Is contemporary art inaccessible, to the point of avoiding any “encounter” with the spectator? This is the thesis defended by Baptiste Morizot and Estelle Zhong Mengual, who question the conditions for a reconciliation between works and their public.
Baptiste Morizot, writer and philosopher, and Estelle Zhong Mengual, art historian, confront each other in The Aesthetics of the Encounter to a thorny question: “What makes that something is happening in front of a work – or that nothing happens? » Or more precisely, because it is above all this question that attracts the whole reflection: how can we explain that in front of contemporary works of art, most of the time, nothing happens? Indeed, contemporary art would produce, according to the two authors, little or no effect, or even withdraw itself in principle from any encounter. The repeated experience of being in front of works that “trigger nothing, neither affect, nor question, nor thought, nor sensation” (p. 12) thus leads the authors to question what they designate as the “enigma” of contemporary art.
Genealogy of the “temptation of contemporary art”
In the first part of the book, the authors return to the genealogy of this situation and attempt to explain the “temptation of contemporary art” – which they strangely designate by an acronym: “tac” – to make itself “unavailable” or “ineffective”. They thus begin by deconstructing different presuppositions that structure our approach to contemporary art, sending back to back the supposed deficiency of the spectator, who would be incapable of understanding what is proposed to him, and the too avant-garde character of the works. It is rather in the withdrawal of art into itself that the authors see one of the reasons for this missed encounter with art. By withdrawal, we must understand the reflexive dimension of art in general and the “reflexive return to the mediums that constitute it” (p. 32) which have become, since modernism, a norm and an end in themselves. B. Morizot and E. Zhong Mengual cite as an example these words of the artist Ad Reinhardt, known for his Black Paintings : “Everything must be irreducible, irreproducible, imperceptible. Nothing must be ‘usable’, ‘manipulable’, ‘saleable’, ‘marketable’, ‘collectible’ or ‘graspable’.” The attitude of contemporary artists would therefore be part of the continuation of this modernist conception of art as an exploration of the limits of the medium.
We could therefore legitimately consider that “the tac is indeed a legacy of the avant-gardes. These are the avant-gardes of XXe century which would have brought about this disconnection between work and visitor” (p. 36). But this genealogical approach, if it allows us to explain that the works have become less and less accessible, does not, however, account for “the refusal of the works to communicate with the spectator, their refusal to produce effects on the spectator” (p. 41). In this sense, there is a break, for the authors, between the provocative dimension of the avant-gardes, which still aims to produce effects, and theineffectiveness of contemporary art. To understand the unavailability of works, the authors will put forward a paradigm on which, according to them, the reception of all cultural products is now regulated.
Contemporary art versus digestion
The second part of the work thus opens with the hypothesis of the appearance of a new paradigm of reception in XXe century: that of “digestion”. Works, like all cultural products, would be produced to be consumed, absorbed and digested instantly, without gap or delay (contrary to what Marcel Duchamp advocated in particular). “The cultural industry values digestible products and users (we) generalize the digestive mode of reception to thetogether of artistic production.” (p. 44-45). We would expect a work to be quickly identifiable and easily narrated, in a word immediately “digestible.”
The establishment of this paradigm allows the authors to construct a regime of explanation of the process of contemporary art’s withdrawal into itself. If everything must be digestible today – cultural products as well as everything else – then art would seek to maintain its singularity by posing itself precisely as “indigestible”; artists would try to escape this injunction by making their works “unavailable”. “In order not to be digestible, they made themselves absolutely indigestible” (p. 49). TAC would be a “resistance strategy” (p. 45).
However, as the authors point out, deploying this strategy is to take the risk of radically cutting contemporary art off from its audience. “Non-consumable” works are exposed to simply not being encountered. The transfiguring power of art is therefore jeopardized. How can one be transformed by a work that withdraws and resists the very idea of an encounter with its spectators? The example taken by the authors is that of video art. “Chopped editing, cut sound, blurred images, jerky scrolling, voices off incomprehensible, absent narration, immobile or inanimate subject” (p. 52): the videos take the opposite view of what “digestive” reception requires, but thereby make themselves unwatchable, “unavailable”.
B. Morizot and E. Zhong Mengual point out that some works, on the contrary, have a strong propensity to conform to the paradigm of digestion. Such works tend to make themselves accessible, aware that in order to be seen, one must be able to stand out and capture the attention of a spectator whose eyes are in a permanent state of “zapping from image to image”, to use Hito Steyerl’s phrase. The authors rightly note that in this context the scandal loses its disruptive dimension and instead participates in a strategy of digestibility.
