Visual Propaganda #12: Jean Baudrillard
The prophet of our hyperreal used photography to illustrate the potency of his theories, or something like that....
Over the last year, I’ve developed a real exhaustion towards philosophy and, even more so, critical theory. Sure, I still find value in the classics: Plato, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Stirner, Nietzsche, and so forth. But I barely read them anymore. Conversely, philosophy and theory written even more recently, postmodernism and beyond, I’ve almost developed a knee jerk contempt towards. Anything published by E-Flux makes me want to vomit. Any text sold by Zero Books as “theory fiction” leaves me with the faintest whiff of suicidal ideation. Living in something of a post-political society, it often feels like the problems of our system are so obvious yet so impossible to rectify that philosophy and theory have become little more than intellectual jack offs with no ejaculation. The proverbial blue balls. How many books do I need to read to know that society is fucked? I know intimately that society is fucked, and so does everyone else. That said, I remain forever astonished by the prophetic prescience of Jean Baudrillard’s diagnoses. The great man saw the hyperreality and the simulacra as early as the 1980s, and what he observed decades ago is inescapably and obviously true now to all of us. He saw what we were either incapable or unwilling to see, until it was too late…
There aren’t copious philosophers that also had well regarded practices in the visual arts. Pierre Klossowski comes to mind, for his vibrantly perverse and erotic paintings. Artaud also made self-portraits that offer glimpses into the fractured anarchy that occupied his mind. Nevertheless, what distinguishes Baudrillard’s visual art work from these aforementioned thinkers is the way the late French theorist used photography to elucidate if not outright emphasize his philosophic insights. Klossowski and Artaud both largely compartmentalized their art into singular practices; Baudrillard, on the other hand, was clear that his photography was in constant dialectical commune with his writings
Baudrillard believed that postmodernism completed the devolution of art from art as form to art as value. “Art was a form, and then it became more and more no more a form but a value, an aesthetic value, and so we come from art to aesthetics…” writes Baudrillard in 2005. “And as art becomes aesthetics it joins with reality, it joins with the banality of reality. Because all reality becomes aesthetical, too, then it’s a total confusion between art and reality, and the result of this confusion is hyperreality.”
As reality is replaced by the image and then the copy of the image and so forth, it too becomes perceived on the level of aesthetics. Thus, when art too has lost its form, we start to make no perceptual distinction between art in relation to its broader environment. It’s all one singular drift – meaningless but utterly sensory. This is what Baudrillard’s photography shows us. These images are highly aesthetic – gorgeous sumptuous colors heighten the most banal of images. And yet, they seem to always be missing something. The subject is absent. And if the subject is absent, so too is form. Baudrillard named every image after the city it was shot in, as if the whole meanings and histories of cities can be reduced to single images. This too becomes a commentary on the hyperreal, with images replacing the experiences, memories, and histories of locales and the people who lived there over centuries.
Baudrillard’s fine art photography is a most self-aware anti-art – a kind of sentient artificial intelligence runs through them, demanding that we see something that isn’t there. Photography is of course a highly manipulative medium, but few images I’ve ever seen so deftly manipulate my expectations and anticipate my sensory response.
Jean Baudrillard needs no formal introduction to the Counter-Agency of the Avant-Garde. He’s always been one of us.