For quite some time I believed that Novalis had invented techno. Sifting through fragments in the silence of a library, a single one exploded out of the page at me: “The play of movement – joy at the diverse movements. Play of dance. Play of Machines. Electric Dance.” But so much for the prescience of some old (or eternally young) Romantic. It would be over a century after the fragment was written before truly electric music was produced, when it appeared first – ominously – as reproduction. And another half century would pass before it flowed into the underground playgrounds of the rave, with their shuddering machines and joyful dances. Novalis’ contemporary Johann Wilhelm Ritter would too take up the thought of electric music. Sound had recently been seen for the first time, as Chladni (nephew of the famous hermeneut) discovered the patterns of waveforms in grains on a metal plate that was bowed or struck. Ritter saw the matter with electric eyes, “every sound is electrical, and every electrical figure is a sound.” Chladni’s famous Klangfiguren expanded into a galvanic cosmology of sound and action, with crystals at its summit. “Diamond,” he wrote, “is the hardest substance, and therefore must also have the highest tone.”
All of this had certainly been forgotten by the 1980s, and even if it wasn’t, it proved of little interest to acidheads. But perhaps there is, to shamelessly thieve an expression from Romantic science, an elective affinity between these two generations separated by nearly two centuries. David Panos’ new show Time Crystals at the Pump House Gallery in Battersea suggests it to me. The show, which comprises sculpture, video work, and installation, returns to the fashions, the gestures, the motifs and the shibboleths of a destroyed youth culture. A culture which flourished as an undercurrent – like some shivering fungus, like a Lichtenberg figure beneath society’s crust, still flashing with energy – for a decade. And then as the energy drained it hardened into some uninterpretable fulgurite: its now hollow interior going fully commercial, establishing the musical monopolies of the mid-1990s; while its hardened edges were beaten down by the batons of police legions as the Criminal Justice Act came into force.
The crystal is a form which has internalised repetition. Its contents are thus doubly fixated: once so that they return again unchanged within the structure; and then fixed again by the bounds of the crystal itself, held fast in its shape. Panos’ exhibition opens with a video of the costume archive of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Pieces of fashion of the time – trainers, bags, shirts – are brought out and displayed. The archive is a place where dead things are put in boxes, accruing (if they’re lucky) as much dust as reverence. Like the silence of the library they are most often places without music. Next to the video of the archive the movements and sound of the street, of the everyday, are remixed in another video piece into stuttering beats. And this defines the dialectic of the show. The archive is a foil; the suggestion that this is yet another archival show is a point countered in dissonance by a more frenetic, more obsessive impulse, another relation to the past. Against the archive where dead things are put is a crystalline version of time, a place where the dying must continue dying over and over again. Gestures from dances that no-one any longer knows how to perform are ripped from their context and repeated. Music is played from YouTube, layering into unintelligibility. Against the prevailing archive fever that has accrued so much capital for the visual arts for nearly two decades, this crystalline consciousness and its temporal displays decry an archive fever fever. Against theoretical multiplication it insists on returning (and returning again) to the matter at hand. Things simply cannot be let go.
Yet in refusing to let the dead remain dead, in refusing the archival resting place, a certain neurotic consciousness is revealed. To borrow the famous phrase from Steffens’ 1814 letter to Tieck about the early Romantics, a phrase Lukács felt compelled to repeat three times in his early essay on Novalis, “there was something heinous about the whole thing.” Something almost sick, a suffering from reminiscences that mistakes itself for happy nostalgia. It is like the guilty conscience of one who got something wrong, being forced forever back into the refracted glory of only those surroundings in which the mistake would be noticed. And at its best – at its most ambivalent – Panos’ show knows its own sickness too. It knows that something has died; a social current has been stemmed. Ironically archetypal nature quietly reclaims a ruined wall in violent indifference. Digital renderings float across a pastel non-space.
But more than this, the work recognises its own neurotic impulse from the world outside. It knows a timeform that has been borrowed from techno, in the shuddering pulse in the market: a world of machines and screens, of rhythmic clicks and repetitive strain. It remembers Benjamin’s dictum that “fashion is the eternal return of the New” only to now see its beat not as some world-historical breath but as the universal muzak of commodity exchange, as a billion hands perform – again and again – gestures they no longer understand. Swipe right for love and when it doesn’t work do it again. Always another smiling face but only for the camera, frozen. No longer any joy, just alienated movements.
Back in the library I return studiously to Novalis, examining now a longer fragment, closely related to the first
Sound seems to be nothing but a broken movement, in the sense that colour is broken light.
Dance is most clearly with music and like its other half.
Sound is connected with movement as if of itself.
Colour is like a neutral condition of matter and light – a striving of matter to become light – and a contrary striving of light.
Might all quality be a broken condition – in the above meaning?
Pleasure in the diversity of movements.
Might the forms of crystallization – be a broken type of gravity.
Influence of mixture on shaping the figures.
Could the crystalline forms be of electrical origin?
Ascending to the highest floor of the gallery, one finds oneself utterly immersed in Panos’ crystal vision. The complex of sound and multiple projections makes it hard to find one’s bearings. But certainly this crystal seems now to be broken, shattering around me. Or I have found myself so deeply embedded within it that the world itself has become partial, having become only a set of half-invisible refractions. Might the garish bright green gobo of a decrepit disco light brought out of retirement not be a goddess from some fairytale? In its apotheosis, Panos’ show stakes its claim precisely on this brokenness, and the broken types of grace that, through it, permeate the dance of history. This universe, this youth, now passed, has been fractured into a tension between reminiscence and reproduction. In its gracelessness, this exhibition rebels against a harmonious universe in which an electrified music of the spheres sizzles into action. But everything about this gracelessness is quite deliberate. This is the rebellion of an obsessive, who knows – or is compelled to act with the knowledge – that victory lies in minor histories.
Time Crystals runs at the Pump House Gallery in Battersea Park, 4 October – 17 December 2017