The day before we met, Paul Virilio had been stuck for an hour in a Paris taxi gridlocked by a traffic jam that was in turn caused by a series of one-day public-service strikes. Significantly, perhaps, France’s most famous commentator on technology, urbanism and social degeneration lives 300 kilometres from the French capital in decidedly un-urban La Rochelle. Doubtless this provides Virilio with frequent opportunity for travel on France’s ultra-fast train system, linking with another of his reoccurring themes: speed.
The occasion on which we are meeting is the
inauguration of the exhibition Unknown Quantity, the English translation of
the more aptly named Ce qui arrive at the Fondation Cartier. This is
Virilio’s second venture into curation for the Fondation, following La
Vitesse (Speed) back in 1991. I hadn’t been impressed with the earlier show,
not because Virilio’s ideas aren’t fascinating in themselves, but precisely
because their complexity and intellectual dexterity weren’t matched by a
largely static display of Futurist-inspired art and fast cars.
(Significantly, the catalogue proved a far more varied and comprehensive
document, as is the case with the current show.)
Unknown Quantity has been realised with the help of many people, but
principally through the collaboration of Virilio with curator Leanne
Sacramone. Virilio furnished the basic concepts, while Sacramone and her
team mapped these onto a series of artworks. And therein lay the source of
my initial apprehension, because like La Vitesse before it there was the
ever present danger of art serving merely to illustrate a project that
originated in, and is inherently more suited to, the written word and the
world at large.
If it doesn’t do justice to Virilio’s ideas to measure them against contemporary art, neither are they well served by summarising them in one short article. Nevertheless, a principal axis of his thinking links both the scale and acceleration of modern technology to a reciprocal escalation in the number and size of accidents. Conflated within this equation is the pivotal contribution of war to technological advancement and Virilio’s more recent acknowledgement that as war between nation states gives way to the less defined area of international terrorism, so the distinction between acts of war, man-made accidents and natural disasters becomes less distinguishable. This in turn leads to a panorama in which acts of God and events such as Chernobyl and September 11 together occupy an undifferentiated position at the centre of the world stage. It’s a gloomy outlook, an endgame scenario in fact, but with Virilio positing a metaphorical ‘museum of accidents’, a twenty-first century equivalent to the traditional war memorial’s ‘lest we forget’.
On first entering the show, my initial reservations seem founded. The intent here is for the artists’ work to illustrate the ‘accident’ in an overtly literal sense: architect Lebbeus Woods’ forest of metal poles traces the trajectory of a collapsing building; Stephen Vitiello’s sound-piece responds to random events in the gallery and the street outside; Nancy Rubins’ 10,000-pound suspended sculpture is made out of scrap aeroplane parts. The problem is that each of these works is a skilfully crafted product, with aesthetic dimensions and technical problems that have been considered and surmounted: quite the antithesis of ‘accidents’ in fact.
Downstairs it’s another story, being exclusively for artists working with time-based media. With the exception of Aernout Mik’s theatrically filmed reconstruction of the aftermath of a stock market crash, all the work here engages with documentary footage, from the ups and downs (literally) of the Space Race to the Hindenburg disaster, the Bikini H-bomb test, and of course Chernobyl and the World Trade Center. The mishaps in Bruce Conner’s brief history of disasters from 1958 at times resemble nothing more than the home-video clips featured in TV’s You’ve Been Framed! Even when Jem Cohen or Tony Oursler take to the streets of Manhattan on the morning of September 11, their edited video recordings pale in comparison to our own memories of witnessing the event live and the hours of television coverage we have seen since. Which brings me back to my original apprehensions concerning art’s inability to confront and mediate such cataclysmic events without diminishing them.
It is with such reservations in mind that I sit down with Paul Virilio to discuss the exhibition and the ideas behind it. First off, I want to challenge Virilio on his claim that the twentieth century was the ‘century of fear’. Disappointingly, however, this turns out to have been a quote from Camus, who in 1946 proclaimed the centuries from the seventeenth through to the twentieth as being those of mathematics, physical science, biology, and fear respectively. ‘Science is part of this fear,’ Virilio maintains, ‘because its practical developments endanger the world’s survival.’ And this has been so, according to both Camus and Virilio, since the catastrophe of the Hiroshima bomb in 1945.
Are we not in danger of being subjective in our assessment of this fear, I wonder? After all, history is littered with catastrophes on a human scale, but the only ones that inspire fear in us, personally, are those that threaten us directly and thus are those rooted in the time in which we are living. Virilio answers this by quoting the statistics from insurance companies, which seem to indicate that industrial accidents in the twentieth century came to outnumber natural disasters for the first time. This strikes me as curious, because while I know institutions like Lloyds grew out of syndicates meeting in eighteenth-century coffee-houses, I’m also pretty certain that insurance as a universal must-have was only a product of the twentieth. When I raise this minor discrepancy, Virilio enigmatically replies, ‘We can insure ourselves against everything, but not against man or his genius.’
