Neeme Lopp
As a general rule, art celebrates victory over matter. Even when speaking about such an inescapably material artform as sculpture, we tend to see its beauty as something that the artist hammered out of resisting matter. The matter itself is something vague, dark, maybe even evil. Real art seeks to defy the laws of nature. But what it is not trying to defy is the logic of economics. In contemporary (art)world it acquires necessarily a certain exchange value (even if it is 0), which can stem from the relationship between supply and demand, but also depend on the artist’s mood, indicating not the maximum price the buyer is willing to offer for it, but the price for which the seller feels up to relinquish it. According to some authors, since the emergence of the art market, this would be in fact the primary goal of an artwork: to acquire exchange value, to enter the market, to become a commodity. Whereas it is of lesser importance if the artwork will later be used as a trinket or a beer tray, what matters is its exchangeability; that is, the potential to offload it at some price.
The project «Great Love / Beautiful Rotting» intends to leave Sirje Runge's large-scale painting «Great Love» in the arbitrariness of the surrounding nature to decompose. By making Runge’s original painting a part of natural history, this project thus performs a reversal: it enforces the laws of nature on the painting, while liberating it from the laws of economics. In November 2018, Runge’s much smaller painting «Tigers in the City» was sold for 16,000 euros. If everything goes according to plan, nothing will remain of «Great Love».
However, there is something beautiful about this process, as the title righteously reveals. Why does then decay, the natural course of things, touch us in such a manner? For the reason that decay brings out the subtle coherence between human nature and nature, between the historical and the natural. The German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin called this dimension Naturgeschichte – natural history. Benjamin's Naturgeschichte does not suggest that nature also has its own history but that human artefacts tend to acquire a quiet, natural way of being similar to nature as they leave the circulation of meaning in our symbolic world. In fact, this would be the key to understanding nature: we can really acknowledge the otherness of the natural world when we meet it in the form of a ruin of a human world. The impenetrability, materiality and opacity of the natural world becomes most tangible to us when we encounter it as some kind of remnant of human history, now a meaningless ruin to which we can no longer attribute a viable meaning. Therefore, according to Benjamin, it is these ruins of human activity that reveal to us the dark essence of our existence, the dimension connecting us with nature, the drive towards death and destruction, the interweaving of lust and extinction, order and chaos, proliferation and decay.
«Great Love / Beautiful Rotting» seeks to take a piece of art history and transform it into natural history. The physical impact of the environment on the work no longer presents a taboo («Please do not touch the exhibits!»), instead decay has become equal to creation, the artistic representation, or actually representation as such, equal to the quiet materiality of nature: to blotches on stones, streaks on sand or dirt on village roads. «The essential meaning of silence,» says the American minimalist composer John Cage, «is not the absence of sound but the giving up of intention». Nature does not possess intentional attitudes. So, everything that from now on happens with the «Great Love» is detached from the artist's responsibility for the meaning of the work and transmitted to arbitrariness – from now on it will follow the laws of nature, not of art. It is no longer painting from nature, but nature’s painting, not an artwork resembling nature, but nature itself. So, when Runge herself stated after completing the work that this painting is an expression of her selfless love to the world, then now it becomes the world, it collapses into the world.
Abandoning the artist's contribution and making the artwork a part of natural history, a strange dissonance between an actual and a symbolic death becomes apparent. The natural history becomes the realm of manic undeath. The more the work of art is handed over to nature and the more it actually decays, the more its symbolic meaning increases. In other words, from the perspective of intention: the less the effects of decay are planned by the artist, the greater eventually the intended effect. Which is nothing more than liberating the creation from its bondage to decay, as Paul writes in the letter to the Romans (Rom. 8: 21–22): «The creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.» Liberating the work of art from the pains of childbirth related to the artist's intention, by abandoning it, «to decompose in the arbitrariness of surrounding nature», it is also salvaged from the bondage to decay that can be the destiny of artworks the physical form of which remains while their historical form (the art world) diminishes or dies down, turning the work of art into a meaningless lump of the world.
But if a work of art that sets as its primary goal its own decomposition can indeed be interpreted as beautiful in a Kantian sense – it is something that does not only seem to emerge directly from nature, but that actually merges with the natural order – then the collapsing of the logic of economics is simply sublime. As already mentioned, if the plan is carried out, there will be nothing left of the «Great Love». Of course, there is also a messianic economy to such decay, pointing to the conflict between the conservative and destructive side of human culture. As in nature, there is no endless accumulation in culture. Although culture strives to preserve artifacts and meaning, something has to die in order for the new to emerge. This is a positive, liberating destruction, a sublime diminution relating critically to the illusion of eternal growth haunting the logic of economics.
However, another form of sublime is concealed here, related to the experience of freedom and equality that stems from nothingness itself destined Runge’s work of art. If the ghostly materiality embodied in natural history is best represented by a fetish, an object of mystical value (the real thing, an object of profound existence), and nothing is ideally closer to a fetish than a work of art (both acquire their value as out of nothing – «these prices are so arbitrary!» — and both carry a certain promise of happiness), then nullifying this symbolic sphere, converting it into nothingness, is definitely sublime. An artistic fetish object is deprived of its symbolic power, which is replaced by the liberty to completely ignore the symbolic sphere (including the logic of economics).
So now every beholder is equal in relation to the artwork. If a beholder meets the artwork that is altogether driven by the arbitrary (nature) and the meaning of which reveals itself in the effect that the world (not art) has on the beholder, then each beholder is in an equal position in relation to the work. The previous experience in art as well as the knowledge of art history (and the discussions around it) don’t matter anymore. Everyone's experience is equal to everyone else's experience, which means also that everyone's experience is equally irrelevant (as there is no criteria for valuing one experience over another). And it is not only everyone's experience but also everyone's financial condition (i.e class) becomes equally irrelevant, for no one is able to purchase this artwork passing into nothingness. The true sublimity and the infinite experience of freedom in the decomposition of «Great Love» lies precisely in this: finally and for everyone it costs equally nothing.