| 
| The Far Off Fight | 
| Victor Alimpiev Sept. 7 - 25, 2004 |
| | Contemplating the horizon – the romantic meditation, praised by a citizen Kaspar David Fridrih – was probably the epitaph to the space, the space which is open to explorations of the previous epoch. Later Walter Benjamin used this image - the sliding look at the horizon – for defining aura of an art work; to the loss of this aura he devoted his famous text, and its loss – emotionalizing, marvelous and in some kind selfless devotive – marked the New era and the contemporary art itself. The image is valedictory, as in Fridrih’s case, but promising. In a decade or two, after the war that killed Benjamin was over, this mystery, this promise revealed themselves in the spatialism of Lucio Fontana. If there’s no more space, if it’s desecrate – let it seize the imaginative, let it peep, let it see the through the looking-glass: the vertical dimension. Yet only its above-the-Earth part, - the down-the-Earth vector has been already bought by fascists, - at least up to Anselm Kiefer.
The Benjamin’s sliding look at the horizon marked the transition to the new content of this wonderful pastime. To the content – “the world can change in an hour”. To the content which is proportional to panic and painful uncertainty: panicking geography. Movement of this “distant territory” to the screen – notorious media apotheosis – changes nothing, it’s just a postponement: doesn’t matter that “the Gulf War did not take place”, - there will be another war which will “take place”.
The “Far Off Battle” image is:
Imagine a titanic battle panorama. Armies run into each other, banners fall and then arise again. One can see the sky between depopulating rows – for a moment, then it disappears again.
All this takes place at the horizon. All this happens in silence.
The battle at the horizon, the battle which can’t be heard. The far off battle, which stays at the one-dimensional horizon-line, in the coordinate position of the scene.
It won’t approach. It will let the glace of the spectator get polished for as long as it takes. It will produce the aura, it will be the banner of the poet’s rightness, it will be “yes!”. It’s a purely dream image. These are clouds at war.
While gazing at the horizon the citizen can hardly distinguish the line where the Earth ends and the clouds mix with dust. Somewhere your territory finishes. There are miracles, there is somebody’s land and somebody’s will. A perfect tv-picture: dust knocked up at the horizon from the “galloping red cavalry”.
There where the city ends starts this new landscape feeling:
the desire to assure yourself that all the things are at their places. The desire not to meet the enemy – ever.
Victor Alimpiev
| |
|
|
