The Century of Illegibility

The legibility and likewise the illegibility of the world are phenomena that preceded the creation of writing. The so-called primitive man read the world as an order. The moment that he encountered something that was not part of this order - that was l'insolite, as Jean Cazeneuve puts it - he became terrified. The horror of the illegible is almost subhuman. Harlow's experiments with macaques demonstrate that young apes are frightened by the sight of an unknown object. After some time, however, the illegible object becomes a challenge and the young ape, especially with its mother close by, approaches the object and starts to investigate it.

One of the features of the contemporary world is the increasing number of illegible objects in it. While almost everyone agrees with this, reactions are quite different. For those who resemble scared young animals, this phenomenon is a sign of the end of the world. For those resembling lonely young animals it is an enticement, a promise of the beginning of a new era. The polarity of neophobia and neofilia reaches its climax in our behavior towards technological changes, social innovations, or towards the field of aesthetic perception and evaluation. For a long time it has seemed that such reactions are the outcome of the historically unprecedented number and scale of changes (the number of processes of growth has risen dramatically), but since the 1970s, the explanation for it has rather been that there arose some kind of deeper historical change in perception and thought, which represents -- according to the scientist-historian T.S. Kuhn -- a change of paradigm (what in science is a scientific revolution).

Illegibility is neither solely inherent to the object, nor to the reading subject. This is made clear when compared to legibility. Legibility can be objectified relatively well: from textbooks, we can learn about legible and illegible script, suitable color contrasts of text and background, optimum light intensity for reading, etc. Because legibility can be objectified, illegibility tends to be considered subjective. The inability to decipher something is thus regarded as the incompetence of the reader. In other words, we praise he who is able to decipher something, and not he who did not accept the challenge, even if it was because he bowed before mystery.

The legibility of man-made signs is an inborn skill, but the result of acquire the code by learning. For an individual to be able to read the world as an order is a matter of a common shared culture, within which instruction occurs without a plan, a so-called implicit learning. A great number of this perception code is in the genes of the animals and even man has some of that instinct left. When higher levels are reached, there is a tendency to weaken and diminish the role of lower levels: it seems that the more man is capable of reading artificial sign structures, the more he closes the ability in himself to read on the level of community or even on the primordial instinctive level. The better the contemporary man can read artificial sign codes, the less he can read physicality, nature and space. It is as if the higher codes silence the lower ones.

The horrifying experience of an illegible world (not only that of nature but also that of civilization) occurs when, on the one hand, explicit sign codes become too multileveled and the information is increasingly felt as potential misinformation and, on the other hand, when physicality and nature cease to be legible because the ability to decipher lower codes has been lost. In short: the artificial world lies, the natural world is mute.

As far as the relationship of the visual arts and public space is concerned, it must be noted that illegibility has increased on both sides of this relation Art has become illegible: the border between art and non-art is being intentionally shifted and blurred; the social status and the very existence of art is being questioned; and the public sphere has also become illegible. The permeation of the public sphere into the private expresses the attempts -- even when of wholly different characters -- of both totalitarianism, which wants to fully control the private sphere, as well as radical, alternative movements, which promote de-institutionalization of, for example, school or health care systems.

In order to understand this better, we will try to distinguish several key periods preceding the present. This is not an attempt to supplement an algorithm for history but rather an attempt to judge, on the basis of the identification of some levels of development, whether it is worthwhile to reconstruct a certain systematic logic in the background as a component to this history. We will not be identifying periods of art history nor concepts of the public, but the hierarchical levels of a term, which is rightly of interest for art history, urbanism and social ecology: the term place. In this way, the question of the illegible present might at least be illuminated by looking at some of its historical levels.

The Sacred Place

The sacred place was neither invented nor discovered but simply determined because some holy event had taken place there: the deity had shown itself, medicinal springs appeared, or some miraculous act of salvation occurred. From the contemporary abstract rational perspective, which even for non-believers is monotheistic, we do not recognize such an act as being substantially bound to a location, because the invisible Deity is indeed able to communicate with us anywhere at all. The sacred place was therefore connected with the logic of polytheism, which did not mean (the term itself is misleading today) that there were many gods but that there were various gods bound to various locations. The genius loci is not a general patron of human dwellings but a divine power springing from a certain location.

The sacred in this ancient sense of the word was not transmitted afar by invisible rays but was transferred through contact. One, thus, had to come to it. Anything that came into close contact with the sacred place could receive some of its power and also became somewhat sacred. The sacredness was not -- as the monotheistic God -- everywhere and anywhere, but instead was nonexistent in some places, while in others it abounded. If the sacred place was at a distance and one sought its power, it was necessary to make a pilgrimage to it. Therefore, the pilgrimage site was not a spot where a shrine had been built, but a place where everything was sacred, and coming to it sufficed to sanctify the pilgrim.

