to souls it is death to become water, to water death to become earth, but from earth water is born, and from water soul.
– Heraclitus1
This exhibition is a metaphorical current flowing from one related image
to another. The tide is such – death to entropy, entropy to water,
islands to cities, cities to ships, ships to men, men to death. Its
mimetic drift traces the dynamic process central to the concept of
entropy itself, a transition unto static oblivion. Since this physical
law cannot be escaped it must be surfed.
In numerous ancient philosophies the sea stands for the primordial
interconnectedness of all things, a fundamental unity incorporating the
dissolution of individual subjectivity and other ostensibly discrete
systems.2
Though antique, this image complements a modern scientific principle.
Entropy – the Second Law of Thermodynamics – entails the eventual
non-differentiation of the physical universe precipitated by
unavoidably increasing disorder in mechanical processes. The entropic
end-state is nothing less than ‘all-encompassing sameness’, an
equilibrium which recent art-theoretical discourse has associated with
representations of melting and liquidification – an ocean of
homogeneity.3
The discovery that loss of usable energy and disorder in the universe
cannot be avoided – i.e. that entropy unavoidably increases – has been
conveyed in apocalyptic terms. Terminal decline and the eventual ‘heat
death’ of the world are exemplary characterizations of our fate given
the entropic principle.4
If these things are unavoidable then why bother with anything at all?
Such is the romantic-morose response to the Second Law, to which
clearest rejoinder has been supplied by the founder of information
theory, Norbert Wiener. For him the question as to whether to construe
ever-increasing entropy pessimistically or not “depends on the
importance we give to the universe at large, on the one hand, and to the
islands of locally decreasing entropy which we find in it on the
other”.6
Continuing – “we ourselves constitute such an island of decreasing
entropy and […] we live among other such islands”. To this statement we
may add the following: we live upon such islands and may discern the image of our fate and virtues in their character.
Venice is such a reflection. Against the odds, it emerged from water.
The seventeenth century English diplomat Sir Dudley Carleton described la Serenissima
as ‘microcosmos rather than a city’. It is certainly an exception to
the rule of ocean and, therefore, a world set against a wider/liquid
universe. It is also an archipelago in more than one sense: in
geographical terms the sea surrounds its metropolitan isles but they
are otherwise encircled by a countervailing aesthetic principle; stone
and brick architecture bounded by liquid flux, straight lines
contradicted by fluid – the aqua alta greedily licking at San
Marco’s colonnade. In this respect the floating polis can be
characterized as a triumph against entropy; the natural law evaded. This
is one reason why it is often referred to as a city of miracles. Beyond
divine intervention in human affairs, the establishment of an urban
island in the middle of a lagoon was, at the very least, highly
improbable. Thusly, the unlikely birth – and maintenance – of Venice
informs this exhibition.
Yet, as intimated by regular floods and many sinking palazzos, the
physical city is only a momentary confection in time; it may be the
fruit of conquest but it is also a future Atlantis – the historical
presentiment of which has already been supplied by the loss of some of
its islands to the surrounding waters.6
Often likened to a ship, the Venice which remains bobs atop the
inexorable entropic flow like the metaphysical principle of
individuation described by Arthur Schopenhauer: ‘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’.7
The ‘Venice in peril’ campaign, aimed at foreclosing the possibility of
the city’s sinking, may be interpreted as a sublimated expression of
the desire to save the image of mankind itself from cosmic oblivion – an
attempt to stop our boat overturning.8
Venice constitutes a victory snatched from the jaws of loss but it is,
nevertheless, only a battle won in a losing war against entropy. Despite
much care for the physical city manmade catabolic processes gather
pace. At Santa Maria Glorioso del Friari, in front of the gold-bathed
cherubim of Titian’s l’Annunciata, lie marble tombstones. Once
inscribed with such clear martial iconography they have been smoothed to
abstract mounds by the pious feet of pilgrims and tourists. Who was he?
I cannot tell. It requires some effort – some energy – to establish
that the man underneath the slab was a specific general or a merchant
prince. Defeat, under feet, of memory: today the whole city is a memento mori.
This is a melancholy fact paralleled on the historical plane by the fate
of the Arsenale in which our exhibition is housed. Formerly an engine
of triumph – a factory for the production of naval ships that would
dominate trade routes in the region – today its buildings are
predominantly empty, no longer vessels for the city’s economic energy.
Devoid of galleys, the windows of their yards offer a view of San
Michele, the island graveyard established by Napoleon – the first
foreign conqueror of Venice whose rapid subjugation of Europe in the
eighteenth century was nothing less than an imperial tidal wave. The
vista reminds us that the historical ship of state – the Venetian empire
– is already sunk. In this and other respects our exhibition takes
place after conquest, with an eye trained on the posthumous present.
