Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida

20 Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida
However, this is not the only shape that idealism can take in modernism. Surrealism,
for all is radicalism, constitutes another:
A notion of the ‘noumenal’ persists. Surrealist thinking is haunted by demons and
old ghosts such as a ‘transcendence,’ subjected periodically to rituals of exorcism,
but never quite dispelled. Surrealist ‘immanence’ is, in fact, and more than most, a
‘transcendence’ in disguise... Dedicated to the abolition of Christian myth and its repressive
vestiges, Surrealism derived its strength and its contradictions from that
myth. (BS 73)
There is, however, another, more marginal, secular trend in modernism, exemplified,
perhaps, in the pre-war era by Duchamp’s aesthetic of ambiguity,
which artists of the ’60s such as Morris and Rainer can be seen as extending: ‘It
is, I think, a prime quality of Morris’s work that it offers ... the terms of a sharpened
definition of the nature of the sculptural experience ... in a manner
wholly consistent with a commitment to the secularist impulse and thrust of
modernism’ (RM 23):
There are, in the contemporary renewal of performance modes, two basic and diverging
impulses which shape and animate its major innovations. The first,
grounded in the idealist extensions of a Christian past, is mythopoeic in its aspiration,
eclectic in its forms, and constantly traversed by the dominant and polymorphic
style which constitutes the most tenacious vestige of that past: expressionism.
Its celebrants are: for theater, Artaud, Grotowski; for film Murnau and Brakhage;
and for the dance, Wigman, Graham. The second, consistently secular in its commitment
to objectification, proceeds from Cubism and Constructivism; its modes are
analytic and its spokesmen are: for theater, Meyerhold and Brecht, for film
Eisenstein and Snow, for dance, Cunningham and Rainer. (YR 33)
Rather than attempting to find an aesthetic substitute for lost theological certainties,
‘to dwell in Presence,’ to transcend the limits of everyday, contingent
reality and the way we standardly know it, this trend analyzes and questions
quotidian reality and our ordinary knowledge of it itself. Morris, for example,
rejects the metaphysical ‘virtual space’ of traditional sculpture and focuses on
real space and the spectator’s standard perception of it. In a parallel gesture,
Rainer rejects the metaphysical ‘synthetic time’ of traditional dance in favor of
‘a time that is operational, the time of experience, of our actions in the world’ in
her ‘ordinary language’ dance (YR 58). In this way, modernist art can be seen
as recapitulating the same fissure that exists in Western philosophy between
those who seek new metaphysical certainties beneath or beyond contingent reality
and the way it is normally known (Descartes, Kant, Heidegger), and
those who, rejecting the possibility of (finding) metaphysical certainties, focus