Announcing: Love in a Time of Allegory

Across books and exhibitions, Nicholas Muellner, Art Senior Lecturer and Codirector of the M.F.A. in Image Text program and ITI Press, has placed visual media and the written word in dialogue to explore aspects of the human condition spanning the personal to the political. Yet in the opening pages of his latest publication Love in a Time of Allegory, he poses a startling confession for such an artist:

Adding more pictures to the world feels like making thin plastic bags that I know will end up in the ocean. But I have built my life around bag-making, so what else am I supposed to do? I no longer want or use these bags, but it’s all I know how to make.

In the pages that follow, Muellner does not set himself the charge of altering the world which brings him to this question, but rather investigates how to best interact and imagine from within it.

The idea that imagination and social connection are being suffocated by the avalanche of crises and turmoil all around us is so resonant. Did exploring these ideas through text and images as you have in the book alter or expand your lines of thinking about this in any particular way? At the outset of the book, you note that the title came to you but that you didn’t yet know what it meant, so I’m curious how this evolved for you.

The suffocation the book addresses comes not only from the crises all around us, but particularly from the avalanche of images and information that bury us in these crises. These events, in all their vast range of importance, and their images, in their indiscriminate excess, assault us without the time or context to situate and respond, and then are instantly replaced by more. My attempts to think my way through this onslaught, which I recount in the narrative of the book, starts by looking at 19th- and 20th-century histories of how events and social conditions were presented. This begins with a reconsideration of the realist tradition (as opposed to what I describe as “contemporary realism”), which I trace from its 19th-century literary and visual origins through to 1970s nightly news broadcasts. This helped me understand how much our common understanding of the present had been shattered by the digital revolution, but it did not provide a way forward. I then move further back in time — from Italian Renaissance painting and Indian Miniature painting to Giotto’s frescoes — in search of the formal tools of allegory, and how those forms or representations institute potentially useful forms of collective belief. But it is only through the trial and error of my own picture-making that I arrive at an understanding of the connections between love and the traditions of allegory. As I assert at the book’s beginning, I do not propose a solution to an overwhelming and complex global problem, but I do discover ways forward in image-making and thought that I can hope give solace and possibility to other image-makers, both in everyday life and in art.

[AI] is innately antagonistic to new landscapes of the possible. To create those spaces, we need to close our eyes to what is already, endlessly, in front of us.

How would you encourage others (perhaps specifically your students) to engage with what you term this stifling “relentless realism” and shift how we engage with the world and one another? I couldn’t help but think of how AI “content” on top of the fire hose of news and text notifications may just keep turning the volume up if we take no action. It’s already so loud it’s hard to hear each other.

One answer to that quandary comes from the book’s foray into texts by the Soviet dissident writer Andrei Sinyavsky and the French philosopher Jacques Rancière. Both writers give me language to diagnose the manipulative problems of contemporary realism, but more importantly, both, in their own ways, urge us to move away from the discourse of the real and towards a discourse of imagination. Sinyavsky calls for a “phantasmagoric art” of the grotesque and the fantastic to replace realistic description. “Such an art,” he insists, “would correspond best to the spirit of our time.” In Rancière’s most concise formulation, “the real must be fictionalized in order to be thought.” Most inspiringly, he tasks artists with sketching “new configurations of what can be seen, what can be said and what can be thought and, consequently, a new landscape of the possible.”

So, on the one hand, I encourage other artists, my students included, to think about how they can create exterior and interior worlds that we have not seen before. AI, as I note in the book, relies entirely on what is already visible or readable to create the new. It is innately antagonistic to new landscapes of the possible. To create those spaces, we need to close our eyes to what is already, endlessly, in front of us.

I haven’t been able to shake the line you, a photographer, write about wishing for a “pictureless pause” to reset before returning to the work again. The idea that we could stop bailing out the boat of our brains, have a nap, and come back with refreshed eyes and ears is so enticing. Have you found a way to have that experience for yourself?

This question is directly linked to the closing of the eyes I mentioned just above. And that simple-sounding act has become incredibly difficult in the media and image worlds we inhabit. I don’t have any magic solutions to offer. For me, it means that I don’t engage in social media. Luckily for me, I always found it depressing, and it never failed to make me feel lonely, even though I am not a lonely person, even when I’m alone. But there is still the news, and email and texting, and streaming everything. My best defenses are to leave my phone at home, to do my creative work on a computer without a wi-fi connection, and to take hikes in places without phone signal. Finally, I find fiction and poetry powerful escapes, in that my mind does the work of translating even imagistic writing into new internal visions. I don’t do these things enough, but I always feel better when I do.