But something stirs. In view of the necropolis and within the Arsenale a
‘small army’ has recently been at work constructing a fleet of vessels
that synthesize ‘art, culture and technology’. The title of the
exhibition suggests that their task is nothing less than defeating the
undefeatable second law. This grandiose agenda is slightly modified in a
polemic by the curator and artist Alexander Ponomarev; the artists’
‘less probable structures’ are launched in order to allow us, if only
‘for a second’, to ‘doubt the inevitable domination of Entropy’. The
exhibition’s intellectual coordinates are thus set out: the resistance
of fact by fantasy, a seeming paradox that will, unquestionably, be
resolved in time.
*
Hercules was the tribal hero of the first people to settle the lagoon –
the Veneti – and he became a legendary protector of their new home. He
was an apt champion given the colossal task facing these pioneers – to
lay foundations and maintain lives on shifting sands. Not least because,
as Peter Ackroyd has noted, it is he who ‘acquires by labour what
others claim by right’.9
Beyond this, Hercules embodies the power to defeat divine / natural
law. Our exhibition labours under this aspect of his sign. Artists are,
Ponomarev asserts, ‘warriors with cosmic noise’, it is they who give
‘birth to life energy that is capable of creating less probable
structures to counterbalance more probable ones’.
Preternatural energy and monumental gestures are characteristic features
of Ponomarev’s practice. The man can – in a figure of speech not so far
from the truth – move mountains, as demonstrated by Maya: A Lost Island in which the artist, collaborating with the 5th
Fleet of the Russian Navy, made a land mass in the Barents Sea
disappear. Prior to this, in 1996, he gained access to a secret naval
base and painted an operational submarine in ‘anti-camouflage designs’.10
When the vessel was properly decorated it left the harbour and sewed
his signature into the ocean. Further colossal works would include a
fleet of handmade submarines, one of which surfaced on the Grand Canal
during the 53rd Biennale; the erection of a forty foot periscope beneath
the dome of the Salpêtrière cathedral in Paris; and the construction of
his own aeroplane, Feedbacks (2009). Such pieces are united
through their embrace of significant technical challenges – rooted in
Ponomarev’s training as a nautical engineer – and what the artist calls
his “strategy of adventure” – forged during a previous career as a
Soviet torpedo officer and, later, as a merchant seaman.11
Ponomarev’s oversize agenda remains on display in Formula (2011), the work that he has produced for One of a Thousand Ways to Defeat Entropy.
It consists of two eight metre tall acrylic columns, each clear and
hollow with a diameter of one and half metres, containing twelve metric
tons of lagoon water. The immense pressure generated by this liquid has
posed an unprecedented challenge for the manufacturing team, being the
largest quantity ever to be held in vessels of this shape and material.
Thus, prior to intellectual content the work breaks new ground through
its contention with a sheer physical magnitude. For this reason the
symbolic weight of its fluid element looms even larger as it surrounds a
pair of quasi-automobiles which rise and fall in their vertical
caskets, as discussions of entropy commonly invoke an ‘all-encompassing’
measure.12 The titanic scale of Formula is matched by the other works in the thousand square metre exhibition space. At over three metres tall and sixteen metres long Duchamp Funeral 3 is the largest painting that Adrian Ghenie he has ever produced. Furthermore, Ryoichi Kurokawa’s Octfalls (2011) and Hans Op de Beeck’s immersive Location 7
(2011) also occupy great spatial volumes. In this respect the
extravagant rhetoric of Ponomarev’s curatorial text/manifesto plays out
on the material level. Nevertheless, the exhibition’s concern with
extension does not constitute an unreflective performance of virility
and obsessive control. In fact, all these constructions are deployed as
specters of limitation and demise; effectively, as ghost ships.
The clearest manifestation of this propositional linkage between energy and death is apparent in Duchamp Funeral 3,
which depicts the eponymous artist’s cadaver laid out in a decorous
coffin recalling the cult scenography of Lenin’s tomb in Red Square. The
resemblance is both intentional – following Ghenie’s previous portrayal
of the latter’s corpse – and suggestive. Vladimir Ilyich rarely slept.
Isaak Brodsky’s Lenin at Smolny would have us believe that he was
even too busy to remove the white dustcovers from furniture in his
dacha before getting down to the business of dispatching communiqués
that would give sense to anarchy – new order to the radically chaotic
socium. So preternaturally busy, so engaged with the building of a new
world was he that mortality would have to wait – from 1924 his mummified
person lay in state for all to see, apparently motionless but still
‘acting’ on the Soviet Union; even today, working on contemporary
Russian public life. Through his painterly act of refiguration Ghenie
recognizes that Duchamp is likewise undead, just one of many revenants
which – like the spectre of entropy – shape our lifeworld.
