by Tom Pazderka
It is no secret that visual culture exists as a supplement or modifier to existing ideologies. Centuries and millennia of the creative arts have seemingly not been able to crack through the veneer of political and socioeconomic power wielded from the commanding heights of culture.
To illustrate this point, one simply has to look at what visual culture looks like within specific political and social paradigms, from high to low art.
By high art, I mean what is typically considered the fine arts; painting, sculpture, installation, conceptualism, academic art, film and so on. Low art (if there is such a thing) is everything else that does not neatly fold into the definition of high art, from pottery and kitsch to Sharknado.
High art functions the way it does because it is a potent signifier of power due to its ties to money. In his now classic Ways of Seeing, art critic John Berger observed that much of Western art can be thought of as subtle, but nonetheless powerful, images of power and possession belonging to the wealthy elite.
These were later appropriated and reevaluated by critics as expressions of beauty or historical documentations, basically anodyne propositions masking the true import of the images depicted, so as to dull their impact on society at large.
These images of power reach far back into time, and we can think of ancient art in a similar way. But for the purpose of this text, we’re going to have to narrow the focus, so we’ll stick to the art of the Western tradition.
Classical art and the ideology of belief
Patronized by the Catholic Church starting in Medieval times, the role of Western artists was to depict whatever the Church’s commissioned ideas were. The Catholic Church was one of the largest patrons of the arts in the Middle Ages, and as such, it had the power to dictate the direction the arts ought to take; what is to be depicted; and what ought to be left behind.
The artist was a tool of the church by which to communicate ideas to a largely illiterate populace. The lack of artistic freedom was often derailed into other, more subtle ways of communication. It was around the time of the rise of the Renaissance masters like Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael, that geometry and perspective entered into the art of rendering space.
The early masters like Giotto, attempted, but largely failed to visualize space as anything other than two dimensional. Giotto sits on the cusp of a major shift in artistic depiction – from subjective to objective space – straddling both at the same time.
By the time artists like Raphael entered the picture (no pun intended), objective space had been more or less mastered by the use of geometry and two-point perspective, lending an aura of realism to an art form that had struggled to regain what had been lost since the age of Rome.
But geometry had also allowed for another, even more subtle form of aesthetic communication to enter the frame (again, no pun intended). Through the use of geometry, subtle relationships between figures within the objective space of the realist painting could be made and produced. Triangulations, number relationships, diagonal lines, mathematical formulas and occult symbols, all of these and more, could be subtly placed into the design of paintings in order to communicate meanings beyond the ones lying directly on the surface.
This was an important development because the idea of hidden symbolism as the result of geometric formulations produced not only a more “beautiful” or realistic art, it gave the art form itself a hidden power with which to effectively communicate that which is incommunicable – and to do so in a way that, at least partially, was legible to lay people.
Occult symbolism exists as one very specific way to understand a world deeply rooted in mysticism and metaphysics. To mystics, Gnostics and many Catholics, geometrical symbols like pentagrams, hexagrams, spirals, golden ratios, squares, triangles, enneagrams and sigils, are renditions of what constitutes the real world in its hidden form.
In essence, these different forms of mathematics were applied to visual culture, forming a contemporary understanding of the religiously driven world. In a very real sense, these metaphysical depictions were externalized descriptions of how the world was organized.
Visual representation of capital
As the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance and eventually the Enlightenment, the role of the artist remained pretty much the same. What changed was the patronage system.
The rise of the merchant class in places like Flanders, the Netherlands, and Italian city-states like Florence, shifted the focus of artists from depictions of religious dogmas to portraits of direct wealth and power (the newly minted elites).
Artists such as Rembrandt and Franz Hals, for example, were tasked with painting the upper classes as a modern form of propaganda, albeit subtle. Geometric and mathematical riddles were replaced by a more direct, almost photographic form of representation.
The use of the camera obscura and other visual techniques and tools for reproducing images foregrounded that which was directly seen. The sitter, the sovereign individual, had become the all-encompassing subject.
Dominated by the rise of science and capitalism, the age provided its own ideology through visual representation, its own symbolism and occult power deployed through a different, much more abstract use of mathematics and geometry: the chart.
