by Micla Petrelli
In our time, the human capacity to produce objects and their containers, to build cities and design landscapes, is increasingly measured by the awareness of the consequences and effects of all this construction. Controlled by its own progress, the exercise of power over spaces and things has turned against itself, and what remains of man, if we really want to use an image, is the body of the strangled victim hoisted on the mast of a drifting raft. Only the inhuman remains.
Between 1818 and 1819, Théodore Géricault painted a shipwreck scene known as The Raft of the Medusa, in which the point of maximum upward tension to which the viewer’s gaze is directed is the cloth waved by a survivor at the sight of a brig on the horizon: the hope of rescue. But the story documented by the survivors of this shipwreck is one of mutiny, cannibalism, and the despair of torn flesh. Géricault chooses a scene of hope, as if his main concern, writes Julian Barnes, «was not to be: 1) polytical; 2) symbolic; 3) theatrical; 4) shocking; 5) thrilling; 6) sentimental; 7) documentational; or 8) unambiguous» 〈1〉. He chooses to paint a cloth waved by an energetic arm instead of a body, like the others, abandoned to the waves and the madness.
Although the raft of the Medusa was expertly built, as the documents report, this does not prevent it from being reduced to a wreck: it ends up, in fact, as a symbol of catastrophe. When it is thrown overboard by the shipwrecked, it is so that it can be dragged ashore so that everyone can be rescued. «This plan was perfectly well laid; but as two of the company were late to affirm, it was traced upon loose sand, which was dispersed by the breath of egotism» 〈2〉.
It is now clear that the works that we have made with the best hopes, at least since modernism, and that were intended, at least intentionally, to function as reliable «points of application» for our actions (as Maurice Merleau-Ponty defines them, looking at Cézanne’s hesitant world) 〈3〉, seem to point us to only one awareness; of unshakable and necessary nothing remains. No illusions seem to survive. The fury of the sea waves in Géricault’s shipwreck scene, a remnant of Romantic imagery or of particularly resistant literary and figurative models, was still capable of representing the change of fate, a turning point in human history and its achievements. «A musical score, a painting, a book or a revolution», wrote José Saramago 〈4〉, could be carried by the waves between ebb and flow, by the movement of the waves, repetitive, to be sure, but still with unpredictable results. In short, it was still possible to wonder what objects might be rescued from time to time, propelled by the force of time and history until they reached the sandy shore of the present. To run aground there or be pushed back out to sea.
For Géricault and Saramago, almost two centuries apart, with different purposes, languages, and circumstances, water continues to function as a visual metaphor. It is the moving water that drags, carries, sustains, swallows, in which objects and bodies sink and from which they can also emerge and save themselves. Vital water, in short. All the more so if we think of The Stone Raft, the novel in which the Portuguese writer imagines that the Iberian Peninsula, through a sudden crack along the Eastern Pyrenees, separates from the European continent and, like a giant stone raft, begins to drift across the Atlantic, amidst dark omens and miraculous events, towards Africa and America.
Can we say the same for the present? That water, despite everything, can still function as such a dynamic and, all things considered, regenerative, palingenetic element? Take, for example, the photographic image documenting a performance staged in 1997 by the Chinese artist Zhang Huan, To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond.
The water here takes the form of a marsh, a shallow and well defined pond in the park of a megalopolis, Beijing, carved out in an urban context, among skyscrapers and bitumen, a calm surface in which stand immersed, impassive, bodies at once resigned and hieratic. Figures that only occupy the space defined by their bodies, standing upright, with their feet on a muddy ground, in a kind of equilibrium maintained by the combination of water resistance, the entropy of forms and the force of gravity. The artist reminds us that these bodies, as a whole, are perhaps destined to change the level of the water, according to the laws of physics. It is in silence, in inaction, a kind of anti-hubris, that they experience the possibility of modifying, even minimally, the environment, their habitat, without dehumanizing it even more. The water element, for its part, as in the origin of the earth, is both resilient and reactive, willing to change shape and level while remaining the same. Everything changes but remains the same, in a transcended and indefinite time.
