Atomic Bicycle: Art, Shock, and Power

Neke Carson, Atomic Bicycle

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Atomic Bicycle

Diagnosis by Supervert of contemporary art at the end of the millenium, particularly in terms of power and shock. Originally published in Francesco Bonami, ed., Echoes: Art at the End of the Millenium (Monacelli Press, 1996).

"Saturate each atom," writes Virginia Woolf in her diaries.¹ In the post-War age, we know what this means: when the nucleus of an atom of uranium is bombarded with neutrons, it results in the fission of the atom and a tremendous conversion of mass into destructive energy. But it's not a matter of whether Woolf lived to see the A-bomb dropped in 1945 or understood anything of the long history of atomic physics stretching from Democritus and Lucretius to the present day. The artist already works at a molecular level: every text is made of a million microscopic decisions of grammar and style, every painting is made of countless independent commitments to a certain hue, density, or direction in the minutest brushstrokes. Every work of art is already caught up in fission and fusion, and what does the saturation of each atom among congeries of them signify if not a desire to set off chain reactions in language, to trigger a conversion of painting or photography into energy and thereby irradiate the world with art. Perhaps artists were the first physicists: Lucretius formulated his theory of the declination of atoms in hexameter.

"It originates with the atoms," wrote Lucretius. "Then those small compound bodies that are least removed from the impetus of the atoms are set in motion by the impact of their invisible blows and in turn cannon against slightly larger bodies. So the movement mounts up from the atoms and gradually emerges to the level of our senses."² It's as accurate a description of the creative process as of the physical universe: a brushstroke here, a brushstroke there, until the microscopic structure takes on a macroscopic appearance, the colors blend in the eye. But if it originates with the atoms, where does it end? It used to be said that art was that which endured, that art was long and life was short, but now that we can predict with certainty that a given radioactive material will take 1.2 million years to disintegrate, art doesn't look so long anymore. Artworks may possess half-lives, may exhibit periodicity, may create fall-out, but in the end they're atoms among an infinity of others in the universe. One of the first problems in the formation of the atom bomb was to separate out U235 — the most volatile form of uranium, capable of a chain reaction which spreads like fire — from ordinary uranium; so how do we extract the U235 of art from the rest of the universe?

universe > art / non-art

It has been said that the vexata quaestio of 19th century art, broadly put, was this: What is Beauty? How could Courbet dare to paint pictures of peasants on a grand scale normally reserved for the beau idéal? And for the 20th century, the question was this: What is Art? How could Duchamp dare to sign a urinal and call it art? These are generalizations, of course, yet inevitably they bring to mind the fact that we are at a turning point, at the threshold of the 21st century, and it's tempting to try to sum up the art of today — and perhaps that of tomorrow — with a new question. What will replace "Beauty" and "Art" in the new inquiry — Truth? Quality? Sublimity?

If art is the sphinx, its riddle has yet to be solved. Obviously, some of the best minds of the century have asked "What is art?" without discovering anything decisive, else we could answer the question in a word and move on to something else. In "The Origin of the Work of Art," Martin Heidegger demonstrated that the question poses a vicious circle: "What art is can be gathered from a comparative examination of actual artworks. But how are we to be certain that we are indeed basing such an examination on artworks if we do not know beforehand what art is? And the essence of art can no more be arrived at by a derivation from higher concepts than by a collection of characteristics of actual artworks."³ That Heidegger seeks an "essence" of art betrays the problematical neoplatonic presuppositions underlying his mode of inquiry. That is, the very form of the question, "What is...," implies an answer that would reduce art to its quintessence: if art is z, then every work of art is (z-1), (z-2), (z-3) — an essence or ideal minus the specific imperfections of matter in which the artwork is necessarily ensnared.

