The cut flower as art form. An encouragement
2020, Sebastian Olma/cultural sociologist, Amsterdam
Translation: Nick Quaintmere
Plant, art, society
Plants are experiencing something of a renaissance within contemporary art, not least due to the growing influence of paradigms such as new materialism or the Anthropocene. And yet, the cut flower remains often excluded from the serious spaces of the art world. It may occasionally decorate the room, but as an art form the cut flower has a dismal reputation. The following considerations represent an attempt to redefine the function of the cut flower in contemporary art. The aim is not so much to focus on the cut flower as a motif or an artwork in the conventional sense, but rather to investigate the extent to which the cut flower as an objective participant observer of social processes can open up new perspectives for the practice of contemporary art.
Modernity and environment
If one understands modernity – as Peter Sloterdijk, for example, does in his Spheres trilogy – as a process of progressive human domestication, then the cut flower advances to a central position within the modern locus vivendi. In this version of the modernisation narrative, the dwelling (home) moves, as it were, from the background of daily social life right into its spotlight. The dwelling increasingly forms the stage upon which “the explication of the human sojourn or residence in a man-made interior”[1] takes place. It is in this context that Sloterdijk introduces the term Umweltumkehrung or “environmental reversal”[2]: the “natural” situation, whereby the human being is that which is surrounded by the environment, is reversed in the sense that the human being now designs and furnishes its environment itself.
The cut flower is an early product of this environmental reversal and later becomes both an icon and an observer of the formation of a kind of dwelling that radically breaks with the sedentary nature of the agrarian way of life. It becomes an icon because it embodies the positive interpretation of the groundlessness [Bodenlosigkeit] of modern life, which lends the “concept of uprootedness [...] a bright tone”[3]. And it becomes an observer, since the uprooting of social life is associated with a gain in distance and speed, which is the very precondition of observation and reflection: “It can be freely stated today that sedentary life was too slow, too curved in on itself and too oriented towards the model of the plant to be able to express an opinion on its various forms of living with the deterritorialization required for theoretical knowledge.”[4] The objection one needs to raise vis-à-vis Sloterdijk is that the cut flower is a special case of this development, as it is precisely the deterritorialization/environmental inversion that creates the observational milieu here and makes it the sole plant to participate in mankind’s progressive uprooting.
Inside without outside
The Dutch biologist Arjen Mulder recently published an essay in which he tries to assume the perspective of The World According to Plants (also the title of his book).[5] Inspired not least by the somewhat obscure but still fascinating observations published by the founder of psychophysics, Gustav Theodor Fechner, in 1848 under the title Nanna oder über das Seelenleben der Pflanzen (Nanna, or on the soul life of plants), Mulder encourages us to pay more attention to the plant perspective on life. He also discusses the role of the houseplant, which should at least be considered a close relative of the cut flower. “The task of the houseplant,” says Mulder, “is to combine the inside and outside, the domestic with the wild, the living room with the fresh air, the narrow city lane with the extensive landscape of the farm, this vegetative domain, whose negation and reflection shape urban life.”[6] This botanical room-mate is understood here as an “art form”[7] that constantly reminds city dwellers of the natural foundations of their urban life.
However, in this context, the question immediately arises as to how effective this indoor, plant-induced reflection on nature or – as it must be formulated in the age of the Anthropocene – the state of our planet still is. The US artist and theorist Brian Holmes recently offered the remarkable observation that today’s cities are increasingly taking on the function of deflectors that successfully block their inhabitants’ view of the catastrophic consequences of the capitalist overexploitation of our planet.[8] According to Holmes, the main reason why extractive financial capitalism functions so smoothly is that it links the destruction of vital resources directly to the construction of an interface aesthetic that constructs a digital gap between reality and users. In this system, cities take on the role of gigantic urban screens: they generate a comprehensive network of smartphones, tablets and similar ‘attention vampires’ that form an an-aesthetic protective screen that keeps urban life from being aware of its responsibility for the destruction of the planet. No plant – and certainly no houseplant – can stand against such a smart system of ideological and technical an-aesthesia. We have indeed fully entered the “world interior of capital”[9]; however, in the throes of digitalisation, this is becoming an absurd space for self-destruction.
