The new
When I speak of the new, I try to name that which transforms whatever it is into art. It marks the event which makes art visible, but as Lyotard says, "the visible of a vision without subject, the object of the eye of no one" (Lyotard, 1978: 56), because it refers to the impersonal, as in the emotion of art according to T. S. Eliot [1].
It belongs to no one; or rather, to the artwork itself. Nevertheless, it can only be brought into being by the subjectivity of the maker. At the same time, it is only perceptible from the subjectivity of a spectator. It makes real the intersubjective communication fostered by art, but it also expels us as subjects and becomes common heritage: if the artwork exists as artwork, it is because, after travelling through the maker's and viewer's subjectivity, it detaches from them. This is so because, in front the work of art, it is always obvious that, although it affects us personally, so does it affect everyone else. If the artwork is artwork, it is because it belongs to nobody in particular.
I distinguish the new from the novel. The capacity and power of art [2] allows, in the best cases, a renewal of forms, views, ideas, modes of feeling, etc. which constitutes a event of creation and as such, a transcendental event of resistance by reference to the origin [3].
That is, the new in art is not so much the novel, but the form taken on by something that has always been there, resisting the passing of time.
Following Nietzsche, Deleuze speaks of the event as an eruption of "the ill-timed" of "the out-of-date, the unknown that knocks on our door" [4]. What is new, while being a real event, struggles against its own time, and unrelated to the dynamics of novelty. The ethical associations of the new and the novel are very different. The novel is, above all, a contextual requirement: transgression and innovation are structural elements in the current age of cultural capitalism. Therefore, the effect of novelty as a planned result, whose reception causes surprise, corresponds more closely to the logic of innovation, which is to a great extent the logic of visual culture. On the contrary, the advent of the new has to do with the return of the same, with the re-encounter of something that could be conceptualized as the Real [5] in a Lacanian sense.
From Botticelli’s La Primavera to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon there is, perhaps, a change of intensity in the forces that they embody, probably an increase in violence due to a contextual requirement; but both artworks refer mainly to the same thing, to that which is beyond the expressed and expressable.
The new does not follow any particular formal pattern, but is characterised by its refusal to fit into any form of coding. It is, somehow, an untraceable sensation. On the flight from what can be codified, however, it does not appear as a natural fact that we can grasp without intermediation; on the contrary, it reveals the representational character of the artwork, insomuch as it creates a breach and distances itself from it. Any attempt to describe what distinguishes the new is necessarily insufficient, never entirely accurate, always partial. The new cannot be reduced to a set of new data. The new is the opposite of full formalization because it consists of a relationship between formal factors characterized by not closing in on itself and always remaining open to interpretation, open to the composition of new relationships between artwork and beholder.
It is a form in progress, constituted as such precisely at the time of reception, and in that sense, real, intensive information [6]. There is something in it that prevents it being crystallized in a definite figure. You could say that something, which rather would be nothing for its lack of concrete meaning, is the remnant of pre-individual remaining in the artwork as a sign of its process of individuation. Pre-individual refers to that which, in any process of differentiation and singularization, resists and remains as a residue of an ungraspable whole. Nothingness, again, is the outcome of the modulation of an infinite field of technical possibilities used at will, i.e., according to the dictates of a particular subject’s desire.
Perhaps too riskily, I will claim that the new is the particular way to embody, through the proper means in each instance, the Lacanian objet petit a. This object, in psychoanalysis, is a structural mechanism of our psyche which stands for the unattainable object of desire. While, by definition, it cannot have any figure, it appears as a hole in the sense of the art object, as what you cannot stop looking at because you are never fully able to glimpse it.
The new is not the uniqueness of a circumstantial gesture, but a complex construction. It always arises from a background of concrete reality, in specific times and places. Thus, it always becomes an event related to something, but from the moment of its emergence it achieves the metaphorical ability to be perceived as strange in different contexts. Because, although it gathers momentum within its context, the new appears when the artwork overreaches the determinations of its historical moment. The work of art would be a sign freed from all particular context [7], from any kind of “right” meaning. It exceeds all emotions, all interpretations leading to it and also all those that may arise from it. Speaking of painting, René Passeron says, "Nothing that is a subject-viewer, any term of subjectivity can rigorously define the painting, which is an absolute object, like a stone" (Passeron, 1978: 34). In other words, according to Deleuze and Guattari,"Art preserves, and is the only thing in the world that is preserved" (1993: 164).
As I said above, to break out of its context of origin, the work should always be something more than a mere extravagance or a set of these, more than an elementary destruction of given forms or mere sign of ambiguity. On the contrary, it should come close to constructed, positive nothingness [8] which guarantee its potential for transhistoricity or transculturality from its uniqueness. As Regis Debray says: "There is something profoundly subversive in not wanting to express anything" (Debray, 1994: 42).
In the emergence of the new there is always excess, so that it can never be reduced to its historical and material causes. If it could be reduced to them, it would be predictable, capable of encoding methodology, and would thus naturally cease to be a real event. The new can give us what Lacan says that love gives us: exactly nothing, that which it does not have.
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[1] "The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.” (Eliot, 2011).
[2] Following Menke, I distinguish capacity, related to tradition and community that allow the existence of art, and force, related to the ill-timed and pre-subjective character of creation. (Menke, 2010)
[3] Here I follow the ideas of M. Eliade on archaic man, which I carry over to this context to consider that the function of art has to do with, as he says : "The crude product of nature, the object fashioned by the industry of man, acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality. The gesture acquires meaning, reality, solely to the extent to which it repeats a primordial act.” (Eliade, 2000: 15)
[4] Reference from a text by J.L. Pardo quoting Nietzsche: "The ill-timed, the out of date; the evolution that splits off from history, the diagnosis that takes over from analysis in other ways. No, it is not about predicting, but about being alert to the stranger who knocks at our door." (Pardo, 2011a: 99-100.)
[5] The Real, for Lacan, is something that escapes symbolization. Along with the notions of the imaginary and the symbolic, it explains the structure of our psyche.
[6] In a passage from his The Open Work, Umberto Eco differentiates meaning and information. Information for him is linked to the original, to non-probability. Meaning, on the other hand, would address structural predictability in each step of a message. In any case, unpredictability should be determined in a foreseeable context. Otherwise, it cannot be more than noise. He concludes that "the information carried by a message (whether poetic or not) which has been intentionally organized will appear only as a very particular form of disorder, a “dis-order” which is such only in relation to a pre-existing order" (Eco, 1984: 69).
[7] As described by J.L. Pardo in Aesthetics Of The Worst (Pardo, 2011b).
[8] I use the word nothingness as an appropriate designation for the hole mentioned some paragraphs above. Nothingness, also, within the informative meaning that Bateson gives to what is missing, to zero. For him, what is not is also information: "I remind you that" zero "differs from" one "and can, therefore, trigger a response. The starving amoeba will become more active and go out to search for food; the growing plant will depart from the darkness, and the staff of the tax collection office will be alerted by the statement that you have not sent." (Bateson, 2002: 112).