While it's not difficult to see why Plato might have sought an ideal behind so many sculptures of athletes and Aphrodites — a vanishing point behind the relatively isomorphic history of Greek art up to the Periclean period — it is not as easy to see why the neoplatonic might seek an essence reconcilable to a tribal mask, a Bronzino painting, a Buddhist stupa, a Greek amphora, and a performance by Paul McCarthy. Given the astonishing number of things that qualify as art, the very category "art" must be overdetermined: it is not reducible to an internal essence, but is rather traversed by a complex of external determinations, differentiations, deformations. Consequently, the very form of the question "What is art?" is misleading, since it preordains a response articulating the ways in which the object is made to fit the category or the essence rather than the reverse, the ways in which the category "art" is manipulated to fit the object.⁴

Karen Kilimnick, Black Plague

How do we phrase a more accurate question? One way is to replace the verb "to be" with "to become." What becomes art? Restating the problem in terms of becoming rather than being allows a work to be evaluated by criteria which are not absolute in relation to some Art, but are rather relative to historical parameters surrounding the work at any given time. It allows for the work to overshoot its goal, to become art, to pass through art and then become non-art again. The case of Adolphe Bouguereau: he began, like so many others, as a student (i.e. producer of non-art); he won a Prix de Rome and became a popular late 19th century painter (i.e. producer of art); the advent of Modernism made his academic depictions of mythological subjects look ridiculous (i.e. his work became non-art); the development of Post-Modernism sparked a reconsideration of his position in the history of art, so that his paintings now hang in the Musée d'Orsay beside those of peers as disparate as Manet and Caillebotte (i.e. they became art again). Did Bouguereau's paintings ever lose or recapture the essence of art? Of course not. It was not the work but "art" that changed — and if the very essence of an essence, as every good neoplatonist believes, is that it be unchanging, then art can have none.

Prior to any definition of art's essence, there is thus an operation of selection and separation. Art may detonate an explosion, but just as U235 needs to be extracted from ordinary uranium before an A-bomb can be constructed, so too must art be extracted from the universe before it can set off a reaction. What causes it to be separated out is a complicated question — the becoming-art of any given object involves a sort of polymerization, where a multitude of molecules (personal ambitions, political pressures, global fears, the race to stay ahead of the enemy....) are fused into a temporarily stabilized aggregate. But the synthesis of all these becomings-art, taken in their duration, has the effect of splitting the entire universe in two — though certainly not evenly in half — into volatile and stable radioactive materials, into art and non-art. Consequently, any attempt to unravel "What is art?" without accounting for both art and non-art is comparable to basing a theory of critical mass on U235 alone. In the terms of logic, it begs the question: it assumes what it tries to prove by deriving the essence of art from things already considered art. Heidegger does this by deducing an essence from Van Gogh and Greek architecture, both already well seated in the canon. It's like a syllogism of the following form (where the first premise, unspoken, assumes what is to be proved):

(Van Gogh was an artist,)
Artists cut off their ears
Therefore, Van Gogh was an artist

Of course, Heidegger was well aware that his attempt to discover art's essence was tautological in nature. When he infers from Van Gogh's painting of a pair of peasant boots that its essence is the "unconcealment" of truth, he crosswires the ends and means of art and epistemology: "Truth," he admits, "belongs to logic. Beauty, however, is reserved for aesthetics."5 But if truth, according to Heidegger's reformulation, now pertains to aesthetics, does beauty pertain to philosophy? His philosophy of art is certainly pretty — pretty illogical.

universe > art > power / knowledge

Thomas De Quincey once broached the problem of "What is....?" in regard to literature. What is literature? De Quincey wasn't sure he could answer, and in fact thought that a far more important point "is to be sought not so much in a better definition of literature as in a sharper distinction of the two functions which it fulfills."⁶ Taking the fact that there is something called "literature" as a given, De Quincey drew a very useful distinction between two of its primary functions, arguing that there is a Literature of Knowledge and a Literature of Power. "The function of the first is — to teach; the function of the second is — to move.... The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understanding or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy." De Quincey adds an example: "What do you learn from Paradise Lost? Nothing at all. What do you learn from a cookery-book? Something new, something that you did not know before, in every paragraph. But would you therefore put the wretched cookery-book on a higher level of estimation than the divine poem? What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge...; what you owe is power."⁷

