lascaux2
Villa Arson
http://www.lascaux2.org

"Lascaux is the passage from the work world to the play world, which is
the passage from the Homo Faber to the Homo Sapien."–Georges Bataille,
"Lascaux: La Naissance de l'Art"

The Villa Arson, a relatively well-known center for contemporary art
located in Nice, France, has closed its doors for the summer and opened
itself up to the web with an exhibition called "lascaux2"
(http://www.lascaux2.org). Since I had planned to pass by Nice during
my stay this July in the south of France to see the Villa Arson, this
came as unfavorable news; but now that I am back in Paris I have made
the visit virtually.

I was particularly interested in the title of the exhibit in that I had
a couple of years ago received special permission to visit the actual
Grotte de Lascaux (carbon dated circa 17,000 BP) which is located atop
an ancient headland in the Perigord for my research into immersive
consciousness (see: http://www.dom.de/groebel/jnech/ideals.htm). This
voluptuously painted cave is the most superbly adorned of the
prehistoric caves, festooned as it is in a wrap-around overhead garland
of animal figures.

Lascaux's upper-walls and ceilings are resplendently surfaced with
sumptuous immersive paintings. The tangle of imagery exists in a
groundless (virtual) atmosphere, not anchored to anything suggesting
land. Rather, what is suggested is a 360 degree non-Euclidean space -
which is precisely the arrangement of the ideal range of virtuality in
Virtual Reality. There is no attempt at depicting non-virtual Euclidean
ground or defining a landscape - and there are no plants, trees or rocks
depicted.

The ludicrous title of Villa Arson's show "lascaux2" is a transparent
reference to "Lascaux II": an immersive reproduction which copies the
shape of the Grotte de Lascaux's Salle des Taureaux and the Axial
Gallery. Here painters have reproduced the figures and symbols of these
two galleries exactly as possible using the same painting materials as
the Magdalenians used. Lascaux II also contains a small museum which is
educationally informative. There is no sense in calling it a copy. It is
an educational tool.

The catch-as-catch-can approach of lascaux2, however, holds nothing of
the layered, nuanced, cadenced, and revelatory aesthetic qualities of
even Lascaux II. It is rather just another summer group show - this one
of primarily web-casts augmented by chilly chat. As such, it is neither
better nor worse than the typical summer group show - it is a jolly (or
unseemly) hodge-podge of effaceable works which suffer from
ordinariness. Like an inexpensive French table wine, it has no bouquet.

As Georges Bataille (1897-1962) in his lengthy 1955 essay "Lascaux: La
Naissance de l'Art" said of the Grotte de Lascaux, we cannot know its
full meaning but we can sense its maker's desire to impress by stunning
our senses. And indeed in coming into the immersive space of the Grotte
de Lascaux my first impression was of being stunned and disconnected
from the norm in favor of a psychic space where sex, art, and death meet
in an aesthetic discharge. lascaux2 has none of this. Even worse, it is
devoid of that damned elusive thing called taste. I am not talking about
that quality called beauty, but of that quality which can invest the
ordinary no-nonsensical with dignity and indelibleness. Zeal, spunk,
concavity, airy intelligence and an obtuse, non-belabored Proustian wit
for non-idealized schematicization are all there in abundance, but the
sense of subtle understatement mixed with powerful presentational
finesse: this is absent. And it is a pity in that the exhibition fails
then in making the visitor more alert, more interested, or more aware of
the cross-currents between contemporary art and the distributional
aspects the Internet.

I do not think we should blame the Villa Arson directly for these short
comings; the trouble is indirect and lies deeper. France, like America
in the 90s, has adapted a blathering aesthetic rut where most all
artistic endeavors are ultimately subsumed by some sort of naturalist
morass. This comic-pathetic mentality is admirable, of course, for its
efficacy of anti-intellectual acumen and oppressive non-loquaciousness,
while one might regret its lack of quixotic subtlety and style.