Michel Gauthier: Flying Loops for a Revolution (p. 41-70)

“Cities, and still more cities; I have memories of cities ...”
Valéry Larbaud, The Poems of A.O. Barnabooth

The exponential growth of aerial transportation over recent decades has profoundly modified conditions for what situationists have been referring to for half a century now as “psychogeographic drifting.” This circumscribed wandering in a city, through a part thereof, or even the act of “static drifting” (1) through a place, have all been supplanted by international travel. In keeping with this phenomenon, new spaces have emerged, such as boarding and landing areas and passageways, airports, airport hotels, etc. — all non-places so characteristic of the supramodernity discussed by Marc Augé. Not only is it possible to easily, quickly reach any unknown city or to wander off, but in addition, the infrastructures created to facilitate these movements constitute in themselves potential drifting sites.

Franz Ackermann is a particularly intensive user of planes and airports. His artistic career is almost indistinguishable from his traveling activity. The production of his work literally proceeds from kinematics. (2) Boarding— such is the title of a large painting from 2002. Against a moving background of colored volutes and abstract architectural blueprints, a plane is readied to take on passengers. An installation called Fly (2004) offers the view, on wallpaper animated by a whirlwind of bluish forms, of a photograph of a jet perched atop a building. A hotel room door, number 422, completes the spectacle. (3) There is no beating about the bush for the title of the Helicopter series. Its opus XII (2000) offers a vision seeming to be more that of an eye trained on the rotor rather than lodged within the cockpit. Indeed, the publication produced on the occasion of an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum in Wolfsburg in 2003 is replete with helicopters fresh out of Apocalypse Now. (4) And it was an odd machine indeed inaugurating that same exhibition: an antique Volkswagen 1500 transformed into an improbable flying engine. Permanent Departure (2003), a small work on paper, echoes Mental Map: Permanent Arrival (2003). Two sheets with helicopters drawn in red are glued onto the outline of a dense network of straight and curved lines. For the “Eine Nacht in den Tropen” (A Night in the Tropics) exhibition in 2002, visitors entered the Bale Kunsthalle by means of an airplane boarding ramp.
The entire subject matter of Mental Map: Seat 52A (1998) is composed of connective airport apparatuses. Indeed, it is perhaps these non-places, engendered by the contemporary leisure and transportation industries, that the ultramodern tourist, or the “supertourist,” loves most of all. One can go on listing works by Ackermann which, either by their images or by their titles, evoke the universe of aerial transportation. So be it. But is there nothing more to this than the resolutely mundane? An artist recounts the preponderant aspects of his existence. He travels frequently and his productions show it. In the case of Ackermann, however, the issue extends well beyond these perimeters.

If Franz Ackermann has traveled all over the planet since 1990, it is probably because this way of life agrees with him. Yet it is also true that his aesthetic program demands it. For him, it is not about merely seeking out visions of here and there, but rather about moving between here and there in order to alter his vision. Throughout, or between, his voyages, Ackermann accumulates small works on paper — in pencil, ink or gouache — which he calls Mental Maps. These are not so much panoramas as “psychogeographic” accounts of places where he has been, impressions cast by a geography upon a psyche in movement. Referring to Baudelaire and the streets of Paris,Walter Benjamin wrote that the poet's view of the city was the “gaze of the disoriented.” The revelation within Ackermann's art also denotes disorientation. This disorientation doesn't derive so much from the idea that the flâneur, or wanderer, urban though he is, has become transcontinental and that the exotic tenor of the places he travels accrues in consequence. Rather, the wanderer of this new genre is less disoriented by the nature of the landscapes observed than by the way in which he now observes them, by the mutation of the ocular regime. This is generated by the industrialization of spectacle, the industrialization of tourism — only one of its many aspects — and the development of means of transportation.What a more or less illicit pharmacopoeia is to the production of some images, so are travel and nomadic life to Ackermann's art. (5) What does such psychedelic tourism mean?