Once the U235 of art has been extracted from the universe, is it not reasonable to assume that it will unleash a tremendous power? Given the political or even moralizing temper of much contemporary art, it would be tempting to predict that the paradigmatic question of the art of the future might be something like "What is just?" or "What is right?" or "What is fair?" However, the call for an art that empowers is no more than an oxymoron — like calling for a flower that blooms or a bird that flies. Artists may tilt at the unjust windmills erected in society by the powers that be, but art is not opposed to power per se — art gives power. What do you learn about the AIDS crisis from the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres? Nothing at all. You'd do better to consult the informative "literature" of the GMHC. Nevertheless, there's something about Gonzalez-Torres' elegant, eloquent, poignant work — there's something about art itself — that speaks to a "higher understanding" through "pleasure and sympathy," that hits an overtone of mortality more affective than the atonal statistics of death.

Matthew Barney, Cremaster Cycle

The precise nature of such power is not easy to articulate. It's not simply an issue of representation or subject matter, although there certainly are artists overtly concerned with power and force. In the early installments of his Drawing Restraints series (1989-1993), for instance, Matthew Barney devised a number of pseudo-athletic training procedures which necessitated that, in order to make a drawing, the artist pounce on trampolines, climb ramps while straining at the end of tethers, and push football blocking sleds. The idea, more familiar to athletes than artists, was to see if increased resistance could stimulate an increase of power, just as a muscle atrophies in repose but strengthens against an opposing force such as weight. While critics have construed the autotelic nature of such training procedures in Barney's work as sublimated autoeroticism (i.e. pumping iron = jerking off — and similar nonsense), really it's not so much a matter of psychoanalysis as thermodynamics: muscular hypertrophy results from the excessive build-up of energy in a closed system (as opposed to a dissipative system, where that energy is expended). Barney's oeuvre is not comprised of idiosyncratic allegories of athletes and satyrs; rather, each element in his iconography is a point of contention for certain forces traversing an entire series of energetic systems. In the recent video Cremaster 4, the mad dash, sudden bursts and abrupt halts of the sidecar racers around the Isle of Man are just that: the circulation of forces in a closed system — energy spinning in circles in a force field surrounded by water.⁸

However, while Barney's work may explicitly address the movement of forces and cultivation of powers, it would be wrong to think that the power of his work derives just from this. The power of a work encompasses but transcends mere thematic concerns. Some of the sublimest art in the world — that of Gonzalez-Torres, for example — is incredibly powerful without having any pronounced relation to power as such. And if content alone is not enough to produce power, neither is form. Artists beginning to explore the expanding field of digital hypermedia are encouraged to "empower" users by providing them with nothing more than an increasing number of buttons to click, but as the New York-based digital artists Necro Enema Amalgamated, producers of the CD-ROM BLAM!, write, "Giving a user more and more buttons to click is like giving extra links to a dog chain. Sure, you can call three feet of mobility 'freedom' if you want. You can think of BLAM! as empowering you, but we know that we're the ones jerking the end of your chain. We've determined what every last little button accomplishes. Programmers are just that: programmers."⁹ BLAM! is an aggressively non-interactive CD-ROM, substituting tracking mechanisms and Pavlovian behavioral modification techniques for the simplistic models of user empowerment currently predominant, and yet it delivers more power than any of its peers. In short, it doesn't wait for you to point and click — it pushes your buttons first.

