Icons and the Interent

  

i.

The internet is estimated to weigh about as much as an egg.  There was an advert that used to be on telly with a man dragging a bursting ‘shed-load of data’ through the sand; it was for broadband or something. The internet is troubling as it is formless and unimaginable, incorporeality makes me uneasy. I want to be able to hold the internet and give it human proportions.  It has no edges that can show a hand’s trembles. Weight is the crux. I feel like we’re living circling a void; I desperately try to fill it with scrolling.

ii

Icon painters in the early days of Christianity were faced with the same problem; how to grasp the infinite, humanise the unseen. There are very few icons from the infancy of Christianity, the ones that do survive are without the weight of history or convention. A whole new aesthetic of the divine had to be conceived. Google is my Jesus.

There are similarities between God and the internet; omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, unfathomably, invisibility. The parallels go further, the internet’s functions as a confessional and an advisor; it forms communities. Just as the church functioned as an arm of the monarchy, to survey, control and suppress, so the internet is used by the government. But there is a tension; God is all inclusive and boundless, whereas the internet is divided from our ‘real’ lives.

iii.

This duality of reality also makes me uneasy; if there is a division between our life online and in the physical world, then why and how is one more ‘real’ than the other? Reality is becoming less and less static, all is filtered. My life seems to be losing weight, shifting digital. Yet there are more eyes, I’m seen thousands of times over, and I am thousands of times heavier.

Does the internet make me realer or less so? Would God exist if people didn’t pray? I weigh more as my actions are documented constantly, archived, seen and validated. Yet the documentation is so endless I’m buried. My actions are becoming increasingly meaningless, I’m back at the unbearable lightness.

iv.

I’ve never had a very firm grasp on static and singular reality. Between the ages of 13 and 15 I wanted to become a ghost, to deny my existence weight. I walked through the corridors, milk eyed, muttering passages of The Waves like a mystic possessed. I’d go home to read about lace, rose thorns and dead sea captains on my Dell laptop.  My first diary entry of year 10 involves me splitting myself out into Lettuces and Lunas and Beatrices, to rationalise and compartmentalise the formlessness.

This dividing helps keep us sane, removes the panic of conceptualising outside the universe. Sometimes I have an urge to stuff it down; push the air out and fold it into a drawer. When I look up at the sky my eyes feel too small, when I open chrome no number of tabs can ever suffice. My mind feels like blinking pixels under a camera lens, distorting, colours chasing each other, grids shifting and flashing. It’s making me dizzy, all this neck craning.

v.

‘Light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness’ is how Agnes Martin describes her late grid canvases; they look like a snow coughed sky rationalised. She criticises the young for being too full of ideas, for jumping erratically, like a glitch, not waiting for some sort of divine inspiration.  When I picture the internet it’s a scribbled three dimensional swirl in a room empty for all but a chair and a table. The swirl floats in the centre morphing and bulging like a strobe light, gradually eating everything up, even light. It becomes monolith, simultaneously nothingness and infinite.

I can’t accept Agnes Martin’s lightness. I want the sky to be velvet, to sag with confetti stars, I want to wrap it around me. I want my actions to have weight, to shift tectonic plates. Not being able to feel is disquieting - a sky made out of 0s and 1s.

Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ reminds me of the internet; the same fear of the formless, the same everything/ nothing paradox; when originally exhibited in 1915 it was hung across the corner of the room like an orthodox icon.

vi.

Early Icons were not made by artists but by miracles; imprints on Veronica’s veil. Yet their Marys are sincere and tangible, their sliding eyes and bulging necks showing the human despite their divinity. Though I don’t believe in God I still adore these icons. Online you can’t pinch yourself, no spinning tops or enchanted dice will tell you what is real.

Now I want something to hold, to weigh my hands down. This all sounds a bit Brave New World, the Soma as the internet-mythology to protect us from the emptiness of reality. I’m scheduled to stand and beat my fists to my chest and declare, like the Savage, that I want authentic experience: let’s all move to a cliff face and ‘look up’ and feel the weight of the ‘real’ world. This isn’t the case, nothing that specific; I just want something to hold. I’ve made a portable altarpiece to sit by my laptop, embroidered, to be touched. Here, trace the outline of the ‘like’, the google ‘g’. Art needs to fill in for the sensory, to take our hands. Art needs to visualise the formless, give it human proportions. 

