For a Baroque Aesthetic, A study of the Films of David Lynch

Baroque and Realism

The baroque can be approached in many ways and some may be in contradiction with each other. The art historian Christine Buci-Glucksmann distinguishes two tendencies in the baroque: a baroque of fullness and a baroque of emptiness:

The relation to history is complicated. Besides, isn't there but one baroque? I believe that in reality there is a baroque of fullness such as Leibniz or Deleuze's. There is nothing but fullness. It is the baroque of the fold and the crease, the unfolding, the interior and the exterior, etc. But in the historical baroque there is also something that fascinated me, it is the baroque of emptiness. Borromini isn't Bernini. The baroque of emptiness is the spiral, which climbs nowhere.^13(*)

She develops her notion of a baroque of emptiness with a comparison to the art of rhetoric, an art of elaborated form around nothing: `It's beginning with nothing that there is rhetoric, pose, metaphor.'^14(*)

There may be two tendencies within the baroque, but there may also be two different points of views from which to look upon the baroque. The different appreciations of the baroque seem to spring for a large part from the question of what is reality. The classical point of view considers the essence, the origin of things; classicism researches the truth through the perfect form. From this perspective the baroque representation, with all its artifices, excesses, decorations, trompe l'oeils and multiplied images, is necessarily superficial and false. The baroque is the art of illusions deluding the beholder away from the truth of things. Thus theorists of the 18^th century, invested in classicism, found no redeeming feature in the baroque. More recently however, its very artificiality has seduced many for being more revealing of a world made of deceptive appearances. A manifesto for the neo-baroque aesthetic written by Erminia Passannanti gives a good example of this point of view:

Neo-baroque is the rediscovery, exaltation and re-evaluation of the kitsch, it is the attribution to its codes of a scheme of values, and it is indeed the re-activation of these values in the contemporaneity. It is believing in the power of the false, the artifact as being more meaningful of the true.^15(*)

This also echoes the comparison with the art of rhetoric made by Christine Buci-Glucksmann. It has in common with classicism a reference to the `true', albeit by replacing it with emptiness. Thus, all images are false but as it is all there is, therefore, the baroque is «truthful».

There is, however, another line of thought, which not so much denies the existence of an origin than makes it one image among many just as valid. In his essay Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Michel Foucault develops the notion of genealogy:

The search for descent is not the erecting of foundations: on the contrary, it disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself.^16(*)

Thus considered, genealogy, far from seeking a mythological origin, exposes the diversity and multiplicity of descent.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) denounced the notion of Truth as a fraud, the research of truth being used in effect to deny reality: reality, in this sense, is the world we live in, a world of appearances, the only thing we have. Therefore appearances are the only truth we know of the world and not some abstract and otherworldly idea of Truth, which can only exist in denying life itself with all its illusions.

From this vantage point the multiple images of the baroque are no longer seen as so many illusions, but rather as a representation of a world made of images. The images do not hide the truth or adorn emptiness, they are the truth, the many layered, multiple faceted truth. This is the baroque of fullness, the baroque of the fold, the baroque of Leibniz and Deleuze.

* ¹³ Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Orlan, Triomphe du Baroque, Marseille: Images En Manoeuvres Editions, 2000, p. 42. `Le rapport à l'histoire est un rapport compliqué. N'y a-t-il d'ailleurs qu'un seul baroque? Je crois qu'en réalité, il y a un baroque du plein qui est celui de Leibniz et de Deleuze, par exemple. Il n'y a que du plein. C'est un baroque du pli et du dépli, du déroulement, de l'intérieur à l'extérieur, etc. Mais dans le baroque historique il y a également quelque chose qui m'a fascinée, c'est le baroque du vide. Borromini, ce n'est pas Le Bernin. Le baroque du vide, c'est la spirale qui monte sur rien.'

* ¹⁴ Ibid., p. 42, `C'est à partir du rien qu'il y a rhétorique, qu'il y a pose, qu'il y a métaphore'.

* ¹⁵ Erminia Passannanti, Neo-baroques? , Transference, Oxford, 2001, www.literary.it/ali/dati/autori/passannanti_erminia.html. [18.02.2003] The term of neo-baroque is mostly linked to literary criticism and has been associated with notion of postmodernism. These are not really relevant to this study, taking the notion of baroque into realms quite removed from its art historical origins. This quote just helped to give an idea of the different avenues the term could be developed into.

* ¹⁶ Michel Foucault, `Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', in Rabinow, Paul (ed.), Michel Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, p. 82.