Nietzsche says that the "effect of works of art is to excite the state that creates art — intoxication." Or again: "Art and nothing but art! It is the great means of making life possible, the great seduction to life, the great stimulant of life."¹⁰ Perhaps it can be said that art itself is not to be grasped but to be taken up or caught, in the same way that a surfer catching a wave merely inserts himself into a preexistent flow of energy. Artists often feel as though their creativity originates beyond them, in a "muse" perhaps: it may really be an impulse of some sort, an impulse the artist picks up and directs into a work and passes on to you. "A work of art," writes George Kubler in his brilliant, concise book The Shape of Time, "transmits a kind of behavior by the artist, and it also serves, like a relay, as the point of departure for impulses that often attain extraordinary magnitudes in later transmission. Our lines of communication with the past therefore originated as signals which become commotions emitting further signals in an unbroken alternating sequence of event, signal, recreated event, renewed signal, etc."11 It is a matter of potential and kinetic energy: the artwork harbors a certain force, and this force becomes kinetic when it moves someone.

universe > art > power > shock / beauty + sublimity

Jake & Dinos Chapman, Ubermensch

If a treatise were to be composed, in the manner of Edmund Burke or Immanuel Kant, on the affects produced in us by modern works of art, it would no longer focus on the beautiful or the sublime. Its subject would have to be the affect predominant since the 19th century — its title would have to be The Analytic of the Shocking. The OED cites the first use of the word "shock" to connote "a sudden and disturbing impression on the senses" in 1705, but it is only with the advent of modernism that the word, the feeling have come into their own. Many of the major thinkers of this century have in fact articulated theories of shock. Freud, parallel to the developmental etiology in medicine of traumatic shock, proposed a theory of psychic shock in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: the one "regards the essence of the shock as being the direct damage to the molecular structure or even to the histological structure of the elements of the nervous system; whereas what we seek to understand are the effects produced on the organ of the mind by the breach in the shield against stimuli." Walter Benjamin, applying Freud's formulation to works of art, wrote of the "disintegration of aura in the experience of shock." And other thinkers in various disciplines developed more or less explicit theories, including one of shock's complement and antithesis, the "blasé attitude."¹²

That the primary affect associated with modern works of art is shock implies not only that art has power, but that we're able literally to connect with artworks — plug in, form a circuit, tap into the power of the work. This is fundamentally different from the sublime, which was predicated on distance. Burke argued that the feeling of the sublime was only possible in the face of danger, but a danger kept at bay: "When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful."¹³ The sublime is thus always on the other side of the proscenium, as even its etymology — sub (under or up to) and limen (threshold) — indicates. In shock, however, there is no longer a safety zone between artwork and viewer. "The work," writes Adorno, "is neither a reflection of the soul nor the embodiment of a Platonic idea. It is not pure Being but rather a 'force field' between subject and object."¹⁴ A force field, a shock corridor, a power line able to pass shock waves from one thing to the next — it's no metaphor to say that there is something which connects us to works of art, which enables works of art to transmit their force to us. How else can we be moved?

For a work to be shocking, however, entails not just that it form a circuit with us. The work has to have a superior force, something excessive, it has to be able to send a tremendous surge over the power line. If the U235 of art is able not just to be extracted from the universe but exploded, then how do we measure its force? How does it acquire or increase its power? Traditionally this force — or more specifically, the quantity of this force — derives from the degree of difference manifest in a work of art, either in the form of the new (the black square) or the taboo (the slit eyeball). Simmel argues that the blasé attitude is caused by "an indifference toward the distinctions between things."¹⁵ Conversely, the shocking is precisely that which asserts its difference in an aggressive fashion: violence is anathema to society? Un Chien Andalou begins with an eyeball splitting open like a plum. Art has to represent the world, the life of the bourgeoisie? Malevich paints a black square. If the sublime is produced by the deferral of the dangerous, the shocking is created by the danger of the different.

