Why Guernica Would Be Impossible Today

Because aerial bombardment was somewhat new. Because humans cannot show themselves to be surprised too much or too often. This could be arrogance of pride but more likely it is a cognitive phenomenon. But perhaps graphic representation of tragedy is passe. Please don't mediate it through a human body that intimately. Painting ceded to photography which ceded to don't even show us. Because an armed culture is a luxury and a screen. Guernica becomes, instead, closer to today, something Boltanski would do. Respectful, less ego. The clothing being lifted over and over by the claw of the machine and dropped from a height onto the ground. The way the simulacra of bodies, the empty clothes, dance as they plummet. This instead of drawing. The self pretending to be removed, pretending not to draw, from what is still drawing on the air, somehow. But it is the otherness drawing. It is the emptiness celebrating itself. A new innocence that is not us. We become leaves of the molting tree. A new innocence that is not human being. The moment preceding and the moment following a human thought. 

Poor Species

I feel increasingly distant from you. Your weak attempts at birdsong. Your dominion, which was enjoyable, warm and cozy, while I was young. But more and more the frayed sweater of the DNA. We pick at it on the television news. The sound of gunfire in the streets. But still: Poor Species. I wonder if the search for expression will end. The search for expression will not end. It is the search for expression which is Guernica and that which Guernica depicts. And how long ago was Guernica painted? Do you feel that slippage? Today, nobody would attempt to paint it. Irony is lifeblood. But the secret is encoded in the art itself. That there is pleasure in the forms which quote pain. If they are imaginatively conceived, they are a distraction, an invitation to play. Guernica was such an invitation presented as a raw scream. Infantile and dark. Shelter of speaking or drawing. The people come out of the bombed theater speaking. The film still plays.The lovers are on the screen in black and white as the rafters fall. They are toying with each other. Their faces the size of the entire screen. It is only the childhood of the work of art. The work of art is eternally at play in a form of childhood. We feel like shadows, like shades, when faced.