The periscope mediates between surface and (hidden) depths, the visible
and the hidden. It is a mechanical and metaphorical continuum between
revelation and obscurity. It also facilitates the act of looking while
hiding the observer.
It may be a poetic exaggeration to characterize the vision enabled by
this apparatus as voyeurism – with all its attendant sexual overtones.
And, doubtless, emphasizing the phallic nature of the periscope’s
‘erection’ is a banality. Yet, the issue of desire cannot be dismissed.
Often the periscope operator wants to – visually – seize the scrutinized
object in order to facilitate capture in a more comprehensive sense. In
war this often entails physical destruction. In such a manner the act
of looking is a prelude to violent assault – having a ‘wicked way’ with
the object. Art theory is replete with feminist accounts of ‘the
violence of the male gaze’ and – for every banality must be repeated –
the rising periscope is well-known preface to unwanted penetration (of a
hull by a torpedo).
One might bob along in the gender politics of the gaze – buffeted by a
gentle wind of analogical satisfaction supplied by the suggestive nature
of metal tubes and the all-male environment onboard Russian naval
submarines. However, Ponomarev’s vessel is also a hermaphrodite of
sorts. Wherever it appears in his oeuvre it is in the context of change,
transformation or indistinction – including transition from one state
of being to another.1
Moreover, it appears in the context of decoration – the alteration of
tubular, military, modernity – by way of colourful paint, feathers, and
even sequins. To say that the artist means to feminize the submarine is
perhaps too specific (for there is nothing essentially ‘female’ about
sequins). The point is merely that the well-known statement ‘gender is
performance’ is a particularization of a more general notion that
identity is performance. It is in this respect that Ponomarev’s
submarines symbolize the fluidity of many powerful imaginative, social
and cultural distinctions. In the case of his sculpture View Point, the
periscope is not trained upon another submarine or even on an object
atop the sea surface. Rather, it is co-extensive with a tree trunk. The
operative question is as follows – How does this quasi-periscope perform
and, accordingly, what desire does it seek to satisfy? By extension,
what is its identity?
Perhaps View Point does not represent a periscope at all: Consider the
gaze as a prelude to penetration in the context of nature – following
Ponomarev’s introduction of the tree symbol. The immediate association
is with the scopic regime of the microscope; the scientific looking
whose goal is dissection or delving-into to better serve the purpose of
mastery. One recalls the writings of Francis Bacon (not the painter!),
who spoke of science as exploitation and subjugation of the natural
world – a field of conquest. The historical consequences of this regime
have often been characterized as the rape of the earth. Yet, Ponomarev’s
View Point does not look at wood in terms of microscopia. Instead it
suggests a kind of looking-with-tree, whose supra-physical sense we
shall explore in due course.
What are we to make of the sailor costumes on the two figures who
operate View Point’s quasi-periscopes? Of course, Ponomarev’s previous
employment as a submariner and merchant-seaman may have some bearing
upon this issue. However, consistent references to the nautical in his
oeuvre have more than biographical significance. When asked about the
issue of symbolism he often invokes concepts and terminology from
ancient Eastern metaphysics – such as he old Mongolian word ‘dalai’.2
This translates as ‘ocean’ but carries an extra sense: oneness or
totality. He also refers to the Upanishads, and the metaphor that is
Indra’s Net. As with the previous example, its concept is that of the
primordial interconnectedness of all things.3
In other words, Ponomarev’s ‘ocean’ signifies an all-encompassing
non-individuated reality that underlies appearances, which subtends
seemingly discrete entities, gathering them together in its web.4 The sailor seems to be a symbol of he who charts this ontological terrain.
But how does the archaic metaphysical doctrine of dalai cohere with
Ponomarev’s qualification as a nautical engineer – that is, his status
as a man of science? The answer is to be found in the artist’s passion
for the work of the Russian philosopher-scientist Vladimir Vernadsky
(1863-1945) – considered one of the founders of geochemistry,
biogeochemistry, radiogeology and – significantly – ecology.5
Vernadsky rejected the traditional approach to biochemical analysis on
the grounds that it was reductionist, instead emphasizing ‘the
interconnections of a system or organism that produce a whole greater
and more meaningful than the parts’.6
The “biosphere”, as he termed this supra-organism, is a complex
choreography of matter functioning as a unified totality – operating in a
manner both physically and cognitively impossible for its individual
components. As one commentator has put it, ‘[t]he biosphere can be
understood analogously as a kind of superior intelligence of the planet.
The multiformity of all planetary life is integrated in a singular
organismic mechanism dedicated to the functioning of the earth and to
the photosynthetic incorporation of solar rays into the order and
structure of life’.7
One recognizes the incorporation of the ancient metaphysical notion of
the unity of opposites and – as previously mentioned, the primordial
oneness of being: dalai – recast in this modern notion of a
supra-physical mechanism. Rather than being a case underlying ‘reality’,
which presupposes a veil of illusion or maya, it is an overlying
function.
The biosphere is the broadest biophysiological point of view, the global sum of all ecosystems.8
We may term it a macroscopic perspective. View Point is the name of
Ponomarev’s sculpture for a reason, a clear reference to positional
vision. To look into the tree, to see through it, up through its
branches and out through its leaves: What a peculiar idea. What is it
like to see with a tree? A question or implication that is almost
nonsensical. But not entirely, for it posits a fusion of the observer
and the apparatus. The work thus represents a sublime idea: To have a
vision by way of tree is the co-extension of Tree and Me. To see through
photosynthesis is a literal statement of Vernadsky’s conception of the
biophysical unity of seemingly discrete organisms. The fusion of the
tree trunk and the periscope seems to suggest a look that is macroscopic
– a beyond everyday sight; a synthetic supra-organismic visuality.
