MA3 Current Work

I am beginning to think of my work as illustrations of my attempts to renegotiate a relationship with the non-material (currently by absenting the material through accelerated, forced erosion, tracing and making openings)  after having spent the bulk of my adult life applying my fathers scientific-materialist template to reality (the same father who has also begun re-addressing his own relationship with the universe through a direct negotiation with God, that he calls The Infinite, whilst recovering from surgery in hospital). But also as an accompaniment to my efforts to understand post-Nietzschean attempts by wider western materialism to cope with its exit from the non-material aspect of what was up to that point a reality that recognised that humans are both animal and spiritual. That is, with Modernism, we opted to leave the God-created universe for a new man-made, language-defined universe. The question being, was this a natural and necessary act in order for us to be ultimately reconciled with the cosmos on better terms than the previous relationship based as it was on God as Creator Entity and us as sinners, or is this a one way trip to Technic and the end of Magic (F. Campagna)? Is materialism a necessary step toward Jungs Individuation? Is democratic capitalism merely a symptom of this materialism?

‘The debate around the hierarchy of word over image has raged for a long while and will continue to do so. How we as artist work within this and use it to our advantage is a challenge’. (Caroline Wright commenting on OCAMA 16 seminar, Oct 18).

Technology can be seen as a symptom of a culture or a creator of it. The printing press is a primary example of this. It manifested at the beginning of the psychic shift from the non-material to a material reality. From the image-based Southern European ineffable Magic of Catholicism to the word-based, iconoclastic, Northern Techne of Protestantism. Was Protestantism successful because of the printing press, or was the printing press successful because of the Protestant paradigm? Or was the development of a protestant reality an expression of an energetic development that feeds off an insistence on non-ineffability: the World can, must and will be described. All else is witchcraft or weakness. Modern Science ensues. Art adopts language of scientific discourse. Techne victorious.

I am not interested in attempting to express the ineffable but I am leaving markers along the border between the expressible and inexpressible, at openings in the border, and about the nature of the data that passes from one to the other, in both directions. I am attempting to construct a language that helps me to communicate with myself, or rather the act of attempting to construct a language that helps me to communicate with myself about myself is symptomised by object making. Object making is a by-product of language -making. But at the same time there is an awareness of the unconscious using this process as a means to communicate, even up to the point of expressing itself IN the objects.

Words roam the surface of things. They serve the material. We exist on the surface, neglecting the depths where words cant penetrate. We look for signs in named things, some configuration, some alignment. Clues. Looking for meaning in the potential of things to combine and teach us something of Value. But this is a symptom of illness. We are trying to put elements together that are already together, which means we need to seperate them first, tear things apart in the search for potential. Because we are not part, having chosen to step outside, like little gods, in order to look in, judging, categorising, mining and extracting value.

 

 

 

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