Invisible art

Once, a search engine's page featured a chameleon that made me think of the art of Liu Bolin and mimicry.

Liu Bolin in front of a magazine shelf

Mimicry must be the oldest form of art in nature. In contrast to the 20th century tendency to create art which points to its presence as art, mimicry succeeds only if it achieves its goal of blending completely with its surroundings. In short, mimicry is essentially an art of invisibility. Although some sort of transparency or opacity accompanies its execution, its goal has always been exhaustively neither. As an integrative procedure, it also does not have representation as its objective. Mimicry neither represents itself nor another object. Instead, it blends by blurring the boundaries between itself and its opposites, or between imitation and imitated without falling either into some kind of hyperrealism or objectivism. The sign does not replace the real, nor the real the sign.

As an art of invisibility, Bolin's mimicry also enacts the disappearance of the traces of art by reducing its elements visually to become indistinguishable from the elements around it. All the signs of art become inseparable from non-art and non-signs. There is just something magical in his act, the summit of camouflage and survival skills, a "ghost" mode reminding us of the old Baroque art of the Trompe-l'œil. Of course, the optical illusion he performs is "detectable," or else we won't be talking about it this long. It is like a magician's trick that we all pay to see: a subject or an object appearing or disappearing.

Anything that appears in the universe that has some kind of pattern and complex organization has been called an "emergent" structure. Language has also been seen to develop this way. It would only take one step to think of writing and art along the same genre. Maybe as a type of "fourth-order" emergent structure*, art and other forms of representation could also be "seen as a system emerging from long-time participation in communicative problem-solving in various social circumstances." 

In Bolin, however, this level of participation in the realm of signs has taken a different path. As a form of self-portrait that was supposed to incarnate the essential qualities of a persona, Bolin's trompe-l'œil instead transmutes itself and its medium of existence into the optical substance of its environment. In Bolin's case, it can be anything: rocks, groceries, monuments, cinema seats, toys and magazine racks, walls, trees and logs, symbols, famous tourist spots, drapes, streets, buildings, graffiti, postcard wall, etc. As an omnipresent kind of living statue, Bolin the invisible man is there only to make his presence remarkably unremarkable, an indefinable image among other self-similar images, signs, objects, symbols, and things. Won't this zero-degree mimicry be the most eloquent embodiment of asemia (Greek asémos, "without mark," "signless")?

By becoming almost imperceptible, he probably makes us see what we always miss seeing: the whole and its parts are really invisible.**

_____________

* It is useful to distinguish three forms of emergent structures. A first-order emergent structure occurs as a result of shape interactions (for example, hydrogen bonds in water molecules lead to surface tension). A second-order emergent structure involves shape interactions played out sequentially over time (for example, changing atmospheric conditions as a snowflake falls to the ground build upon and alter its form). Finally, a third-order emergent structure is a consequence of shape, time, and heritable instructions. For example, an organism's genetic code sets boundary conditions on the interaction of biological systems in space and time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence). 

**  I recall a passage from Henri Michaux: "On ne voit rien, que ce qu'il importe si peu de voir. Rien, et cependant on tremble. Pourquoi?" (Je vous écrit d'un pays lointain)