All images have a physical presence. Even in our time of fugitive, digital pictures; images require a body. Images in this sense are similar to other symbiotic relationships. Their bodies are completed by the receiver. It is a presence manifested between two entities. A picture posted on Instagram requires a server farm, several computers and your particular phone to come into being. It is high time we stopped thinking of the proliferation of images as throw away. They may be spectral: both viral and addictive; unresolved phantoms but they take up space psychically and physically.
The metaphor of the uploading of an evergreen consciousness that can be moved into upgraded bodies haunts our imaginations and fictions. Early in the internet age, The Matrix by the Wachowskis imagined a hardwired port that went into our brains. Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) is hooked up to a mainframe as instructional software floods his brain with martial arts expertise. This fantasy ignores the hard yards of muscle and bone memory acquired through physical practice. In other words, its not a brain thing. The knowledge is stored in the body. Appropriate to his sensibility, David Cronenberg in his film Existenz created fleshy interfaces for virtual reality that looked like the innards of a half-formed homunculus. In those early days, the internet, even in fantasy, required hardware. Tech designers have done all they can in the intervening years to sell us a fantasy of a “cloud” and have done away with ports, wires and buttons. It’s all sleek, invisible as air and a massive con job. Walk down any street anywhere today, and while not the grotesqueries of Cronenberg, we live in a cyborg world. Tablets and phones glued to people’s hands, ear buds popped into the ears and all attention focused on the aforementioned spectral image world.
Ideas of a spirit or consciousness separate from a physical body is nothing new. The splitting of spirit and matter, body and mind, flesh and soul have long occupied human cultures; particularly those cultures that radiate out from the Near East and Mediterranean. The Judeo-Christian or Abrahamic religions make a speciality of the split. The definitions of these three words: body, soul and spirit can be slippery depending on what tradition you are engaged in. Carl Jung in his posthumously released Red Book engages in a lengthy conversation with his soul. The experience is recorded in paintings and drawn text. For Jung the soul was more substantial than spirit. Spirit was more of a collective wind that blew in the direction of the times. He spoke of “The Spirit of the Times” and “The Spirit of the Depths”. The Spirit of the Times is the contemporary and superfluous. The Spirit of the Depths is far deeper and doesn’t respond to the fickleness of fashion.
“The spirit of this time whispered to me: This supreme meaning, this image of God, this melting together of the hot and the cold, that is you and only you.” But the spirit of the depths spoke to me: “You are an image of the unending world, all the mysteries of becoming and passing away live in you.If you did not possess all this, how could you know?”
This split of body and spirit has a bearing on how images are received in a culture. Central to the Torah and Old Testament is the story of the Golden Calf. It illustrates the sin of worshipping graven images (false gods and idols). Moses returns late from Mount Sinai to find his people reveling around a golden statue of a calf. This is a big no-no to a deity who is a one-god-show. Yahweh is probably a little insecure given that he is a sky god who has dispensed with the rest of his pantheon and claimed all creation as his. Perhaps his fear is that if people start recognizing the soul in images and artworks they might start remembering their old myths and reconnect with the many voiced chorus of the world. Out of this prohibition came a very particular iconoclasm whose contemporary echoes come in many flavors.
The truth is, images do have soul. They have power. It is why despots, religious fundamentalists and self-appointed cultural watchdogs are always trying to tame and suppress the imaginal. Images are shape-shifters. No matter how one tries to domesticate them they can revert into wild indeterminacy. In 2020, when the focus of social justice protests were Confederate monuments, it points to this truth. The monuments are connected to a place and a history. They are specific embodiments of a particular idea. It is why the “disembodied” viral image is so troubling. Those pictures are placeless, floating like toxic particulates that allude all filters. These zombie images infect quietly without any symbiotic nutrition.
Consider the Paleolithic cave art of sites like Lascaux and Chauvin. We mostly know those through reproduction. I am very grateful to know of their existence. Access to Chauvin is severely limited and an influx of tourists damaged the walls of Lascaux. Either way, to enter them now would require the mediation of technology: electric lights, video, camera flashes. Try to imagine the caves in their original context. You enter into a hole in the earth. As you descend into total darkness, the cold air smells different. The walls constrict around you. Then you emerge into a chamber lit by firelight. Werner Herzog calls this experience “proto-cinema”. The drawings hug the shape of the cave walls. The images are indeed alive. The line work and pigmented shapes recall the animate world aboveground. These pictures must be experienced with the full body.
For thousands of years of art making; place and body are central. In rock art throughout the Great Basin and desert Southwest of the United States, images are etched into and drawn on boulders, rock overhangs and shallow caves. We don’t know their full purpose and meaning any more. What is true is that the pictures were records of the social and psychic world of the peoples who drew them. They are placed in the truest sense of the word. The images are leavened by story and the story elucidates place and place anchors the image. They are manifestations of bodily experience and the invisible threads of connection. This doesn’t mean that pictures don’t evolve with new context, but it does point to the necessity of a material body of an image to speak to something ineffable. Spirit is always tethered to the stony thusness of matter.
Just showing up is no guarantee for the temple bell to ring. Once a few years ago while doing a myth telling workshop in Devon I caught a ride with a friend and fellow participant back to London. We decided to go past Glastonbury Tor. Glastonbury has loomed large in my imagination for many years. Reading different versions of the Grail story, diving deep into Arthurian lore, not to mention loads of W.B. Yeats who frequented the town. This was a callback to that first visit to the Yale Art Gallery and the medieval section from high school. The tor has many layers of occupation and spiritual meaning as the highest point in the area. One can gain a full 360 degree view. As we got closer I realized that my heavy breakfast was ready to move on to its next phase of existence. There were no restrooms along the road. I asked my friend if there might be a public restroom near the tor. She said she thought so. There wasn’t. I walked the long stairs and path up to the tor. It wasn’t very crowded. It was a perfect sunny day. I couldn’t have asked for a better time to experience this place. However, it was getting more difficult to concentrate. I hastily took a few pictures. I made my way down the other side into town looking for anywhere I might relieve myself. This was a much bigger operation than finding a tree to hide behind. Finally a pub about to open let me use their toilet. Sadly we didn’t have time to head back up to the tor. My memory of that sacred place is clouded by the need to take a shit. It doesn’t get any more bodily than that. We stopped for one of the most delicious ciders I’ve ever had and were back on our way. Whether or not I will ever return I have no idea.
I will close out this section with a few thoughts about memes. Lately, aside from everything else going on in the world, I have been getting very crabby about social media. Memes in particular. My Instagram feed seems to be full of the tired trope of someone playing two parts of a conversation on TikTok, someone yelling at me to perform political outrage correctly, raccoons (I can’t get enough of them) and memes. The meme originally referred to a biological phenomenon of viruses that spread through imitation. Now it refers to little bits of repurposed cultural flotsam and jetsam that spread exponentially. They’re like little shots of meth. This image world (and I’m sure there’s a Media Studies PhD and/or fifteen year old to tell me why I’m wrong) in this digital sphere is a bleached out, denuded landscape. The meme exemplifies disembodied infection. They are addictive. I find myself when I could have read a chapter of a book having just scrolled mindlessly.(Except the raccoons. Did you see the ones chasing bubbles?) If we want to experience that moment of the temple bell ringing, we need to reclaim our bodies and bring them into alignment with the material world. Images may be abstractions and fabrications but they manifest through medium, through place and body.
Next week I will finish the essay with fresh insights from the Frieze Art Fair in Los Angeles.