Imago Summer 1997 [antikvár]

T JLhe . he end of the second millennium A.D. is the time when image reigns. The invention of photography opened the long list of scientific and technological discoveries resulting in the rapid and all-embracing visualization of the worid. Through the labour of reason the spirit becomes alienated from word and adapts itself to image. Man thus receives an instrument which finally enables him to realize the secret and eternal human striving to become equal to God. The truth is that virtually everyone can now recreate the world in his own image and likeness or select from an infinite variety that which is consonant with his own image and likeness. The process of the secularization of consciousness which began in the age of the Enlightenment has been reified and ultimately found its completion in the creation of a new world where man perceives himself as a demiurge. The significance of this new worid is largely illusory, imaginary and subject to manipulation as visuality itself is illusory, imaginary and liable to be manipulated. It is illusory like a shadow of an instant carried away by the flow of time, imaginary like a gust of wind tearing away a hat from one's head, and can be manipulated like a pack of cards dealt out by the global information networks. Information does not stand for knowledge and experience does not signify understanding. To observe does not mean to explore. With the third millennium to be ushered in, when the ever multiplying forms of being become paradoxically cumulative to produce the universally unified and averaged mass culture comprehensible to man-demiurge, it is essential not to allow a growth in the entropy of the high culture and to preserve the potential for the development of its genetically diverse constituents, which in their entirety, interpénétration, and reciprocal influence form the creative field for the search for truth. Photography is democratic while high culture is elitist. Yet, amidst a host of artists who are creating images today there are those whose gift, whatever the modernity of its expression, is part and parcel of that tradition of the cultural space in which they share by the right of birth, legacy and being. These artists convey extremely diverse "ideas", but were the world deprived of only one of these, it would no longer be whole and complete. As I see it, the mission of the IMAGO is to explore, comprehend and be knowledgeable and, consequently, to preserve the wholeness and completeness of the world. Evgeny Berrezner