The episteme that renders such an art as Ackermann's possible is characterized by a rejection of the static, stable subject. The first instability affecting the subject is mental in kind. It falls under what Paul Valéry called “self-variance.” Many passages in the Cahiers seek to show the importance of the phenomenon: “I've observed that instability is the rule here”; “one can consider thought as a series of transformations”; “the mind is what changes and resides only within change”; “the fundamental law of the mind appeared to me to be… like an impossibility of fixedness.” In other words, Valéry considered stability as contrary to the very functioning of the mind. Mental activity is primarily resistant to prolonged focusing. Ackermann's works, with their chaotic, multipolar images, manifest a clear example of this instability of thought and memory. They reveal a vision foreign to the hierarchizing of assimilated percepts. Ackermann's memory of the places he visits, and the idea he constructs of those he is about to visit, are fragmented, inviting the spectator's gaze to wander doubly from one interpretation to the other and, in the case of the large format, from one part of the work to another. Many of Ackermann's urban representations are animated by curving lines, infusing the space with energy, precluding immobility. For an art so conscious of the fundamental instability of the psyche, he has developed two modes of behavior. Either try to reduce this instability, as with single, constraining signal works, or, conversely, try to exalt it. Ackermann has chosen the latter path, rousing the artist's self-variance through intensive travel, though long-term drifting. He can thus stimulate the spectator's own self-variance by confronting it with a multiplicity of polyvalent signals.

The mind incessantly passes from one thing to another, and so too is the body itself in movement, passing from one place to another. An art is thus born out of a consciousness of the mobility of represented bodies: the cinema. An art will surely be born out of a consciousness of the mobility of the spectators' bodies. Ackermann's works certainly participate in questioning the fiction of the static subject. The distortion, the curving, to the point of abstraction, of the proposed points of view are due to the movement of the eye and the mind's own perception of it. Through this angle, Ackermann's aesthetic is not unrelated to the axiomatic dimension of Futurism. (6) The speed of movement that machines allow engenders new sensations that art should be able to explain. This is why the airplane, next to the automobile, becomes the favorite vector of the Futurist aesthetic. As early as 1909, Paolo Buzzi published a collection of poems entitled Aeroplanes. And numerous paintings are based on the aviator's point of view. From Fedele Azari's impressive series Perspectives of Flight (1924-1926) to Tullio Crali's extraordinary paintings, such as Nose Dive on the City (1939) or Nose Dive on the Airport (1939), to Alessandro Bruschetti's Spiral (1932), the painter becomes aviator. In his Manifesto of Futurist Aeropainting (1929), Marinetti evokes “the changing perspectives of flight” and the “new reality” they were bringing about. Consequently, the planes and helicopters in Mental Maps have ancestors in the history of art. At the same time, there is a clear difference between the Futurists' aerial vision and that of Ackermann. The former, operating as a critique of the perspectival space, seek to establish the rules of a new, dynamic way of seeing, whereas Ackermann's views seem to express nothing less than formidable disturbance.

An airplane is an instrument allowing the perceiver to appropriate for himself what narratologists call God's point of view. This “zero-focus” point of view, through distance, perspective and global vision, renders its narrator omniscient. In order to perceive meaning, the eye must be able to distance itself. This is the theorem at work, for example, in the architectural paintings of Sarah Morris. The representative activity in the Midtown paintings series (1997-1999) proceeds from focusing on a fragment of a New York building facade — that of the Seagram, Condé Nast or Lever House building, for example — in such a way that an abstract image appears on the surface of the painting. The figurative capacity, its meaning, is lost through the exaggerated zoom effect. Therefore abstraction, according to Morris, is not, as in the Greenbergconstructed Hegelian discourse, the result of Painting's abandonment of conventions not essential to its viability. Rather, abstraction marks the age of the anti-panorama. (7) Morris's pictorial and film images tell us, with apt brilliance and colorfulness, that in the contemporary world both spatial and temporal distance are necessary to the production of meaning. It would seem to suffice, therefore, to engineer distance in order to restore the signifying mastery of the spectacle. For an overhanging perspective, one need only climb up a mountain or a tower, or board a plane or a helicopter.