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I’ve been trying to think of my life as a play, breaking days into acts, drawing narrative arcs, sensing character development. Sacredness is at the heart of this, making something higher. I’m reaching, always reaching; life as art and visa versa until everything is just a crepuscular glow and I melt into the ground or dissolve into the sky. That’s the idea anyway. I want the bone crunching knee tingling feeling, I want to be powder, liquid, glass. 

You’re sitting in a pub in Amsterdam, smoking inside and smoke stinging your eyes. You lack grace, and so does sacredness. You don’t follow football but that’s what your friends are watching, rooting for Germany; this provides the necessary detachment, like seeing things through water or syrup, slowing and warping. Above the TV screen there is a stained glass panel with a beer holding man, Lucas Bois, he looks on as a side-line saint. Everything begins glow like a hum. 

Vermeer knew about sacredness, his secular Marys staring out of windows, all quiet Dutch divine light and space. I am no Mary but I still want to glow. Velasquez knew better, he paints my kind of sacred, smaller still, warmer still. ‘Old Woman cooking eggs’ is what I have in mind, the people as an extension of the still life, the same infinite care, showmanship. The culmination of glows, sheens, shines and luminescence. It makes things untouchable, bell jar ready.  It’s a different kind of beauty, one with room for the grotesque.  That is my sacred, all about the light, the distance between bodies, alignment. It’s earthly, prosaic and carnal. Perfect moments are what I’m searching for, pregnant moments.

Outside the Pompidou a man is bent over feeding pigeons. He was the sun. The pigeons’ tail feathers turn and feet lift off the ground in unison as he stumbles forward, they cascade in front of him. Food is light. The universe is strange and wraps and folds inside of itself, there are solar systems within solar systems.  This does not glow gold but has a silver sheen, and you don’t want to bottle it. Would you photograph god? Can you photograph the sun?  

Walking around the Louvre I decide I want to be a small blue Iranian pot from the 15^th century.   I think of moon jars, combining heaven and earth in two joined hemispheres, a true sacredness. The problem is I just want to wrap everything in satin and stick on gold stars.  I’m essentially a sentimental moth. A bit like Velasquez cradling his parade of gleams, glints and glows.

Sacredness is about weigh, I want to make everything vital and heavy. Sacredness is about transcendence, I’m creating a world inside itself, a tinging, throbbing perfection.

We’re on a volcano, the sand doomsday black. We’re in a lighthouse on the spine of the Atlantic, between two tectonic plates. And the air is like a swimming pool, thick and hot so that the ash sticks to our skin. You’re standing on a 10cm ledge in the bell of the lighthouse, clutching onto the net of metal that bolts together the glass with your fingernails. You’re teetering.  You feel like you've found the edge of the world.

I’m stuck in the early middle ages with my celestial spheres. I’m tired by all this reaching. Maybe this is all nostalgia then, this longing, it’s too earnest. I wear myself out.

You’re on a moped speeding over the road bumps, lifting off your seat. It is 1am and you've just watched a documentary on Artie Shaw, the people you were babysitting for came home to you in tears swaying on the sofa. You have only been driving for a week. It is cold so you keep the visor down to avoid misting up, even though the air scratches your skin.  A bat swoops a meter in front of you, your eyes squint shut, you scrunch your hands and swerve onto the pavement.

Sometimes I feel like my eyes are too small. Velasquez saw everything, every object painted with respect. And of course this was all to reflect back on himself, to show his virtuosity. I fear that my compulsion towards the sacred is some vain attempt to distance myself further from reality, to create new gods, to create myself as a god, consecrating left right and centre. But it’s more sentimental than that even, more sentimental than Velasquez, I just want warm yellow syrup light, eyes like UFO beams, sucking scenes up from reality. A man no longer a man but The Sacred Man, totally reborn in my own eyes, no longer human. I’m scared I’ll rob everything of its humanity like Velasquez.  As I write Emmy the Great sings ‘and the things we set on fire don’t exist’.

Light is the crux of the matter. By cataloging the sacred like film scenes I simultaneously make the light, by removing them from reality, and heavy by canonising them. When I see a sacred moment it glows, liked a burning meteor turning from solid to gas as it tears the atmosphere.

When Joseph Beuys fell from the Crimean sky in the winter of 1943, the Tsar Tribesmen wrapped him in felt and fat. Sacred moments are like butter, yellow, between states, vital; Velasquez’s egg whites on the brink of transparency.