Unquestionably, death moves us.
Other works in this exhibition explore the mortal pathos of the
Herculean agenda through architectural metaphors. In his memoirs Giacomo
Casanova noted the rarity of gardens in Venice.13
However, the masonry of the city’s many palazzos imitates flora,
comprising sculpted foliage, flowers and bark. Ruskin outlined the
breadth of such details in his Stones of Venice.14
Bearing this in mind, the city must be viewed as a stone garden. Every
garden is an exercise in reducing the complex distribution of naturally
occurring life to an island of relative orderliness and simplicity. One of a Thousand Ways to Defeat Entropy proceeds according to this observation, addressing manmade environments in general.
The mere relativity of a garden’s orderly composition with
respect to the entropic principle can be a fact either more or less
repressed through symbolic and spatial design. The degree to which
natural complexity and disorder is acknowledged effects a corresponding
register of cosmic pathos. In unreflective arrangements bad faith is
most apparent. Such is the thrust of Hans Op de Beeck’s Location 7.
This ‘total installation’ stages an archetypical suburban garden in
monotone as an object for contemplation. The viewer enters the work by a
staircase which leads to a living room filled with the banal
accoutrements of domestic life – cups, a bin, etc. – all rendered in
grey concrete. In the middle of this space a chesterfield sofa is
positioned in front of a window. From this vantage point the viewer
surveys a dull garden vista – a grey series of tables and chairs, a grey
barbecue, grey rubbish bags and the detritus from some kind of party,
next to a sliver of grey grass surrounding a grey pond. It is as if some
Vesuvius has frozen anywhere Western Europe in ash.
Op de Beeck’s concrete ‘evocation’ of a garden can only be seen from a
single position, the window through which it is viewed functioning as a
picture frame. In so doing the installation stages unified perspective –
invented during the renaissance and, consequently, allied to
rationalism – whose implication is control. The lack of colour in Location 7
seems to indict this scopic regime, echoing Goethe’s complaint against
the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn: ‘Mendelssohn treats beauty as
entomologists treat butterflies. He catches the poor animal, he pins it
down, and as its exquisite colours drop off, there it lies, a lifeless
corpse under the pin. This is aesthetics!’.15 Along such lines, Location 7’s
rectilinear plan, symmetry and formal balance, as well as its
subordination of plants and water to shapes corresponding to
architecture critiques a traditional occidental approach to garden
design – privileging stasis. The artist has said that this garden is
supposed to be ‘typical’ in so far as it is ‘very structured and
closed-in’. Representing a highly ‘tamed’ piece of the natural
environment it is, he asserts, nothing more than a failed suppression of
entropy and, therefore, a ridiculous index of human vanity. Such an
aesthetic denial may be characterized as the post-romantic
pseudo-sublime. Sitting on a grey sofa overlooking a prosaic vista the
‘presumable character’ constitutes a bathetic descendent of Caspar David
Friedrich’s Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog.
Location 7 also recalls Robert Smithson’s comments on lugubrious
‘urban sprawl and the infinite number of housing developments of the
postwar boom’ whose defining features are vapidity and dullness, whose
elements – such as pathetic gardens – announce a ‘future of humdrum
practicality’. The work encapsulates this urban desert of ‘null
structures and surfaces’ but whereas Smithson upheld sterile qualities
as a symptom of the entropic end-state – stillness brought on by total
loss of useable energy – Op de Beeck deploys them as a catalyst for
meditation upon the dynamic aspect of the entropic process.17
At the centre of his petrified garden, in the middle of an oversized
pond, a fountain bubbles and rushes. Likewise, Ponomarev’s Formula
sets water against what Marc Augé has termed typical ‘non-places’ of
‘supermodernity’: highways encircling suburbs containing many a Location 7 – perhaps the quintessential expression of Smithson’s putative ‘architecture of entropy’.18
In the former work liquid is substituted for the inert concrete of the
road, verticality for flatness – echoing Joseph Brodsky’s remark that
water unsettles the principle of horizontality.19 Both operations constitute a reflection upon Venice, with its waterways, as a fateful mirror.
