If there was ever a time to imagine something better, it is now, someone is always saying from the precipice, high altar, media conference stand.
My imagined better is boundless; is matter without edges, water for water’s sake rather than water as limits in channels and ways; is a stateless state; a being beyond measure and beyond the dualism of formed and unformed, known and unknown, possessed and dispossessed, dressed and undressed.
Such an infinite space speculates, stretches, flexes to infinitum — what if, Lisa Robertson writes, “there is no ‘space,’ only a permanent, slow-motion mystic takeover, an implausibly careening awning?” Careening now, we lose our center of gravity and, with it, metrics for space, time, truth, and beauty, and I wonder what becomes available to us in flight.
In “Baroque as a World Philosophy,” Édouard Glissant draws this groundlessness out of the Baroque, writing that “Baroque style made its appearance in the West at the very moment that a certain idea of Nature — that it was homogeneous, harmonious, and comprehensible — was gaining ground.” He continues, “Baroque art or style was to turn to contrast, to circumvolution, to proliferation, to everything that contradicted the soi-disant oneness of the known and the knower, to everything that exalted quantity repeated to infinity and totality eternally renewed.” Written in 1987, the poet and philosopher writes of and through the Baroque not in support of Catholicism or the European settler campaign but in support of its refusal of “nature” and how this might be applied to conversations around gender, class, and race — or identity, period.
As a chronology (1600 to 1750), Baroque mirrored the contours of social and political crisis — the Protestant uprising across Northern Europe and the Catholic Church’s campaign to win back lapsed Christians by encouraging a more effusive, personal, and embodied religious expression. Unwieldy, bloated, and ornate, Baroque gave form to the campaign — rallied against the rigor of absolutism in excess of meaning, not a surplus of it. Baroque wrote the power of surfaces large — in trompe l’oeil clouds, in the powder clouds of a woman’s visage, and in clouds of opacity. It operated at the surface of the page, a lip, curlew, cherub’s thigh, a state beyond substance and all its representative forms. In proximity to the body and its sensorial experience and antithetical to the realism of Renaissance Italy, Baroque offered a “vitality, movement and emotional force of the kind which periodically causes an upheaval in the arts,” wrote Glissant. This sentiment appealed to artists and musicians who, emboldened by the visions and finances of the Catholic Church, were commissioned to adorn their buildings in a triumphant mode of propaganda against the stringency of Protestantism. It extended to women like the composer Barbara Strozzi and the painter Artemisia Gentileschi, whose mutual coterie of artists and writers in Venice discussed sexual liberalism and la questione delle donne or “the woman question.” Gentileschi, whose bloody rendering of Judith Slaying Holofernes (c. 1920) depicts the drunk, corpulent general Holofernes, who falls asleep and at the hands of Judith, loses his head and thus his life. Gentileschi, who began her professional career at fifteen years old, painted Judith slaying Holofernes as retribution for and testament to her traumatic sexual assault by her tutor Agostino Tassi when she was a young teen. Inadvertently, Catholicism produced an artistic movement that expressed, or embodied in the case of Judith Slaying Holofernes — vis-à-vis Gentileschi slaying Tassi — both the violence of the patriarch and its demise.
Baroque is defined by a crisis — one that assumed and capitalized on excess and proliferation, against Protestantism but also the rationalism of Renaissance men like Da Vinci and Michelangelo with their precise and calculated measurements. It spoke to and of power but also sensuality, sexual liberalism, and feeling, the illusory nature of things, and the theater of life. It was defined by its “breadths” and reaches, and a “core hybridity” that Édouard Glissant said worked “against the rationalist claim to penetrate the mysteries of the known in one single, incisive, uniform movement.” In proximity to the papacy and their payroll, artists and musicians infiltrated the zeitgeist with these ideas and traveled with them to Mexico and outposts of the Mediterranean, making room for Baroque’s versions and sisters. What became cultural “inputs of a novel kind” had begun as “revolutionary disfigurements of reality” — or Western conceptions of reality. Glissant writes that “a first manifestation of this expansion was undoubtedly to be seen in Latin American art, so close to Iberian and Flemish Baroque, yet so intimately interwoven with indigenous elements, daringly introduced into the baroque concert.”
