FA6010 2D24180F3EF9873E9FA055C068B0684F53B613B59A20E121FE62375B4994ABE5

The above numerical heading is the result of a protocol that generates a secure hash algorithm. SHA-512 reproduces text of any fixed length into a 512 bit - 64bytes - ‘signature’. In the same way that outcome is a way of assuring success in a digital realm, can the same assurances be drawn upon in an artist practice? Do we see Damian Hirst’s ‘Dots’ as a signature? What connects these dots to the author and how does this connection ‘create’ our role as an audience? And why is this important to any artistic practice? Connecting the outcome of something that does not necessarily make sense as a thing in itself is what should challenge a viewer, in the way that what is not obvious, explained or what is not a “givenness” (Harman 2020), should confront our knowledge of the thing, our place or what it is we think we know of the world in correlation to that which exists to be understood.

The title banner for this blog contains a photo extract from a page of a book called Parerga und Paralipomena: Kleine Philosophische Schriften, Volume 2, by Arthur Schopenhauer. [1] There are only two paragraphs in this section [§76] in the second paragraph we have the phrase:

Daher ist die Aufgabe nicht sowohl zu sehen was noch keiner gesehen hat, als bei Dem was Jeder sieht, zu denken was noch Keiner gedacht hat.

Lets put this into google translate…

So, we have a very specific instruction of how to approach thinking about what it is we see.

‘Abalone Acetone Powder’ (1991). Photographed by Alex Hartley © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2012

Hirst has served as a source of intrigue of late within my growing understanding of how to ‘be’ an artist in a panoptical world of viewership.

Something I wish to address for this year is how my work acts as an entity. The question left over from last year was, what does my work do? Immediately, the question of what my work 'does' brings about the consideration of art as a verb form. The 'doing, the action, state or occurrence', could probably have a whole essay written about any of the three definitions given, and how they would manifest artefact as real or urgent, eventful, or critical, and sited and located spatially, just some of the interpretations amongst many more possible outcomes drawn from a reservoir of potential effects and emergent happenings. I have to note here that I find myself in a constant flux of evaluation during my making process. It's as if there is a need to justify myself as an artist, maker, or producer of work. This justification comes from a place where the doing is. Here I draw the comparison to an evaluation by Barbara Hepworth when talking about carving, a result of something that demands the artist produce artefact from materials, "because he must" [1]. But somewhere within this compulsion, within the practice, is a process. My part in this process is like that of a processor in a computer. The arbitration I provide in duty to the outcome, following tradition, puts me within a systematic deliverance of results. The rules to the process within my making aren't as scientific as this may come over to you as the reader, but I do like the sentiment that these two things are in the process of being bridged. As Hans Ulrich Obrist reminds us, as a viewership, we can through art be led to "junctions that allow unexpected encounters and results." [2]

Ulrich Obrist's context within this quote was concerning how we marry Art and Science. The obvious implication that there is a divide, by his very intent to marry the two disciplines, has a very distinct grounding back to Kant in how science looked to objectify that which was one subjective. Since science is empirical, about exacting some truth, it can be hard to agree on what is universally given as, say, artistic and aesthetically pleasing. Truth to meaning must be delivered through an autonomy that the creative process demand if it remains unaffected by the science of what a thing is in this world. The state of being unaffected by external conditions rely, in this case, upon autonomy. "For Theodor Adorno, the autonomy of art lies in the work of art, in its production, not specifically in the aesthetic judgments of the subject." [3] What we are given here in this proposition is what intrigues my own approach to the production of works that start through a subjective genus yet take on a definite form that ensures this autonomy.

In the title quote, I have used Schopenhauer’s quote for a very specific reason. Since the use of the readymade, in articles taken taken from the everyday we find new ways with art to interpret thought, through a mediated materiality. These resultant forms of being, in a world already being, (see Heidegger) for me, act as a way of finding new unthought thoughts that underpin an - what Adorno calls- ‘autonomy’ within the forms presented throughout my practice.

[1] Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena: Kleine Philosophische Schriften · Volume 2, (Berlin: A. W. Hahn 1851), p. 96 (§76) [accessed 02/01/2022]

[2] Extracts from 'Barbara Hepworth – "the Sculptor carves because he must"', The Studio, London, vol. 104, (December 1932), p. 332 <https://barbarahepworth.org.uk/by-barbara-hepworth/quotations-from-barbara-hepwor.html> [accessed 26/09/2021]

[3] John Brockman, (ed.), Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI, (New York: Penguin Press, 2019) p. 207.

[4] Murray W. Skees,’Kant, Adorno and the Work of Art'‘, Philosophy & Social Criticism, Vol. 37, no. 8 (October 2011), pp. 915–33. <https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453711413713> (See abstract) [accessed 28/09/2021]