The Twenty-First Century Baroque Sensiblity

Guy Debord and the Situationist International (SI) saw everyday life as “the measure of all things” and in 1957, declared they would henceforth dedicate themselves to the abolition of art and to the destruction of the everyday. Their displeasure with modern society was a direct result of what they observed as an increasing cultural reification and a ‘spectacularization’ of everyday life – where all that was once directly lived has become mere representation”. As recently as 2004, Art Historian and Situationist scholar, Tom McDonough has admitted that while the SI’s theory of the spectacle continues to gain an increasing amount of academic interest, there are still certain gaps existing in the overall historical understanding of the movement (1957 – 1972). One of the areas he has called for more research in is that of the Situationist interest in the Baroque.

There is a tendency to assume that spectacle is a concept unique to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries when it actually reflects all the characteristics of a baroque fascination with visual saturation in the forms of ‘spatiality’ and ‘seriality’. Debord and the SI were well aware of seventeenth-century baroque spectacle and often referred to it – with both dismay and as a source of inspiration – in terms of a sensibility still persisting in, and pervading, contemporary culture. In fact, a comparative historical analysis of the Debordian concept of spectacle in terms of a seventeenth-century context and the rise of baroque form can be used to reconcile the persistence of today’s spectacular sensibility as a result of a cultural circumstance experiencing a state of ‘transition’, or ‘paradigm shift’.

In his Principles of Art History (1915), Heinrich Wolfflin defines the Baroque in opposition to the Classical. For Wolfflin, the baroque uses the same forms as the classical, but in place of the concept of the ‘perfect’ and ‘completed’ found in the classic, the baroque implies a notion of ‘limitlessness’, ‘infinity’, and ‘the colossal’. The classic idea of beautiful proportion is replaced, in the Baroque, with emotive expression and the classic preoccupation with ‘being’ becomes a concentration on ‘happening’ and action. Wolfflin demonstrates this shift in sensibility through a comparison of the artistic practices of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To do so, he first defines the existence of five oppositional concepts found in Classical and Baroque art. A classical linear composition – where things are represented as they are, vs. a baroque painterly composition – where things are represented as they seem to be; plane to recession – classic art reduces the parts of a total form to a quiet sequence of planes where the Baroque emphasises depth and movement; closed, structured form vs. open, lawless form; multiplicity vs. unity – in the classic, unity is achieved by a harmony of free parts, in the Baroque, unity is achieved in a single theme; and classical absolute clarity vs. baroque relative clarity of the subject.

It is through precisely this comparative definition that the baroque has commonly come to be described as bold, extravagant, and spectacular. For example, in The Last Supper (Fig 1), Tintoretto uses dramatic light sources – such as the halos painted over the heads of the disciple figures, and the brilliant glow surrounding the head of the Christ figure – to emphasize a strong contrast between light and dark. Conversely, the subjects in Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (Fig 2) seem to be dining under a more subtle, centred, and evenly distributed light source. The plume of smoke and ‘heavenly bodies’ that are painted into the surrounding area of the primary light-source at the top left hand corner of the Tintoretto painting, together with the figures themselves, each of which are painted in mid-action, suggest a chaotic movement in form as well as in paint. While many of Leonardo’s disciple figures also seem to have been captured midway through a movement, their gestures are far less aggressive than Tintoretto’s, particularly since the central Christ figure is notably stationary, and is defined as the fixed point of perspective. It should also be noted that Tintoretto’s striking use of fragments of blue, gold, and red colours dotted unevenly throughout the canvas contributes to a startling tension in the overall composition. On the other hand, Leonardo’s piece maintains a soft, balanced, and unvarying palate, which seems to project a sense of calm over the image. Tintoretto’s piece, composed as it was with a concern for stirring the affections and senses of the viewer, exemplifies the baroque delight in spectacle and sensory experiences.

