Mirrored Futures
Ashraf Jamal
Two visions, one world. Understanding how Cassian Robbertze and Paula Anta converged, is to understand the nexus of catastrophe and hope which, indissolubly, binds all of us. Ours is a plastic present, a plastic future. We are all ‘plastiglomerates’, amalgams of organic and inorganic matter. Knowing this is the sum not only of our demise, our fatality, but also, wondrously, the means through which to grasp the ever-evolving understanding of what it means to be human, and belong to an intra-species realm in which the synthetic, vegetal, animal, psychological, political and spiritual, are reconciled. ‘Only connect!... Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.’ E.M. Forster’s memorable words, from his novel Howards End, affirms the vital importance of synthesis. Exaltation overrides fragmentation. Which is why – ethically, humanly – we must embrace the rub of the dead and the living, synthetic and organic, if we are to understand this historical moment and our futures.
In 1985 Donna Haraway published ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ in which she rejected the false distinction designed to separate the animal, human, and machine. ‘A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.’ This understanding, today, is commonplace. Reality and invention are one. The world is perpetually unmade and remade. Neither a social reality nor a social fiction is ever static, ever finite. It is the ambiguous interpenetration of the natural and man-made that shapes our being. Production and Being-as-Becoming are coterminous. As Haraway prophesied, or rather, saw in her midst, was a world in which ‘we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids.’ Any future ‘transformation’ required this complex of speculation-invention-fabrication. Intriguingly, Haraway notes that ‘The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.’ This complex formulation deserves unpacking. As cyborgs, we lack purity, transparency, honesty. The moral ideal, typically assumed to define goodness – the righteous being – is now compromised, traduced, or cancelled out by the inescapability of an intimate, contaminated, perverse complex in which irony, reflexivity, and radical doubt override any transcendent vision. This new-world vision is, for Haraway, ‘completely without innocence’, this is because it understands aberration as constitutive, paradox as normative.
Now, ‘Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other’. Conditions and states are no longer polarized, hierarchies no longer functional. Hence, the emphasis on contaminants or perverted hybrids. In our world the Vitruvian Man is delusional. There is no centre, no governing centrifuge, no pivot about which – humanly, morally – one might turn. Rather, all boundaries have been breached, all divisions overturned. It is imprecision and fluidity that reigns. ‘Writing, power, and technology’ is, now, an exhausted triumvirate. Today, we find ourselves in the raw midst of ‘transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities’ – ‘fractured identities’ are a given. Which is why, ironically, we find ourselves caught in a global reaction against imprecision and the toxic return of fascistic certainties such as race, gender, sexuality, and class – redundancies from a prior age conspiratorially obsessed with polarity. Is this reactionary revolt a sign of our incapacity for change? A fatal reversion? An appalling denialism? This, surely, is the assumption that informs Pankaj Mishra’s book, Age of Anger. Subtitled A History of the Present, it argues that ‘global rage, extremism, and political instability stem from the failed promises of modern, Western-led civilization, which promotes intense individualism and competition while producing widespread humiliation and resentment.’ This is certainly the case. But, perhaps something far more threatening is at work which overrides individualism, and renders any subjective or collective response deficient? After all, as Haraway reminds us, the very conditions which fostered Western civilization are null. There is no human-centric position from which to narrate our world. Ours is a radically hybridized sphere in which anger – the reactive attempt to stop the inescapable advance of a technologically shaped mortality – is futile.
If Cassian Robbertze and Paula Anta have, singularly and together, offered a response to this paradoxical moment, it is because neither quite imagines that one can transcend the contaminated world which inhabits us. Neither claims an alternate economy, other than one snagged in the complexity of this hybrid moment. What matters, what remains critical, is how and why each artist engages with the world, and how each understands the place of art therein. In the case of Robbertze, what intrigues him is the notion of ‘technology as a religious artefact’. He is not only preoccupied with the impact of faith on our technological present moment, but also with ‘what technology might mean to us in the future’. It is this sweeping grasp of time – our past and our future-present – that guides his creative expression. If technology is paramount, it is because ‘most of the thinking happens in a digital realm’. If software is the point of departure for sculpture, it is because technology, then and now, is the sum of knowledge-practice-system, because human need is indissolubly connected to invented solutions. If, then, Robbertze chooses to understand this connection as sacral, it is because he does not separate science from belief, method from hope, practice from invention.
As a sculptor who fuses technologies, be they digital or haptic, Robbertze wholly understands the significance of plasticity – the creation of solid forms through processes of melting, molding, and extrusion. If the initial work is produced digitally, virtually, its transference from the second to the third dimension, from surface to volume, idea to its extended actuation, is as compelling. Digital creation requires the ‘muscle memory of sculpting’, says Robbertze. This logic may seem far removed from the vision of an ‘angel’ extruded from marble, as Michelangelo Buonarotti famously remarked – Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it. I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free – however, when reconsidered, the route from the digital to the artisanal possesses as compelling a trajectory. Here, stone is the digital template, the hand a muscle memory. As for the conceit of extraction – the discovery of an essence within, the exploitation of a resource – it is a vision and practice which is markedly different to Robbertze’s creative realm in which accretion-assemblage-layering is the means through which a sculpture is built. However, while there may seem to be no imagined interiority – no imagined ‘angel’, no hermeneutical fantasy – there is, nevertheless, an acute understanding of the making of a world.