View Point represents vision from a macroscopic standpoint. The fact
that the viewers/sailors are not actually standing – either on a point
or in position – but floating coheres with this interpretation. To see
within and through the macroscope is, Ponomarev seems to suggest, to
lessen the weight of everyday individuations/determinations. His sailors
are mere vessels, lacking all but the most basic figurative schema;
arms, legs, heads etc. There is no realistic skin, fake eyelashes,
waxwork or color on show; they are light as air and hollow, floating
within a larger matrix (the biosphere).
For centuries, sects have outlined various methods for losing oneself in
primordial unity, such as meditation and mantra. For the ancient Greeks
it was Dionysian orgies, ecstatic intoxication through drink, dance and
song. In the 19th century the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer
claimed that this ‘reality’ could only be approached through
‘non-empirical’ cognition. Perhaps influenced by the watery imagery of
dalai, he described the process in nautical language: “Just as the
boatman sits in his small boat, trusting his frail craft in the stormy
sea that is boundless in every direction, rising and falling with the
howling, mountainous waves, so […] the individual man calmly sits,
supported by and trusting the principium individuationis”.9
According to his vision, non-individuation is akin to the boat
overturning, with the boatman plunged into the boundless ocean, his
(individual) self-conception sunk into the profound deep.
Schopenhauer’s boatman finds an echo in the sailors of View Point and
another work by Ponomarev – Deep Water Graphics (2010), a series of ten
self-portraits on polystyrene cups, created while onboard a Russian
scientific ship. Thrown overboard and then dragged to the ocean floor in
heavyweight containers, each was distorted and shrunk by subjection to
water-pressure at depths of up to 3km below sea level. In consigning
these pictures to the abyss Ponomarev’s ‘self’ is, quite literally,
reduced. In one sense the works proffer empirical access to an
ontological undertow, physical evidence of the meta-‘truth’ that the
principle of (self) individuation is tenuous and context-specific. The
resulting objects, which have been recovered for our benefit, are a kind
of self-reduction as proof of ‘real’ life. However, they are also –
simultaneously – a self-portrait of the Atlantic Ocean. Each hollow cup
is assigned a longitude, latitude and depth – in both physical and
symbolic terms – along with Ponomarev’s likeness, so that the
conditional distortion and reduction of the artist’s face in Deep Water
Graphics is tantamount to dalai’s own coming into view. This is to say,
each cup represents the macroscopic, biospherical organism of which both
the Atlantic and Ponomarev partake. In this case, instead of
seeing-with-tree it is a case of being-with-sea.
The non-specialization of the – scientific/technological – gaze, the
‘generalist’ look at the world, with the world, and the consequent
hollowing-out of our self-centeredness, has come along way from its
ancient mystical-metaphysical foundations. It is a trope that is of
great contemporary significance in the context of debates about climate
change and conservation. In some respects it is the most generally
accepted utopian vision of our age, albeit one frequently invoked as a
counterpoint to dystopic realities – such as the mass of jellyfish that
choke parts of the Mediterranean coastline, stinging bathers who deign
to dip their ostensibly innocent toes in the ever darkening morass.
However, macroscopia is less a fantasy than it is categorical imperative
in a world of oil spills, strip mines and other byproducts of our
contemporary ‘global’ vision. It is, to paraphrase the modernist
engineer and visionary Buckminster Fuller, an ‘operating-system for
spaceship earth’ that ecologists desire.
In this respect View Point can be taken as an instance of agit-prop, a
striking metonym for way of seeing that requires more partisans. The
uniforms on dalai’s sailors – officers of the biosphere – are a seeming
call to the bridge of our cosmic vessel. This is a modification of a
theme that the artist has previously explored with his fleet of
submarines for ‘the interests of art [and not war]’ which, since the
Northern Trace of Leonardo (1993), have surfaced around the world in
locations as diverse as the Paris, the Loire and Moscow.
However, Ponomarev is a (post)Soviet man brought up on a diet of
dialectics, so his metaphors are apt to somersault. Further realities
and connections come bubbling up from beneath the surface of his works.
His symbols are highly charged in the context of contemporary
geo-political conflict over natural resources. In fact, the submarine
plays a central role in the new ‘great game’ whose rules, as conceived
by the players, are not macroscopic. In August 2007 a Russian
submersible dived deep below the North Pole. Then, at a depth of 4,261
metres, its mechanical arm dropped a titanium flag onto the seabed.
Following this act, four other polar nations attempted to prove that
their continental shelves extend into Arctic waters. Their respective
were the same – to secure rights to hitherto unclaimed stores of
minerals, oil and gas. Industrial exploitation of these reserves is only
possible now, given the year-round opening of the Northwest Passage – a
sea route linking the Atlantic and Pacific. This new Arctic highway is
the result of climate change, which has reduced the average amount of
pack ice in the region. If the booty is successfully extracted,
pollution resulting from its use will compound the effect on this part
of the world – and, consequently, the rest of the planet. In light of
this geo-political drift towards the bottom of the ocean we might read
the floating dummy submariners in View Point as a challenge: Partisans
of the macroscope must stake their claims to real ground.