These fragments are being extrapolated into what can be dubbed as \u201ctotality in miniature\u201d\u2009\u2014\u2009the infantile model of the whole. A symptom readable as the deferral of adulthood.1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - In The Globe Shrinks<\/em> the preference of small-scale deconstruction over systemic \u00adcritique is self-evident.<\/span> In the words of Ilya Kabakov: \u201cA person who feels like a child is able to escape the canons and boundaries of being, in which he or she is, as it were, assigned a place. You develop an entirely different attitude toward reality. It is perceived as a theft, even though it is, in fact, not limited by anyone and therefore belongs to you in unlimited quantities. This is space without dimensions: it can be shortened but can also be expanded. What starts from such attitudes (or criteria) is the prospect of complete happiness and eternal childhood.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - An excerpt from my conversation with Kabakov in \u201cParallels Leben oder Leben im Kanon,\u201d Neue Bildende Kunst<\/em> (December 1998): 60-64.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBe ye therefore as children,\u201d Christ urged his followers, \u201cfor theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Verily I say unto you: whosoev\u00ader does not accept the Kingdom of God as a child will not enter the Kingdom of God.\u201d Self-perception as an eternal child (a phe\u00adnomenon, which demonstrates the similarity of Soviet tradi\u00adtions not only to Christianity, but to Zen Buddhism) harks back to a time when the burden of adulthood was placed on government bu\u00adreaucracy. Everyone else was inculcated with the idea that \u201cthe only privileged class in the USSR is chil\u00addren.\u201d Therefore, the prospect of the loss of such (class) pri\u00advileges, an\u00adticipated by the \u201ccommunal uncon\u00adscious,\u201d caused the tempo of matu\u00adration to slow down. Something similar is happening in today\u2019s art world, the difference being that the role of adults has been taken over by curators, critics, and art dealers. It would seem that if the creative personality is an enfant terrible<\/em>, to enter a \u00adprofes\u00adsional rela\u00adtionship with such a person is to engage in the exploitation of child labour, and there\u00adfore to violate both moral and legal norms. That is why re\u00adlations be\u00adtween the child (enfant<\/em>) and the adult do not usually go beyond the \u201csymbolic economy\u201d: the former is expected to be diligent and well-behaved, in exchange for gifts and praise from the latter. Such is, in general terms, the \u201ccompulsory assort\u00adment\u201d of socio\u00adcultural infantilism. Nonetheless, the incon\u00advenienc\u00ades that burden permanent childhood, are more than ade\u00adquately com\u00adpensated by the conveniences acquired as a result of abdicating social responsibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An infantile vision of reality is conservative and, in a sense, reactionary, especially when practiced by adults. In relation to this, one can introduce (paraphrasing the philosopher Mikhail Ryklin) the term \u201c\u00adterroro–<\/em>optic.\u201d The child, after all, is simultaneously a prince and a pauper, a sovereign and a vas\u00adsal, persecutor and persecuted. The infantile model of sub\u00adjectivity rests on the presumption of the wholeness of the world, on belief in the totality and continuity of being, while represent\u00ading, at the same time, an example of aggressive ego\u00adcentrism. Following Lacan, one can maintain that \u201cthe characteristic modes of the agency of the moi<\/em> in dialogue are the aggressive reactions,\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Jacques Lacan, \u00c9crits: A Selection<\/em>, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 15.<\/span> and that \u201caggressivity is the correlative tendency of a mode of identification that we call narcissistic.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Ibid., 16.<\/span> Hence, the naive longing for accidents combined with the carnival-like (festive) perception of acts of violence: the conviction that \u201ceven dying is good if the world is watching\u201d best illustrates this. Translated into the language of urban problems, immaturity is the ghetto, whose contribution to culture is nothing other than kitsch (contrary to Greenberg\u2019s belief, it is not avant\u00ad-garde). Those who came out of the ghetto often turned out to be the most zealous guard dogs of conven\u00adtion and orthodoxy, the angelic host entrusted with protecting the authoritarian power. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite their chronological proximity, the contexts of childhood and youth are not metonymically close: unlike childhood, youth does not feel comfortable in the position of onlooker fascinated by the conflict and the unity of opposites. It is characterized by so\u00adcial altruism, rebellion and an intolerance toward everything in\u00advested with \u201cpaternal\u201d prerogatives. On the other hand, the ico\u00adnoclas\u00adtic gesture does not befit childhood (\u00adeternal, stagnant child\u00adhood), for which inertia and a taste for an apocalyptic vision of the world are \u201cappropriate\u201d\u2009\u2014\u2009whereas youth is aflame with a desire to alter the existing order of things. In other words, both youth and the youthful are missing from present-day world, where childhood and \u00adadulthood remain the principal psy\u00adchosocial niches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes the compartmentalization of viewpoints and principles characteristic of verbal interaction does not apply to the written word, which, as we know, \u201conce written, cannot be erased.