Figure 1: Tintoretto, The Last Supper, 1592-94, oil on canvas

Figure 2: Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, 1498, fresco

As Marshall Brown points out in “The Classic is the Baroque: On the Principle of Wolfflin’s Art History”, Wolfflin’s articulation of baroque art is that it is “present, vocal, and alive”, where classic art is “absent, silent, static”. Although Wolfflin intended Principles of Art History to act as a defence of baroque, it reads rather as its own classical articulation, where “the true baroque becomes nothing other than a delicate variation on the classic”. The baroque came to be believed as lacking the reason and discipline that is associated with classicism, neoclassicism, and the era of Enlightenment, gaining it a reputation for being ‘spectacular’.

The term ‘spectacle’ most simply refers to something of an especially remarkable or impressive nature. It depicts an object or action primarily on a large and lavish scale, certainly in the realm of public display, and is often considered regrettable – a degeneration or decline of the norm. Spectacle has also been aligned with the bizarre, excessive, and irregular. The ‘baroque spectacle’ then, has come to be understood as an extravagant and theatrical formal style or production. However, the tendency it has for pervading consciousness seems to allow it an application to an overall cultural sensibility.

Wolfflin himself was strictly committed to a formalist evaluation of art and to the aesthetic, material, and technical means of artistic production. Brown, however, argues that the formal features of artworks rely on their context of production in history. He states that “works of art participate in history because they make history…’form is act’ because artistic shaping both grows out of and reflects the labour of creation.” In this way, Brown uses Wolfflin’s principles to argue that the baroque actually signals a larger historical moment; one that exists in a perpetual state of flux. In other words, the classic is a moment of stability in contrast to the unstable circumstance of a baroque period. Brown is not alone. Recent scholarship has tended to extend baroque aesthetic formalism into a fuller contextual affectation.

Historians such as John Rupert Martin, Christine Buci-Glucksmann , Timothy Hampton, Omar Calabrese, and Angela Ndalianis have used the baroque to describe dominant social and cultural drives that have manifested themselves throughout various points in history. For instance, in “The Baroque From the Point of View of the Art Historian”, Martin assumes the baroque to be a set of commonly held attitudes rather than strictly a product of the seventeenth-century. He notes the difficulty faced in defining a baroque style due to the diversity of practices present in the seventeenth-century. For Martin, it is this very diversity of styles, which has become the most distinguishing feature of the baroque.

In Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity, Buci-Glucksmann recognizes modernist and abstract qualities in seventeenth-century baroque aesthetics as a tool for understanding the development of early modernist movements. She notes a baroque ‘folie du voir’, and emphasizes how the radical and experimental possibilities in baroque form were also present in some early twentieth-century painting practices. Buci-Glucksmann exemplifies Paul Klee’s 1920 painting, Angelus Novus (Fig 3) as demonstrating an ironic excess “which marks the passage from the visible towards the invisible, where…the whole concoction of the unnameable plays itself out”. She argues that this painting is one among many modern compositions that calls on a baroque tendency to suspend linear, chronologic time in favour of opening a “realm beyond appearances”.

Figure 3: Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920

Hampton is equally concerned with historical perception and the development of modernity but, unlike Buci-Glucksmann, remains hesitant to define it in relation to the critical categories of baroque itself. He points to the historiographical debates that have examined the baroque as an ambiguous term reflecting the difficulties inherent in structuralist approaches to delineating the past. He finds it useful to “imagine the baroque as a series of exchanges between various types of representation – political, literary, philosophical”. Hampton believes that these exchanges define the emergence of the material and illusory sites that “provide the terrain for the very invention of modernity”.

The formal manifestations of the baroque across chronological confines also concern Calabrese in his text Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times. Dissatisfied with postmodernism as a consistent, unified framework of analysis to explain aesthetic tendencies, Calabrese suggests that the baroque offers a productive formal model with which to characterize the transformations of the cultural objects from both the seventeenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. He recognized the baroque as a general attitude and formal quality that crosses the boundaries of historical periodization. According to Calabrese “many important cultural phenomena of our time are distinguished by a specific internal ‘form’ that recalls the baroque” in terms of dynamic, open structures. Like Brown and similar to Martin, Calabrese indicates that a baroque disposition “displays a loss of entirety, totality, and system in favour of instability, polydimensionality, and change”.

