PHALANGE WAGNER FRACASSANT!
The day is ticking away too slowly and the sentences I keep beginning keep dissipating before they finish. I take breaks and read other, related things, thinking I might become somehow more focused thereby, but my mind still runs to ANYTHING-BUT-L'EVE-FUTURE. Can my dissertation be just four chapters?
This painting fascinates me, though I think I like it best in the form in which I originally encountered it, earlier this afternoon, as described in a review of Stephan Jonsson's A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions:
"Whence the interest of the middle essay which enlists the sprawling phantasmagoria of Ensor's Christ's Entrance into Brussels in 1889 for an investigation into the shifting relations in the fin-de-siècle between madness, Messianism and mass politics.
The most arresting dimension of Ensor's painting - which Jonsson brings into contrast and contact with Le Bon's psychology of mass contagion and Stridberg's Little Catechism for the Under Classes - is its neglect of the aesthetic canons that oversee the depiction of the relations between the individual and the collective, but above all its evasion of the choice between the mass-people as heroic symbolic actor and the mass-mob as merely biological enemy or inorganic debris.
Click here for a scale-providing tourist on Flickr
Under the red banner of Vive la Sociale!, Ensor depicts social ontology as a kind of collective hallucination neither obviously benevolent nor definitively threatening. And as Jonsson perspicuously notes, what we are given is no longer a single, homogenous mass, but an aggregation of masses with different compositions and varying origins. Ensor maximizes the divergences and contrasts within the painting, rescinds the border between faces and masks, and refuses any point of identification (the Christ figure, crucially, provides neither leadership nor resolution; he is simply, as Jonsson notes, 'a mediatory figure that neutralizes the forces that block change').
Please please please click here to go to MOMA's site to examine this minutely. It's marvelous. (You'll see in the upper right corner a banner from which my subject line derives.)
Ensor's painting, with its emancipatory model of collective hallucination, its social disorganization of the senses, shows that political aesthetic of the mass (or the crowd, or the multitude) cannot be reduced to an unproblematic democratic striving for visibility, recognition, or representation. Larvatus prodeo ('I advance masked') could also serve as the motto for a political art which evades, as Ensor did, the melancholy idea that art is there to make the people visible and recognizable, as though such an aesthetics of democracy held the secret of emancipation.
This painting fascinates me, though I think I like it best in the form in which I originally encountered it, earlier this afternoon, as described in a review of Stephan Jonsson's A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions:
"Whence the interest of the middle essay which enlists the sprawling phantasmagoria of Ensor's Christ's Entrance into Brussels in 1889 for an investigation into the shifting relations in the fin-de-siècle between madness, Messianism and mass politics.
The most arresting dimension of Ensor's painting - which Jonsson brings into contrast and contact with Le Bon's psychology of mass contagion and Stridberg's Little Catechism for the Under Classes - is its neglect of the aesthetic canons that oversee the depiction of the relations between the individual and the collective, but above all its evasion of the choice between the mass-people as heroic symbolic actor and the mass-mob as merely biological enemy or inorganic debris.
Click here for a scale-providing tourist on Flickr
Under the red banner of Vive la Sociale!, Ensor depicts social ontology as a kind of collective hallucination neither obviously benevolent nor definitively threatening. And as Jonsson perspicuously notes, what we are given is no longer a single, homogenous mass, but an aggregation of masses with different compositions and varying origins. Ensor maximizes the divergences and contrasts within the painting, rescinds the border between faces and masks, and refuses any point of identification (the Christ figure, crucially, provides neither leadership nor resolution; he is simply, as Jonsson notes, 'a mediatory figure that neutralizes the forces that block change').
Please please please click here to go to MOMA's site to examine this minutely. It's marvelous. (You'll see in the upper right corner a banner from which my subject line derives.)
Ensor's painting, with its emancipatory model of collective hallucination, its social disorganization of the senses, shows that political aesthetic of the mass (or the crowd, or the multitude) cannot be reduced to an unproblematic democratic striving for visibility, recognition, or representation. Larvatus prodeo ('I advance masked') could also serve as the motto for a political art which evades, as Ensor did, the melancholy idea that art is there to make the people visible and recognizable, as though such an aesthetics of democracy held the secret of emancipation.