The movement through the landscape was thus oriented by the location of sacred places. If one got close enough, one could ÒchargeÒ oneself, be filled with sacredness. As today's drivers stop at several gas stations on a long trip, so the pilgrim went from chapel to chapel.

The sacred place could be entered by anyone who arrived to it with reverence. It could not be enclosed as private property. This is a case of neither private ownership nor communal property -- the sacred place supersedes human communion. It is neither private nor communal and one could say that a higher criterion arises from it, which sets a higher sort of justice over various types of ownership. It is public in the sense that it is sacred. Only with the swelling of the clergy's independence and power were there attempts to introduce human ownership to sacred places. Until then, however, it was impossible to make such a place one's own -- it was only possible to present it with something, for instance, as an expression of thankfulness after miraculous help in need. Statues, chapels, churches and monasteries were thus built upon sacred places. With them came marketplaces, inns, hospitals, and gradually complete settlements.

As Olga Frejdenberg has observed, the morphologic predecessor of the house is the temple, the predecessor of the table is the altar and likewise mutual gift exchange preceded commercial exchange. Sites which are not intensely sacred are secular in this social structure, as if they were not sufficiently blessed. The scale ranges from plus to minus, but the neutral center remains empty. Roads bypassed cursed locations with unfavorable influences. The macrostructure of the sacred in a region corresponded to the microstructure of the villages and individual houses.

Each house was built on the basis of maximizing sacredness, which means that places for them were chosen where most of these criteria could be fulfilled: the house stood close to sacred trees, the location was suitable for saving energy, and was not within dangerous areas. The villages could not have a rigid geometric structure, because this would not correspond to the microstructure of the sacred. The spatial structure of the settlement became in this way a kind of visualization of the hidden structure of both the sacred and its opposite.

According to Yi-Fu Tuan, the building of a house as the center of a sacred district became itself a sacred activity, similar to the everyday devotion to the site-bound deities, visiting the local sacred places, cleaning oneself before touching the sacred, or after having touched the cursed: all these acts are realized in the form of rituals. These rituals were not private acts -- all members of the community participated in them. Solidarity, mutual help, social support and renewal of the community were their motifs and goals. The rituals structured the time lived in.

The artwork in a place that was distinguished by the scale of sacredness/cursedness and in time that was structured by rituals became a visualization (revelation, epiphany) of the sacred power springing forth from the place. It is impossible to separate art works from the rituals with which they were created (Vladim’ra Koubov‡ has recently shown that even in the Baroque period, a sacred painting or a sacred sculpture had to be created by means of a sacred power, and in their semantics cannot be seen as mere information about something sacred); and with which they were used (in the archaic world, the dishes were not just food containers, but were the object level of the ritual of common eating -- dividing and eating the god). These works of art were not created by specialists but were a part of the commonly shared ability to express that which was also manifested in dance, make-up, masks and clothing, the shaping of ÒfunctionalÒ objects, verbal presentation of myths, or in ritual sequence of acts. All these works of art -- that can be differentiated and characterized thus only in retrospective -- had a life of their own which depended on the respect paid to them, on the miraculous signs they revealed, on the way they helped those who pray to it and on the way this help was further transmitted.

Artworks placed in sacred spaces were defined only by their relationship to the sacred and did not fulfill any independent aesthetic function. From a distance, they marked the close proximity of the sacred and when touched they enabled its transfer. From a distance, these art works were signifiers, on close contact, they are the signified.

This kind of structuralization of space and time is the basis of so-called primitive societies. Monotheistic religions have rejected it as pagan and tried to fight it, although much of it remains preserved until today, especially in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions.

The Secular Public Place

The non-democratic Greek rulers differed from those who held to democratic principles not only in the political difference of their rule -- even though less visibly -- by living in space and time that was structured entirely differently. On a political level, the tyrant claimed his legitimacy by stressing his divine origins, whereas the democrat was elected by the people who could also recall him: the vertical and external basis was in the former case substituted for horizontal overlap within the visible community. This was found, too, in the structuralization of space and time. Whereas the tyrant claimed the right to live at the sacred place to occupy it, to decide from its power, or even to be one of the springs of sacredness; the democrat would negotiate with the civilians or the elected representatives in a space which had many functional features of a sacred place, except that it was not sacred.

