It seems to have been forgotten, in recent years, that the basic relationship of the artist to the world in modernity is one of estrangement. The artist is a perpetual outsider — an observer of the life around them, always less so an actor. Their moment comes when the action has long since concluded — in the studio, in the dead of night — where experience can be forcibly broken apart and re-arranged: made to give what it couldn’t. The artist is a helpless romantic. They would like to restore the world to its unity by mending the wound of desire, which separates the beloved from the lover even as it draws them together. The artwork is an attempt at restitution, but one marked by the knowledge that the attempt must fail. Art is not religion nor ethics nor politics but a reminder of what they should aim for. The existence of art as a special field, and of artists as specialists in that field, accuses the whole of society of having lost or forgotten its purpose. Freedom is allowed only in the virtual spheres of culture (and increasingly not even there), where the imagination can be safely circumscribed and reigned in. But the artist — as romantic and outsider — works with the knowledge that the game is rigged. 

Walter Benjamin’s celebrated section on the flâneur, in his essay on “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” includes an analysis of the poem “To a Woman Passing By.” The sonnet (subject of a later translation-into-prose by Kafka) recounts an encounter, lasting no more than an instant, between the poet and an anonymous woman. Their eyes meeting across a crowd, the poet conjures the love they could have shared — a fantasy shattered as the beloved turns away, not entirely innocent of the desire transfixed by her gaze.  For Benjamin, the poem is indicative of the modern phenomenon of “love at last sight,” and he makes the claim that the delight of the poet is actually predicated on the destruction of his fantasy — on the very impossibility of the poet’s love, which grows only more perfect through its denial.

Self-estrangement offers a possible catchword for Dan Herschlein’s recent show at Matthew Brown, The Long-Fingered Hand. The consummately crafted bas-relief panels depict domestic scenes as though seen with a sidelong glance: a wall, door, and doorknob arranged in a grid; the light of a window cast on the floor; a suburban yard with a tree, faucet, and fence; an extension cord plugged into a socket; the view from a window in a nondescript room. These are the kind of sights the eye settles on in moments of distraction, or, what is almost the same, introspection. Chosen unconsciously for their general character, they become screens on which to project paranoid fantasies, like the walls of Proust’s childhood bedroom at Combray which were transfigured by the light of the magic lantern that accompanied his mother’s departure for the night. In Herschlein’s work, the repressed returns in various hallucinatory forms that seem to implicate the artist or viewer — or whoever’s gaze is embodied in the works’ perspective — in a psychological drama where the sense of self dissolves into the features of the world around it, animating them with its surplus of free floating anxiety: hidden musculature writhing beneath the surface of things; dismembered hands and fingers tied off like balloons; sinister shadows cast by groups of figures just out of view; a giant egg sat expectantly in a chair. The meaning of these images is diffuse: they slip away from cognition.

During a Q&A following the American Cinematheque screening of his newly restored Wings of Desire (1987) at the Egyptian Theater, director Wim Wenders described how the sound recording for the city’s internal monologue — the unspoken thoughts and desires of the populace of Berlin as heard by a troop of wandering angels, invisible to the human eye — was only conceived after filming had wrapped so that earlier, all throughout the production, the actors had been left to imagine for themselves what ordinary people might need or want and how this could be conveyed in a gesture or by means of pure presence. And not only this; those cast as angels — principally, Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander — were additionally tasked with responding to this silent cacophony with the benevolence of a gaze replete with understanding. But the most challenging role in the film was given to the team of camera operators led by legendary French cinematographer Henri Alekan, who was instructed by Wenders to make the camera “look lovingly” at its subjects, to brush them tenderly with its lens, like mother and child. Strangely, the effect is similar to that achieved by avant-garde filmmaker Michael Snow in La Région Centrale (1971), where he fixed the camera to a robotic arm that moved “in every direction and on every plane of a sphere” following a sequence of pre-programmed commands. The footage, capturing the desolate mountain landscape of northern Quebec, mimics the feeling of vertigo, of the world falling away from our grasp. In Wings of Desire there is a dialogue between the angels Damiel and Cassiel in which they recall witnessing the history of Berlin from the moments after creation to the childhood of man, the birth of nations, and the destructions of war. Soon after, Damiel is granted his wish of descending from immortality to the realm of flesh and blood. As he falls from the heavens, so, too, does the camera. Wings of Desire is a fairy tale, a story of redemption and justice, and a paean to love, a prayer of hope for the restitution of body and mind. But just so. It remains a film and is aware of itself as such. The use of color film stock for the ending sequence — in contrast to the black and white of the angels’ gaze — is meant to symbolize Damiel’s transition into the world of man, but the happily ever after that follows is hardly ever the lot of real men.

The truth is closer to what Catherine Opie depicts in her 1994 photograph of the 105 Freeway, re-printed for the artist’s retrospective at Regen Projects, Harmony is Fraught. Adopting the quasi-scientific, documentary style of Bernd and Hilla Becher, the photo presents a straight-on view of a freeway junction. The only indication of its setting in Los Angeles is given by the title and the distinctive fronds of palm trees visible in the far distance. Otherwise, the site itself is unremarkable; the kind of thing you could find in most cities across the world. Just because of that, it is something both universal and intimately particular. A piece of infrastructure facilitating the movement of labor and capital — the transit of raw materials, workers, commodities, and everything else that production requires — and, at the same time, a conduit for people’s lives. A place for desire and fulfilling desire; a site of death, both sudden and drawn out. The photo’s exposure time blurs the few cars in frame and casts stillness over the scene, which becomes available to the eye in a new way, different from the actual experience of driving. What you see is time and space compressed, folded-in on itself, cast in concrete, cut into the landscape, and captured as light. Distinct spaces open up in every part of the image, framed by columns and overpasses. One hundred and one vanishing points, windows, and punctums. Pictures within pictures. All of the city is present, already here and already gone. Vertigo of a society constructing its ruins. 

The lonely eye looks on, all the same.