Fires on TV: Images of Catastrophe

Fire is a textbook example of symbolism. One of the five elements, a crucial metaphysical substance for mythologies, pre-Socratics, Christianity, war technology, pyrotechnics and medieval alchemy alike. Arguably, the key characteristics of fire in western culture are its metaphysical and biblical connotations. Moreover, fire bears an apocalyptic symbolic, which seems crucial for the era of climate crisis.

Symbolization is, however, highly suspect in postmodernism. According to Jean Baudrillard, with the advent of mass media and the proliferation of images, we entered an epoch of simulation, or symbolic collapse. Postmodernity for Baudrillard explodes modern epistemology by creating a situation where the meaning of objects is reduced to relational terms in a combinatory system. In postmodernity images of fire have become disembodied from their original significance, their ritualistic and religious characteristics collapsed into a Baudrillardian sign. This does not imply a total disappearance of the qualities but their transformation through simultaneous disembodiment and accentuation.

The question is thus as follows: what is the validity of images of fire under postmodernism? The primary lens of focus is the transformation of the original spiritual and biblical symbolism of fire in the context of graphic representations of the climate crisis and the work of contemporary artists. The aim of this investigation is not, however, to recover an original symbolic of fire, but to construct what could be a new, more contemporary one, focusing on fire as image.

Hyperrealism, transaesthetics and symbols

In Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Jameson defines the character of postmodernism as a kind of inverted millenarianism, where visions of the future are substituted by a specific sense of the end. Postmodernism is, according to Lyotard, the end of old concepts, ideology, metanarratives, and, according to Baudrillard, the end of political economy. Most significantly, it marks the end of the classical dimension of the sign. Domination of images generates a society centred on visuality. Proliferating reproductions grow independent of their ‘real’ referents, creating a realm of hyperreality. Here, the distinction between real and simulation dissolves, and any real signification is lost in favour of a combinatory system of relative connotations. Postmodernism is the advent of sign value – the object is not defined by any direct relationship to reality, but to other objects. Commodities are no longer defined by practical use, but by connotations they bear, what kind of aesthetic they refer to, what images they evoke. Sign value is not limited to consumption, conversely, in the era of transaesthetics and transeconomics it is not only a marketing strategy, but a mentality. Hyperrealism is the mode of postmodernity, along with increased aestheticization of everyday life. And where everything becomes aesthetic, aesthetics dissolve into a relational vagueness.

Images are much more than a mode of signification. To quote W.J.T. Mitchell, they “are not just a particular kind of sign, but something like an actor on the historical stage” In the era dominated by images, “everything comes to us now an image”, image is a mode of thinking. Thus, the study of images is much more than an aesthetic endeavour.

Secular apocalypse - climate crisis as spectacle

Australia’s bushfires have repeatedly been called ‘apocalyptic’ by media outlets like the Times, the Guardian or the New York Times. Fire is an important element in the Bible. It functions as a tool of judgement and punishment, a sign of divine vision (in the Book of Exodus), of God’s wrath and power (in the Book of Revelation). Fire is a technology of truth, from Lot saved from the flames of Sodom, through Moses’s encounter with the burning shrub, to medieval trial by ordeal.

Fire’s significance and connection to the bible is undeniable, but why does it persist in a secular society? And how does it facilitate the understanding of the climate crisis? What does it mean to call an image of fire ‘apocalyptic’? Rather than a declaration of literal belief that fire is a direct expression of God’s wrath it is just a loose concept. There, fire is only an image evoking a conglomerate of connotations from the Old Testament to disaster movies. This has nothing to do with the actual contents of the Bible, it is only biblical, referring to the aesthetic and not genuine belief.

Hans Memling's 'Last Judgement' (1460), detail

Interpreting fire as a kind of supernatural wrath ascribes imaginary agency to it, contributing to loss of agency on the spectators’ part. This is also highly evocative of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, where divine order is replaced by Gaia - Earth as a self-regulating system, reinterpreted by Isabelle Stengers in identifying the impending disasters as an intrusion of Gaia. Gaia is to be neither exploitable nor threatening, but completely indifferent. But how does thinking about disasters connected to the climate crisis and caused by humans as a manifestation of some ‘nature’, indifferent as she might be, help solve the problem? How are we to take responsibility for an intrusion of another entity?