With the proximity of some activity that is inconsistent with the sacred, the danger of the temple being desecrated increases. The temple can not simply be moved in space. When the communists who had the church in Most, Czechoslovakia moved so as to have access to brown coal boasted about their tolerance -- indeed, they did not destroy the church but moved it a bit to the side -- they did not sense what an act of violence this act had really been. The site of democratic negotiations, on the other hand, does not have to be connected with any sacred location: this place is established by decision and activity. It is not yet an individually inward place (in the European tradition, such a place could appear only with the mysticism of the Middle Ages), but it is an inter-subjective one. Nor is it a geographical place, but a social, political or economic location.

The secular public space had been created so that various functions be held there over time, even though they would be incompatible simultaneously: there could be assemblies here and afterwards, markets could be organized. Everyone who was a citizen could talk at the assembly and everyone who respected the local currency could buy and sell at the market. Both these activities were regulated by rules, which were not sacred, but had to be observed under the threat of punishment. These rules were not understood as eternal -- they could be discussed and changed if necessary.

When archaic societies that were based on the sacredness of time and space carried out the common ritual of war preparations, even a foreigner could tell what was going to happen: the movements, masks and clothes were either composed of ÒfragmentsÒ of the enemy such as skulls (signs) or they were in imitation of him (iconic symbols). When, on the other hand, the matters of war were being discussed in a secular public space, it could seem to the foreigner who did not know the language that the negotiation might be about almost anything. The sacred place was connected to vivid metonymic and metaphoric codes, whereas the secular place worked with a conventional sign system that differed from the iconic system.

Roland Barthes wrote in one of his essays that the sign character of a city square is in the fact that it is an empty place. Such a place can signify all the activities that might take place here: markets, promenades, festivals, parades, manifestations, executions, elections. This means that works of art, or any other object, placed in a secular space do not need to be defined according to the sacredness of the place but according to the place as it shaped by the event (the ecological psychologist R. Barker calls these kinds of repeating events behavioral settings).

It is interesting that at the beginning of Greek public life the opening of the secular dimension was not aimed against myth or against religion. Philosophy developed next to theology, theater occurred side by side with religious ritual. In this manner sacred places could remain sacred, but the world no longer had the structure of one continuous field with either positive or negative areas, but became an area with increasingly larger islands which were neutral in regard to sacredness. Myth and religion ceased to be the integrative axis of life and were instead among many parallel life functions.

The visual arts were polarized no longer only in the dimension sacredness/cursedness but also in many other dimensions. The works of art became goods, objects of aesthetic pleasure or historical research, vor expressions of social status -- according to the context of behavior situation in which they appeared. Gradually, an independent sphere of religious art established itself and also the art created in the archaic world of continuous sacredness could be seen as more or less beautiful and therefore be made aesthetic.

Art works in continuous sacred space did not need protection, because they protected themselves: it was anticipated that every attempt to desecrate them would be punished immediately by the Divine power. These art works belonged to everyone because everyone was dependent on their well-being and everyone had the obligation to worship them. In a sacred space, this was also the case with all objects and with objects of nature, then still perceived in the animist sense. In a secular public space, however, art works numbered among all other things that could be intentionally removed or altered; they could become private property, be removed from the public space and or be stolen and sold. Private collections of rare objects genetically precede public collections. The very act of collecting works of art meant taking them out of the context of their original place and creating a new, functionally defined place.

Demythicization, Secularization, Criticism

With the perception of God as an invisible creature behind all visible creatures and things -- as their Creator and Lord -- the relationship between Him and man changed substantially. For the spatial concept of sacredness it meant that sacred places were now only those locations where the Deity or his messenger appeared, where He accepted prayers and offerings -- but it was always Him, the one and only, the spirit floating wherever He wants, choosing His places and accepting the places offered to Him, or rejecting, leaving and destroying them. It was not possible to absorb the energy from this God by touching the sacred places or sacred things as from the house Deities, because He could be grasped neither in nature nor in the things created by man.

On one hand, the space became more homogenous, on the other hand every human mind could now become a temple, through which God enters human actions in places and moments of His choosing. The close mutual dependence and a type of mutual urging and tugging between the Deities attached to a certain place and their worshipers shifted towards a relationship with increasing freedom on both sides: whereas man had the opportunity to search his own way, God did not need to come immediately after every human action with either support or punishment. Time began to lose the structure of an annually repeating cycle and became an open drama. History became possible.