The chart, with its communicative power of a sigil or a Nicholas Poussin painting, allows for a hidden dimension within the totality of capital relations. The chart isn’t simply a record of market dynamics, stock prices across the dimension of time, or a way to predict future movement based on past performance, but rather a complex system of cues that give the capitalist ideology grounding in visual culture.
It is the chart’s visual symbolism that helps fix capitalism in reality. The chart ensures a description that is at once complex and immediate. It is able to capture complex mathematical formulas and visualize them in a linear format, moving abstract ideas into concrete form. The chart captures relationships, quantities, movement, volatility, time, price, and so on and so on. More importantly, the chart offers the initiated a hidden view into the halls of its own form of religion, the market.
As in Renaissance allegorical painting, the chart can be read on two levels: first, the surface level, with its lines, bars, indicators, numbers – this is its primary visual level – and second, the hidden, occluded level, where the same lines, bars, indicators and numbers form a different sort of language that is necessary to learn if one is to be able to read the chart properly.
Technical analysis or “chartism,” as the practice of reading charts is called, is used to predict price movement, market reversals, points of entry and exit, and to map past price action.
Bars or candle sticks are to the price chart what the alphabet is to language. While there may be different possible interpretations to the movement of a chart and its indicators, there is always a specific reading of a bar, while a sequence of bars gives the technical analyst a more specific indication, a word if you will, of the possible movement of price. The importance of the chart to capital cannot be overestimated. It is today what the importance of Caravaggio was to the Baroque period.
The modernist self-own
While religious movements and capitalism have had long periods during which their visual cultures were integrated within the larger culture, mass movements have fared far worse in their short but intense periods of activity.
The advent of modernism gave the twentieth century and mass movements a mode of visual representation. But almost immediately, the problem of modernism came in the form of a question, ”how does one effectively illustrate the abstraction of modern human existence?”
This question is a subset of a problem that modernist political and social movements face in communicating their ideas effectively through visual means. There is no version of the sigil or the chart in socialism or communism, thus making interpellation of the subject virtually impossible.
There is no great sublimation, no great art to turn to that might provide the necessary grounding in the symbolism of socialism. All past attempts were hideously appropriated relics of ancient visual culture, reaching back into time, rather than forward into the future, substituting crude and cumbersome realism for a more nuanced symbolism. Even twentieth century modernism, with its ideological abstraction, was better associated with the rapid rise of fascism than of communism. In what way can this problem be resolved, and is there such a thing as a visual culture that isn’t already a version dominated by capital?
To this end, modernists like the futurists, surrealists and dadaists, and later, the conceptualists and situationists, deployed various techniques meant to free art of its capitalist shackles, from shock value to philosophical interventions. In the U.S., abstract expressionism became the largest project of abstraction, tackling concepts like emotion, speed, science and philosophy.
But even before abstract expressionism, art critic Clement Greenberg identified the central issue with what he called the “avant garde.” The artists of the avant garde simply could not move beyond the relationship to capital. Capitalism provided money and collectors who had it provided legitimacy. Any art formulated within this structure was always going to be subject to its rules.
Another problem for abstraction and thus for modernism was that it laid everything out on the surface. There was never a hidden meaning behind correlative notions of line, color, thought or concept. Most of these issues were handled separately, individually, and to their own ends. Having to wrestle with the fratricidal, self-own politics of constant and terminal revolution, always overturning that which came before, modernism became a victim of its own success, never fully developing into a system or language.
Though abstraction does function as a type of visual language, its opacity and orientation toward the surface prevents it from burrowing deeper into the subconscious. That is not to say that it is ineffective in visualizing certain types of mood, emotion or experience. But perhaps the surface level of abstraction was always the point.
The abstract artists of the day were very direct in their ideas. What is there is there and nothing more. Reading into a picture would have been sacrilegious for artists like Pollock, Stella and Frankenthaler. Modernism’s aim was to be the universalizing language of a globalized world. Its failure points to the project’s incompleteness.
Then again, every philosophical or political project is in essence incomplete. They must be in order to generate and spawn new ideas and the projects that will inevitably take their place.
On the other hand, visual language can and does often remain constant over centuries, even millennia, but only if the underlying conceptual foundation holds fast outside the contemporary value proposition of the day.