The view in Ackermann's paintings is undoubtedly set at a distance. His paintings elevate the point of observation. And when the view is not from a plane or helicopter, it is nevertheless from some eminent point, as made explicit in the title Mental Map: Vom Hügel (from a height). There is a convergence of two points of view wherein one from the Helicopter series is entitled On the Balcony (2001) even though the viewpoint in the painted image evokes more that of a helicopter in a crashing nosedive than that of the static outlook from a balcony. In one of Ackermann's exhibition catalogs, there is a photograph of ski jumping ramps, (8) another metaphor for the mobile, aerial gaze. But what is to become of these belvederes of the contemporary world? What epiphany of meaning do they produce? Does the pixilated world, in mosaic, really reflect its subjects? Hardly. Instead, the emerging perspectives are odd, erratic. Gyrations in mutation. Cyclones of infrastructure. Archipelagos of fragments. Chance core-drilling in the lithosphere. Deviant topographies. Ruins of modern urbanism. Disconcerted meanderings of energy currents. A jungle of anamorphoses. (9) Like a pornography of plastic transportation. (10) The eye of God: none other than a centrifugal machine of inhabited spaces, leaving a pandemic of underlying abstraction in its wake. And if, in Ackermann's images, veritable seisms seem to rock the image, it is nonetheless reasonable that abstraction is at its most radical in the epicenter. The aptly named series Epicentres effectively presents concentric circles of different colors adopting extreme deformations. All figuration has disappeared. The idiom has become perfectly abstract. The shock waves can spread with help, if need be, from Melissa, the notorious computer virus, whose name, in one work, Ackermann writes on a wall. Even God's point of view doesn't escape the ravages of Melissa. In short, the point of view of God is in fact that of the devil, if we recall the Greek etymology of diabolos, which means “he who divides, disperses.”

Gerhard Richter's Stadtbilder, which he began to create in 1968, had already given us forewarning. These works adopt a perspective of looking down over a city, and even so, the resulting image is blurred, threatened by a subsequent defection of meaning. The paintings allow us to sense that God's point of view might perhaps no longer guarantee a clear, organizing vision. Indeed, when order and clarity are borne out of an aerial perspective, it is no longer the real that we are looking at, but instead the fragment of a map. Ed Ruscha's Metro Plots series at the end of the 1990s zestfully proposes diagonal bird's-eye views of maps of Los Angeles. Ackermann's work confirms this. Far from restoring the meaning that a close-up look, in perceiving only the sweeping lines onscreen, would miss, God's point of view conjures up only confusion and chaos. In other words, the contemporary view would be either too close, or too far from the object, caught in the fatal impossibility of finding the right focal adjustment. If, in the history of painting, God's view has been confused with the panorama — this pictorial genre which, refined at the end of the 18th century, would haunt the whole of the 19th, to reach its apogee with the Eiffel Tower and its swansong with the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900 — it is only fitting that Ackermann acknowledge this precedent. In 2000, he produced a panoramic work, smaller in size than the canonical panoramas, which could measure as much as 15 x 120 meters, and which the public would view from a platform. Untitled (Janis Joplin) appears as an authentic panoramic structure with a five-meter diameter, showing horizontal bands of different colors and irregular borders. Thus, where the view accorded by a classical panorama conferred upon the spectator a feeling of mastery over an often urban spectacle, Ackermann's version offers up nothing more to the viewer than an abstraction. Even the panoramic view no longer stabilizes the image.With these horizontal bands, everything happens as though a spinning top affected the veduta. That Ackermann gave the title of Janis Joplin to a panorama devoid of his representative competence attests to the role of rock and punk culture in the gestation of his work. But this title also signals its psychedelic dimension. Another work, almost contemporary since it predates it by two years, corroborates this metamorphosis of the panorama. The work in question is 360° room for all colors by Olafur Eliasson. There is no representation offered up in this large, circular structure whose diameter exceeds eight meters, but instead, there is only a game, luminous in its moving colors. The panorama for the spectator, therefore, is no longer the opportunity to submit to the illusion of a visual authority over ambient reality, but to experience, more so than usual, a dazed feeling, the bankruptcy of the gaze that would like to dominate the spectacle surrounding it. And even when they don't dispose of exactly the same staging, Ackermann's installations still tend towards the panoramic form. One thinks of, among others, Songline (1998), which presents an improbable sequence over several meters, comprising bands of paint, both horizontal and vertical, in black and white or in color, hippy-like floral figures, architectonic maelstroms, trick mirrors, video projections, photos of an Arabian suicide bomber, Bantu people, a São Paulo building or a Berlin stairwell, a postcard stand — the whole animated by a systematic rounding-off of angles and the division of the exhibition space. The device used here is panoramic in nature, but devoid of a center. It is without a vantage point from which the perceiving subject might reassemble the unity of spectacle. The representative rule of panorama is no longer the trompe l'oeil. It seems to have been definitively replaced by the kaleidoscope.