This moment of the argument thus brings two impasses face to face: that of a spectator accustomed to digesting everything that is presented to him; that of works refusing any possible absorption. “False encounters”, on the one hand, with formatted works that adopt the paradigm of digestion as a norm, and “non-encounters” on the other with works “that refuse any effectiveness.” In both cases, nothing happens. The false encounter and what presents itself as its solution, the non-encounter, constitute two deficient and symmetrical forms of aesthetic experience. According to the authors, it then remains to think about the possible modalities of a true encounter with art.
Towards an “individualizing” encounter
To escape the observed aporia, the authors seek to conceive the conditions of possibility of an encounter that they consider to be “individuating”, according to the terminology of the philosopher Gilbert Simondon (1924-1988). The last moment of the work, supported by case studies, therefore considers the counterpoint of what has been studied until then by placing at the center of the analysis the concept of “individuating” encounter, in other words an encounter that allows us to crystallize and deploy something of our individuality. Unlike the false and non-encounter, the individuating encounter is the one that interferes in our process of individuation.
The authors here start from the principle that we have all already experienced such an encounter with a work of art that would have come to modify our ways of feeling, perceiving, conceiving as well as acting. What the authors identify here, unlike tac, is the effective, “individuating” power that art has to shape and durably model our being and our relationship to the world. But for such an encounter with works to take place, something must happen, “catch”. “There is an encounter each time there is tension between a singularity in the work and the unresolved in the individual.” (p. 115). The aesthetics of the encounter is modeled on the experience of the romantic encounter: the person encountered redistributes the cards of what one thought one wanted; in the same way, the encountered work comes to give form to the unresolved tension that had inhabited the spectator until then. “The individualizing encounter has the effect of giving form to wishes new, that is to say, opening up dimensions of being and paths of action.” (p. 118). It thus allows us to escape the double pitfall of digestive reception and non-encounter.
Contemporary art: enigmatic or elusive?
If the initial question (“What makes that something is happening in front of a work – or that nothing happens? “) is certainly worth asking, we regret that the authors close it almost immediately by starting from the postulate that most of the time “nothing happens”. Starting from there, B. Morizot and E. Zhong Mengual develop an argument that cannot avoid the pitfall of generalization and sometimes of schematism – the monochrome or the mountain of rubble taken as examples of the ineffectiveness of contemporary art (p. 59-60).
From the beginning of the book, the authors recognize the difficulty of talking about contemporary art. in general due to the plurality of practices involved. In order to get around this difficulty, they choose to insist on the experience of the spectators, on “a form of relationship very particular relationship that regularly takes place between the work and the visitor” (p. 11); but these precautions taken do not prevent the authors from producing a statement that is often too generalizing, or else extremely qualifying what has just been stated, at the risk of making the initial hypotheses lose their relevance.
The passage devoted to video art is symptomatic of their approach: they describe various works that seem to make themselves unavailable through effects of saturation and blurring of the image, but by putting on the same level works from the 1970s – corresponding to the beginnings of video art – and contemporary works, and by leaving aside pieces such as those of Bill Viola for example, which are not only accessible but replay the pictorial codes of classical painting, they do not seem to sufficiently open the field of examples. Finally, the philosophical apparatus summoned – the theory of the encounter formulated from Simondon, which occupies almost a quarter of the work – seems disproportionate, and too overhanging, compared to the situation of contemporary art.
These limitations do not prevent the work from being extremely stimulating and from developing a number of enlightening analyses and remarks: we are thinking in particular of the pages dealing with a specific aspect of art today – that of “art in common” of which Estelle Zhong Mengual is a specialist. The authors see in it the very illustration of the aesthetics of the encounter: “The development of art in common since the end of the 1990s could thus be understood as a solution, among others, adjusted to the great artistic problem of our time: how can art create individuating encounters, in this shared conjuncture of digestive reception?” (p. 132). This form of art indeed exemplarily implements, and by definition, this “functioning of the work as a relational entity, only activating itself within the framework of a relationship with singular individuation processes” (p. 133). We will also mention the passage on the economy of attention in the second part (“The temptation of the digestible of creation itself”) which returns to the need to capture the attention of a spectator in a biennial or a fair or even the beautiful analysis of the piece by Hideo Iwasaki, aPrayer (2016) which poetically closes the work.