Reflection: Where does the art reside?
A representation, in its materiality, complexity, and details, always goes beyond beyond its meanings or possible meanings.
Tristan Garcia [1]
As I find myself experimenting and playing about with ideas, I find that there are moments that produce real solid experience of creative drive and momentum as I ask what is this work doing?
Since going to Steve McQueen’s exhibition of film works at the Tate Modern in September, and also Cerith Wyn Evans at the White Cube, I find myself looking at my own practice within differing scopes that allow me to harness or embrace other ways of deriving a result that isn’t - to steal a phrase from Graham Harman’s Object Oriented Ontology - either a result of describing what the work does, or what the effects of that work produces. For Harman there is something deeper, withdrawn, but not necessarily of anthropomorphic origin.
Its this space i find my work wanting to reside in. What is exciting… is I have no way of knowing how to reside in this space myself…
I made this film last night as an ongoing exploration into documentation and noticing. The documentation is mirrored back at me in the evidence of existence. The mirroring comes in the unnoticed existence of myself as I reside alongside other everyday anonymous elements of being. (I use the Heideggerian sense here)
We could see the soul evident and presented/symbolised as electric light, moving sky, the sense of the cold October air. But these elements are embodied within something deeper. They act as signifiers of existence along side and within existence itself. Producing a bifurcation of existence and meaning.
So when I think about what making is I believe this is where I am trying to arrive at.
I use the word arrive in a very deliberate and distinct way. The exactitude of constituting what arrival means implies a journey has preceded the event.
I’m keen to rephrase locations of my practice in deeper groundings, newer epistemologies, that stay in review whilst developing a considered ontological quest away from, and I will quote Alfred North Whitehead (1861 - 1947) here, “A final description of reality.”
Short excerpt of an ongoing idea that is formulated on documentation of time, space and being. These ‘captures’ as I call them, take on a deeper symbolism as monuments to existence.
I think it is important to remain open at this time, to experiment further. One of the traps I fall into, and again some of my painting reflects this mostly, is perfectionism.
This trait within my making plays out as a mimetic residency that produces paintings which I am finding are too literal. Arthur C. Danto makes reference to this when he reminds us of a futility of trying to gain something that is so close to the real thing you may as well have the real thing. [2]
Danto goes on to quote Robert Rauschenberg “Painting relates to both art and life (I try to work in that gap between the two).”
It is this same gap that I am now starting to identify as the gap that is starting to call to me and have my own work reside there, in the undefined, the surplus, the withdrawn.
What makes this evident is my thinking as my practice evolves. Constructs and context seem to act as building blocks that put together in the right way reveal something close to but yet far away from what I am trying to do. Because there are moments when I am not sure what it is I am trying to do, I consider these moments as ‘opportunistic residency’, a phrase I want to coin as an exemplar of what my practice is about. I guess I see myself as an estate agent, checking out the property before the arrival of the work that will ultimately be the thing to dwell in, not only a space, but a time too. (although not in a newtonian way, I like to think there is more potential for difference than exactitude)
[1] Garcia, Tristan, Form and Object: A Treatise on Things, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 255.
[2] Danto, Arthur, C., Transgressions of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1981) p. 12