The work of art's loss of its autonomy, or the ending of the illusion of independence from its context, has been defocalizing in nature, in different ways. Indeed, as soon as it is no longer possible for me to imagine abstracting the work from its space, I no longer really know how to adjust my way of looking at it, whether to focus on the foreground or the background. And blurriness is lurking, as shown by the dozens of giant-sized targets that Ugo Rondinone began to create in the mid-1990s. The artwork's refusal to adopt a deliberate focal position leads the contemporary spectator to develop a floating ocular response in turn, so that the gaze shunts or drifts from one point to another, at the behest of multiple stimuli that never cease to present themselves. And the eye's tolerance of movement, constructed by film and by car travel, (11) reaffirms the defocalizing propensity of the aesthetic view, which is no longer allowed to remain focused on the art object. To put it another way, in an age in which the moving image has become banal, the autonomy of the work itself is almost necessarily compromised.When the eye is so used to seeing streaming images, how can it avoid taking a sensory sweep of the neighboring space around a painting or sculpture? Indeed, the art of installation is in large part a result of taking this new perceptual phenomenon into account. Of course, this is not merely a retinal phenomenon, but, more broadly, a cerebral one. Since the eye moves, the work must accompany this movement through the spatial interplay of its components. Since the work cannot remove itself from its physical context, it transforms itself into a site. Though Ackermann's installations thus play upon the spatial distribution of the multiple plastic events composing them, they also distinguish themselves by means of something like a mise en abime.While the spectator is invited to move around and follow the different stages offered up by the work, its theme, as we have seen, is movement itself. There are two ways of considering this relationship. Either we view it as a clever rhetorical trick, where the voyages, which are the principal theme of the work, are replicated by the spectator's own voyage in the exhibition. (How might the traveling be better staged other than by a spatial maneuvering of the work?) Or instead we sense there is more: the defocalizing, which, according to a complex story, affected the aesthetic gaze, would then be more than merely the expression, the reflection of this other “defocalization,” inferred by the accelerated circulation of people and information. Both would participate in an age in which flux would win out over stasis, where the idea of a stable, unified point of view would simply collapse. No Roof but the Sky (2005) is a work presented as an enormous vertical disc, slowly rotating on its own vertical axis. Its two sides show a highly colored whirlwind of vulnerable architectural forms. They are fragmented, as though suspended in a state of ineluctable drifting. The disc itself evokes a radar device; a radar device recording the turbulence of this Ausland where a revolution is taking place.

If psychogeographic drifting is an experience of hastily passing though various environments, then it follows that the increasing speed of communication technology has created the perfect conditions for it. Paradoxically, the society of the spectacle has adopted drifting as one of its products. Ackermann's poetics are deployed precisely where this paradox becomes a destiny. The subject is dispossessed of its own self. The alienating effect is surely a result of the empire of mercantile exchange, the hold of commercial science over conscience, as when, for example, the subject goes to the places suggested to him by the travel agency brochures, which Ackermann piled up in one of the exhibition rooms in Reims in 2005. But this very dispossession is the goal of the psychedelic maneuver, or situationist drifting. Being nomadic is the province of the exiled, of immigrants, of those excluded from the economic game, but it is the province too of the artist, who is driven here or there according to the kinematics of the work to be produced. In other words, the essential in Ackermann's work, other than the stupefying efficiency of his sculptural arguments, resides in this pileup of determinations. Through some of its most daring expressions, the art of the last decades has fundamentally destabilized the perceiving subject, broken down the illusions of unity and mastery that this entailed. Contemporary society, with the rapidity of its instruments of communication and transportation, with the multiplication of nonplaces, does the same, and perhaps better. Dream and nightmare are confused, one with the other.

One day, we will build worlds just for drifting.