Angela Ndalianis agrees that modern and contemporary baroque aesthetics are not simply a case of art history repeating, imitating, or appropriating itself. Rather, recent (neo) baroque forms parallel seventeenth-century baroque forms but with technologies that express twentieth and twenty-first century concerns. In Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, Ndalianis suggests that the neo-baroque shares a baroque delight in sensory experiences by combining the visual, the auditory, and the textual in a spectacular mode of dynamism. She argues that recent decades have shown our culture to be “seduced by visual forms that are reliant on baroque perceptual systems”, systems that engage the spectator by means of sensation. She offers a dialogue concerned with the broad issues and general tendencies that construct cultural sensibilities. In this way, Ndalianis identifies two aspects of baroque aesthetic production that characterize both seventeenth-century and contemporary perception. ‘Spatiality’ and ‘seriality’ are two components of baroque spectacle, which make it easier to trace the existence of spectacle across historical divides. Together, spatiality and seriality obscure the boundaries between reality and illusion.

Spatiality can be understood as a ‘formal effect’ demonstrating baroque attitudes towards visual delight and illusion. For instance, in Pietro da Cortona’s Divine Providence/ The Glorification of Urban VIII, in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome (Fig 4), the single, immobile viewpoint of the classical spectator is transformed into a dynamic process that changes as a result of its 3-dimensional capacity to actively engage the viewer in spatial terms. It exhibits the baroque tendency to “pass into an undulating continuity where both beginning and end are carefully hidden”. This creates a system where discontinuous elements are sharply outlined and rhythmical, and which stretch out into a luminous realm of movement and colour. This represents the baroque’s direct refusal to respect the limits of the frame, and its inclination to “invade space in every direction, to perforate it, to become as one with its surroundings”. This lack of respect for the limits of the frame is manifest with intense visual directness in baroque spectacle. The impact and meaning of Cortona’s ceiling painting depends on the interaction and combination of multiple, shifting viewpoints and narrative perspectives. Open systems typical of the baroque permit a greater flow between the inside and outside and between the viewer and object. Rather than reflecting a classical concern for the static, closed, and centralized, the baroque system is dependent upon dynamic forces that expand, and often rupture borders.

Figure 4: Pietro da Cortona, Divine Providence/ The Glorification of Urban VIII, Palazo Barberini, Rome, 1633-39

Baroque spectacle, then, operates on the principle of a space that illusionistically connects with and infinitely extends from our own space. For example, the central panel of the Barberini ceiling appears to be punctured and perceptually extends to the heavens. Furthermore, the figures appear to be tumbling into the space of the spectator. The gaze of the viewer is drawn “deep into the enigmatic depths of the infinite”, or what Ndalianis has identified as “the realm of baroque spectacle as theatre of the world: once invited beyond the frame, the frame perpetually disintegrates” enclosing the viewer in a series of baroque ‘realities’ that present the possibility of a “limitless scope of vision”. She points to the way in which contemporary entertainment spectacles greatly expand upon baroque spectacular vision – where the fictive and the real appear to merge.

Special effects theme park rides, such as the Terminator 2: 3D attraction at Universal Studios in Florida (Fig 5), exemplify the spatial indeterminacy that make up a baroque spectacle. Using hydraulically powered motion simulators combined with film and digital technology, the participatory and invasive nature of these rides produce such an intense sense of the architectural dimension of sight that many audience members literally suffer the effects in the form of nausea! The line that demarcates audience space from the performance is blurred, and the audience becomes a participant in an enveloping spectacle. In both Cortona’s ceiling fresco, and Terminator 2: 3D, a baroque spatial perception informs the logic of the spectacle; “the spectator into the spectacle, and the spectacle into the spectator”.