In all this, between the majesty of the raging waves of Géricault’s raft and the flat surface of Zhang Huan’s water, there is still a place, we would say space, for the imaginary, for man to explore himself and his limits, even extremes. Of a different tenor is the world today, crossed by irreversible ruptures, dramatic and at the same time grotesque polarizations, staged by the South Korean director Bong Joon Ho in his film Parasite (2019). The houses in the film (from the sophisticated architectural model of the bourgeois home to the squalid basement) are embodiments of the deep-seated distortions that capitalism has produced, and eloquent representations of the conditions of their inhabitants. In the midst of forgeries and deceptions staged for the sake of sheer survival, the “parasitic” characters live in a habitat where, at some point, due to a cloudburst, the objects, furnishings, and ordinary and decayed things with which they surround themselves daily are in the chaos of the most random stacking. Water has invaded the basement, everything is rubble and wreckage that leads nowhere, a world-set of floating garbage, where drama is immediately transformed into an opportunity for a selfie.
The waters of such shipwrecks no longer have anything epic or tragic or irretrievable. They do not have the mythopoeic power of certain departures or landings (Géricault’s or Saramago’s raft), they do not carry anything, nor do they have any hope of cyclical life. Marine metaphors run aground in images of inertia and suspension (Zhang Huan’s stagnant bodies). Of course, one can always save oneself, on the edge, submerged in the heaps of things that in Cézanne’s modernity could still function as “points of application” for human action. There is no impetus that moves such waters, no past behind, «all the time lived that takes us with it and pushes us forward» 〈5〉, as Saramago, visionary as he was, imagined. The horizon of the inhuman is offered here in its fullest and most substantial evidence, and from it, by subtraction, the human cannot be derived. The inhuman here is a category that knows no “positive” or “negative” versions of image and interpretation, it has no stratifications, nor does it lend itself to reversals or extractive operations (the in of “inhuman” indicates an operation of subtraction of the substance of the human from the inhuman). It is therefore a candidate, with all its dense obviousness, to be truly the cipher of our time and the distinctive feature of its achievements.
〈1〉 J. Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art, Jonathan Cape, London 2015, p. 22. 〈2〉 Ibidem, p. 11. 〈3〉 «Points d'application». M. Merleau-Ponty, Le doute de Cèzanne, in Sens et non-sens, Nagel, Paris 1948, p. 23. 〈4〉 «Uma partitura, um quadro, um livro ou uma revolução». J. Saramago, Da estátua à pedra. O autor explica se, text of a lecture given in Turin in 1997, available on the Fundação José Saramago website (www.josesaramago.org/conferencia/da-estatua-a-pedra-o-autor-explica-se). 〈5〉 «Todo o tempo vivido que nos leva e nos empurra». Ibidem. BIBLIOGRAPHY • Barnes, J., Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art, Jonathan Cape, London 2015. • Baudrillard, J., The System of Objects (1968), Verso, London-New York 1996. • Merleau-Ponty, M., Sens et non-sens, Nagel, Paris 1948. • Ortega y Gasset, J., The Dehumanization of Art (1925), Princeton University Press, Princeton 1968. • Petrelli, M., Arte di questo mondo. Pagine, schermi, visioni, Meltemi, Milan 2019. • Saramago, J., The Stone Raft (1986), Harcourt Brace, New York 1995. • Saramago, J., Da estátua à pedra. O autor explica se, text of a lecture given in Turin in 1997, available on the Fundação José Saramago website (www.josesaramago.org/conferencia/da-estatua-a-pedra-o-autor-explica-se). Homepage: Jean Louis Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, detail (Wikimedia). Below: Plan of the raft of the Medusa at the time of its being abandoned, engraving from the original drawing by Alexandre Corréard, taken from the book by H. Savigny and A. Corréard, “Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816... comprising an Account of the Shipwreck of the Medusa”, Henry Colburn, London 1818 (Wikimedia).