‘Nothing compares with the physical form’, the artist declares, on seeing a digital conception being realized physically, in the round. Further processes await, the aggregated molds, once sutured, then scored with clay, are followed by swathes of silicon, a ‘fiber glass jacket’, then a waxed joining of seams and a ceramic shell, into which bronze is poured, the shell removed, the metal soldered. Fabrication is key. Every component is inseparable from the next. While there is no pure or ecstatic revelation, which we imagine to be the case when a sculptor works with stone or wood, there is, nevertheless, the profundity of the shift from a drafted vision to its build-up in the physical realm, the pleasure of an accreted moment, the fulfillment on realizing a whole which, after Henri Bergson, is produced through movement and which is fundamentally open. Totality as a transcendent signifier plays no part, and neither does the hermeneutical fetish of interiority. Rather, we find ourselves in a simulacral zone, that is, a zone of creation defined through aggregation and accretion. There is no a priori angel. Instead, as Haraway noted at the outset, we are dealing with ‘a cybernetic organism, a hybrid … creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.’ If we cannot disinter reality from invention, it is because to do so would be to deny the complexity of the present moment, negate the aggregative core that shapes and informs Cassian Robbertze’s vision.
The works exhibited – figures all – are post-classical. They echo a peculiarly Greek past and its reiteration during the Renaissance, then reboots this aesthetic and ecology in the present moment. Now, the hubristic synthesis of Reason and Beauty, the foundation of Greek Art, is questioned. If we can no longer adhere to the adage – beauty is truth, truth beauty – it is because the essential has been supplanted by simulacra and affect. Robbertze’s sculptures with telling titles such as Abdication of Identity, I grow numb, The Artificial Prophet, acknowledge our aberrant complex. ‘Abdication of Identity is a bronze sculpture depicting a suited figure in quiet submission, holding his own head in his hands … The gesture is not one of struggle, but of acceptance. The figure does not resist; instead, he willingly participates in his own transformation’, for now, a television screen is connected to the neck. In Robbertze’s world, there is no room for reaction, no stance from which one is either for or against. Polarity is null. Instead, it is a fusion of the human and technology that issues forth a cybernetic being. Certainly, one can see echoes of Hamlet reflecting upon mortality via the skull in his hand, or Rodin’s The Thinker. However, the Cartesian fantasy – I think therefore I am – which informs both visions, is, in Robbertze’s world, rendered impertinent. Rather, new technologies and a new being become the markers for an ever-evolving world.
Paula Anta is a photographer and a sculptor. In her series titled Knots, Anta considers the relationship of art and nature ‘as an environment to which we belong, represented by vegetal clusters that, after a chaotic and random appearance, discover the existence of a universal order’. This vision in which chaos is recovered in order is a projected ideal. As such, it is teleological, for it supposes that the feral can be cohered, a narrative put in place to answer the wildness of life. However, as Gilles Deleuze reminded us, systems only ever appear after the fact, and, as such, they remain an imposition, and, furthermore, that they never quite work. The notion of a ‘universal order’ – a theological fantasy – is such an imposition. However, notwithstanding my radical doubt regarding an integrated and core order, lets, rather, stay the course. As Anta resumes, ‘Plant clusters form in an ordered manner…. The beauty of this chaotic order … lies in the fact that it can be found everywhere, from the most microscopic, innermost reaches of ourselves to scales beyond our imagination’. God is in the details. We are the sum of ‘neural connections’ in the body and mind, in the world and in nature, the sum of ‘the myriad mass of lines created by energy connections … found in the movement of gravitationally connected galaxies’, realms both distant and innermost. However, in declaring that ‘What is outside is also deep within us’, Anta also affirms that realms are interpenetrative. As such, separateness is delusional. Subdivision is infinite, both microscopic and macroscopic.
By staging her ‘myriad lines’ – organic, biological, constellatory – against a sheet of gold, Anta announces the sacred or sacramental. Her variegated fretwork of lines emanates through light that is energetic, illuminating, meteorological, sublime. All importantly, the light is also reflexive – returning us to the artist’s medium, photography, for which light is considered an ‘essence’. Notwithstanding the artist’s idealized vision, one cannot ignore that it is also knotted, and, as such, a vision that is fastened, therefore vulnerable. The very sum of rope, for example, is the sum of a myriad threads. Nothing is entirely itself. Everything is connected. As to whether one chooses to see these connections holistically – theologically – or not, is another matter. If knots are fastenings, they are also gnarled, even arthritic. Moreover, they announce a physical tension. It is these dispositions which, for me, amplify the rich complexity of Anta’s vision. Patterns are never fixed, never finite. Furthermore, a photographic image excludes far more than it includes, and, as such, is prohibitive and exclusionary, in the very instant that it attests to the integrity of what is seen. As for the use of gold? One cannot deny the freightage of prestige, purity and enlightenment, typically associated with the metal and sign. But what of ‘fool’s gold’? What of illusion?