In Mieke Bal’s survey of Belgium artist Lili Dujourie, titled Hovering Between Thing and Event: Encounters with Lili Dujourie (1998), she writes that the Baroque is “retrospectively illuminating about a great artistic tradition that has become so well known for its decorative excess that we tend to forget its revolutionary innovations.” Dujourie’s draped and folded fabric work from the late 1970s and early 1980s mirrors the Baroque drama, but Bal failed to note that its decorative excess is its revolutionary innovation. Decorative excess has long been assigned to the condition of women; women who have since the advent of beauty — Aristotelian symmetry, not Helena Rubinstein — been associated with surface appearances — cast in gold, illuminated in alabaster, or not. Beyond this veneer is an opportunity. In the early 1970s, women artists began to rally against the puritanical minimalism of the art world the same way the Baroque rallied against Protestantism; they sought out “a new consciousness and an aesthetic praxis and discourse of difference” (Dirk Snauwaert, 1998). Made at a tipping point in women’s liberation, work like Lili Dujourie’s disrupted the white cube gallery with a post-minimalist sensibility and a tendency toward proliferation — in cloth, paint, bodies, and menstrual blood. Attending to the surface of things texturally was an artistic counter to rationalist thought — a philosophical turn prescribed by men who’d have us believe that there’s always something more or better beneath the surface and, thus, beyond our grasp. Like Baroque, this period of intense consciousness-raising and resistance was a lesson and warning, and produced its own set of internal politics, not least around the aberrant artistic exclusion of women of color. Still, it did strive for inclusivity and pluralism in another sense — in the various groups, dialectics, and factions that formed feminist activism.
On email, a friend quoted another friend about the state of things in our current moment. She wrote, “We can’t choose the time in which we are born, but we can choose to struggle against our time.” Baroque was the manifestation of a struggle against its time. I don’t summon it wholesale or claim this as a title or movement, but seize it as an aesthetics of resistance in which “core hybridity,” “opacity,” and a “loss of scale” constitute a set of principles concerned not with an appreciation of beauty but with resistance, a breaking free from control. What arises from this lack of control? What does a lack of control mean socially and personally? How might we co-opt it, not as an inevitability but as an intent? How might we turn that feeling — hurtling, careening like that awning, a loss of gravity — into something generative, perhaps even meaningful? This makes me think of all the women and “unheroic” bodies like trans bodies, gender non-conforming bodies, colored bodies, and disabled bodies who’ve turned their lack of control, by which I mean oppression, into a feeling, perhaps even an artwork.
Baroque “announces to the world the growing contact between a diversity of ‘natures,’” writes Glissant. “It is in sympathy with this world movement and is no longer content to be merely a reaction against a philosophy or an aesthetic. It is the sum and result of all aesthetic theories, of all philosophies. In short, Baroque is neither an art nor a style, but a being-in-the-world […] the sum total of all types of being-in-society,” and I imagine “being” as both a feeling and critical intensity, one that speaks to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s definition of queerness, as an “open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality, aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.” I am for this, as I am for anything that breaks with monumentalism (also monopolies and monotheism). I am for multitudes; I am for Julia Kristeva’s excess of meaning rather than surplus and her jouissance, concocting the “sexual, spiritual, physical, conceptual at one and the same time.” I seek out instances — whole movements, epochs wryly — where women, whoever defines themselves as such, make texts against the deep and rational thought of “learned” men. By text I mean prose, by text I mean painting, by text I mean poetry. Through his essay “For Opacity,” Glissant transforms material opacity into a conceptual framework and applies it to questions of identity, writing that if we “examine the process of ‘understanding’ people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency.” Conversely, opacities “can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly, one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components.” I am drawn to this loss of clarity and how this also means a loss of hegemonic control, allowing difference to enter — our versions and sisters.
In the aptly titled essay “Unpresidented Times” (2017), Amy Sillman expounds on the timelessness of Ovid, in at least one sense: “A total fascination with a structuring logic of endless change.” Sillman, whose paintings are affecting, poetic, and downright funny, raises an important point — how we, as a society, across cultures, can redefine a loss or lack of control as an opportunity for endless and necessary change. “All human cultures have had their classical periods,” writes Glissant, “eras of dogmatic certainty from which they must all emerge together.” Baroque is not simply perceived but felt, perhaps even embodied, offering us not a blueprint but a framework for dissent — a how to be in the world — together.
For A Baroque
After Oldenburg, Glissant and Robertson
I am for a baroque as cloying
I am for a baroque as scarlet
I am for a baroque as velvet
I am for a baroque as surface
I am for a baroque as gesture
I am for a baroque as redress
I am for a baroque as excess
I am for a baroque as deluge
I am for a baroque as multiplicitous
I am for a baroque as breaching
I am for a baroque as commingling
I am for a baroque as hybrid
I am for a baroque as opacity
I am for a baroque as body
I am for a baroque as spirit
I am for a baroque as mind
I am for a baroque as breaths
I am for a baroque as breadths
I am for a baroque as boundless
I am for a baroque as anti-monolith
I am for a baroque as anti-maxim
I am for a baroque as anti-patriarchy
I am for a baroque as ignoble
I am for baroque as misshapen pearl
I am for a baroque as elastic
I am for a baroque as resistance
I am for a baroque as rupture
I am for a baroque as careening
I am for a baroque as eternally renewed
I am for a baroque as eternally renewed
I am for a baroque as eminence
I am for a baroque as becoming
I am for a baroque as meaning
I am for a baroque as ill-defined
I am for a baroque as being
I am for a baroque.