The most horrifying disaster, if transmitted through media, can be treated as a spectacle. Intensified by the proliferation of images of cinematic catastrophe, fire is not only an image of God’s wrath, it is a spectacle. Catastrophic fires become a simulacrum, preceded by their own representation; Notre Dame fire’s social media coverage was filtered through the images of the Disney hit ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Australia’s fires have repeatedly been termed an “armageddon”. In the words of a backpacker stranded in Australia during the fire: "I now know what it's like to experience Armageddon because it was definitely hell on earth".

There is a precession of vague aestheticized symbolic value in the relational system of objects, and the actual causes are eclipsed by narrative and symbolic interpretation. Fire’s sign value in contemporary society retains some of its pre-modern connotations, but they are detached and abstract. Thus, the question: what is the meaning of fire? is a highly anachronistic one, we have moved far from such rational, clear cut symbolism. In postmodern semiurgy consciousness is mesmerized by spectacle and image.

New Spirituality - Susan Hiller

Stengers’s Gaia is an attempt to negate the distinction between scientific and non-scientific knowledge. Postmodernism is the crisis of modern science’s rationality. Perhaps in this context the symbolic of fire can be analysed as a ‘spiritual’ element. The very word ‘spirituality’ is rather suspect, but it is undeniable that even scientific explanations of the phenomenon sometimes bear a mark of idolatry. Even if rapid oxidation has nothing unusual to it, the image of fire has at least a pretence towards supernaturality.

When discussing images of fire it is impossible to omit Susan Hiller’s Belshazzar’s Feast, the Writing on your Wall. The installation consists of a living room lounge setting with a TV set. The screen shows a recorded footage of Guy Fawkes Night bonfire accompanied by a soundtrack featuring a woman’s testimony of seeing apparitions in a blank TV screen, singing, and Hiller’s son describing Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast. The recording was also broadcast on Channel 4. In Hiller’s work, spiritual connotations of fire are absorbed into the medium – the TV becomes a spiritual object. The image may have very well taken up “a logic of the implosion of meaning in which the message disappears on the horizon of the medium”, but this is precisely the point.

Susan Hiller 'Belshazzar's Feast, The Writing on Your Wall' (1983)

The bonfire is no longer flames but the image of flames. The significance of the work is not the fire but the TV, reminiscent of McLuhan’s proposition of the medium as the message. The image haunts the screen in an eerie expression of what could be a new understanding of spirituality. One of fire’s alchemical mysteries was its supposed immateriality – here, it is literally immaterialized, displaced. In Belshazzar’s Feast spirituality moves from the campfire and the hearth to the TV, which acts as a “potential vehicle for reverie”.

Contemporary humans no longer have contact with fire as a practical element; it is abstracted into symbolic vagueness, where sign value takes over. This is consciously explored in Hiller’s work, which is a bricolage of stories and images. Periphery, occult, spirituality, the Bible, the news, a face noticed in a random alignment of pixels, all come together and melt into one stream of eerieness. Writing on Your Wall suggests communication, but there is no divine message to be deciphered. It’s something supernatural but it is not anything specific.

In Hiller’s work, the supernatural is no longer an outside, it is glitches inside an incoherent system, it is fire inside the TV. This also, paradoxically, serves as a reminder that the digital world is still physical. One is reminded of the popular internet meme urging people to charge their iPhones by placing them in the microwave, which caused them (quite expectedly) to catch fire. Technology is still electrical, it still can short-circuit and spontaneously combust, taking with it the ephemeral data it holds. Fire is a glitch, an incoherence. Maybe this chaotic character, and not residue biblicalism, is more relevant today.

Protest, transgression or nihilism? - Chris Burden

In Gaston Bachelard’s formulation of the Prometheus complex, the prohibitions surrounding fire are a primarily social reality, embedded in the relation between the paternal figure and the child and not in fire as a dangerous substance.

This is particularly interesting in the context of Chris Burden’s Dos Equis, where he blocked a highway with two monumental timber X figures set on fire. Here, fire acts as a kind of transgression, but most importantly, it is real. This reality does not lie in the fact that Burden did not use a screen or a canvas, but in the way the work was experienced as completely unexpected, a kind of rupture in spectator’s reality.

Chris Burden 'Dos Equis' (1972)

One way to think about Burden’s work is as psychosis, the transgression of an arsonist. Fire is here the element of entropy, disintegration, Promethean disobedience without a cause. Burden’s actions are often masochistic and ritualistic, but also irrational, they are the enactment of some almost randomly generated ritual without a transcendent purpose, save perhaps for shocking the audience. In this way, Burden’s fire may be real, but it is also nihilistic, the last resort of a madman who can find no other way to create a spectacle.

