Avatar Emergency. Gregory L. Ulmer
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are so arranged as to facilitate the interpretation of the parts as well as the whole: the words praeterito, praesens and futura serve as labels, so to speak, for the three human faces in the upper zone, viz., the profile of a very old man turned to the left, the full-face portrait of a middle-aged man in the center, and the profile of a beardless youth turned to the right; whereas the clause praesens prudenter agit gives the impression of summarizing the total content after the fashion of a “headline.” We are given to understand, then, that the three faces, in addition to typifying three states of human life (youth, maturity, old age), are meant to symbolize the three modes or forms of time in general: past, present, and future. And we are further asked to connect these three modes or forms of time with the idea of prudence or, more specifically, with the three psychological faculties in the combined exercise of which this virtue consists: memory, which remembers, and learns from, the past; intelligence, which judges of, and acts in, the present; and foresight, which anticipates, and provides for or against, the future. (Panofsky 149)
We may borrow from Titian’s Prudence the concetto form, his personalizing of the iconography. The role of epigram in an emblem is to resolve the enigma (in this case) of the busts (humans and animals) juxtaposed with the motto invoking prudence. That role is played here by the fact that the three men are Titian and his family: the old man is a self-portrait; the mature man is Titian’s younger son; the youth is an adopted grandson. The painting celebrates an occasion of satisfaction, a prudent action—the successful completion of a legal case in which Titian changed his will so that his inheritance would pass not to the oldest (scoundrel) son, but to the younger son (who is shown as the lion) (166). Most of all, it is an encounter with time.
The three animal heads are derived from several iconographic traditions (image commonplaces), as Panofsky explains. The tricephalous monster was a companion of Serapis (Pluto), god of the underworld. The arrangement associates the old man with the wolf (the past devours time); the mature man with the lion (action in the present); the youth with the dog (always trying to please, in hopes of a good outcome). The three heads in the convention are joined by a serpent’s body—the serpent being an allusion to the snake swallowing its own tail. Titian’s design reflects the Renaissance fascination with hieroglyphic signs popularized by the Neoplatonists. Gombrich cites Ficino as providing the charter for the art of emblematics, setting a precedent from which modern advertising benefitted, for our ads are precisely emblems. Modernity through advertising already absorbed what the tradition knows about thinking fast, about instant comprehension, but there is nothing inherently Capitalist or Christian about the emblem.
When the Egyptian priests wished to signify divine mysteries, they did not use the small characters of script, but the whole images of plants, trees or animals; for God has knowledge of things not by way of multiple thought but like the pure and firm shape of the thing itself. Your thoughts about time are multiple and shifting, when you say that time is swift or that, by a kind of turning movement, it links the beginning again to the end, that it teaches prudence and that it brings things and carries them away again. But the Egyptian can comprehend the whole of this discourse in one firm image when he paints a winged serpent with its tail in its mouth, and so with the other images which Horus described. (Ficino qtd. in Gombrich 158–59)
Emblematic images support flash reason by means of enigmas that provoke thought to move beyond the given sense.
Not only can we not think of the sign as representing a real creature, even the event it represents transcends the possibility of our experience—what will happen when the devouring jaws reach the neck and the jaws themselves? It is this paradoxical nature of the image that has made it the archetypal symbol of mystery. The serpent does not represent either time or the Universe, but precisely because it is inexhaustible in its signification it shows us so much “in a flash” that we return from its contemplation as from a dream we can no longer quite recount or explain. (159)
The “flash” of inference produced by such “open signs” does involve some articulation: “the experience of meaning after meaning which is suggested to our mind as we contemplate the enigmatic images becomes an analogue of the mode of apprehension in which the higher intelligence may not only see one particular proposition as in a flash, but all the truth their mind can encompass—in the case of the Divine Mind the totality of all propositions” (159). We could just as well think of the schema as an allegory of rhetoric, sorted out according to temporal responsibility: forensic (past), epideictic (present), deliberative (future). The flash of reason has always been desirable but becomes a necessity when the three time zones collapse into Now. And for “the Divine Mind” read “Internet,” since what is at stake in our updating of Prudence is the functionality of what was imagined and described in previous eras as the “mind of God.” Avatar is how individual and collective (total) beings communicate in a digital apparatus.
Template
In order to exercise the quality of experience augmented in electracy, you may compose your own Allegory of Prudence, using Titian’s work as a point of departure. The template includes the formal possibilities (allegory, iconography, portraiture), and also the content (a family incident, cultural mythology and legend). The work celebrates a satisfaction. The purpose of the exercise is to get a feeling for flash reason by composing an image commemorating an act of decision, specifically a decision covered by prudence. It is not that the action was itself prudent, but that im/prudence offers a frame, a measure, of your judgment (your decision). The elements of the template include 1. a grounding in personal experience, specifically some decision made in the past, that is memorable for whatever reason; 2. a framing of this event by the tradition of the virtues, specifically prudence, which measures the decision in the context of time (past-present-future); 3. icons: find some equivalent for the allegorical animals, which are “corporate” in McLuhan’s sense, each having an assigned meaning in the cultural encyclopedia, recoded to make specific sense in the setting created by Titian; 4. compose a motto or maxim (even a proverb) that expresses the moral of the event.
The rule of thumb for such assignments, when adopting existing works as a relay for a new composition, is to ask “what is that for me, in my circumstances?” Such is the pedagogy of decorum. I observe prudence in Nietzsche or Titian not as information for an exam, but to notice prudence in my own case. With this rule in mind, it is worth noting that Francesco Clemente did a version of our exercise in a different context, as part of a millennium celebration, in which the National Gallery invited twenty-four contemporary artists to make a new piece based on some historical work in the collection. Clemente chose Titian’s Prudence as his relay, but the “encounters” idea suggests that a further element in our template puts in play Titian’s work itself: the point of departure may be Titian’s allegory, but then some other work of art might be selected to guide the remake, as a relay for the commemoration design. The modified instruction is: select an existing work of any sort, genre, medium, mode, as a reference for your allegory. Clemente’s remake indicates also how loose this adaptation may be, since his version expresses ambivalence. The template identifies fields of attention, to provoke thought.
The salient components of Clemente’s remake, entitled Smile Now, Cry Later, were inventoried in the commentary by the curator of the exhibition, Richard Morphet:
1.The point of departure for the theme came from one of Clemente’s friends in Los Angeles, a Chicano, who had a tattoo including a statement of wisdom popular among his peers. On each arm there was tattooed a girl, one smiling, with the words “smile now,” one crying, with the words “cry later.” Similar wisdom may be found in a number of classic proverbs.
2.Clemente chose to enter a dialogue with Titian’s allegory for several reasons, beginning with his own admiration for the emblem as a form and tradition. Ezra Pound’s imagism, or vorticism, was one resource, taking the poetics of the ideogram as an updating of the emblem, with its capacity to create an internal flash of coherence through the juxtaposition of heterogeneous materials.
3.Clemente riffed on Titian’s iconography (relating the three ages of man with three totem animals) which Clemente associated with the gryllus, a representation for Medieval people of the baser instincts of life. The gryllus theme is evoked through the growing vine, each of whose leaves depicts a naked black man, each one either smiling or crying and holding a paper with the appropriate half