Figure 5: Still photographs, Terminator 2: 3D, Universal Studios, 1997

Ndalianis, like Wolfflin, argues that the serial structure integral to the baroque is an open form that complicates the closure of classical systems. Expressing their seriality in alternate ways and through alternate forms of media, contemporary popular entertainments reveal a serial logic that has emerged from the contexts of globalization, postmodernism, and technological advances. Computer games, comic books, theme parks, and television shows have become interwoven. Reflecting the interests of multinational conglomerates that have investments in numerous media companies, one media form often serially extends its own narrative into those of other media. Rather than interpreting the serial logic of contemporary entertainment media as the product of an era steeped in sterile repetition and unoriginality, Ndalianis suggests that the repetition inherent in serialized form is the result of a baroque ‘aesthetics of repetition’ concerned with variation.

The term ‘seriality’ relates to the copy that seeks to reproduce, multiply, or allude to versions of an ‘original’. The articulation of this in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries encompasses the series, serial, and sequel. For example, in addition to its multiple comic book variations – Batman, Detective, Shadow of the Bat, Gotham Nights, Catwoman, etc. – the Batman story has also found popular form of expression in four blockbuster films and numerous computer games. This kind of contemporary seriality is driven by capitally motivated cross-media extensions and cross-merchandizing. It is the outcome of a marketing strategy that aims at maximizing the fullest marketing potential from its product. Quite simply, financial risk and gain is reduced or amplified by promoting serial variations based on previously successful formulas in the hope of reproducing their success in the serialized format.

The serial formations associated with the seventeenth-century baroque are the product of different economic, social, and technological formations than the serial formations associated with contemporary times. However, free-market strategies were present in both eras. The seventeenth-century experienced a boom in international trade and the establishment of the first stock exchanges and security dwellings. For example, in 1602, the Dutch East India Company established the Amsterdam Stock Exchange in order to concentrate large amounts of capital to carry on trade with the East Indies. It began with dealings in printed stocks and bonds and was the first exchange to formally begin tradings in securities. Under these circumstances, art production was no longer purely the domain of princely patrons or church officials. Independent art dealers established shops throughout Europe, selling to and ordering commissions for buyers from a new middle-class market. In a very short time, artists developed a great variety of genres that answered to the tastes of the middle class, such as landscape, still life, townscapes, and the genre piece. With an eye to competition, artists specialized in one of these subjects. By devoting themselves to one particular genre they were able to attain the highest standards, which increased the chances of selling their work. Reflecting this rise in mercantilism, and the shift away from patronage, artists painted and sold serial variations of similar scenes. This is best exemplified in the context of seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting.

Painters gathered together a variety of objects, arranging and combining them in a way that could be translated onto canvas as realistically as possible. For instance, in Still Life with Chinese Bowl (Fig 6), Willem Kalf chose a vertical canvas format, suitable to a diagonal arrangement, in which a precious Chinese bowl dominates the composition. In Still Life with Late Ming Ginger Jar (Fig 7), he chooses an almost identical layout and once again focuses on a rare Chinese article. In fact, these two paintings are noticeably alike right down to the dual lemon peels spiraling from the tables and the thick oriental cloths bundled at the bottom right hand corners of each canvas. The still life was a popular specialization for artists to best depict the objects at which they excelled. The perfect rendering of material, clever compositions, and subtle illumination won the admiration of a broad public, who ensured that still lifes sold well. It was in the best financial interest of the artist to perfect and then reuse a very particularized style for which they could become notable. Furthermore, the continued development of the printing press, at this time, facilitated a proliferation of image copies of these paintings, as well as sculptures and architecture, amongst all classes of individuals.