Floortje: Kick Ass by Inez van Lamsweerde

Inez van Lamsweerde, Floortje: Kick Ass

But haven't we seen it all? Is anything shocking anymore? If the blasé attitude appears to reign today, it's because of a paradox: a work can only shock by asserting its difference, and yet art itself has become a differential system. In other words, it was easy for a work to differentiate itself when art was comprised of isomorphic systems — academies, schools, movements. But just as nuclear proliferation has now taken the form of coups d'état, terrorists, guerrillas, molecular clusters of power rather than the old bilateral stasis of superpowers, so too has art undergone a profound, rapid fission. Atomisation has become its very operative principle. If the category is traversed and smashed by a complex of external determinations, it now allows for every kind of difference: when we speak popularly of artists, we tend to say that an artist reflects society, leads society, attacks society, mocks society, cures society, is suicided by society, etc. You could draw an equation, artists x society, where the variable x can stand for reflect, attack, cure — and, today, for throw shit, puke, fuck, anything.

In short, art has become a differential system in which an astonishing number of aesthetic strategies are able to multiply and combine in pursuit of a dazzling number of effects. It can encompass the most advanced experiments of New York or Berlin and the most indigenous traditions in China or Mexico. It does not level the differences between such disparate incarnations of creative desire, because art is itself comprised of these differences. Consequently, shock may seem dulled because nothing can be different enough when difference itself is the norm. But does this mean that art no longer has power? No, no, "shock" is not a very specific word after all, there are many different uses for a current — electrocution, electroconvulsive therapy, art may no longer shock but it can resuscitate hearts, cure schizophrenia, punish criminals...

universe > art > power > shock > atomic bicycle

Traditional aesthetics have always prioritized vision. Nietzsche criticizes Kant for having "unconsciously introduced the 'spectator' into the concept 'beautiful.'"¹⁶ The spectator's aesthetics — contrasted by Nietzsche to those of the creator — assume or perhaps even create a gap between the subject and the object, a caesura, a viewing distance. In the concept of the sublime there is the threshold between subject and object, and even in the museum there is the artificial fabrication of a no-man's-land, PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH, as though artworks were little resurrected Christs murmuring "Noli me tangere" to every passerby. In contrast, the art of power presumes that there are points of contact between artworks and viewers, that it is possible to form a circuit between the affective designs of an object and the affective receptors of a subject — as though the artwork is a conductor transmitting impulses from the efferent nerves of the artist to the afferent nerves of the viewer. It's not so far from a Lucretian physics, which is based not on vision but touch; how can a sense be affected by something that doesn't touch it? asks Lucretius, arguing that in sensation clusters of atoms literally brush against the eyeball or slip in through the ear. ¹⁷

Art has an essentially atomic structure, which is to say that it exhibits wave-particle duality, that it's schizophrenic. "But electrons, neutrons, protons and even whole atoms — the stuff our own bodies are made of — also display pathological behavior... The root cause of this pathology is the schizophrenic personality of quantum phenomena, which act like waves one moment and particles the next."¹⁸ Artworks tend to be objects or things, but just as a nuclear reaction transforms matter into energy, so too do artworks become forces. Shock is nothing other than the sudden, excessive transmission of charged electrons from one atom to another: asked to describe his electroshock therapy, a patient says: "It's like an atomic bomb that runs horizontally through your brain."¹⁹ Powerful art sets off reactions and explosions in the beholder, who is no longer an isolated satellite of bourgeois subjectivity but a circuit board, an affective system able to connect to outside forces. Shock treatment literally exteriorizes Artaud: " And my whole inward electric body, the whole lie of this inward electric body which for a certain number of centuries has been the burden of every human being, turned inside-out..."²⁰ There's no longer a gap, a viewing distance, between works and viewers — there may no longer even be "works" and "viewers," as the lie of the inward electric body gives way to the communication of force fields, power lines transmitting shock waves of charged electrons from one field to another.

