[Hi all, here is a present from Patrice. I have edited it, slightly. John.]

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From: Patrice Riemens
To: [log in to unmask]
Cc: [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]
Sent: 21/10/00 14:02
Subject: Paul Virilio: La Procedure Silence (review)

Hi John,

Here a present for CSL (or any other outlet you may wish). But you'll
have
to run it through a spelling checker and do some editing - no thesaurus
at
hand.

cheers,
patrice

(cc to net.art critique extraordinaire Josephine Bosma ;-)
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Paul Virilio
La Procedure Silence
Paris: Galilee (2000)
76p 98FF


Philospher and urbanist Paul Virilio publishes here two talks he gave
some
time ago at the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence (S.France)
That
might explain why some words are in capital letters, or in italics,
somewhat misplaced typographic adornments straying through the text and
underlining emphasis: diligent speakers use them in order to remember
the
moment at which they need to raise their voice and awaken their
audience. 
The first lecture is titled "An Art without Pity". It brutally begins
with
a statement by Jacqueline Lichtenstein to the effect that when she
visited
the Auschwitz Museum, and saw 'the pile-up of suitcases, prosthesis, and
chidren's toys', she had the feeling of being in a modern art museum. 
This type of shortcut is something of a Virilio trade-mark. When
questionned in 1995 about the 'information super-highway' (le Monde,
Sept
30 of that year), he already ventured in a daring comparison with
totalitarian systems: "There is something truly imperial about the
communication super-highway. May I remind you that fascism inaugurated
the
superhighway concept. Those were Mussolini's ~autostrada~, and then
Hitler's ~Reichsautobahnen~ which served as strategic vectors for the
colonisation of the Eastern lands.  They weren't a fun thing then,
though
they became that later, of course..." 

The second lecture gave its title to the book. There one learns, once
one
has managed to extricate oneself from an unlikely banding together of
the
1929 Wall Street crash and the projection, in 1927, of the first
'talkie'
ever, "The Jazz Singer", that this later film is responsible for the
death
of painting. "One does not give speech to walls, to screens", says
Virilio, "with impunity. Doing so, one necessarily attacks frescoes,
wall
art, and finally, the whole ['parietale'] aesthetics of both painting and
architecture." And he goes on to deplore the fact that the art lover has
become
"a
victim of sound, a hostage to the 'sonorisation' of the visible."

What fascinates, and at the same time repels in those two Virilio texts
are his choice of examples, and what use he makes of them. To recall
that
Italian futurists and German expressionists were furious war-mongers at
the time before WWI is factually true. But they were neither less nor more
so than those French (primary school) teachers whose brief was the
recapture of the minds as a prelude to the recapture of Alsace-Lorraine.
To
state that Dadaism and Surrealism are the children of the same war is
correct, but to suggest, even in Virilio's customary, and annoying,
allusive and imprecise formulation, that they supported it, is beneath
contempt.  So what does Paul Virilio actually like? Difficult to say.
He
for sure regrets the time when painting abided by the laws of perspective. A
[point de fuite], a horizon-oriented glance, is a handy way to
hierarchise and to describe reality, and hence to control it. Already in
1992, Virilio was asking questions about "the disapearance of models
based
on the concept of centre and periphery, this geometric way of organising
space we were accustomed to", and he railed against the passing away of the
relevance of "the perspective of (in) real space, which we inherited
from
the Quattrocento,"  adding " but then, the 'classic' perspective is what
gave the city-plan its organisational principle, and (hence) of the
whole
spatial organisation of our own lives." (Le Monde, January 21, 1992).
That
it still would be possible to believe that single-focus perspective
accurately renders reality is quite too weird to consider. But that an
urbanist would regret the loss of such a commodious instrument of power
makes more sense. 

Virilio also believes that contemporary art wallows in the horrible.
That
is both true and false, or rather, it is just as meaningful as to
imagine
that since cats and dogs both have four legs, cats must be dogs.
Something
that will not be long in actually happening, he thinks, given the
monstruous advances in genetic engineering, which he links without
further ado to developments within contemporary art: "Ethics or
aesthetics?
That is *the* question at the end of the Millenium. So, if freedom of
scientific expression is just as unbounded as freedom of artistic
expression, where will 'dis-humanity' end tomorrow? Thus, in the name
of
human values, should the Chapman brothers' hybrids be outlawed? Hans
Bellmer's dol burned? Erase Duchamp's add-on moustaches on the Mona
Lisa?
Turn back to regulation pink those green stripes Matisse put on a
woman's
face? And finally gouge out one of one's eyes in order to finally grasp
the joy of single-focus perspective? 

That being said, Paul Virilio well expresses a widely shared
disorientation in the wake of the limitless freedom, the opening-up
towards a pluralist, laughable and yet generous, innovative and
ironical,
often brutal and sometimes wonderful world as represented by living
(contemporary) art. This because modern art, just like the genetically
engineered four-legged broiler of Virilio's nightmare, states a problem.
One does not know whether it tastes good or bad: nobody has ever managed
to lay its hand on it.

Review by Harry Bellet, Le Monde Oct 7, 2000
Q&D translation by Patrice Riemens
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