In the 17th and 18th centuries, a new form of live entertainment began to spread across Europe. The phantasmagoria was a kind of theatrical show that used a device known as a magic lantern to project images from transparent slides. Paired with music, dramatic narration, and illusory effects produced by smoke and mirrors, this early precursor to film often took the occult as its subject, conjuring demons and ghosts before a terrified audience.
As the Industrial Revolution progressed into the 19th century, Marx would come to see phantasmagoria as a metaphor for the estrangement made necessary by commodity production. For Marx, this mode of production relied on a system of exchange that converted living labor into dead labor through the extraction of a value in surplus of that consumed in the time of production. Capital, appearing as both means and ends of this process, assumes a phantom autonomy that belies its origin as the product of definite social relations. At the same time, however, the dynamism of capital outstrips those relations and creates the potential for a form of social life no longer mediated by the value of an individual’s labor time. The images cast by the phantasmagoria’s lantern bring to mind not only the projectionist but the possibility of another world than ours.
Baudelaire, closely tracking the winds of change, understood that this unprecedented historical situation demanded an artistic response in kind. Avant the avant-garde, Baudelaire raised the rallying cry of modern beauty, which meant capturing the afflictions of urban life while recounting the transubstantiating spell of commodification: “The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else, as he sees fit. Like those roving souls in search of a body, he enters another person whenever he wishes. For him alone, all is open . . .”
As Walter Benjamin would later write of the flâneur, “[t]he intoxication to which [he] surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity immersed in a surging stream of customers.” The semblance of autonomy attained by modern art is thus owed to its commodity character, but to the extent that it’s able to test the limits of this freedom—by embracing it with “a total absence of illusion . . . and at the same time an unlimited commitment to it”—art points beyond the commodity form. The critical moment of aesthetic experience comes at the point where art exhausts its own efforts and yet continues to speak, its complete ambiguity reflecting the world’s.
The exhibition will be on view at the gallery from 4 January to 26 February 2023.
