La Vittoria, or ‘Suicide of the Machine’
Today’s post builds on my media-theoretic explication of the anti-meme and its application to text, The Antimeme Haunting Western Philosophy.
I’ve been accidentally tracking one of the great antimemetic artists across Europe this summer.1 There are pictures and videos below, but in true antimemetic fashion, his greatest work no longer exists.
Daniel Soar explains, in review for the LRB, the situation with “Jean Tinguely’s self-immolating sculpture La Vittoria, or ‘Suicide of the Machine’”:
On the night of 28 November 1970, in front of the Duomo in Milan, a sheet of purple drapery was removed to reveal a ten-metre-high golden penis, with a pair of massive golden papier-mâché balls on the plinth at its base. When darkness fell, a firecracker went off, and then another, as sparks and smoke issued from the tip, with louder explosions following, rockets shooting out everywhere, until the whole thing was a tower of flames erupting into the sky. Somewhere in the crowd a man sang ‘O Sole Mio’; within half an hour the structure had burned down.
This is not a video of that event.
In a vindication of Tinguely’s sexually explicit motif, Sora is unable to produce any but the most symbolist of 10-meter-tall golden penis.
Given that this series of blog posts might as well be titled “Footnotes to McLuhan”,2 I would be remiss to not reiterate his point about the centrality of the visual in Western culture.
Like books, paintings and sculpture are ontologically stable. They persist; many people across time can be said to encounter “the same” painting or sculpture. Modern museum practices are optimized to keep them stable, in fact: careful controls over light, temperature and moisture. If the object is somehow “damaged” (that is, if it changes), museums invest serious resources in restoring them. The aim is to remove these objects from the temporal realm, making them, as it were, divine.
McLuhan argues that this externalization / eternalization of art is part and parcel of the Rennaisance package. Perspective is a key technical innovation in Rennaisance painting: it literally adds depth, but in so doing imposes a fixed position for the viewer, outside of the scene. This position is reified by museums, treating both the content and the object of the painting as external and eternal.
The visual-intellectual ecosystem which includes both painting and written art criticism promulgated through printed (rather than handwritten) text allowed for the progressive development of the Rennaissance memeplex of philosophy, science and visual art. Institutions like museums, libraries and universities housed and channeled the media through which this knowledge could flow.
And of course the Rennaissance was an important period in the consolidation of whatever came to be called Western intellectual culture. The high points remain the most famous artworks in the world. The Mona Lisa and Michelangelo’s David are some of the most fundamental visual memes in Western culture. Walking around Florence, you can find aprons, t-shirts and towels with any number of unlikely objects in place of the fig leaf on David’s dick.
The centrality of 500 year-old paintings and sculptures to the contemporary imaginary of “Western art” is obviously something that practicing artists have been rebelling against for at least a century now. Dada, Lettrism, Fluxus, and particularly Situationism — these art movements were explicitly opposed to the hegemony of legacy mediums and intitutions. These and other movements are an antimemetic stream within the art world, known and studied by serious artists and theorists but impossible to scale within the mainstream art world of public-facing museums.
This “central tendency” of Western art has proven resilient. The mediums of paintings and sculpture are ideal for art-as-commodity. Paintings, in particular, are nice, medium-sized objects that can be transported without too much difficulty. They can be hung on the wall, visibly displaying both taste and wealth without taking up any valuable floor space. Within a museum, they are easily photographed by visitors looking for a selfie; they can be easily remixed within contemporary digital media.
Performance art is generally the most anti-memetic medium. Performances take place exactly once; some performance artists, like the Situationists, performed their actions in public spaces rather than art galleries, making it unclear that “Art” is happening.
The exception proves the rule. The most famous performance artist today is undoubtedly Marina Abramović. Before her turn towards wellness entrepreneurship, her most famous work was The Artist is Present, also the subject of a popular documentary. The work consists of her sitting in the MOMA for hours and hours on end, while a single person can sit in a chair across from her, making eye contact for as long as they want. Her performance is to literally turn herself into an object in a museum, forcing the viewer to adopt a specific perspective. To transcend its antimeme status and be viewable on Amazon Prime Video, performance art has to become legible by turning itself into painting or sculpture.
Tinguely’s ‘Suicide of the Machine’ is obviously neither external nor eternal. It cannot be purchased and it cannot be used to signal good bourgeois taste. It took place in public, allowing viewers any point of view they could phyiscally achieve — but only for a half-hour in 1970.
Differently from the Situationsists, however, Tinguely’s work uses the medium not of the body but of the machine.
I was struck by an oddly editorialized passage in the Wikipedia page about Alexander Calder:
Calder’s turning away in the early 1930s from his motor-powered works in favor of the wind-driven mobile as marking a decisive moment in Modernism’s abandonment of its earlier commitment to the machine as a critical and potentially expressive new element in human affairs. According to this viewpoint, the mobile also marked an abandonment of Modernism’s larger goal of a rapprochement with science and engineering, and with unfortunate long-term implications for contemporary art.
