[-empyre-] On Francis Danby's Opening of the Sixth Seal

[Premesh Lalu]

Thank you Johannes Birringer for your question about Danby. I too was
fascinated by Soo Yon Lee's [Finding the Invisible], and grateful to say
more about Danby in response to your question.



There is so much to say about the Danby painting and our current global
crisis that it is hard to know where to begin. Briefly, I believe the
painting speaks very directly to issues about the art of communication
raised by our current global predicament, especially as it focuses our
attention on the conjuncture of the promise at the end of slavery and
revolutions in communication technology upon which our contemporary world
rests.



Coincidentally, Rustom Bharucha, author of *Terror and Performance*, wrote
after my earlier post to ask if the current global crisis allows us to
rethink the basic infrastructures of communication. I thought I’d share
aspects of my research as it overlaps with the epistemic reorientations
made possible by the current conjuncture. My comments reflect efforts to
escape the circular causality of race through an elaboration of a
specifically postcolonial aesthetic theory. Danby’s painting, Seamus
Heaney’s *The Cure at Troy* and Kentridge’s less good idea, have each
helped to make headway on how we reframe the question concerning
communication in our times.



Danby’s painting brings into view a specific model of postcolonial
aesthetic theory. It extends understanding of the lingering potential of
the constellations of images of faltering hope that bears upon our
understanding of a “digital baroque”. Beyond its anti-slavery sentiments,
an anecdote about the circulation of the painting may help to place it in a
new constellation of communication. In 1835 the painting was purchased by
one John Watkins Brett, art speculator who came close to having his art
collection sold to decorate the rotunda of the White House (that requires
an emoji, but I cannot decide which). With a decline of his attempts to
create a market in art through speculating on the nascent public sphere in
the Europe and the USA, the Brett brothers, over tea I might add, drew
inspiration from the Danby painting. Like the bolt of lightning connecting
heaven and earth in Danby’s painting, Brett developed the idea of
connecting the continents by way of submarine telegraphic communication.
Combined with the revolution in scientific communication, involving John
Herschel (who settled in the Cape in 1834 to map the southern skies and
where he coined the term photography after finding a way to fix images),
Babbage, Peacock and Whewell at Cambridge University, and the laying of
telegraphic cable, the stage was set for a brave, and some might say,
tragic new world.



I am less and less convinced that a history of communication determined by
the rise of the public sphere is sustainable under current conditions. We
need a new account of communication, perhaps one that sees its onset in how
the “hope” that accompanied the end of slavery, colonialism and apartheid
invariably ended in disappointment. Danby’s painting provides a space of
convergence for thinking such a new history: the abolition of slavery, the
expansion of technological resources, the work of art in an industrial age,
changes in the circulation of commodities and the accompanying technical
reproducibility of artwork, the distribution of art through exhibition and
distribution of offprints, and stitching of the image of the slave into a
canvas from which it had been excised. Not to mention a bolt of electricity.



Ultimately, *The Opening of the Sixth Seal* recalls how the end of slavery,
and the end of apartheid, founded, as Heaney would have it, on the “hope
for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge,” faltered. The racial
remains of slavery appear to be distributed across the spiral of
biopolitics and industrial capitalism, while its uncertain energies were
folded into mechanisms of communication and control. In short, race became
a matter of a circular causality in the age of cybernetics. How then does
the work of art both invite us to think ahead and live in the shadow of
disappointment of communication thus conceived?



So, when we read Heaney’s *Cure at Troy* or catch a glimpse of the
instruments of communication in Kentridge’s theatrical productions, perhaps
we are being invited to join in the anticipation of the unshackled slave,
arms outstretched to the heavens, being restored to the canvas of modernity
as a figure of entropy stitched into a communication network. This is
perhaps why Norbert Wiener, many years later, on the eve of the founding of
apartheid, would call cybernetics a system of communication and control.



All of this to say that perhaps the Covid-19 pandemic calls for a new
constellation in the history of communication that may well proceed from
the setbacks, and the search for a deferred hope, for which the aesthetic
educates postcolonial sensibilities. Apologies for the longish post L




Premesh Lalu (Prof.)
DST/NRF Flagship on Critical Thought in African Humanities
Centre for Humanities Research
Faculty of Arts
University of the Western Cape

Private Bag X 17
Bellville
7535
Cape Town
(021) 959 3162
0716767806

http://www.chrflagship.uwc.ac.za/

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