way, as with a linguistic unit in a language, the proposition.
The object symbolizes the very essence of what the actor strives to communicate. Sec- ondly, the symbolic object efficiently takes the actor’s attention away from the camera. The symbolic object creates the intoxicating situation of aesthetic estrangement first for the actors, and then, for the spectators who see the images. When my actors need to do something meaningful with an object, not only do they forget about the camera, but they also forget about the very idea that they might be represented and documented, i.e., con- sumed as objects. I reinforce the effect of estrangement by choosing a symbolic object that did not yet become a cliché. Moreover, I always prefer the unexpected, and even absurd symbolic object. I hunt for absurd setups, which reveal more meaning and, thus, give more impetus and hunger for life than the inculcated and inert ideas of politics, sci- ence and religion. I was told that my art is my way of laughing. Yes, I thirst for the ca- tharsis of real tears and real laughter, merged together.