Figure 6: Willem Kalf, Still Life with Chinese Bowl, 1662

Figure 7: Willem Kalf, Still Life with Late Ming Ginger Jar, 1669

The kinds of repetition existing in serialized formats, requires a reconsideration of classical closed forms. Unlike blatant repetition, the effectiveness of spectacular seriality actually depends on a complex process of variation. One that keeps the subject – or viewer – interested while, at the same time, recalling, extending, and building upon previous narrative forms. The repeated elements are often emphasized, but the producer must also outperform and refashion past fragments. In other words, seriality is only possible with a pre-established multiple narrative format such as that which is promoted by a baroque consciousness. The kind of open, decentralized, and non-linear framework available to a multiple narrative has the capacity needed to expand narrative scenarios into an infinite and dazzling spectacle.

The problem with spectacle, according to Debord and the Situationists, is that gradually the illusion created by spatiality and seriality stands in for reality itself. They argued that this leads to a collective state of total dependence on image-based and material aspects of culture. The SI believed that everyday life had become a spectacle – where lived experience is replaced by the media image, and the active participation of individuals is substituted by passivity.

In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord offers a description of the ‘spectacle’ as “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images…not just a collection of images”. The Situationists understood contemporary life under late capitalism as premised on consumption and the accumulation of capital rather than on laisséz-faire production, which primarily sought an efficient organization of materials. According to Debord, producers who have successfully established total hegemony over the economy now regulate the condition of consumption within late capitalism hierarchically. Debord argues that this has led to a stage, known as the spectacle, where commodity completely dominates everyday life, and where the formation of authentic human needs is replaced with the manufactured needs of the economy so that “the real consumer becomes a consumer of illusions”.

These illusions are often cited as the creation of a mass media, whose sole function is to generate a false and “endless series of glittering and seductive images” of abundance, satisfaction, power, and leisure for consumption by the masses. For instance, in “Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord”, Thomas Y. Levin notes how the photograph on the cover of the first American edition of The Society of the Spectacle, taken by J.R. Eyerman, depicts a 3D cinematic audience, elegantly attired, in a trance-like state of absorption, with grim expressions, and pursed lips (Fig 8). Intended to reflect the Situationist’s idea of a ‘dumbfounded’ nature present in the masses, this image has since become a cliché for the alienation of individuals by the mass media appearing on t-shirts, bags, and buttons, while remaining closely associated with the writings of Guy Debord and the Situationists. In fact, for the Situationists, all images came to represent a reduction of historical relations to a petrified superficial monumentalization existing apart from lived reality. However, as Anselm Jappe relates in his book, Guy Debord, Debord’s concept of the spectacle does not point exclusively to a tyranny of media such as television or cinema. Rather, the ‘mass media’ are only a limited aspect of the spectacle that happens to act as its “most stultifying superficial manifestation”. In fact, the agency of the media expresses the society of which it is a part. Thus, as Jappe distinguishes, the spectacle is not a “pure and simple adjunct to the world” in such a way as communications technologies may be argued to be. Instead, it is the entirety of all social relations that become appropriated by the spectacle in order to reinforce the isolation of individuals for the perpetuation of consumption.

Figure 8: cover of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, designed by J.R. Eyerman, 1957

Debord points to the way celebrities are seen to embody the quintessence of illusory living as “spectacular representations of living human beings, distilling the essence of the spectacle’s banality into images of possible roles”. Celebrities are depicted by the mass media as having successfully adopted a style of life that any individual is seemingly able to achieve through a continual pursuit of consumption. Debord argues, however, that “the individual who in the service of the spectacle is placed in stardom’s spotlight is in fact the opposite of an individual” since the spectacle requires a relinquishing of autonomy in favour of capitalist obedience. A celebrity, by offering him/herself as an image commodity, also expands him/herself to contribute to an increasing ‘falsification of life’ at the same time.