Calder is an extremely famous contemporary artist. His “mobiles” delight, the way an infant looks up at dangling ornaments from a crib, and his monumental sculptures serve the function of “tasteful painting” for giant corporate buildings around the world.3 He was also a major influence on Tinguely, who very much embraced the machine as an expressive new element in human affairs.
Tinguely happened to be the focus of a major retrospective at the newly-refinished Grand Palais in Paris, along with his short-time wife and long-time muse, Niki de Saint Phalle. I knew some of her work, which is great; she burst onto the art scene in the 60s with a series called Tirs in which she made paintings by shooting a gun. I had never heard of Tinguely. But, in fact, I’d seen the famous Tinguely-Saint Phalle collaboration, the Stravinsky fountain, outside of the Centre Pompidou:
Tinguely mostly made whimsical, aggressively noisy clanking machines; some of them self-destructed, others were paraded around the streets of New York and Paris to interact with the public.
This video, for example, shows him being approximately as cool as I’ve ever seen someone be:
He’s basically minting paper NFTs with a Rube-Goldberg-ass machine, deftly smoking a cigarette and handing out unique machine-drawings to extremely charmed women.
Some of Tinguely’s machines self-destructed on purpose, but others simply wore down over time. Art in motion is far more difficult to maintain than is static art; motorized art even moreso, due to the increasely violent movement it makes possible. The more complicated the technology, the less likely that spare parts or expertise will persist to maintain it. This is true for all varieties of pre-digital audio/video art, as in the case of one of Flusser’s favorite visual artists, Nam June Paik.
As a result, the machines on display were only turned on for one minute out of every 15. My favorite, and most convient for my thesis, was his series of four “philosophers” who influenced his work:
Of the four works on display (Bergson, Jacob Burckhardt, Rousseau and Heidegger) only Bergson was not moving.4 Amazed by this coincidence I tried to take a video at the correct angle, but by then all motion had ceased.
Soar, from the LRB article cited in the intro, notes that
Bergson is a rotating and swaying doll or spinning top with copper-basket pineapple head, turning around a central axis while also oscillating from side to side – of course the philosopher of mind in motion does a complex dance. Ingeniously, the sculpture’s form also resembles Bergson’s diagram – the inverted cone – with the apex representing the present moment and the stacked segments layers of memory.
Personally, I thought it looked like a stawberry. The coolest one was probably Rousseau, also the most problematic one, but the circular motion of the wheel made the caricature of the native american move in an extemely satisfying fashion.
So I was stunned to encounter this unmistakeable circular motion again, in a documentary about the Austrian artist Friedrich Hundertwasser showing at the Kunst Haus Wien, the museum desinged by Hundertwasser!
In fact, the final presentation of Tinguely’s work during his lifetime was the inaugural show at the Kunst Haus Wien, in 1991. There is a clear affinity between these two artists; Hundertwasser was engaged in what I can only describe (and not elaborate on, in this overlong post) as antimemetic architecture.
Today, perhaps, the hegemony of painting and sculpture is being eroded. Not in terms of museum visitors, surely, but in the form of the technology for preserving and remixng the processes at the heart of this formerly antimemetic strand of art practice.
Most interesting contemporary art, as Carly Busta and Lil Internet have been arguing at New Models, as Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon have very effectively demonstrated in practice, and as Venkatesh Rao has done some heavy theorizing on, takes the form of protocols. The medium of computer code turns writing into a protocol, interaction with the world through sensors and effectors, allowing for the generation of novel outputs in response to novel inputs.
These practices might allow for the development of an alternative memeplex, to supplant rather than merely rebel against the central tendency enshrined in the Rennaisance. Protocols aren’t ontological stable; to preserve them in a musuem is nonsensical. Tinguely’s machines communicate their meaning through action, and are the victims of entropy. Protocols work only through interaction with the world or with the viewer — who is, of course, no longer merely a viewer.
That sounds grandiose, but it turns out to be much easier to spend the summer in Europe after you move to Europe. Really, we were just crashing with friends and family while our apartment in Florence is being renovated.
One more amazing thing about Whitehead: I noted in The Antimeme Haunting Western Philosophy that his magnum opus Process and Reality is antimemetic via impenetrability, but it does contain one of the best philosophy memes: the idea that “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
Sorry I actually love Calder, and especially his Tyrone Slothrop-level American history.
There are four more in this series that weren’t present at the exhibit: Engels, Kropotkin, Wittgenstein and the playwright Frank Wedekind.
Loving these essays. I read Ada Palmer’s lovely new book “Inventing the Renaissance” as an antimemetic exploration of the period’s memes and antimemes.
It does look like a strawberry.