I was recently and intriguingly told that the first selfie occurs in Ridley Scott’s film, Thelma and Louise, a factoid I will revisit. Another, however, intrigues me more. That the selfie first came into being when a drunken Australian lout recorded his puke-strewn mug while lying smug and snug beside a toilet bowl. Whatever the truth – and these day’s truth has become dangerously relative – what is glaringly in evidence is our desire to find ourselves at the centre of things. We must be seen to be, to exist, as players on histories ephemeral stage. Our mugs have become post its, as jaundiced and facile as a smiley face. Emerson’s ‘transparent eyeball’ is the antidote to this disease. How else are we able to allow the ‘currents of the Universal Being’ to pass through us? ‘Retrograde’ was the word directed at me by a chiding friend when I recounted the pleasures which a potentially pure apprehension of art allowed. A backwards move, the slur also carries a degenerate and inferior quality. I’m not sure I agree. Yes, Impressionism today is mistakenly perceived as kitsch. But to what end? Why is it that the great early modernists can be revered and yet, in the case of Monet, be simultaneously negated? Surely there is something wrongheaded in the long-standing valorisation of the New York centric Pop Art and Abstract Expressionist movements at the expense of a Paris centric art dedicated to understanding the mysteries of nature, form, and light? Surely Emerson has a point in declaring that ‘When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of corn’? I am not a naturalist at the expense of the postindustrial tech centred world which consumes us today. These states are not mutually exclusive. It is just that, in Paris, I profoundly recognised the urgent need to restore the Rights of the Human and natural world. In a very different yet equivalent way, the fifth floor of the Pompidou also demonstrated the power of human insight untainted and unmediated by a technology that seeks to intercept and antedate that experience. I am not saying that tech does this per se. As the South African sound artist, Jenna Burchell, reminds us, tech can help us to understand the soul. She, however, is an exception to the rule. What we love today and choose to align ourselves with is our aridity. We are Nietzsche’s ‘Last Man’, complacent, smug, content to wallow in easy gratification and unfought for pleasures.
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On the fifth floor of the Pompidou, however, another more genuinely experimental battle was waged. Here it was Matisse who stood at the portal. Matisse who understood Emerson’s recognition that ‘Nothing is so fleeting as form; yet never does it quite deny itself’. At the D’Orsay I overheard a debate concerning the relative merit of Monet and Matisse. The artists are markedly distinct, but the question reinforced the centrality of these two early modern artists in the Western imagination. They are our Scylla and Charybdis, exemplary is their exploration of ‘fleeting form’. Both however stand on a ‘bare earth’, both, after Emerson, understand ‘A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots whose flower
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