Life in the absurd
At the beginning of his autobiography, the philosopher Vilém Flusser offers the following clear-sighted reflections on absurd life:
“The word ‘absurd’ originally meant ‘groundless’ [bodenlos], in the sense of ‘without root’. In the same way a plant is groundless [bodenlos] when you pick it to put it in a vase. Flowers on the breakfast table are examples of an absurd life. If you try to empathise with such flowers, you can feel their urge to take root and put down these roots in any kind of soil [Boden]. This urge felt by uprooted flowers is the mood of absurd life.”[10]
Flusser’s metaphor refers to personal experiences of a life marked by emigration. In the 21st century, this experience has become generalised in a frightening way. Migration due to war and environmental degradation has become a mass phenomenon. To date, humanity has not been able to meet this global challenge with determination and effectiveness. If we are to believe the technology philosopher Bernard Stiegler, this is, above all, a consequence of the self-uprooting of humanity, a sad achievement of 20th century modernity. The toxic combination of technology and capitalism is threatening to turn mankind into an absurd appendage of a system over which all semblance of control has been lost.[11]
Resonance through shutdown
Reversing this loss of control is currently the greatest challenge facing humanity. It is interesting to note that the Covid-19 pandemic offers an exceptionally good opportunity to take up this challenge. As sociologist Hartmut Rosa observes, the crisis demonstrates something that seemed increasingly impossible in the past decades of restless neoliberalism: that the economic primacy of growth and acceleration can indeed be interrupted by politics.[12] Our societies are becoming economically inactive because concern for the well-being of the population makes this necessary. In this context, Rosa speaks of the successful formation of “resonance”[13], which we might colloquially understand as a meaningful relationship with the world. We are no longer storming obsessively into the void but can suddenly feel the ground under our feet again. Of course, we have to accept that this potentially meaningful shutdown is an exceptional situation, after which everything could well go back to business as usual. However, Alexander Kluge and Ferdinand von Schirach remind us that states of emergency resulting from natural disasters are very capable of leaving their mark on the future trajectory of a society. The huge earthquake in Lisbon in 1755, for example, shook the ideological and religious foundations of the Middle Ages so badly that it provided an important impulse for the Enlightenment. As is well known, Voltaire finally lost his confidence in “divine benevolence” after the quake, and many of his contemporaries also had to admit: “God is no longer suitable as a foundation.”[14]
Roots in the future
According to Kant, enlightenment meant humanity’s exit from its self-inflicted immaturity. More than anything else, the task facing the post-pandemic world is to extend our awareness of the feasibility of shutting down our senseless obsession with progress and growth to a sustainable return to a meaningful, fact-based reality.[15] It is about regaining what Rosa calls resonance, which is the exact opposite of the collective an-aesthesia that we face in the world interior of capitalism. Enlightened agency in the 21st century must be aimed at transforming the dominant an-aesthetic into an aesthetic capable of freeing us from the nihilism of this “automatic society”[16].
It should be clear that art has an important role to play in this. Which brings the cut flower back into focus. For this is not, by any means, an argument in favour of a reconstruction of art as ethical or political agitation. What the cut flower has in common with contemporary humankind is indeed the urge to “take root and drive those roots into any soil”. Being our true contemporary in this sense, the cut flower could become a witness to the recovery and reinvention of forms of aesthetic resonance with which humanity can succeed in putting down roots in the fertile soil of a desirable future.
[1] Sloterdijk, Peter (2004) Sphären III: Schäume, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, p. 504. English translation: Spheres III: Foams, tr. Wieland Hoban, New York: Semiotext(e).
[2] Ibid., p. 331.
[3] Ibid., p. 506.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Mulder, Arjen (2019) Vanuit de plant gezien. Pleidooi voor een plantaardige planeet, Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers.
[6] Ibid., pp. 27–28, translation by the author.
[7] Ibid., p. 26, translation by the author.
[8] Holmes, Brian (2017) “Driving the Golden Spike. The Aesthetics of Anthropocene Public Space”, e-flux #85, October, URL: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/85/156774/driving-the-golden-spike/.
[9] Sloterdijk, Peter (2016) In the World Interior of Capital: Towards a Philosophical Theory of Globalization, tr. Wieland Hoban, Cambridge: Polity Press.
[10] Flusser, Vilém (1992) Bodenlos. Eine philosophische Autobiographie, Düsseldorf: Bollmann, p. 9.
[11] Stiegler, Bernard (1998) Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, tr. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins, Stanford: SUP.
[12] Schönfelder, Ute (2020) “Wir können das Hamsterrad anhalten”, interview with Hartmut Rosa on the news page of the University of Jena: https://www.uni-jena.de/200403-rosa-interview.
[13] Rosa, Hartmut (2019) Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, tr. James Wagner, Cambridge: Polity Press.
[14] Von Schirach, Ferdinand and Kluge, Alexander (2020) Trotzdem, München: Luchterhand, pp. 50–51.
[15] See also: Latour, Bruno (2018) Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, tr. Catherine Porter, Cambridge: Polity Press.
[16] Stiegler, Bernard (2016) Automatic Society, Volume 1: The Future of Work, tr. Daniel Ross, Cambridge: Polity Press.
