Development: This Moment Has Already Happened
Taking a more poetic approach to working and evaluation, I wanted to encapsulate a very holistic attempt to producing videos that wander as much as my research over the year. This experiment tries to combine reasoning and meaning into the process of making and looking. What becomes evident in documenting thinking as it unfolds in real time, is the resultant working process takes on a more abstract methodology that could be misunderstood as too contrived or seen as extremely esoteric. What is apparent is how my Critical Contextual Studies are starting to influence my approach to ‘looking’ and or ‘seeing’. This ties closely to my yearning and passion to imbue meaning into results that come from the making process.
One of the elements that has become evident in my time so far over the course of my BA is the obvious influence of certain thinkers. Although, such philosophical grounding for my work can add interesting highlights, encapsulate the appearance into a descriptive realm or observational discipline but also, can bog down the work into a murkiness that detracts from the work itself.
Take Martin Heidegger for example. His writing, his unfolding of Husserl’s phenomenology of how we are a oneness in the world that we are cast out into, a world ready to hand, for me, isn’t always a good. My CCS module brings me into close contact with very deep discourses, including Heidegger via Graham Harman, which then envelope me in my module writings, but sometime overlap into ‘pun’ or ‘cliche’ if I try to hard, which I find myself doing at moments to fit the work I make into specific restrictions of explanation, philosophy or meaning. So, we could say, the video below, is about observation presented through geometric shapes, rather that the very entangled thinking that descriptively becomes imputed into a secondary narrative ‘tacked on’ to the work, as an afterthought. Personally, I would argue this would be a very harsh appraisal. In some ways, my thinking process during a making process, are inextricably exploring new ways of seeing, responding to that seeing, in a way that unfolds in an experimentation of looking through new mediums and new narratives.
So, yes we can say that the work may not need the interpolation of certain thought, influences or rationales, (something Graham Harman calls ‘Overmining’ [i] in his Object-Oriented Ontology) but it is part of my method. I am starting to discover, that “meaning” is - and I want to use the word ‘critical’, albeit this is open to further discussion and exploration - something I find has to exist in the work I produce as a maker. My work is a response to existence, being and noticing the world as it forever unfolds around me.
Something is being.
The light illuminates that which shows itself being in time. What defines time being in meaning?
Has time elapsed past a point we know to be this moment, to a point where it is ahead of us in another time that has not yet unfolded before us/me/I.
Does time exist beyond time as the universe speeds up in it's very expansion. What is ahead of us, already illuminated by photons that have sped past and moved into another yet unobservable part in temporality? time already being, already happening outside of the linear.
All possibilities exist right now. Nothing is certain until it becomes an intelligible certainty. Yet, these very same certainties do not rely or care for our observation. The the fact that what is being an existence means that at any given point it matters as matter before meaning.
Meaning can only exist in being, but not within the being of being, but because of being. While the sun is being a lifecycle, life is witnessing that being 7.8 billion times over. Therefore, what that means is only relevant within to those who find themselves existing in 7.8 billion unfolding possibilities that overlap meaning with experience.
The warmth of the photons colliding unnoticeably with objects that then go on to release the photoelectric potential that lights up the underside of shadows and parts of the visible that otherwise stay hidden in the being of being, become what I try to understand.
That which exists in multiple meanings that reside in tandem besides, underneath, around and beyond. This moment. Has already happened.
Stuart Lee
Fragments of Time
Video: 03:00secs
(2021)
What I was looking for between the lines, wasn’t there to be seen? More so discovered, revealed and exposed.
Why does the literal clash so violently with hidden subtlety of what doesn’t exist yet has been left there to be found? Why did we put the literal there in the first place, what was was it that had to be covered over, obscured and protected?
The use of the obvious becomes apparatus, a frame work, a housing to hide and give birth to meaning amongst the clumsiness of the performative charade that is the literal.
This work is Built around the idea that time unfolds. Somewhere there is an overlap between my sensorial self and the world that exists around me. This video stands as a gestalt of being. Moments sit as collage. Using the grounding of temporal response to an ontos that collides with meaning.
Our description stands in for what is, so, as posited by Karen Barad,[ii] matter and meaning are intrinsically linked, we use the former to embody the latter. The assemblage of put together moments, track the sky as single clouds roll by. There is a backdrop of a blanket of cloud that hangs motionless, whilst the darker single cloud moves past the suspended sun that is refracted through the atmosphere. This work is about noticing. Witnessing. Meaning and matter. The overlap of geometric shapes in the second part of the film, track the path of an aeroplanes vapour trail. Acting as a symbol for the forward motion, not only of time, but potential, that that is just ahead, about to, could be.
Because being, yet to be determined, comes into being, the mode of existence is prior to the essence of what is “ready to hand”,[iii] what is out there being is what gives us the being in a world of dasein that is relational.[iv]
Fig. 5
Stuart Lee
Shadow of a Cloud
Photograph 4032 × 3024 pix
(2021)
An example of shadow. How do we understand what the being of shadow consists of. Does this being exist as a deterministic entity within a framework of accessible phenomena ?
This intra-inter[v] field posits that our world around us exists in a temporality that - whilst there is cooperation between the object field (clouds, sky, buildings, sunshine) and the perceptive entity (me), there is also an interior recognising of the cooperative.
The intra gives back to that what must have a name.
This very moment happens outside of language.
Like a shadow there is an overlap of our perceptual field. Extending out into the world that houses our being of being. This example of something being can be seen in fig. 5 opposite. In phenomenological terms the appearance is what is of interest here. The object is behind the phenomena but not necessarily the cause. For Lacan this is the real, for Merleau - Ponty the visible of the invisible. Ever since Kant gave us the inaccessible Noumena, Philosophy and art have happily skirted with that that does not need an empirical determination. More a knowing alluding to a sense of something that is, yet, is never really stated or known.
Fig. 6 above
Trevor Paglen
CLOUD #603 Watershed (detail)
2019
Dye sublimation print
48" × 60" (121.9 cm × 152.4 cm)
Edition of 5 + 2 AP © Trevor Paglen
Fig. 7, below
Trevor Paglen is known for investigating the invisible through the visible, with a wide-reaching approach that spans image making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. Pace Gallery <https://www.pacegallery.com/artists/trevor-paglen/>