If it is transgressive, it is so not because of social prohibitions, but because Burden’s actions are not serving any logical purpose, in this way they express a kind of Bataillean excess, a disobedience towards productivity, but also symbolization.

One could risk the statement that fire as a chaotic element can resist postmodern reduction to sign value – but to do so, it has to remain irrational and real, not represented.

Burden’s work encountered in the flesh can be a close approximation of this, but inevitably, it also becomes an image. Burden is today the icon of transgression in art. One could risk the statement that his work is now inscribed into the symbolic of transgression, forming an aesthetic of a madman-artist-arsonist, but does not in reality transgress anything and that fire has now become merely an attribute of a transgressive performance artist.

The Exform

The question no longer is what does fire symbolize, that belongs to an era long gone, or to dream dictionaries at best. It does bear an accumulation of symbolic residues from religion and social reality, but as it has declined in practicality, they have transformed into spectral connotations, reaccentuated through their anachronism.

Notwithstanding, reabsorption of fire into systems of representation is inevitable. The only way out of it seems to have it state itself explicitly as an image, tied to the media through which it is transmitted, self-aware of its imagistic character – as in Susan Hiller’s work, or for it to stay real, non-represented at all, as a kind of Lacanian rupture in reality, a return of the traumatic Real – as could sometimes be the case with the work of Chris Burden. Thinking about concepts of the Real excluded from conventional reality – here understood as a Baudrillardian system of relational connotations – it might be helpful to refer to Nicholas Bourriaud’s Exform. The exformal is that which is excluded from a given, contemporary realism, which does not belong to the ‘official’, which is constantly expelled into the periphery by mechanisms of ideology, the waste, the outside. This may be applied to the context of fire as rejection of its spectacular value substituted by a focus on what it leaves out, or what is left out from its image. Compared to the blazing spectacle, the debris fire leaves behind, the corpses and ruins, are a relatively rare sight in media transmissions. When it comes to fire as an image, one has to be careful as to its residual implications, which tend to distort its reality, obscuring and aestheticizing, while simultaneously remaining inquisitive and open to new contexts, which, as excluded or apparently obvious, might be more elusive than expected.

---

Sources used in this post:

Anderson, F. (2013) Susan Hiller. Belshazzar’s Feast At:https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hiller-belshazzars-feast-the-writing-on-your-wallt03923 (Accessed 30/12/19)

Bachelard, G. (1968). The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Boston: Beacon Press.

Baudrillard, J. (1983). Simulations, New York: Semiotext(e).

Baudrillard, J. (2008). The Jean Baudrillard Reader S. Redhead, ed., Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Bourriaud, N. (2016). The Exform, London: Verso.

Barnsley, W. (2019) Australia bushfires: Canadian backpacker describes being stranded, fearing for her life. At https://7news.com.au/news/bushfires/australia-bushfires-canadianbackpacker-describes-being-stranded-fearing-for-her-life-c-631420 (Accessed 30/12/19).

The Guardian. (2019) ‘Israel Folau under fire for implying bushfires are God's punishment.’ At: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/nov/18/israel-folau-says-bushfires-and-droughtare-gods-punishment-for-same-sex-marriage-and-abortion (Accessed 27/12/19).

The Independent. (2019) Mother Nature’s revenge against human development At: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/mother-natures-revenge-againsthuman-development-5328790.html (Accessed 31/12/19).

Jameson, F. (1993). Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism, London: Verso.

Jones. M. (2019). Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame Rises In Popularity After Cathedral Fire At: https://screenrant.com/disney-hunchback-notre-dame-rises-popularity-cathedral-fire/ (Accessed 30/12/19).

Kellner, D. (2005). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Jean Baudrillard. At: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/ (Accessed 20/12/19). 12

Lenton, T. (2003). Gaia Hypothesis. At: http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/Courses/6140/ency/Chapter13/Ency_Atmos/Gaia_Hypothesis. pdf/ (Accessed 30/12/19).

Mitchell, W.J.T. (1984). What Is an Image? New Literary History, 15(3), p.503.

Storey, J. (2009). Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. 5th ed. New York: Routledge.

Stengers, I. (2015). The Intrusion of Gaia. At: http://modesofexistence.org/isabelle-stengersthe-intrusion-of-gaia/ (Accessed 30/12/19).

Wark, McKenzie. (2017), General Intellects. Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso.