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The Baroque and Modernity
Over the last hundred years the world has seen several historical epochs make comebacks. The 20th century was rich in actual and imagined parallels. Thanks to Umberto Eco we expected the return of the Middle Ages and got ready to trade in our VCRs for lances and plague remedies. Earlier, when a certain German dictator decided to build the Third Reich, he defined its aesthetic parameters with dreams of antiquity. While no one suggested a new Renaissance was at hand, old ones were found in nearly every vaguely important historical period. 'Baroque is back,' historians Massimo Chiavolella and Patrick Coleman announced two years ago. How, then, does the Baroque - the time of Pope Urban VIII, Rubens and Borromini - behave in our day?
The most precise answer to this question is also the vaguest. The Baroque appears indirectly, as a metaphor or (more rarely) a stylization. While all historical regimes use comparisons with previous historical epochs for propaganda, it is unlikely that a political leader now or in the near future would liken his country to Baroque Europe, a period marred by the corruption of Rome, the reign of the Barberinis (Maffeo in the role of Pope Urban VIII) and religious wars. The art of the time was no less diverse and confused than political events.
One artist would tend the fire in the brazier of the Renaissance, while another would put it out, engulfing his heroes in darkness. In the middle of this arises an international style, one that most of the great masters studied in Rome to gain a fluent command of the mythological arsenal of Christianity and paganism. It was about theatricality, or more precisely: the ability to change scenery depending on the location. And more broadly: life as a Technicolor dream. The Baroque is art without a hero. In the Baroque painting all figures are equal, or they create an uninterrupted pattern of muscles and folds. The contemporary artist also avoids depictions of the heroic, because he cannot find it in life.
The appearance of a hero distracts him from the task of surviving in an information war that occasionally becomes a religious one, such as in the case of the newspaper caricatures of Mohammed or the intellectual battle for parishioners. Through the dust of the battlefield no one can tell who is the barbarian (and discovering the barbaric in an opponent is one of the most important tasks of the classical world view).
In the 20th century, the beginning of Modern Times was used by Jose Ortega y Gasset in a 1915 essay on the Baroque. For today's reader, Ortega's thought process seems original. He felt the Baroque in the novels of Stendahl, and wrote that 'the most precise definition of a Dostoyevsky novel would be an ellipsis drawn in the air with a single stroke of the hand.' His attempt to construct a dialogue between the logorrhea of the Russian classic's protagonists and the voluptuous lines of Barberini's Roman churches is clever, but nothing more than that. The date of the essay's appearance is interesting: the uneasy word 'Baroque' comes at the height of World War I from the lips of a Spaniard, whose native country saw the most passionate incarnation of the style.
Ninety years later, Chiavovella and Coleman found baroque structures in Peter Greenaway's films. Historians believe Alain Rene's film 'Last Year in Marienbad' was a powerful manifestation of the 'will to the Baroque,' particularly Alain Robe-Grillet's soliloquy set in the Baroque's No. 1 specimen - the Sun King's palace and park in Versailles. The formal devices of avant-garde literature, from uneven narrative to mechanical repetition, were framed in the luxuries of Baroque order, in an atmosphere associated with the etiquette of palace receptions.
They also believe that the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze had good reason to allude to this epoch in his book The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Deleuze's book is a prose poem about the fold as both cause and effect of the Baroque world view. Yet the philosopher does not mention the Baroque's most famous fold, which we see on the torso of Rubens' wife Helene Fourmen in the celebrated portrait of her in a fur coat.
As in the West, in Russia this term is used to indicate a mannered and spiky artistic product. We see elements of the Baroque in contemporary architecture, particularly the curves of Zaha Hadid's interiors, which for Muscovites recall the boldest moves of Menshikov's tower. But no one would think of citing Baroque art to the letter. Modern man's ability to concentrate on details is too weak to recognize the abundance of Baroque dÊcor in contemporary life. The Baroque as an art of the carefully planned ensemble, the synthesis of painting and architecture, exists today in the genres of installation and video projection.
Dreams and fictions - the subject matter of the Baroque - are also in demand today. In the early 20th century, the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg boldly defined art as an intellectual operation, and dismissed the Baroque (along with Romanticism) as a fanciful distraction. In our time, Kazimir Malevich's desire to vanish in the 'zero form' and Andre Breton's attempts to make the subconscious speak have been conferred the status of complex hallucinations. The first to speak of this were, of course, postmodern philosophers. They saw the world as a text, and language as a means of subjugating it to their own will, since the perception of the world as a text assumes the revolutionary possibility of rewriting it, or at least analyzing it and choosing almost any depth of critical vision. If all the parameters making up personality - race, sex, behavior - are the result of a social contract, a construct that consists of several rational layers, then analysis could be endless.
The transformation of inactive representational systems into theatrical props seems more productive. We are more interested in learning the everyday details of the search for truth, than the essence of platonic philosopher. The actor who gives the most convincing rendition of a play on antique themes wins. Whether it will be a drama or a comedy depends on the director's personal inclination. Contemporary art no longer feels the diktat of innovation. But the pathos of deconstruction has moved ever farther into the background. The return of painting represents in part a phenomenon of the rebirth of interest in the work of art as a stage. Only it is affect not only by figures, but entire styles as well. Besides, a painting physically fits an interior quite well.
Consumer society, meanwhile, is deeply theatrical. On various levels of social hierarchy various systems of scenery are accepted. Most often, a person's performance of his social role is impossible without carefully planned accessories. For example, the offices of high-ranking managers are designed in the style of Napoleon III, elite apartments are filled with noble varieties of wood in a stylized Japanese design, and democratic interiors feature a mix of the avant-garde and the bourgeois in multiple variations of Ikea. Here, the realm of Swedish socialism, an extra whorl costs an additional thousand rubles. The poorest social strata cannot afford to save up to buy furniture; their nostalgia for the Soviet era comes partly from continuing to live in the scenery of those times.
Therefore, a contemporary artist has no choice but to know his mythologies. Since the grandiose diversity of myths in Rubens' arsenal, the number of them has grown substantially. We have at our disposal not only pagan and Christian narratives, but also the abridged Asian philosophy and the findings of contemporary anthropology, and myths born before our eyes thanks to the huge budgets of movie studios and the media. Not knowing myths in our time means being unable to control your actions.
And only one feature of the Baroque has been irrevocably lost: the aforementioned fold on the torso of Rubens' wife. It dissolved in diet products. This aesthetic canon does not intend to make a comeback in the near future. But then again, who knows? Perhaps new barbarians from the East will put the fold back on the pedestal.
Valentin Dyakonov
Translated by Brian Droitcour
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