\u201d That’s why, upon \u00adseeing rules and regulations produced by the authorities, we become instantly sobered up. The return from child\u00adhood to adulthood transpires in seconds, as if attesting to the fact that the printed word is a maturing factor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the space of collective speech, one feels like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. On the lips of grown-ups, babyish lexicon mani\u00adfests itself in diminutive suffixes as well as borrowings, imi\u00adtations and \u00adrepetitions. \u201cRepetition is the mother of learn\u00ading,\u201d states the well-known truism imported from the scholastic practice of memorizing the say\u00adings of great men, slogans, and literary texts. Continuing on the sub\u00adject of \u00adbor\u00adrowing, imitation, and repetition as attributes of schoolboy man\u00adners and \u00adinfantilism, one has to mention postmodern\u00adism, for which these are key concepts. Regardless of the borders, any \u201cspectacle order\u201d that \u00adpresently exists worldwide can be contemplated as the play of simi\u00adlarities and differences between postmodern infantilism and its tran\u00adscendence (the youth paradigm). <\/p>\n\n\n\n In \u201cPost-Autonomous Art\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - See chapter 12 in Victor Tupitsyn, The Museological Unconscious <\/em>(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009).<\/span> I wrote about the effect of fractionality<\/em>, about our perception which is programmed in such a way that we react exclusively to fractions of phenomena, events, and experiences\u2009\u2014\u2009to a diet of shortened thoughts, plots and narratives. In other words, these are not \u201cwhole numbers\u201d but \u201cfractional\u201d ones, i.e., surrogates that epitomize the partiality to which the mass media have gotten us accustomed. Isn\u2019t it why we find ourselves adjusted to watching actions and events through a crack as if the entire world can fit in? Fractionality<\/em> is, to some extent, a sort of pornographic device. Structurally, TV news and commercials aren\u2019t all that different from peep shows. Museums try to do roughly the same thing; that is, they adopt the aforementioned media technique\u2009\u2014\u2009the technique of manipulating fragments (read: miniatures) in order to endow them with the false (or exaggerated) sense of universality. There is nothing new about expanding to universality or \u201cconstructing\u201d it out of fragments (i.e., \u00adconstructing the whole out of miniatures), just as there is nothing new about fractionality<\/em>. The novelty of the situation is in how extreme it is. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Once ensconced in a museum, artworks begin to resemble the relics of holy martyrs (stumps and fingers) displayed in order to make a \u201cTreaty of Versailles\u201d with fractionality<\/em>, for which we pay dearly with a heightened sense of the whole, with a desire to detect in part the general picture of what is happening. The fractured nature of this illusory totality is levelled by technology; the seams and the clearings become invisible. Every part-object appears before us in media packaging, in the sense that partiality is presented not as an innate quality of reality but as a pretext for submitting a claim that has to do with the restoration of the lost or promised wholeness of the image. In other words, the fractional is perceived as an \u201canticipant\u201d of the whole, as evidence of its \u201cundisputed\u201d presence in medial space. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In order to explain how the effect of fractionality<\/em> manifests itself in the context of the museum, I will cite an exemplary art exhibition with a multitude of accompanying texts (on the walls) and snappy titles through which one can see the barely discernible shapes (fractions) of issues and discourses, the way one can see watermarks on dollar bills. Upon closer inspection one finds out that this is nothing more than a media trick which relies on \u201can imaginative intending\u201d on the part of the viewer inclined (or made to incline) toward extrapolation. Subject to extrapolation, for instance, are the fractions which determine the level of connection between the discourses announced at the exhibition entrance and the eclectic expositions inside. The same argument can also be applied to other fractional phenomena (part-objects, part-concepts, part-insights), whose ephemeral nature is the best possible pretext for medial extrapolation. On the one hand, the notion of fractionality<\/em> applies to everything that appeals to the so-called \u201cexpanded field\u201d (in Rosalind Krauss\u2019 terminology). On the other hand, there are different modes of fractionality<\/em>: while the media have been dealing in extremely small units for many years now, museums have only recently \u201csucceeded\u201d in attaining this goal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Due to the medial effects I have described, contemporary art exhibitions have been gradually losing the status of an autonomous aesthetic event. Moreover, the curatorial projects themselves are no longer oriented toward the art of curating, toward the representation of autonomous worlds (autonomous not in the sense of being socially disengaged or detached from reality, but in the sense of being independent from die<\/em> Kulturindustrie<\/em> and the media). Neither the exhibitions not the featured works attempt any longer to lay claim to the status of independent \u00adartistic value (lest they be accused of \u201cmauvais ton\u201d). In most cases, they consist of trash dumped in such a way that it makes itself available for multiple \u00adassociations on the part of the spectators, for extrapolation, and for \u00adcontact with things that, presumably in \u201ccompleted\u201d form, exist \u00adsomewhere beyond the boundaries of the art world. As a result, the exhibition is no longer fulfilled in a museum but in the gaps between commercials and news reports. By the way, the word trash is used here not in a derogatory way, but in order to amplify the indexical potential of sign-objects featured in media-oriented group shows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The hypocrisy of the slogan \u201cSupport our troops\u201d yields a comparison with ballpoint pens. The repeatedly renewed process of using these disposable tools is linked to the notion of parthenogenesis in the sense that the used-up set (the dead) is immediately replaced with a new generation. Such is (we are told) the balance sheet summarizing relationships between \u201ccasual\u201d and \u201cuniversal.\u201d To conclude, I will recall a misfortune that befell Italian PM Berlusconi in December 2009, when someone threw a miniature sculpture into his face. Regardless of pros and cons, one is left wondering if the miniature has survived the accident.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/70_HS01_Tupitsyn_BKruger_10441a-extra-scaled.jpg\")
The Globe Shrinks<\/em> (still image), 2010.
Photo: courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n