Research: Experiencing the self outside of the real.
Objects also have their own horizons: worlds from which they emerge, which shapes their surface and the direction they face, or what direction we face, when we face them. So if we follow such objects, we enter different worlds.[I]
Sara Ahmed
Subject Object (2020)
Film made to show works in a presentation on ‘home curation project’
Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, wrote:
Just as as we cannot think of spatial objects at all apart from space, or temporal objects apart from time, so we cannot think of any object apart from its connexion with other things.[II]
The inter woven worlds of things and the spaces they inhabit or surround themselves with, imply a geographic or proximal element of location. This binary way of thinking about object in or across a space, suggests there is only the physical realm to consider. Rarely do we ever say “oh there’s some hard against soft’ or “look how loose those unattached components are rolling by something we can see through”. If we break away from the binary, the idea of opposite, the idea of here - there, then we can view the object as ‘intra’. [III]
Considering the object as already within, immediately creates a zone, area or expanse, that treats the object as part of a wider network of things. So for Wittgenstein, this connexion was immensely important if we are consider the objects route to being. Within the discourse of objects appearing, what emerges was already there. Sara Ahmed, in her book Queer Phenomenology, makes a point that orientation is important when considering object and the phenomena therein. This consideration of the other means ‘to be oriented around something means to make that thing central.’ [IV]
This monadic proposition, negates the surroundings if we only consider the object alone. Only our focus makes the object central, to where our attention is being held. This suspension of all other temporal influences upon our gaze or focus, posits that there has been an agental element enacted by object to exert its potential to include us in it’s ‘de-distancing’. [V] This evokes our ability to navigate that which is perceived missing. The ability to make connections between the world already in presence and our intelligibility, draws us into the the spatiality of objects through consideration. Using attributive qualities of objects as indicators brings us closer to understanding relational significance within the confrontation of phenomena.
“Don’t ask what the work is. Rather, see what the work does.”
Fig. (a)
Subject Object (2020)
Left hand view in neutral setting
Fig. (b)
Subject Object (2020)
View from right hand side.
How do we consider the element of suspension that exists above the three lines that hold up the moulded concrete. When we think of the solid, we think of matter with a density. There is almost an element of the upside down, if we were to apply a taxonomy to the qualities of the elements on display, what order should we scale them to?
What vital connections exist between and around the sculptures in fig. (a) ? What is at hand to tell us what is being there? And what does it solve to know this? With the removal of, say for example in fig. (a), the nails from the wood, we have put something in their place. In essentialist terms, we have gained a different quality, as opposed to losing matter. For Graham Harman, in his book Object Oriented Ontology, it is this space between the object and qualities that underpin the ethos of OOO theory.
In fact, there is a deep wedge between objects and their qualities, and indeed the very principle is the cornerstone of OOO method in every field it has entered. [VI]
The ontic facts rest in what is left after the removal of the nails. The nascent features that now populate the surface, conjure a reverse violence that seems to have been enacted upon the wood as a thing in itself fig. (b). The qualities of repurposing within the enactment of creating a piece of sculpture, is what informs my practice. Sites the work within a field of research that draws on the potentiality of materials. Yes there were nails there before, yes they have been removed, lost discarded, but like Heidegger tells us about the hammer, it is only when something loses its acute functionality does the object become present at hand.
To take Heidegger’s proposition, the ‘ready to hand’, we can investigate the potential within the two objects on display. What I find here in this work is the potential to explore space. There is something important about the negative space as well as the objects before us. The introduction of the object field, the space between spaces, has become something integral within my practice. It is within this questioning, and coupled with my CCS investigations that fuse the interrogative force of critical thinking to the purpose of making within my practice. Here, as with work that was a part of a response to a group project asking us to home curate some art works, I am able to utilise the making process whilst embracing a critical engagement that set a task for the viewer explore what they a. Know about objects, b. Explore within those objects, qualities that seem to appear as something else, and c. Encourage any agency within the materiality of an object to act as a conduit to a deeper appearance of something that cannot be directly accessed.
I base this on my CCS investigations, where I am uncovering how my work embodies certain particular disciplines within philosophy and critical thinking around the object, forms, relationality, becoming and emergence, set within a growing understanding of the ‘real’. This ‘real’ as explored through Graham Harman, Karen Barad, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižec, Dan Zahavi, has my work searching the correlates between that which ‘appears’ in a phenomenological sense, and that which embodies the material yet stands in as metaphor, either socially, metaphysically, politically or aesthetically.
Some of these attributes aren’t always achieved. Politically I seldom “make statements” with my work, in comparison to someone like Bob and Roberta Smith or Faith Ringgold for example. Yet, my work ‘Hoods on a Raft’ (2020) imbues the experience of Diaspora, the refugee crisis and migration. Contrast those works with ‘Concrete Lampshade’ (2020), and the work takes on a Rachel Whiteread’esque silent residency, of object and space that explores residency in a completely different way. So though these observations of “spatial tensions” and “object placements” I am finding a more authoritative confidence to interpolate a wider critical context into the process of making that will hopfully not only question my own process but also enrich the depth within the resultant work to come.
Subject Object (2020)
Close up view
[II] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. by C. K. Ogden, (New York: Dover Press, 1999), p. 30.
[III] Intra as dynamic potential as posited by Barad of interaction. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
[IV] Sara Ahmed, p. 116
[V] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, (New York: NY State University Press, 2010), p. 103.
[VI] Graham Harman, Object Orientated Ontology, (London: Random House, 2018), p. 91.