What do you take away from an artists work when you encounter what they have created? Does it inspire you to create yourself? Do you quietly reflect and ponder deeper existential meanings? Do you discover things about your own practice that may otherwise not emerge out from the object as a form, an essence or a condition?

Below (Fig.1) Is a drawing on canvas by the artist Joe Howse.

Fig. 1, Methods and Enquiry – Artist Response Task- Joseph Howse

Joe had this to say about the work.

My entire project so far has hinged upon technology; utilizing computers, algorithms and coding to produce my outcomes, whilst actively trying to disengage myself and my conscious thought from the process via handing over the reins to the computer, allowing it to make the decisions.
This piece is yet another experiment within that same vein but has a noticeable difference; there is no technology involved in the process. I myself was the computer in this sense and the rules/bounds I set for the drawing process was the algorithm.
This drawing is part of a series of works that exist to explore the nature of creativity and expression through the removal of conscious thought, bias and critique. Generative artist Nicola Lorusso is somebody I have recently become of aware of due to the eerily uncanny similarities between my new series of drawings and his algorithmic, generative work. This sameness suggests that there may be something deeper to this act of drawing/art creation, a driving creative force within everything, human, nature and computer.

We were tasked to come up with a response to the work of another peer, so I chose Joe’s artwork as seen above. (Fig. 2)

Fig. 2, Bag on a Wall (2021), Stuart Lee, Plastic and Concrete, Digital Photograph,

In response To Joe Howse, I have produced a work I call The Noumen (2021). In Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter, we are re-introduced to the German term “Bildungstreib”.iTranslated as ‘Formative Impulse’,ii the idea is based in a grounding that inert matter has no “spontaneity”iii. Because the vitality of matter resides in a ‘idealism of nature(represented as art).’iv

We cannot access matter under the term Kant uses called the Noumenal.PhilosopherDavid Abram believes we respond to a universal sentience shared with matter after matter ‘catches’ our attention. For this to hold we must consider Kant’s stance that this cannot be because “even if all things were to be united in one simple subject, yet such unity would never exhibit a purposive relation unless these things were understood to be, first, inner effects of the substance as a cause, and, secondly, effects of its cause by a virtue of it’s intelligence.v

Graham Harman, in his book, Object Orientated Ontology, re-sites the noumenal outside of the ethics that Kant grounds its origins in. Rather than the noumenal housing the inaccessible outside of human determination and experience,Harman posits that all objects reside in the noumenal world, ‘we do not have direct access to plastic bags in themselves any more than we do Human Beings in themselves”.vi

AlthoughI can feel the bag, feel the rustle of the plastic, use it as a utility for purpose, even use it to recreate Joe’s drawing because I recognize some familiarity or similarity with the shame he has drawn. There is an element of metaphor, I cannot intrinsically know how the bag exists in its own world, yet I can ‘re’cognize the idea I took on from Joe’s drawing and recognize the chiasm that exists between my experience that was inspired by Joe’s physical drawing, in time and space, at a time other than the moment I bridge the points of referents and information and imagery that becomes the representation of a truth in time and space outside of my own experience.

i Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 65

ii Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)

iii Bennett, p. 65

iv Kant, p. 220

v Ibid, p. 221

vi Graham Harman, Object Orientated Ontology, (London: Penguin Random House, 2018), p. 69

Bibliography:

Bennett,Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2010)

Harman, Graham, Object Orientated Ontology, (London: Penguin Random House, 2018)

Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)

Reflection: Collaborating.