The theological coming to terms with this change led the more radical religious leaders to pledge against all such archaic kinds of worship that were bound too closely to concrete places, creatures and things. Thus came about the Jewish and Islamic religions restriction against the direct depiction of God, or the Hussite or Lutheran dislike of ornamental Catholic churches. The critics did not see the art work at the sacred place as incarnation of Divine power, but as a thing-idol that overshadowed the invisible God and tried to replace him.

This criticism extended towards the assumptions of basic life experience. It started with demythicization, continued with secularization and further on the secular turn to the criticism of the presupposition of perception and thinking in Kant's philosophy and all the further intellectual and technological development stemming from this impulse (e.g. perceptrons or artificial intelligence).

In his book Tao of Nature, Rupert Sheldrake has shown with vehemence how the Protestant form of secularizing place has had particularly negative impact on our relationship and practical behavior towards nature. It not only justified the breaking of the relationship between the people living in the countryside and the land but also its impudent exploitation. This is certainly just one side of the problem, a view, which appeals to those who would like to see the Earth, as does Lovelock, like the Goddess Gaia. But if it were not for this criticism, man would not have a chance to defend himself against any decay of the cult that could include the demand for human sacrifice or monopoly control of all religious activities by bureaucratic clergy and/or secular powers.

The departure from site-bound deities not only contributed to the development of abstract monotheism of the large world religions and later of philosophic rationalism; it was also the origin of human internity, individual responsibility and creativity and of internally differentiated social subjectivity, which is based upon people helping each other in mutual development. If it were not for this critical reflection, the modern followers of the goddess Gaia could have neither the systematic analysis of the Earth as a whole, the reconstruction of the influence of myths and religions on human civilization, or the technology allowing the instant connection to almost all inhabitants of this planet. This emancipation, though full of risks, was undoubtedly a path towards spiritual maturity.

In the arts, and not only in visual arts, we can observe a similar, self-exploration and almost self-undermining trend. Later on, ÒanythingÒ can become an artwork - anything that is recognized as such, chosen, signed, accepted or bought. Theater is no longer defined by the outlines of the theater-temple and it becomes a performance that does not have to be directed by professional theater clergy. Man realizes how much he projects of himself in art, that he is the co-author of an artwork; he realizes that even the most illusionist depiction always has a conceptual character. It seemed for long that the goal of the journey is the triumph of pride of the human intellect. Today, we are already past this point. Critical reflection now demands the sense and the consequences of this reflection upon physicality, community, and place. Nowadays, it is again possible to talk about God in a genuine sense even if we do not accept the miraculous appearances or statues shedding tears and similar phenomena (these attempts actually signify a defensive regression back to the archaic concept of sacredness). The so-called metaphoric theology (Sallie McFague) enables us to talk about our experience with God in a way that does not hark back to the time before the efforts of critical thinkers to demythicize and secularize the world. The points of interest today are the social consequences of the various metaphors in which man tries to express his experience with God.

The relationship with God is, therefore, a search for his appearance and at the same time the creation of this appearance. Developments in the arts and in the public space and time are similar. Nothing has any firm or even eternal features, nothing exists outside the scope of our responsibility. The illegibility of the world is not a challenge to read it, but rather to start ÒwritingÒ it, or more precisely, to start acting in a way that is based both on decoding the past and on anticipating and projecting the future.

When we are facing various manifestations of Òpublic artÒ in the twentieth century -- carnival, procession, outdoor mass, outdoor exercise, military parade, happening, street theater, theme park, sculpture symposium, land art, sidewalk drawing competitions for children, graffiti -- we should be able to distinguish which of the mentioned level or organization of time and space (access to place) anticipates such action and tries to activate itself in the people. It is remarkable that all the levels are still present: even the most archaic concept of the sacred places has not disappeared and continues to be vital, not only in the acts of some remote village inhabitants, but also in our everyday appropriation of the lived space, so-called territorialism.

These levels work sometimes separately, but mostly they act together. The messages they bring can be generally ÒparallelÒ or conflicting. Some time ago I wrote about the existence of some kind of environmental double relation, when an explicit appeal or instruction call upon people to become playful or spontaneous, even though the messages encoded in the environment are of a very different nature. Such manipulation of people, as is typical for mental institutions or schools, exploits the difference between the reflected level of explicit sign communication and the almost non-reflected level of implicit non-verbal communication.

These are just some suggestions about something that is known to us on the level of experience but that mostly remains unidentified. I do not think it is useful to develop a kind of botanical key for the definition of species. My aim was not to mortify the works of art in space by classifying them, but rather to open them up by being able to discover a hidden structure in a seemingly chaotic state. No observation is possible without a preliminary set of categories of observation, but it is even more productive if it allows for this set of categories itself to become the object of reflection.