Angkor
Wat: Statues: Roots and Stones…
(from
‘Aesthetics of Ruins’ book project)
Statues/faces
: in the context of ruins, of the ruins or remains of statues, this, in effect,
means the phenomenology of the ‘half worn out’, of the ‘face’ as ‘effaced’… as
uncanny in its presence; as (both…) there and not there… So now present (in our
present) as …‘semi-present’… Offering an aesthetic of past-ness reinforced,
(both) ‘there and gone’… exactly so: ‘gone’ as the present endpoint of a
contiguous chain of history, of entropy, of ‘wear and tear’ and as a perceptual
experience paralleling (resemblance) the semi-presence of the past in the mind
as memory (together with its projection as future) a ’semi-presence’ as
exemplified or actualised in the aesthetics of black
and white photography – along with other ‘orders of priority’ incarnated in
degrees of presence in the world of the image (as ordered by plane, centre/margin, inner frame, and cultural preference, by
left/right position and implied motion horizontally as narrative and on the
diagonal/orthogonal as power or hierarchy). Therefore we have the opening of
the perceived image to the imagination (as with the past’s relation to its use
in imagining things - including the future…) as the image we see becomes ‘read’
according to the viewer experience of visual culture (always culturally
specific and according to art history as experienced…). So uniting together the
perceived as ‘old’ (point of origin back in a distant historical epoch) or as
‘past’ as in the accumulation of cause and effect as ‘wear and tear’ as a de-presencing, a ‘de-forming’ of the original with the labour of entropy, together with our sense of memory as
semi-present as compared to the presence of the perceived - a semi-present
resemblance to what once was… (a resemblance measured
and described in words, in the part/whole relations of language). Both old in
matter and old in mind… in the object as in the subject; and with the object
point of view in tandem with the subject point of view (the diremption
oscillation as the process of the self) as our situating ourselves in relation
to the object, here the ruin, or the ruin of a body, the ruin of a face, in our
imagination – as self as other, as imagined from the object point of view, is
augmented by the sense of the object as other, generalized into ‘the Object as
Other’, as if we were to ‘re-experience’ the return of our Animist pre-history
and the history of the Sublime… These former as all part of, all making up, the
object point of view nexus (think ‘genius loci’ and that implacable mountain
‘face’…). All part of our personal history as constituted by the object point
of view (our self-consciousness), with its implication of the object as other
(as that which perceives us…). In this way the diremption
plays a key role in our emotive bond with our environment - plays a key role in
our aesthetic experience…
The
‘uncanniness’ then of the statue or the sculpted face (in three dimensions as
in ‘the real thing’, so an effect over and beyond that of the two dimensional
portrait – or perhaps the later partakes of another, different kind of
eeriness…) this effect of marked-ness, or displacement, is, I am strongly
suggesting, due in part to the parallels drawn, the resemblance found, with the
diremption as the constituter of human (self)
consciousness. In part also to the re-constituting of the body or face in stone
(or some other material, some other means of expression, which would, of course
alter the experience, the aesthetic, of the object as reproduction in question
completely… as in the case of wood or plastic - or colour
and black and white as in photography, or coloured
paint and white marble as in the case of ancient classical statuary and temple
pediment decoration…). The reproduction of the face and body of a (once) living
being (or imagined, as in the case of gods or immortals) in whatever material,
itself carries a variety of effects, that of stone (in this instance) and of
‘weathered’ stone in particular, an incarnation (or reproduction) that involves
a texture, a resemblance in a new material (sic) incarnation whose resemblance
clashes with the material in question… as living with dead, organic with
inorganic, the form of expression with the means of expression (so producing
together an ‘uncanny’ content of expression). A doubling which echoes that of
the diremption as we find again the presence of the
object as other… the very performance of the personification in stone (in this
example) as the object point of view – and so of the other avatars of the diremption… in the case of the face, of mind as caught in
matter, of spirit as caught in another kind of body... The object as given a
point of view (the view of another) is the very manifestation of our sense of
being viewed as from elsewhere, which constitutes our imagining of ourselves as
‘from the outside’… ‘The outside’ here is what is concretised,
given specific form and place, a location for a ‘genius loci’, an actualized
position of the general sense of our sense of ‘self as others see us’ as part
of our social self as of our ‘own’ self… In the case of the statuary as
depicting the bodies of the gods, their heads as the Face of God, as an materialisation of the Object as Other – the Other as
caught in the Object… Where the Object is indeed supposed to be alive (as more
than just a copy of what it depicts) or as the very thing or person it does
depict) – so containing the same powers… a rhetorical calling up, which itself
demands or calls for, offerings, sacrifice, acts of worship.
