These are two images from the inestimable BibliOdyssey. They're from the commemorative volume, Sammlung aller Denkmale des Westphälischen Friedens, published to celebrate the Treaty of Westphalia. Westphalia is generally viewed as the landmark historical moment in the creation of the modern state system.Look at the images. They're... freaky,... to use a term of art. I don't possess the capacity to contextualize and narrate the individual images, but it strikes me that our own historical moment is most likely as flush with allegory and symbolism. Our supposed contemporary advantage is reflexive self-criticism, that the history of criticism collapses in on itself in the postmodern age and we find a hall of mirrors running throughout humanity, a source of endless linguistic games, criticism, the production of theory, irony. But we are most likely just as freaky, heads and institutions filled with allegory, symbolism, fantasy, of which irony is a puerile defensive reaction in the face of our own incomprehension of who we are and where we think we're going. The arrogance of modernity / postmodernity, however, is that we think we're on top of it all.
Can we imagine a contemporary moment such as Westphalia, celebrated in these images? That is, one in which we could celebrate with all our powers of fantasy and imagination the coming of a new world?
4 comments:
Where does the artistic expression exist that tries to capture our historical moment? It is missing.A billion images a minute flood our consciousness but which ones have meaning?
Thank you, that's an interesting development of thought.
The arguably equivalent event of modern times that came to my mind was the dismantling of apartheid.
Art has been thoroughly democratized since Westphalia so in addition to the neverending flow of internet flotsam, we lack a cultural elite who could lead an artistic charge towards an allegorical portrayal of any single event, no matter how significant. It's now all satellite movements.
So I can neither imagine the end of apartheid represented in mannerist symbolism nor could I imagine a century and a half of allegorical renderings of the event moving forward.
Perhaps the equivalent would involve a collection of myriad styles that together would represent a similar artistic assembly of deeper meanings. Or not..
But I do love the freaky.
Satellite movements, yes. A billion things in orbit... but around something? Or a small-ish set of somethings?
I wonder if the dispersal itself is centered on something intimately shared that we don't yet understand.
Satellite movements, yes. A billion things in orbit... but around something? Or a small-ish set of somethings?
I wonder if the dispersal itself is centered on something intimately shared that we don't yet understand.
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