The metaphorical current continues in Ryoichi Kurokawa’s piece, which is
closely related to Norbert Wiener’s image of unstoppable entropy –
Niagara Falls.20
Rather than staging (super)modern scenography as an absurd denial of
flowing disorder Kurokawa posits a synthesis between nature and digital
structures, describing Octfalls as the technological successor to the Japanese garden.21
In production, complex sonic and visual algorithms generated by running
water are ‘traced’ by his own custom computer program before being
edited and arranged for broadcast on numerous monitors and speakers. In
this way entropic flux serves as a co-author. At the level of
spectatorship, Kurokawa also engineers a counterpoint to the monological
vision parodied in Location 7. The elements of his
self-described ‘garden’ surround the viewer, its LCD screens distributed
in front, behind and alongside him/her at various heights. In these
alternate locations representations of waterfalls and other natural
scenes flicker on and off with corresponding soundtracks and numerous
degrees of digital and sonic distortion approaching white noise, so that
at any particular moment a complete view of the (un)natural landscape
is impossible.22
The spectator is framed by this multiperspectival environment and not
separated from it – a floating eye in a whirling excess of possible
impressions. Though the sense effect is disorienting its conceptual
payload is, in fact, reorientation – a drawing attention to oneself as a
hollow vessel in a shifting manifold, a site of only partial control
and comprehension.
Kurokawa’s attempt at synthetic contention with flux calls to mind
Ghenie’s comments on his painterly process and, specifically, the
dynamic nature of his liquid medium. Paint is, he states, ‘basically
uncontrollable’, having its own entropic ‘autonomy’; through its drips
and splashes disorder is ‘communicating with you’. In his view the most
appropriate response to this phenomenon is dialogue – an altered course
or, one may suggest, the good sense not to swim against its current.
Notwithstanding this practical attitude, Ghenie pursues a figurative
destination. Perhaps, therefore, the most appropriate nautical metaphor
for his practice is not swimming but the movement of a sailing boat
travelling against the wind.23
In light of this image one must note that Venetian artists were among
the first to paint on canvas, and that their uptake of this material was
conditioned by a surplus supply of ship sails. Continuing with this
mimetic tack, let us recognize the continuum between the sail and the
shroud, which returns us to both the white drapes of Lenin at Smolny
and the painted fabric swathe adorning Duchamp’s coffin. All warriors
with cosmic noise, such as those who would go to war with painting in
the name of all-controlling intellect, must be killed in action.
*
Art writers have made quixotic and misrepresentative use of entropy since Rudolf Arnheim’s seminal text Entropy and Art (1971).24
Not least, because they have lacked adequate scientific training. For
this reason they have been advised by scientists them to move on to
another topic. But this is not so easily done. Entropy is a physical law
and, as such, an inescapable condition. Furthermore, its definition in
the field of information theory indicates that our abuse of the term may
be predestined, as redundant data and ‘noise’ necessarily increases as a
discourse continues.25 Or, as it has been put elsewhere, ‘all information, and that includes anything that is visible, has its entropic side.26 Wiener has also taken up this thread.27
Accordingly, the entropic process occurs at the level of culture, where
the scientific utility of a given concept – including entropy itself –
is transposed into relatively ‘useless’ or false images. Our slippery
way with metaphor – including our mixing of metaphors – pays the
ultimate tribute to this liquid meaning, and any further apology that we
may owe can only take the form of Joseph Brodsky’s preamble to his
autobiographical ruminations on Venice:
Having risked the charge of depravity, I won’t wince at
that of superficiality either. Surfaces – which is what the eye
registers first – are often more telling than their contents […] If I
get sidetracked, it is because being sidetracked is literally a matter
of course here and echoes water. What lies ahead, in other words, may
amount not to a story but a flow of muddy water “at the wrong time of
year.” At times it looks blue, at times gray or brown; invariably it is
cold and [undrinkable]. The reason I am engaged in straining is that it
contains reflections, among them my own.28
The author of these words is interred in San Michele, across the lagoon
from the Arsenale, and the waters that touch him meet the walls of our
exhibition site. For this reason, let us comprehend his manner of
(self)reflection more deeply – if that is the right word. To do so,
another voice from beyond the grave proves useful: Heraclitus. Long
before the stillness of the ‘ultimate future’ entropy is experienced as a
dynamic quality. The Second Law guarantees a unidirectional movement
from a higher degree of usable energy to less, from simple arrangements
of information to complexity, improbable to probable, order to disorder.
In this respect it stipulates change in physical circumstances, like a
river flowing away from us into the future.29
Bearing this in mind, a particular interpretation of the philosopher’s
doctrine of flux allows us to conceptualize its quasi-paradoxical
‘defeat’. He famously stated ‘On those stepping into rivers staying the
same other and other waters flow’.30
The most profound implication of this claim is that we call a body of
water a river precisely because it consists of changing waters.31 As one commentator has it, ‘Here constancy and change are not opposed but inextricably connected’ – some things are
by virtue of their varying constituent matter. Put otherwise,
high-level material realities supervene on lower-level material flux. By
this token, entropy is defeated by every supervening entity. However,
perhaps an even higher form of victory is secured through their
reflection upon the substrate: at the height of our powers, in the
concrete geography of the non-place, near mummified ideologies, on TV
screens, there is always flow.