Modal Environs - Art as Expanding Microcosm
How Images Inhabit Aesthetic Ecosystems: A Dinosaur in a Contemporary Art Sale
Art of the Meme: Coping with the Religion of a Commercial Paradigm
MODAL ENVIRONS - ART AS EXPANDING MICROCOSM
Since the rise of modernism and the ensuing information age,
the role of art has undergone many shifts and adapted to many
societal changes in conjunction with the technological
advancements of media and communication that have developed
around them. At a fundamental level, our assessment of the
progress of art since then has been historically linear, with
the status of art left largely contingent upon the subjects of
culture, economy and media to support its value. Within the
digital age however, it can perhaps be easily accepted that the
ubiquitous influence of media —and the accelerated rate of
information transpiring through it— has had a great impact on
what this value means and how it is assessed. At this moment
when artistic culture has become both pluralistic and transient,
the model of linearity which has in the past justified art has
become undermined by changing perceptions of making and viewing
which have yet to be fully understood, yet
appear as aesthetic modalities synthesizing various criteria in
their individual arenas of engagement. It is through this
understanding of a modal, pluralistic approach within the
context of the late information age that the insufficiency of
the linear model begins to become clear, and the role of art as
a more expansive practice reveals potential to become
invigorated by its aesthetic, perceptual, emotional, and
humanistic depth.
An understanding of such “modal” culture found at present can be
gained from this essential premise: that our increased
familiarity with data, images, products, processes, methods,
genres and movements has generated a more “multi-polar”
perspective based upon the reconciliation of numerous
contingencies. In other words, as our capacity to manage more
complex modes of information and the sharing of experiences
increases through relational ways of thinking, we become more
engendered towards the communication of complex “worlds”. These
“worlds” are what we referred to with the term Modal Environs.
The Modal Environs acts through communicating a
'perceptographic' visage or corporeal image based on expressions
of content and the creation of context through an expanded,
aesthetic, and spatial field of sensibility. Mood, timbre, and
tone (in addition to physical materials themselves) become
elements to delineate an environment in the Modal Environs— a
sphere of sensation that extends beyond the limits of the work’s
physicality. As the linear mode of perception becomes less
reliable, and as life experienced through platforms of
information becomes more pluralistic, the Modal Environs acts a
means of producing an image of greater lasting potential; an
image formed in the language of visual reality and physical
space, whereas appealing to qualities of the imagination. It is
an image varying from the static appearance of everyday reality,
however, by maintaining an experiential operation manifesting as
the tactile performance of a perceptual construct, designed as
becoming veiled over what might be consider as conventional
reality. It is an image that is meant to somewhat replicate, yet
subvert, components of the commonplace into an atmospheric,
albeit more changeless, semblance of reality.
Fredric Jameson once wrote about how the rapid transposition of
present events through information media produced a certain type
of amnesia or forgetfulness.[1] There is enough suggested by our
increasing experience of this phenomenon through digital media
that our recollection, and immersion, of what we experience has
decreased. The premise of the Modal Environs, however, works in
opposition to this. Rather than to remain affected by the
phenomenology of transpiring information, the Modal Environs
works to bind immaterial things together through their aesthetic
gravity, creating a sensible aesthetic ecosystem of interrelated
things. Within this aesthetic "event-horizon", thus cleared of
the phenomenology described by Jameson, we are exposed to an
experience of things distilled in an ambience of lingering
sensations carried within the memory of our personal
experiences. Roland Barthes, in writing about photography
referred to this as the punctum, which in Latin
carries the meaning of a wound, or a mark left by a pointed
instrument. The punctum is the realm of the
personal, the place where the inner-world collides with outer
world. This outer world, conversely, is the studium—
the objective, social sphere where images and objects interact
and mingle. Through these two aesthetic modes, a reflexive means
of creating something more tangible might occur with greater
potential of merging the personal (subjective) with the public
(objective) sphere.
While our experience of perception in relation to
visual art continues to evolve through our increased capacity
of relational thinking, this experience of aesthetic modalities
allows our lexical capacity for their expression to become more
multi-dimensional. As explained by the philosopher Jordi
Claramonte:
"With the reintroduction of modal thinking we aim to explore an
ontology and a reasoning of a different order, as if we were
passing from a flat, two-dimensional world to a four-dimensional
one, from plane geometry to a historically deployed topology." 2
The creation of new “worlds” in relation to visual art, in other
words, has less to do with inventing “new forms” than it does
with changing our understanding of how we see things. By
accepting different modes of expression and different models for
doing things, the dimensions of art are expanded. By laying down
a foundation which accounts for plural contingencies, we
perceive a expanding microcosm accounting for art’s intrinsic,
humanistic, and expressive value that connects to a larger
collective sphere.
1 Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the
Postmodern, 1983-1998, published 1999.
2 Jordi Claramonte, An introduction to Modal Aesthetics, written
2016.