Twelve
The inconsistency principle
- Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt
What is the role of consistency in the elaboration of The Serpent?
It is true that there is an aesthetic aspiration here, one that conforms to a relatively narrow but multitudinous series of bands: part Italian Quattrocento, part classical Roman, part 18th and 19th Century scientific illustration…and a host of other things in between.
While there is perhaps a propensity for the aesthetic to disintegrate into cliché, I hope to skip between eras and visual frameworks in a way that is constructively inconsistent. This is so that, in the words of Dave Hickey, (to misappropriate his quote), the various aesthetic schema “all present[ed] themselves as equally problematic, equally mendacious, and absolutely possible.”1
To put it another way, to quote Hickey again from the same source (see citation below),
“…those antique categories of painterly expression that had been embraced with such ardent belief during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were resuscitated…with the understanding that, as long as doubt remained an agency, and the painting it entailed affirmed that doubt, it could neither disintegrate into despair nor transcend into monadic assurance, but remain, instead, always an absolute permission.” 2
These are the conditions under which I resuscitate the ghosts of eras past, to build the pastiche aesthetic of this blog. Under conditions of ‘absolute doubt’ and with ‘absolute permission’.
1 - ‘Richter in Tahiti’, Dave Hickey, Parkett #35 (1993), pp. 83
2 - Ibid
