The story that I want to tell in regard to the subject of CONSTELLATIONS is a very old one. It was revealed to me through some theoretical writings by the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, called: Variations on a Subject, but he himself must have read it through the lines (as poets do) when he was dealing with the German composer Richard Wagner who embodied those ideas as an artist more than anybody else and he had found them in his copy of Arthur Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation. It is well known that, at the time when Wagner was composing his famous Ring, that book was laying on his table all the time as if it produced some direct inspiration, the composer accepted to let it penetrate into his music. Schopenhauer on his turn might have found those ideas in India, since he was one of very few people in Europe who studied and understood the Indian language of Sanskrit and took a keen interest in Indian mysticism and so, from there we are not so far away anymore from the mountains that separate India from China and if those ideas went all the way West, why shouldn’t it have moved in the other direction as well? 1
For Mallarmé the essence of poetry and art could only be reached by escaping from rational reflection as well as by refusing emotion and sentimentality. In his view, there was no need for the poet to suffer or to search, he just had to keep his exceptional gift as poet available for signals coming from outside reality, that announce themselves with violence and the effluvium of a lightning.2 Since those signals are originating from a world of primary ideas that has to be understood as an eternal condition that belongs to our universe since the darkness of times; they introduce bits and parts of those completely abstract ideas into the system of the artist, who then is supposed to interconnect those particles of universal material, and turn it into ART by conducting a practice that, again, refers to a gift received by birth. Art can only be practiced, it cannot be learned.
Through those ideas the French poet reshapes dramatically the nature of the creative process. In a first stage, the artist is little more than a “receiver”, a “medium”, completely unaware of the direction that should be followed.3 However, on the other hand, he or she is also a person of skills, who will structure and refine the material into a shape that reflects those skills, however, the more those actions by the artist are un-deliberated, the higher the quality of the final artwork will be. The clash with the old European model developed from de Renaissance onwards, could not be more intense since Mallarmé refuses categorically the artist to be the only “author” of the piece produced, since the essential elements that turned the work into an expression of genius come from outside and are not even fully understood by him or her. 4
In Mallarmé’s mind, each art work is nothing else than the temporarily materialization of an eternal idea that realizes throughout each creative process its own objective (and not that of the artist). And what spectacle could better serve as a global metaphor for all this, than the firmament, a spectacular cosmic screen spread over with lightening stars. It might be one of the only intellectual activities that we know we share with humans from all the generations that came before ours: laying on our back during a summer night and looking at the stars. How could all this NOT be the theatre of all kinds of hidden meanings? In all times people have tried to find systems in them, to look to the future through them, to read messages in them and the most sophisticated applications of all that, became huge and complex schools of astrology that never succeeded in convincing completely. But for poetry and art there is need to convince. Those are human activities of another kind and Mallarmé decided to charge the entirety of all those wonderful products of the mind, that we call: CONSTELLATIONS that are hidden in the sky, in a metaphorical way, as the generic reservoir that contains all the fundamental ideas we will never possess but that will light up, every night again, as a sign of their universal mission. It is out of this universal source that human creative activity is nourished and that is what make creative processes so special, every time when the miracle happens again.
Except for being combinations of stars, charged with a special meaning by humans, CONSTELLATIONS can also come into being here on earth as a result of a human activity by specially gifted man and woman and Mallarmé’s main conviction was that both are utterly connected to each other.
He even expressed this in a more radical way by stating that the only sense-giving ACTION that could happen on earth to the artist/poet, was giving birth to the artwork. He or she will feel it to be born through the feather, the brushes or the camera without ever being capable of bringing it under control. Mallarmé described those processes with a beautiful metaphor. Think how limited and ephemeral our actions are if we compare them to that huge universal perspective of the milky way… They are indeed restricted, but as humans we CAN produce effects that come close to the divine constellations in the sky. 5
We do it, for instance, each time when we throw the dices: we cannot predict what the result will be and each time again, chance will fulfill its own idea. But what we see, when the dice are casted, are the dark eyes of our result - mirroring the universal firmament and all its lightening stars - and that result is representing a temporary, human “constellation” that comes as an expression of CHANCE. The French word for chance is “hazard” and it comes from the Arab word “Az Zhar” that means nothing else as “the game with the dice”, and don’t forget, before being dropped, the dice are rolling over the lifelines incised into the palms of our hands as if it were “small size” parchments for reading the future. 6
In the moment that the curatorial team of the Third Beijing Photo Biennial decided to use the format of the CONSTELLATION as an organizing principle for each of the twelve chapters of the exhibition, we engaged in a quite unusual practice, by bringing artworks, artists, pictures together in configurations that never existed before, but would offer a completely new sense-giving opportunity to all those contributors, to all of those chapters, and this without following any rational logics. Still today I cannot explain why a canonical body of work such as Richter’s Atlas was never before shown in a dialogue with the Atalante series by Luigi Ghirri, one of the most gifted artists-photographers of his generation, but I cannot say neither with precision why such a confrontation makes so much sense for me today, although I have a couple of ideas I love to play with, one of them being that it opens up a new field for reflecting on the tensions between the PRIVATE and the PUBLIC in our societies before, as well as in the current world obsessed with communication.
The approach of the constellation can also lead to a promising new perspective on the medium of photography itself. Just take a look at a turning point picture within the history of photography, Jeff Wall’s Destroyed Room (1978), which I consider to be the quintessential expression of a constellation even before the camera “produced” that famous picture. For several months and through a painstakingly effort, the artist realized the settings for just one single picture. When it was released it was rapidly understood as an invitation to the world of photography to enlarge its scope. 7 Many read it as a liberating act, away from an “obligation” to render “reality” that had never been written down but nevertheless had accompanied the medium of photography throughout its existence.
Constellations also liberate the pictures from a strong tendency within photography to consider each successful image as the result ONLY of a special chemistry between the camera on one side and the eye and the finger of the artist at the other. Within this new framework, those pictures can now start to generate new fields of meaning through confrontations with other artworks, in their quality of photographs that participate with all their rights and privileges to an “un-fulfilled” product of human imagination, open to the future, called: a constellation.
Hans Maria DE WOLF