And what of a vision that is pluriversal rather than universal? A world within worlds? A world in which hierarchy no longer pertains? In which the arborescent is supplanted by the rhizome? In which there is no origin and no end, only an endless bifurcation? Is this not, perhaps, a more accurate understanding of Paula Anta’s Knots? For as Deleuze reminds us, we must, now, grasp the non-hierarchical, the interconnected, that which is irreducible to the fortuitously contiguous or entire. Looking at Paula Anta’s series, it is this irreducible flux that overrides all attempt at composure. Rather, it is the animistic force of nature – ‘the belief that all things – animals, plants, rocks, weather systems, and inanimate objects – possess a distinct spiritual essence, soul, or consciousness’, which informs Anta’s vision. One which, in my view, cannot be resolved, but which must, perforce, remain gnarled and knotted – if only because the fragmental and the total are never mutually exclusive states. And because, in our cybernetic moment, the distinction between the inanimate and animate is disputable. Light refracts. Spines crack. Borders, always, are transgressed.
4
‘For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me’, writes Vladimir Nabokov. ‘With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist’. Here, an imagined essence and a simulacral fact exercises Nabokov. What matters is not the Cartesian fantasy of self-presence – I think therefore I am – but the acute realization that we are phantasmal. If this view is eerily critical today, it is because truth has become a ghost, lies dangerously normative. Against this grotesque theatre, however, there remains the challenge regarding how a given artist, in this case Cassian Robbertze and Paula Anta, position themselves. If Nabakov’s realization has grown all the more acute today, in a time embattled, in which lies have metastasized and truth – the delusory grail – is contested, all the more must we ascertain the complexity of artistic expression. That Nabokov should elect the self as a ‘population of phantoms’ is unsurprising, given the acuity of our cultural drift away from all absolutes.
What then of ‘Mirrored Futures’? Are these refracted possibilities? Mere propositions? Returning to Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, the mainstay for this speculation, we come to realise, on the contrary, that it is precisely the impossibility of a self, a boundary, a definable place, that has come to distinguish what we think or imagine ourselves to be. As such, our futures cannot be known in advance, cannot be fixed. Rather, they must remain speculative and phantasmal. In this pluriverse art cannot assume a demagogic or messianic purpose, it cannot be entire. Rather, art must embrace the fragmental in the very instant that it strives to override it. This is evident in Cassian Robbertze’s transference of the creative act from the virtual to the actual, the digital to matter, though here it is perhaps more fitting to speak of differing yet connected matter. His are sculptures conceived in their imagined entirety then soldered in parts. Are they perhaps fragmental totalities? Certainly, Robbertze is careful to remind us that it is the sum of the parts that also matters, because the totality is indistinguishable from its faceted nature. Which is why I have noted, after Bergson, the significance of an open whole. As for Paula Anta’s Knots? Notwithstanding the artist’s idealized ‘universal’ vision – it is also the aggregative that matters. In Anta’s case, there remains the recognition of a rhizomatic world, conceived in pieces, despite the dream of some divine symmetry.
However, as I’ve stated at the outset, this vision has proven, increasingly, to be impermissible. This despite the resurgence of fundamentalisms worldwide. Rather, the world proposed here – our mirrored futures – is, at best, a realm that is densely woven, interpenetrative, knotted, smashed, simulacral, ironic and paradoxical. A world, after Donna Haraway, in which ‘we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids.’ A world, nevertheless, that maintains a belief in imagined futures and insists upon life, dream, hope – art.
Selected Bibliography
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, London: Bloomsbury, 1984.
Gilles Deleuze, ‘Rhizome’, A Thousand Plateaus, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
E.M. Forster, Howards End, London: Edward Arnold Publishers, 1910.
Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, Socialist Review, 1985.
Michelangelo, Sonnet 151 (c. 1530s).
Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger, London: Allen Lane, 2017.
Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye, Phaedra Publishers, 1965.
ASHRAF JAMAL is a Research Associate in the Visual Identities in Art and Design Programme, University of Johannesburg, and the International Institute of Art, University of the Free State. He is the author of numerous monographs and books, namely, Love themes for the wilderness, Predicaments of culture in South Africa, The Shades, In the World, Strange Cargo, and African Art: The Arak Collection, Looking into the mad eye of history without blinking. Jamal’s coedited book, The Thing Is … Objects in African Art, and memoir, Fact & Fiction, are forthcoming.