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The cut flower as art form. An encouragement
2020, Sebastian Olma/cultural sociologist, Amsterdam
Translation: Nick Quaintmere
Plant, art, society
Plants are experiencing something of a renaissance within contemporary art, not least due to the growing influence of paradigms such as new materialism or the Anthropocene. And yet, the cut flower remains often excluded from the serious spaces of the art world. It may occasionally decorate the room, but as an art form the cut flower has a dismal reputation. The following considerations represent an attempt to redefine the function of the cut flower in contemporary art. The aim is not so much to focus on the cut flower as a motif or an artwork in the conventional sense, but rather to investigate the extent to which the cut flower as an objective participant observer of social processes can open up new perspectives for the practice of contemporary art.
Modernity and environment
If one understands modernity – as Peter Sloterdijk, for example, does in his Spheres trilogy – as a process of progressive human domestication, then the cut flower advances to a central position within the modern locus vivendi. In this version of the modernisation narrative, the dwelling (home) moves, as it were, from the background of daily social life right into its spotlight. The dwelling increasingly forms the stage upon which “the explication of the human sojourn or residence in a man-made interior”[1] takes place. It is in this context that Sloterdijk introduces the term Umweltumkehrung or “environmental reversal”[2]: the “natural” situation, whereby the human being is that which is surrounded by the environment, is reversed in the sense that the human being now designs and furnishes its environment itself.
The cut flower is an early product of this environmental reversal and later becomes both an icon and an observer of the formation of a kind of dwelling that radically breaks with the sedentary nature of the agrarian way of life. It becomes an icon because it embodies the positive interpretation of the groundlessness [Bodenlosigkeit] of modern life, which lends the “concept of uprootedness [...] a bright tone”[3]. And it becomes an observer, since the uprooting of social life is associated with a gain in distance and speed, which is the very precondition of observation and reflection: “It can be freely stated today that sedentary life was too slow, too curved in on itself and too oriented towards the model of the plant to be able to express an opinion on its various forms of living with the deterritorialization required for theoretical knowledge.”[4] The objection one needs to raise vis-à-vis Sloterdijk is that the cut flower is a special case of this development, as it is precisely the deterritorialization/environmental inversion that creates the observational milieu here and makes it the sole plant to participate in mankind’s progressive uprooting.
Inside without outside
The Dutch biologist Arjen Mulder recently published an essay in which he tries to assume the perspective of The World According to Plants (also the title of his book).[5] Inspired not least by the somewhat obscure but still fascinating observations published by the founder of psychophysics, Gustav Theodor Fechner, in 1848 under the title Nanna oder über das Seelenleben der Pflanzen (Nanna, or on the soul life of plants), Mulder encourages us to pay more attention to the plant perspective on life. He also discusses the role of the houseplant, which should at least be considered a close relative of the cut flower. “The task of the houseplant,” says Mulder, “is to combine the inside and outside, the domestic with the wild, the living room with the fresh air, the narrow city lane with the extensive landscape of the farm, this vegetative domain, whose negation and reflection shape urban life.”[6] This botanical room-mate is understood here as an “art form”[7] that constantly reminds city dwellers of the natural foundations of their urban life.
However, in this context, the question immediately arises as to how effective this indoor, plant-induced reflection on nature or – as it must be formulated in the age of the Anthropocene – the state of our planet still is. The US artist and theorist Brian Holmes recently offered the remarkable observation that today’s cities are increasingly taking on the function of deflectors that successfully block their inhabitants’ view of the catastrophic consequences of the capitalist overexploitation of our planet.[8] According to Holmes, the main reason why extractive financial capitalism functions so smoothly is that it links the destruction of vital resources directly to the construction of an interface aesthetic that constructs a digital gap between reality and users. In this system, cities take on the role of gigantic urban screens: they generate a comprehensive network of smartphones, tablets and similar ‘attention vampires’ that form an an-aesthetic protective screen that keeps urban life from being aware of its responsibility for the destruction of the planet. No plant – and certainly no houseplant – can stand against such a smart system of ideological and technical an-aesthesia. We have indeed fully entered the “world interior of capital”[9]; however, in the throes of digitalisation, this is becoming an absurd space for self-destruction.
