Paul Virilio / Sylvère Lotringer

The Accident of Art

We are moving from a civilization of the image to a civilization of optics. This leaves open the possibility of an 'optical correction' of the world –the reconstruction of perception according to the machine. The machines themselves have become opticians. This is an unprecedented event. The vision machine and the motor have triggered a catastrophe within the visual arts, and they have not learned from it. On the contrary, they masked the accident with commercial success.

Urbanist and technological theorist Paul Virilio trained as a painter, studying under Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Bazaine and de Stael. In The Accident of Art, his third extended conversation with Sylvere Lotringer, Virilio looks back on the century in order to address for the first time the situation of contemporary art within technological society. This book completes a collaborative trilogy began in 1983 with Pure War (peace as war) and continued in 2002 with Crepuscular Dawn, an examination of the collapse of space into speed and topology into real time from architecture to bio-technology.

Something fatal has happened to the visual arts, and it has gone unnoticed. In The Accident of Art, Virilio and Lotringer argue that a direct relation exists between war trauma and the visual arts. Technology is war by other means. And today war and accident are just one and the same thing. Accidents are no longer minor, they all are major. Just look at the World Trade Center. Accidents, Virilio claims, are inventions in their own right. They alone can liberate us from speed-induced inertia.

Unlike the performing arts, art has failed to reinvent itself in the face of technology, and simply retreated into painting or surrendered to digital technology. For a wheel to turn, there must be a hub that does not turn. All the way up to the motorization of the image, there was a fixed point, a point of reference in the civilization. Now there is no more perspective in the cultural sense. Art is no longer localized. If there is no focus, there is no perception. The question today is to rediscover a fixed point so it all can turn.

hey Bill, are you trying to start a fight? hah just kidding. This phrase "a direct relation exists between war trauma and the visual arts" feels like a very surprising and mental door-opening suggestion. I've been putting off reading Virilio but I think I'll go to the library for this one.
- sally mckay 1-20-2006 6:59 pm [add a comment]

"Unlike the performing arts, art has failed to reinvent itself in the face of technology, and simply retreated into painting or surrendered to digital technology."

We were discussing offline last night that interesting as V. is, he must be getting up there in years (if he studied with Matisse) and may not be aware of (or comprehend) current work, digital or otherwise, that doesn't constitute "surrender."
- tom moody 1-20-2006 7:24 pm [add a comment]

yeah, that stuck out for me too. I don't really even know what he means by it.
- sally mckay 1-20-2006 7:26 pm [add a comment]

check out pure war and speed and politics too. i read them back in the pre end of the cold war pre computer 80's along with simulation and a slew of the other foreign agent series.
- bill 1-20-2006 7:55 pm [add a comment]