In 1970 the artist Neke Carson developed what he called the Atomic Bicycle. A photograph shows him racing through Central Park on a "bicycle modeled after the old-style idea of the atom for people who like to ride around in an obsolete concept of the universe." Lucretius' universe was obsolete until recently, when developments in physics revived his vision of an infinite number of atoms falling vertically through infinite space. What physicists today appreciate is Lucretius' clinamen — a slight swerve in the declination of the atoms without which there would be no creation.²¹ "If it were not for this swerve, everything would fall downwards like rain-drops through the abyss of space. No collision would take place and no impact of atom on atom would be created. Thus nature would never have created anything."²² The clinamen is a slight deviation of that which is at once particle and wave — atom and energy.²³ It is the creative principle. Is every artist not pedaling away in the nucleus of an atomic bicycle, crashing into other atoms, producing the clinamen — the chain reaction which gives off radiation, aura, and shock? Saturate each atom: convert your medium into energy and irradiate the world with art.

1. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1980), v. 3, p. 209.

2. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. R.E. Latham (NY: Penguin, 1951), p. 64.

3. Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Basic Writings, trans. David Farrell Krell (SF: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 144.

4. Gilles Deleuze articulates a similar problem in Nietzsche's critique of Plato. "Moreover, when we ask the question 'what is it?' we not only fall into the worst metaphysics but in fact we merely ask the question 'which one?' in a blind, unconscious and confused way." See Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (NY: Columbia, 1983), pp. 66-67.

5. Heidegger, op. cit., p. 162 and passim, e.g. p. 197: "The essence of art... is the setting-itself-into-work of truth."

6. Thomas De Quincey, "The Literature of Knowledge and the Literature of Power," Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey (NY: The Modern Library, 1949), p. 1099.

7. Idem., pp. 1099-1100.

8. An exposition of Barney's relation to force appears in Matthew Barney and Beyond, Parkett, forthcoming.

9. Necro Enema Amalgamated, The NEA Agenda (NY: Necro Enema Amalgamated, 1994), p. 7.

10. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (NY: Vintage, 1968), pp. 434, 452.

11. George Kubler, The Shape of Time (New Haven: Yale UP, 1962) p. 20.

12. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (NY: Norton, 1961) p. 36; Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (NY: Shocken, 1978) p. 194; the "blasé attitude" derives from Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," in On Individuality and Social Forms, trans. Donald Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 328.

13. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (NY: Oxford UP, 1990), p. 36. See also Kant: "it is impossible to find satisfaction in a terror that is seriously felt," etc. Kant, "Analytic of the Sublime," in The Critique of Judgement, trans. J.H. Bernard (NY: Hafner, 1951), p. 100 and passim.

14. Theodor Adorno, "Valery Proust Museum," in Prisms, trans. S. Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), p. 184.

15. Simmel, op. cit., p. 329.

16. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (NY: Vintage, 1969), p. 104.

17. See Lucretius, op. cit., p. 72: "For touch and nothing but touch is the essence of all our bodily sensations, whether we feel something slipping in from outside or are hurt by something born in the body." Also p. 137 ff. In "The Power of Words," Edgar Allan Poe describes the word as an air-born current which literally has a physical force comparable to that of wind: "Did there not cross your mind some thought of the physical power of words? Is not every word an impulse on the air?" Words are thus literally able to cause storms, tornadoes, the maelstrom. See Poe, "The Power of Words," in Poetry and Tales (NY: Library of America, 1984), p. 825.

18. John Horgan, "Quantum Philosophy," Scientific American (July 1992), pp. 100, 96.

19. John Friedberg, M.D. Shock Treatment Is Not Good for Your Brain (SF: Glide, 1976), p. 95.

20. Antonin Artaud, "Electroshock," in Anthology (SF: City Lights, 1965), p. 184.

21. See, for example, the book by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ilya Prigogine (with Isabelle Stengers), Order Out of Chaos (NY: Bantam, 1984), p. 141: "We are not so far from the clinamen of Lucretius!"

22. Lucretius, op. cit., p. 66.

23. "The atom of the ancients, from Democritus to Lucretius, was always inseparable from a hydraulics, or a generalized theory of swells and flows. The ancient atom is entirely misunderstood if it is overlooked that its essence is to course and flow." Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 489.

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