Life in the absurd
At the beginning of his autobiography, the philosopher Vilém Flusser offers the following clear-sighted reflections on absurd life:
“The word ‘absurd’ originally meant ‘groundless’ [bodenlos], in the sense of ‘without root’. In the same way a plant is groundless [bodenlos] when you pick it to put it in a vase. Flowers on the breakfast table are examples of an absurd life. If you try to empathise with such flowers, you can feel their urge to take root and put down these roots in any kind of soil [Boden]. This urge felt by uprooted flowers is the mood of absurd life.”[10]
Flusser’s metaphor refers to personal experiences of a life marked by emigration. In the 21st century, this experience has become generalised in a frightening way. Migration due to war and environmental degradation has become a mass phenomenon. To date, humanity has not been able to meet this global challenge with determination and effectiveness. If we are to believe the technology philosopher Bernard Stiegler, this is, above all, a consequence of the self-uprooting of humanity, a sad achievement of 20th century modernity. The toxic combination of technology and capitalism is threatening to turn mankind into an absurd appendage of a system over which all semblance of control has been lost.[11]
Resonance through shutdown
Reversing this loss of control is currently the greatest challenge facing humanity. It is interesting to note that the Covid-19 pandemic offers an exceptionally good opportunity to take up this challenge. As sociologist Hartmut Rosa observes, the crisis demonstrates something that seemed increasingly impossible in the past decades of restless neoliberalism: that the economic primacy of growth and acceleration can indeed be interrupted by politics.[12] Our societies are becoming economically inactive because concern for the well-being of the population makes this necessary. In this context, Rosa speaks of the successful formation of “resonance”[13], which we might colloquially understand as a meaningful relationship with the world. We are no longer storming obsessively into the void but can suddenly feel the ground under our feet again. Of course, we have to accept that this potentially meaningful shutdown is an exceptional situation, after which everything could well go back to business as usual. However, Alexander Kluge and Ferdinand von Schirach remind us that states of emergency resulting from natural disasters are very capable of leaving their mark on the future trajectory of a society. The huge earthquake in Lisbon in 1755, for example, shook the ideological and religious foundations of the Middle Ages so badly that it provided an important impulse for the Enlightenment. As is well known, Voltaire finally lost his confidence in “divine benevolence” after the quake, and many of his contemporaries also had to admit: “God is no longer suitable as a foundation.”[14]
Roots in the future
According to Kant, enlightenment meant humanity’s exit from its self-inflicted immaturity. More than anything else, the task facing the post-pandemic world is to extend our awareness of the feasibility of shutting down our senseless obsession with progress and growth to a sustainable return to a meaningful, fact-based reality.[15] It is about regaining what Rosa calls resonance, which is the exact opposite of the collective an-aesthesia that we face in the world interior of capitalism. Enlightened agency in the 21st century must be aimed at transforming the dominant an-aesthetic into an aesthetic capable of freeing us from the nihilism of this “automatic society”[16].
It should be clear that art has an important role to play in this. Which brings the cut flower back into focus. For this is not, by any means, an argument in favour of a reconstruction of art as ethical or political agitation. What the cut flower has in common with contemporary humankind is indeed the urge to “take root and drive those roots into any soil”. Being our true contemporary in this sense, the cut flower could become a witness to the recovery and reinvention of forms of aesthetic resonance with which humanity can succeed in putting down roots in the fertile soil of a desirable future.
[1] Sloterdijk, Peter (2004) Sphären III: Schäume, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, p. 504. English translation: Spheres III: Foams, tr. Wieland Hoban, New York: Semiotext(e).
[2] Ibid., p. 331.
[3] Ibid., p. 506.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Mulder, Arjen (2019) Vanuit de plant gezien. Pleidooi voor een plantaardige planeet, Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers.
[6] Ibid., pp. 27–28, translation by the author.
[7] Ibid., p. 26, translation by the author.
[8] Holmes, Brian (2017) “Driving the Golden Spike. The Aesthetics of Anthropocene Public Space”, e-flux #85, October, URL: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/85/156774/driving-the-golden-spike/.
[9] Sloterdijk, Peter (2016) In the World Interior of Capital: Towards a Philosophical Theory of Globalization, tr. Wieland Hoban, Cambridge: Polity Press.
[10] Flusser, Vilém (1992) Bodenlos. Eine philosophische Autobiographie, Düsseldorf: Bollmann, p. 9.
[11] Stiegler, Bernard (1998) Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, tr. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins, Stanford: SUP.
[12] Schönfelder, Ute (2020) “Wir können das Hamsterrad anhalten”, interview with Hartmut Rosa on the news page of the University of Jena: https://www.uni-jena.de/200403-rosa-interview.
[13] Rosa, Hartmut (2019) Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, tr. James Wagner, Cambridge: Polity Press.
[14] Von Schirach, Ferdinand and Kluge, Alexander (2020) Trotzdem, München: Luchterhand, pp. 50–51.
[15] See also: Latour, Bruno (2018) Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, tr. Catherine Porter, Cambridge: Polity Press.
[16] Stiegler, Bernard (2016) Automatic Society, Volume 1: The Future of Work, tr. Daniel Ross, Cambridge: Polity Press.
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