NASA
text by Perry Shimon
In the harsh enlightenment of Western colonial barbarism, the predominance of Christianity gives way to a secular age of science—largely divorced from ethics—and often deployed by formations of power and mechanisms of enclosure. This historical period of rapid social and ecological devastation, forced migration, cultural erasure, and genocide produced a spirit of the age that the twentieth-century sociologist Émile Durkheim called anomie: an unmooring of the shared values that ground social life. The dictates of limitless capitalist accumulation, along with the violent disintegrations and dislocations enacted in pursuit of these ends, plunged society into a state of despair. This age of compounding socio-ecological disintegration characterizes the contemporary. Artists today take up questions of ethical refoundation in an unprecedentedly complex, scientistic, and globally integrated world.
In Give More Than You Take (2010), Thai artist Pratchaya Phinthong worked as a seasonal berry picker in Swedish Lapland and requested that a museum director in France display, in the galleries, the corresponding weight of berries he picked, comprised of out-of-use office supplies. In a 2019 installation at SFMOMA, he presented the work alongside a film, a hunting tower he dismantled alongside other precarious seasonal workers, and an equivalent weight in Californian walnuts. His Spoon (2019) comes from a collaboration with villagers in Napia, Laos, who have been collecting undetonated U.S. bombs and melting them down into spoons to sell to tourists. Phinthong asked them to create free-form reflective circles, alluding to metal’s liquid state, which he paired with postcards mirroring the villagers’ hands, laboring in bomb-cleared land that had been converted into monocultured cotton fields. These works invite consideration of geopolitical histories, labor, and negotiations of value within contemporary art contexts in an age of anomie.
In 2016, the American artist Jill Magid intervened through a complex suite of relational and aesthetic gestures into a curious and troubling situation involving the archive of one of Mexico’s most significant architects, Luis Barragán. The archive had been bought by the CEO of the Swiss furniture design company Vitra as a gift for his fiancée, Federica Zanco, who made the materials difficult to access. With the consent of Barragán’s living relatives, Magid exhumed his cremated remains, had them pressed into a synthetic diamond, and then proposed the diamond to Zanco in exchange for repatriating the archive to Mexico and making its contents accessible. The work evolved into a documentary and a series of installations, sparking an extensive discourse around ethics and cultural heritage: Is it ethical for a European collector to acquire a significant Latin American archive and withhold its contents from researchers? Is it ethical to exhume one’s remains to create an artwork that intervenes into the matter?
British artist Simon Fujiwara—an auteur of the anomic—consistently produces shorts within already-fragile circuits of ethics with his baroque, multimedia, relational practice. Whether reproducing a make-your-own Anne Frank House kit in a gallery, alongside a life-size wax replica of Frank and a massive remote-controlled camera trained upon it, or launching a multichannel lifestyle-branding campaign to rehabilitate the reputation of a former grade-school teacher who had been fired after nude pictures of her were leaked, his works plunge viewers into a dark wood of ethical uncertainty.
An excerpt from a recent press release announcing a new installation by French artist Pierre Huyghe summarizes this anomic condition in a familiarly opaque style of art speak:
“The large-scale environment encompasses film, sound, vibration, dust, and light. Presented as a myth, the film at its core follows a faceless and hollow human form. Pierre Huyghe describes the form as ‘a hybrid creature, an infinite membrane carved by void,’ adding that ‘An observer witnessing the ambiguous nature of the entity, its monstrosity, follows states of indeterminacy—of the uncertainty of being, living, or existing. The film portrays an inexistent being, a soulscape, a radical outside, striving to combine empathy with the impossible.’ The artist describes this fictional world as a ‘vehicle for accessing what could be or could not be—to relate with chaos; and turns states of uncertainty into a cosmos.’”
A section of the LHC tunnel, CERN. (Wikipedia)
Simulated Large Hadron Collider CMS particle detector data depicting a Higgs boson produced by colliding protons decaying into hadron jets and electrons (Wikipedia)
The preoccupations and rhetorical framings of the sciences tend to co-articulate the agendas and anxieties of an age. The rise of deregulation and limitless growth espoused by neoliberalism in the late twentieth century emerged coextensively with science’s preoccupation with a boundaryless and ever-expanding universe. Perhaps the Hadron Collider is the greatest monument to an atomist tradition of thinking that allows the world to be violently divided into operational parts. In the resulting moral vacuum, the Euro-American imperial project and the socio-ecocidal trajectory of neoliberal capitalism have produced an aesthetics of anomie.