The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault has inscribed itself in the DNA of 19th century painting and French cultural-historical identity. The large-scale tragedy unfolding before the viewer’s eyes is an attempt at a historical narrative that has subsequently been interpreted, discussed, and attacked in the context of various political discourses critical of power.
However, the fact that the painting itself was created for the Paris Salon, which historically marked a new accessibility of art, especially for the bourgeoisie, is equally important and opens up a connection to the present: in the Salon, the competition between the paintings and their resulting transformation becomes clear when we view the halls in dense Petersburg hanging. The salon thus becomes a model design of the post-digital “flood of images” - one more reason to consider the raft as a symbol of the present as well.
In such an early inflationary image culture of the Salon, the provocation of scandals was part of a strategy of the painters to make themselves visible in this system. Already here, artists resorted to provocations “in the framework” - a drooping girder, a nude woman who was not an allegory, or even the Raft of the Medusa, through which Géricault hoped for a scandal, which, however, immediately failed to materialize.
The cultural history of the image is extensive - poetically as well as musically, it is only Géricault’s pictorial narration that gives rise to the historical memory of the castaways of the Medusa.
Most recently, I came across a video installation that is an artistic documentation of a performance by contemporary German-French artist Isabella Fürnkäs. The title Metamorphoses of Control is open in many ways, definitely it can come to effect in the radical upheavals of digitalization - to which I will invariantly return.
Performers sit on a luminous plateau, there are few props like smartphones, masks and sand. The performers, dressed in white, wear a plastic sheath around their white clothes. They move slowly, pushing the sand back and forth, moving their smartphones. Fürnkäs rarely performs herself in her performances, she uses the principle of “staged performance” - just as for Géricault, for example, the raft becomes the stage for his personal narrative of tragedy, we cannot avoid reading Fürnkäs’ Plateau as the stage of a stagnant tragedy of the post-digital individual.
The motif of the castaway's struggle for survival undergoes a strange transformation; nothing happens jerkily, the drama lies much more in the slowness of the movements. That precisely in this, however, a form of the struggle for survival also emerges is described, for example, by Byung Chul Han in his formula of contemporary life as survival: "Today we spend our best efforts on prolonging life. In reality, life is shortening to survival. We live to survive. The hysteria of health and the mania for optimization are reflexes to the prevailing lack of being." So if all of life becomes survival, then we are also constantly on a sinking raft, which is also typical of contemporary loss of utopia, collective depression in flickering fade-out and fade-in of approaching challenges to humanity, such as coping with climate change in a structure of global inequality and accompanying excessive destruction through capital processes.
A structure of global inequality and accompanying excessive destruction through capital processes. Fürnkäs' work, however, is – deviating from Géricault – not an attack on a ruling elite, all people on the raft appear like a unit floating in the water for themselves in a simultaneity of unification and isolation. At the very least, access to the Internet is now global, and questions of digital representation of the individual become a universal test of courage. The celebration of these achievements, however, happens precisely in this dystopian setting of the present.
These two poles can also already be discovered in Géricault's painting context. The attempt to depict the utter brutality of power relations runs ad absurdum in the context of art as entertainment and voyeuristic object.
However, the raft is also a frame for the common tragedy. This is also the case on the raft in Fürnkäs' work: the props masks, sand and smartphones are particularly striking. The smartphone is not a symbol for digitalization, it has become the prosthesis of every human being - performances with smartphones are in this sense more human than a performance without a smartphone. The mask belongs to the smartphone like the smartphone belongs to the human being. The most inconspicuous but possibly most remarkable prop of the performance is the sand, which is gracefully and slowly pushed back and forth between the performers in slow movements. It can be interpreted as a symbol, quoting Alina Klappert: "Sand is treated as a metaphorical model of virtuality given its quality as a medium, i.e. its openness to shaping and dissolving different forms." Virtuality is the quality of a thing not existing in the form in which it appears to exist, but resembling in its essence or effect a thing existing in that form.
In the age of the virtual, Géricault's vision of the castaways' raft marked by cannibalism decays into poetic utterances by the performers* and translates them into an individualistic reality, such as "I ate my own placenta." From this narrative, Fürnkäs constructs a veritable cannibalism against the self, which simulates a psychic state of emergency. Skin and consciousness are literarily conflated, as are consumption and person. As in Expressionist painting, for example, experience inscribes itself in the body; yet the setting is still a backdrop, framed by masks and smartphones.
In a competitive culture of images, as it began in the salon and has reached a peak today, the contemporary artist becomes a particle of the "flood of images," compensating for this through extravagance, self-mystification within digital worlds of representation. However, the fact that these behavioral schemes also function under the foil of Géricault's raft is both frightening and inspiring.
So what would be the logical consequence of this insight? Must art also be stripped of authorship? Is the author a figure like the zombie-like performers in Fürnkäs or the dying in Géricault? What does thinking mean in this scheme? Is thinking networking or singularization? Is the full arrival in virtual space the beginning of new levels of collectivity?
Donatella Demuth for Metamorphoses of Control, Osthaus Museum, Hagen