I still like Untitled (Human Mask) today, as much as I did before. The impressions it makes are rich and provocative, but they have necessarily changed, or been transformed in the intervening years since 2014. A lot has happened since I first encountered the film. Most important has been the growing importance of Black Lives Matter, particularly after the murder of George Floyd, and its long-overdue account of white middle-class complicity in racial division and repression. Covid-19 has transformed the body politic, issuing the further exposure of racial inequality. There has also been the democratisation of discomfort, now an essential part of interesting artistic and intellectual life, encouraged and given critical energy through Black Lives Matter. There is now the growing sense that we might be living through a fin-de-siècle moment, perhaps our final one, with racist, populist governments now firmly in place in the UK, France, Brazil, Israel and other places we once assumed knew better. In 1853, the anti-slavery campaigner and Unitarian minister Theodore Parker wrote: ‘[L]ook at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe […]. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.’ 44 These words, later distilled by Martin Luther King, Jr, as ‘the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice’, were ordered woven into an Oval Office rug by President Barack Obama.45 These are words that have obviously had to fend off much evidence to the contrary. As if the universe had its own cynosure – a light of goodness and virtue, guiding everything, despite all efforts, good or bad. I think that's what I thought even a year or two ago. I have learned many new facts since. As a result, I don't spend too much time here discussing the reference to Noh theatre, something I would no doubt have written about copiously some five years ago. Today that reference seems a little mannered and has to compete for attention with lots of other ideas and suggestions that are referenced in the work more strongly now than when it was first made.
This gets to the heart of the idea behind the One Work series and its inherent productive contradiction: an original and influential work of art achieves its originality and influence through imitation; by absorbing and building on inventions rendered and lessons learned from other works, as well as engaging with the rhetorical ballet of their accumulated critical enterprises. For most artists, to make a work of art is to engage with materials without really knowing how and why they are doing it. Forms obey their own rules, and imitation, repetition and influence can emerge quite unexpectedly. I have always loved Georges Didi-Huberman's description of this nexus of confusion: ‘In the work of art, everything is presented as a kind of self-evidence, while nevertheless remaining obscure.’ 46 In this scenario, there is no work of art a priori. Making work like this is an example of the Greek notion of hexis: doing something without being fully conscious of what you are doing and only discovering and learning from what you have done afterwards, and even then never fully learning its lessons. Proof of this effect lies in the recognition of the work as a ‘good’ work of art, and not, say, as a lump of coal soon to be dispersed as temporary heat and residual soot (though, of course, under certain circumstances this too could constitute a work). And then the work exists, perhaps as a model for an exemplary way of doing things, a contemporary disposition, and it begins to spread its influence, gathering imitators and imitations.
The One Work series was conceived in part as a way of thinking through how innovatively a consummate work of art repeats and refines its antecedents, and how much it passes on its successful imitation and invention to works that come after. To be original, then, is to imitate and be imitated in turn. There is some kind of ghost in the machine here. I'm writing most of this text on my phone using the Notes app. And every time I type ‘how much it passes on’, the software overrules me and composes instead ‘how odd is that!’ The only way I can overrule this algorithmic tic is by adding temporary punctuation, as in, ‘how much it passes. On.’ Now, how odd is that? A form of surrealist disruption at the heart of digital predictive imitation? A cry for help from the text itself – asking, demanding, that it be freed from a strict accumulation of quotes and steals? Or simply the imposition of a rigorous, machine-honed demand to hew closely to repeated thoughts; specifically well-oiled phrases, down to and including conjunctive precision? Strange and strangely revealing.
At the heart of Huyghe's work there is an Ur-text on the idea of imitation itself: the idiomatic ‘monkey see, monkey do’. Originating in the US in the 1920s, this saying roughly translates into the idea of learning without understanding. It predicates the monkey's second-level status as imitator, casting doubt on anything creative it might achieve. While the reductive summary of animals is part of human self-definition, the monkey is, in this regard, a special case. It behaves almost like a human, but not quite. Its repetition and apparent imitation of some of the ways we are in the world can be very disturbing, and we can have no idea whether this mimicry is essential or trained. We mock the animal because we can't ourselves bear its representation as imitator. What if that is all we are – prisoners of repetition? The word ‘ape’ even creeps into aesthetic discourse: ‘the artist is aping nature’ is an obvious disparagement, by way of an old story, of the production of simulacra without refraction by genius. René Descartes claimed that a perfect imitator was close to an automaton. Take note of the small space of possibility here hinted at by the use of the adjective ‘close’. Racist ideology has claimed that Black writers and artists have no tradition to draw upon and that their works therefore lack originality. Quite apart from the naked racism, it's also a piece of philosophical nonsense: Black artists and writers are condemned as imitators because they have no tradition to imitate.
The best works of art impose confusion, beg for new readings, repurpose things, foreground the historical underpinnings of earlier readings, underline how provisional they always were. I suppose I'm simply saying they stand the test of time and they are contemporary many more times than once. Re-reading a book, re-watching a film you once loved and now want to share that affection for, can be surprising, sometimes a bit embarrassing. During lockdown, my wife Janice and I watched the 1980 parody film Airplane! with our son Oak. I was pretty startled to discover that some things I once laughed at now seem uncomfortably racist and misogynist. Did people really think the scene with subtitles added to African Americans speaking jive was funny? Our son didn't find it amusing; in fact, it annoyed him. I felt a bit ashamed. Watching this film again was an uncanny encounter with a version of myself I no longer recognise.
‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’ is the famous opening line of L.P. Hartley's novel The Go-Between (1953). It describes the experience of finding evidence of your past, and how, while somehow aware that this past has marked you significantly, often badly, you can no longer recognise it. The past may be foreign, but it's shaped by today and its strangeness is made less shocking by our selective curiosity about it. In fact, the past of memory is always about the present of the rememberer, the different person she has become. Memory believes before knowing remembers. Leo, the narrator of The Go-Between, is in his mid-sixties, retired and easing into his final days, when he discovers a box stuffed with a congeries of his long-forgotten past. It all feels strange to him, as if it makes sense but belongs to someone else – not just anyone, but a person he no longer is. He starts to read one of the old diaries he finds in the box, and the novel springs to life. The Go-Between sketches out ordinary action as it either reveals or conceals mythic meaning and purpose. It also reminds us that the future patronises our experiences, so much so that we conveniently forget the past and become generally uncurious as to how it continues to define us. E.P. Thompson has described this condition as the enormous condescension of posterity.47 The past today is more capacious than ever and the extent to which it is collected grows exponentially. Your phone for instance, has become both the narrator and curator of your past lives. It knows you so much better than you know yourself; and almost every day your phone probably presents you with a ‘memory’ – a collection of images and films of one of the many people you once were. This person feels more foreign than ever, no matter how virtually close you stick to them.