| Urbanist and technological
theorist Paul Virilio trained as a painter, studying under Henri
Matisse, Georges Braque, Bazaine and de Stael. In The Accident
of Art, his third extended conversation with Sylvere Lotringer,
Virilio looks back on the century in order to address for the
first time the situation of contemporary art within technological
society. This book completes a collaborative trilogy began in
1983 with Pure War (peace as war) and continued in 2002
with Crepuscular Dawn, an examination of the collapse
of space into speed and topology into real time from architecture
to bio-technology.
Something fatal has happened to the visual arts, and it has gone
unnoticed. In The Accident of Art, Virilio and Lotringer
argue that a direct relation exists between war trauma and the
visual arts. Technology is war by other means. And today war and
accident are just one and the same thing. Accidents are no longer
minor, they all are major. Just look at the World Trade Center.
Accidents, Virilio claims, are inventions in their own right. They
alone can liberate us from speed-induced inertia.
Unlike the performing arts, art has failed to reinvent itself in
the face of technology, and simply retreated into painting or surrendered
to digital technology. For a wheel to turn, there must be a hub
that does not turn. All the way up to the motorization of the image,
there was a fixed point, a point of reference in the civilization.
Now there is no more perspective in the cultural sense. Art is
no longer localized. If there is no focus, there is no perception.
The question today is to rediscover a fixed point so it all can
turn. |