Conversely, each
statue, each ‘graven image’, each ‘stone face’, reminds us of (resembles)
our-selves as if viewed from outside, as if copied, reproduced, as, indeed we
might see ourselves as a copy or ourselves… as we become the other seeing
ourselves, the others seeing ourselves, the Other as seeing ourselves… as
object. Become matter. Become statue (the very stuff of myth and fairy tales…).
And, from another point of view, again we find the echo of the diremption…
In the ruins of
Angkor Wat, however, we can find another kind of relation of the organic to the
inorganic, of the living to the dead…
Roots
and stone… perhaps the two single most constitutive features of the aesthetic
of ruins as found in the experience of Angkor Wat. More than just two textures,
two forms, and two means of expression offering two contents of expression, two
contents suggesting two modes of being… culture and nature, the man-made and
the natural, the conscious and the un-unconscious (or two kinds of memory and
re-incarnation or replication as repetition). In effect two responses to
entropy, first, the labour of repair, of building
again and rebuilding… and then (when the former stops…) by the return of the
means of replication and reproduction we know as growing and re-growing… as the
grid of architecture, weight-bearing and contra-gravity, as using gravity
itself to fix matter, is manifested in the balancing of blocks of stone and in
the grid pattern of construction both vertically (often concealed in the case
of temples by a layer of plaster and the accretion of decorations, paintings,
reliefs, and statues) and horizontally as the replication and repetition of
form as in courtyards and walkways and covered rooms often reduced by time into
a trace or pattern on the ground, foundations revealed with vestigial walls –
the rest is the jumble of fallen masonry… Structure on show (in its disarray)
as the grid is revealed as the veneers and vertical extensions are removed by
history, by time, by entropy; and so on all fronts… macro and micro, both in
the basic stone elements and in the overall structures or the general plan of
the temple complex (again the resemblance of part to part and unit to unit, and
of part to whole in the general structure, or the structure, ‘taken as a
whole’, all actualisations of the part/whole relation
beloved of logic and mathematics and of language itself… ‘object
language’ and natural language… making sense as making things, as form… with
repetition as cause and effect in the contiguous relations of building and
growing). Growing… the flow, incremental, of organic reproduction as
unconscious life… replication and pressure, cell by cell… horizontal and
vertical, root, stem and arborescent or rhizomic… (Deleuze)…
If not just two aesthetics, then two
ideologies, two philosophies… or… in an approach to this contrast, this
difference, which is itself an ideology (part of a part/whole relation)… as
‘taking sides’ (meta-physically) as the (One) root of ideology (as the part is
acclaimed the whole). Alternatively we may prefer to think with
‘both-and’ as diremption’s gift to thought as what
gave us self-conscious thought allows us to be conscious of both sides of the
equation, both terms of the co-implicating non-whole. So avoiding the ‘One’
w/hole of metaphysics. With oscillation as the
post-epistemological mode of dealing with anti-monist forms of thought, of
post-foundational forms of knowing… So coming after the appropriation of
Nature/Matter as the Romantic root of redemptive philosophies, and signaling
the return to Culture as what we see through and with... in the same way as the
subject point of view contains the object as its perception and memory…
including the knowledge of itself as object… and including the constitution of
itself as an object made out of a subject point of view and an object point of
view, as subjective point of view which is real (presented in our perception),
and an object point of view which is imaginary (present only in our
imagination)…
Two
contrasting textures… ‘opposites’…? Opposite in
content: two contents representing two points of view - and the outcome of
their contest… Perhaps even representing two attitudes to form (form and
anti-form/’inform-e’) but is this not just another romantic cliché (pace
Surrealism as Modernist continuation of the Romantic ideology of ‘nature
first’…)? Route to another monism… one in thrall to the Sublime as response of
Nature, but with this response being cultural, or plainly put, human… so (as in
Aesthetics of Ruins II, dealing with Angkor Wat) we need to step further than
the negative, destructive, revenge of entropy, model of ruins (another
‘Aesthetics of Ruins’) and find only the echo chamber of our most profound
(sacred) desires, the mirror of ourselves (or what stands behind us (if the
mirrors too are doubled))… Where the ‘monster’ is not an ‘uncaring’ Nature
(note the capitalized noun, the personification and the concomitant (and
illicit) sense of a whole…), but ourselves as aping this very nature… in effect
projecting our ‘nature’… ‘one’, however, we may, if we
so wish, ameliorate according to the performance of our culture…
*
Copyright
Peter Nesteruk, 2024