Sometimes People get Cranky by Mocksim, one of the Yearly Print series: C-Type, 1m by 2m, completed 11th September 2011

Sometimes People Get Cranky: the tenth iteration of Mocksim’s Yearly Print

In the late evenings of 1480, Señora Uccello would indeed get cranky. According to Vasari, she would go to bed; her husband, the painter Paolo, would stay up exploring draftsmanship. When she called him to take his conjugal place beside her, he would cry out in raptures: “Oh! What a sweet thing this perspective is!” [1]

Dante also suggests there is something chaste about this new aspect of painting. The role of perspective is almost nun-like in his assessment: “Geometry is lily-white, unspotted by error, and most certain, both in itself and in its handmaid, whose name is perspective”.[2]

So the geometric principles of the Quattrocento painter might even be seen as moral ones. It is surely a Christian discovery that: “Parallel lines receding from the plane of the picture surface appear to meet at a single point on the horizon, the vanishing point; Lines parallel to the picture plane do not converge.“ [3]

If politics is the continuation of war by other means, perhaps the same might be said of art with reference to the Catholic crusades of the 12th and the 13th centuries. Islam has never shown any great interest in representational innovation. Perspective soon became an occidental norm, an empirical version developing in the protestant North.

After all, a certain faith or at least convention is necessary to read perspective. So writes art historian Ernst Gombrich: “It is important to be quite clear at this point wherein the illusion consists. It consists, I believe, in the conviction that there is only one way of interpreting the visual pattern in front of us.” [4]

Perspective has a certain dogma, as can be shown by the anecdote about a Japanese student who came to Britain in the early 20th century. Yoshio Markino attended a grammar school where he was taught to draw a box using perspective. His less naturalised father saw the efforts and responded: “What? That box is surely crooked not square.“ [5]

In his twin tower series the artist Mocksim uses classical perspective together with a monochrome green background which calls to mind a hunt, deluge or battle scene by Uccello. As has been said: “The importance of monochrome [is] not only derived from Florentine feeling for sculptural form, but also stem directly from Alberti’s analysis of what is most desirable in painting.” [6]

So far the work is perfectly civic and ordered, but we know only too well that the geometrical certainties of the Christian era now meet a challenge in the form of the two hijacked planes which flew into the Word Trade Centre on September 11 2001. Until that point the horizon of the world was guaranteed by a superpower.

This at least is what writer Jacques Derrida contests. “The obvious fact is since the ‘end of the cold war’ what can be called the world order in its relative and precarious stability, depends largely on the solidity and reliability, on the credit of American power.” [7]

What we lost when American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 hit the towers was our sense of perspective, our relative horizon, here in the West. Perhaps this is what Mocksim had in mind when he spoke to me of “switching off perspective“ to generate the crumbling, shadow towers in his 9/11 series.

Along with switching off perspective, Mocksim has removed the horizon from his ghostly scenes. His towers hover in a virtual space, as infinite as the justice swiftly promised by US foreign policy in the wake of the attack. It is a virtual space which denies us the chance to define what might have just happened.

“’Something’ took place,” points out Derrida, “we have the feeling of not having seen it coming, and certain consequences undeniably follow upon the “thing”. But this very thing, the place and meaning of this “event,” remains ineffable“. [8]

He calls it “a unicity with no generality on the horizon or with no horizon at all.” [9] Clearly following the unprecedented event par excellence of 9/11, lines of perspective and vanishing points have become quite unworkable. We need a new visual language. And having reached the end of this pictorial line, Mocksim is compelled to repeat the moment of impact.

The renaissance science of optics is just a “language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it’s talking about.” [10]

But Mocksim’s project risks becoming more than a mere struggle to comprehend. By reopening this archive each September, he may be conjuring up future attacks. “The worst comes back, or threatens to come back.” [11]. Even a condemnation of the event will call it back

In fact, the simple flick of a switch by which the artist demolishes both towers seems to preempt the form of techno war which also threatens humanity, “the possibilities for destruction and chaotic disorder that are in reserve, for the future, in the computerized networks of the world”. [12] This is one possible horizon of the work.

But you cannot anticipate the worst without some hope for the best. Allowing chaos into his work Mocksim exposes the viewer to the impossible, or to history, or to “this other regime of the ‘possible-impossible’ that I try to think by questioning in all sorts of ways…by trying to ’deconstruct’ if you will, the heritage of such concepts as ‘possibility,‘ ‘power,‘ ‘impossibility’ and so on”. [13]

It is not hard to see these destructured towers as deconstructed towers. Mockim’s Yearly Print moves beyond perspective, beyond dogma, beyond the monolithic. Which brings us back to Uccello, searching all night for the vanishing point. His beloved perspective, which closes off the future, may not have been sweet at all.

Mark Sheerin, December 2011

[1] Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, OUP, p.83
[2] Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, new edition, OUP, p.124
[3] ibid. p.126
[4] E.H. Gombrich, Art & Illusion: A study in the psychology of pictorial representation, Phaidon, p210
[5] ibid. p 227
[6] Peter and Linda Murray, The Art of the Renaissance, Thames and Hudson, p.116
[7] Giovanni Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Harbermas and Jacques Derrida, The University of Chicago Press, pp.92-3
[8] ibid, p.86
[9] ibid, p.86
[10] ibid, p.86
[11] Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television, Polity Press, p135
[12] Borradori, p.101
[13] ibid, p.120

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