I am not yet sure we are speaking the same language, which is literally true as the conversation is taking place through simultaneous translation, but I’m determined to pursue the point. I ask whether he feels that global capitalism in a climate depleted of any clear ideologies is possibly closer to the root of our fear; in which case technology is merely the means not the cause. Virilio agrees and begins, at length, to explain his theory of ‘horizons of expectation’. I get a little confused here, because of the three horizons pertinent to the modern era, two are already redundant for Virilio. Revolution went out with the collapse of the Soviet Union and world wars (in the sense of nation against nation) came to an end with September 11. I’m not convinced that either is down and out, and feel he’s confusing the event of 9/11 with its symbolism. However, Virilio is on a roll and is not to be deflected. The third horizon of expectation is ‘the great accident, the great catastrophe, whose effects are comparable to those of a war’. And just as this ‘expectation’ already has its own leftist political adherents in the form of the ecological party, so Virilio’s ‘greatest fear’ is that it will also attract the eschatological right; a kind of global Nazism.
Virilio makes this sound inevitable, but I am unsure as to whether there’s a degree of resignation here or whether the moral issue impels action. If the latter, I wonder what kind of moral imperatives survive in a world without ideologies: if we feel a sense of individual responsibility, upon what basis do we act? ‘In my view,’ he replies, ‘the solution lies in the reinvention of tragedy.’ For the Greeks, tragedy was an essential part of democracy, part of the process of open discussion. Within our consumer society, tragedy has been replaced by comedy: even disaster movies are essentially entertainment without consequence. What is needed is a return to tragedy: ‘Politically speaking, democracy must face tragedy, it’s what I call Looking at the Medusa.’
Again, I find myself asking on what basis might we build such a return, and in reply Virilio launches into the ‘three ages of man’. Stage one is the predator – all pillage and turmoil – which takes us through prehistory up to the Neolithic period. That sees the beginnings of stage two – agriculture to industry – which is where we are now. Or rather, we are just seeing the emergence of a final stage, dominated by the exterminator. And the exterminator exists by virtue of a world made small by speed. ‘Speed has reduced the world to nothing. This miniaturisation of the world, this finite quality of the world as space, as geography, means that we can easily envisage the end. Suicide attacks are a sign of panic from the exterminator, not just from Islamists.’
Is this the ultimate conclusion of the Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest, I wonder? Is there an inevitable point when the process of evolution turns against us, the ultimate confrontation in which not even the fittest survives? ‘C’est vrai, c’est vrai!’ – this is exactly the point, agrees Virilio. Which possibly just means we both have an equally pessimistic outlook.
Having got somewhere towards an understanding of Virilio’s underlying concepts, I feel it’s time for me to play the critic and address the exhibition directly. I tell Virilio about my reservations, which I am now feeling even more keenly. So, can the exhibition or museum as a vehicle of communication ever live up to the magnitude of his ideas and their implications? Somehow I know, even before I ask, that I won’t get a direct answer. ‘Alors,’ Virilio begins, ‘the word "museum" is a mot-valise – a suitcase-word.’ His idea of the museum is not meant literally, but as a kind of general meeting point for artists, philosophers and scientists, where the accident can be exposed/exhibited. This forum’s objective is the contemplation of the Medusa of progress: the ‘crash-test of culture’.
In Virilio’s view, art too is terrorised and is a victim of violence, and has been since Expressionism and Surrealism rose out of the First World War. His observations are not strictly historically accurate, but I take his point. My problem is that the contemporary artist does not have access to the naive directness of Expressionism. At best it’s a language steeped in self-consciousness, a language upon which damage has been inflicted from within: not by terror but by its own redundancy and by art school semiotics. Part of that self-consciousness is manifest in the editing process that is patently the product of rational and subjective decision-making: quite contrary to the notion of the accident. Moreover, exhibitions are largely places of entertainment, where people pay money for an hour or so of escapism. But it turns out that Virilio has a restricted view of art and sees the contemporary arena as having evolved out of the ‘happening’. It is clear that Virilio sees contemporary art as having ushered in an era of spontaneity, an era that is diametrically opposed to reflexivity. Art is now a knee-jerk reaction of instant emotions, with film especially dominated by fast aggressive cuts and live reportage: ‘It’s an acceleration – speed art.’ And it encompasses tragedy as well as comedy.
To be fair, this is not an inaccurate summation of some of the material in the show. I think of Tony Oursler’s near-incomprehensible filmic ramblings made as a direct response to the unfolding events of September 11. They are a knee-jerk reaction and we can almost feel the artist’s state of shock. But this is an exception, surely? Most art is not made in the heat of the moment: most contemporary art is reflexive and as such cannot fulfil the brief that Virilio claims for it.
I know we are not going to resolve our
differences here. And besides, time is running short and I’m late for my own
appointment with speed in the form of the 19.19 Eurostar back to London. The
Parisian streets remain gridlocked and I opt for the Metro to get me to the
Gare du Nord. It’s rush hour and the ticket machines don’t want anything to
do with my Visa card. The queue at the ticket window is endless and the
train, when it comes, shuffles its way beneath the city with agonising
slowness. The irony isn’t lost on me: it isn’t speed alone that
characterises the problematics of modern life.
Unknown Quantity continues at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain,
Paris, until 30 March 2003.
www.fondation.cartier.fr
Keith Patrick is the editor of contemporary