A discussion of the SI is incomplete without mentioning their collaboration with French cultural theorist, Henri Lefebvre who worked closely with the SI to develop a comprehensive revolutionary program based on the fusion of art and life. Lefebvre saw that his contemporary society viewed itself as dynamic when, in fact, industry and economic expansion were the dominant objectives. He characterized the result of this as a ‘stagnating’ of society and agreed with Debord that everyday life had become a spectacle due to a series of “substitutions, displacements, replacements, and diversions”. He called for ‘total revolution’, which would see everyday life/ man be replaced by philosophical/ artistic life. It was in this light that Debord praised Baroque theatricality for its formal blending of boundaries between frame and viewer. Later, Debord revised his opinion on this, realizing that this seventeenth-century blending – spatiality – actually contributed to a spectacular (un)consciousness.

Debord, like Calabrese and Ndalianis, understood history as a “struggle between tradition and innovation”. He wanted to believe that this is the “basic theme of internal cultural development in historical societies; where innovation always wins”. This is reminiscent of the kind of paradigmatic conception of history laid out in Thomas Kuhn’s 1962, Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn observed that throughout history there have been ‘paradigm shifts’ – conceptual revolutions – that threw the dominant … approach into crisis and eventual dissolution. This was a discontinuous change provoked by altogether new assumptions, theories, and research programs. In science, Kuhn argued, a given paradigm survives until another one, seemingly having a greater explanatory power, supersedes it. The seventeenth-century is an era frequently associated with the kind of transition inherent in a social, economic, and cultural paradigm shift. It is in this light that we can examine our contemporary spectacular situation in light of its affinity with the seventeenth-century.

The seventeenth-century was one of almost continuous warfare, which involved virtually every nation in a complex web of shifting alliances. The Thirty Year’s War (1618-48) was fuelled by the dynastic ambitions of the kings of France, who sought to exert their hegemony over Europe, and the Hapsburgs, who ruled Spain, the Netherlands, and Austria. Though fought largely in Germany, it eventually engulfed nearly all of Europe, even absorbing the Dutch struggle for independence from Spain, which had been waged since 1581.

Comparatively, the early part of the twentieth century has been characterized by the demise of the British Empire and the ensuing struggle for world power – primarily between Germany and America – culminating in the First and Second World Wars. Following this, from 1945 until 1991, the United States and their allies were engaged in a Cold War with the Soviet Union and their allies, causing grave political and cultural tensions throughout the globe. Additionally, the twenty-first century continues to see its own series of physical conflicts between North America, the Middle East, and Asia.

Subsequent to these political transitions, and the economic changes mentioned earlier, were radical developments in scientific and philosophical thought. The complex metaphysics of the humanists, which endowed everything with religious import, was replaced by a new physics, beginning with Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, and culminating in Descartes and Newton. They instituted a cosmology that severed the ties between sensory perception and science. Scientists now defined underlying relationships in mathematical and geometrical terms as part of the simple, orderly system of mechanics. Not only was the seventeenth-century world view fundamentally different from what had preceded it, but its understanding of visual reality was also altered as a result of advances in optical physics and physiology.

The twentieth century also saw rapid advances in science and technology. With the invention of the television, the cinema screen, and the computer, visual reality was once again remodelled. The sudden augmentation in the technical capability of media allowed for such possibilities as simultaneous transmission, special effects, animation, and programming. These techniques were then easily disseminated with the formation of the internet, which created opportunities for global communication and information exchange that were previously unimaginable. Everyday lives and individual standards of living amongst developed nations also changed dramatically as new technologies – from microwaves to home entertainment units – were introduced into the home.

The existence of historical and cultural transformations, are an important aspect of the formal and aesthetic attributes of the baroque. As noted, the seventeenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries underwent radical cultural, perceptual, and technological shifts that manifested themselves in similar aesthetic forms. Although all three periods were the products of specific socio-historical and temporal conditions, each demonstrated wide-scale baroque sensibilities. Specific sets of stylistic trends and aesthetic norms are complexly interwoven with the institutional structures that give rise to them. As Remy Saisselin has observed, “the arrival of a new style heralds changes within a society”. Baroque is, itself, an indication of a culture in transition between two paradigms. Spectacle, manifested by baroque spatiality and seriality, is one result of a historical circumstance in the midst of a paradigm shift.

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