Dan Graham and Rodney Graham at Lisson, Marylebone.
Anselm Kiefer and Doris Salcedo at White Cube, Bermondsey
Hayley Lock
On Reading ‘Falling Into The Void’ by Hayley Lock
Hayley writes of ‘the void that surrounds (us)’ but what about the void within? Can The Void perhaps be the space between material reality and the more real but less familiar, non-material reality. Its where I go when I fall backwards into the eternity of a two minute wait for the next tube train. The place beyond Boredom that seems at first glance empty but which is, like the deep ocean, full of nutrition, or, like deep space, teeming with information. The Void is the threshold from which most people recoil in a panic and quickly fill with their mobile phone, book, newspaper, worry, anxiety, crisis etc. We are losing the ability and desire to spend time with ourselves. Even yoga has come to resemble a sport. Like Seyerls bubble – all surface no content, or Arendts ‘on the earth’ vs ‘inhabit the world’, we live materially, on the surface of ourselves and the Earth, oblivious to our depths and to the universe. Materialism requires that we place ourselves, individually and philosophically, at the centre of cosmology. Yet the journey into ‘space’ is the same as the journey into ourselves. Going further and going within are the same direction. ‘Nothing’ is superficial. Sink down into it and it is Everything.
The whole thing is made trickier by the fact that that ‘Nothing’ is a word and therefore something. It lends itself to wonderful paradoxes. King Lear frets that ‘nothing comes from nothing’ and is lost in its inescapable mad loop. It says much of the relationship between word and thought, material and non-material, Techne and Magic. Scientific Materialism, our current paradigm, confidently insists that Arendt’s World can, must and will be described. Hayley Lock quotes Heidegger’s ‘the nothingness itself nothings’ where he seems to be trying square this circle. It is the insistence that nothing is ineffable, when in fact Nothing IS ineffable lies at the heart of the paradox. Insisting that nothing is ineffable places us at the centre of things and so outside, seemingly god-like but in fact alienated. Saying that Nothing is ineffable activates The Void and fills both it and us with creative data. Pressure equilibrates. The bubble bursts. Object and Subject reconcile.
‘Black’
Fludds primordial Black referenced by Hayley Lock, might also have been the Alchemical Nigredo, the blackening – sth to do with cooking matter until it is primal. Jung interpreted this as a dissociative stage before Albedo, the Light, or the whitening. Ive just read a short story by Hemingway, ostensibly a simple tale of a solitary fisherman. But to get to the idyllic spot from where to cast his line he has to pass through a town that has been burned to the ground. The surrounding land is blackened. Even the crickets have turned black. (as I write this a house is on fire across the road – the smoke is stinging my eyes). He is the Fisher King traversing The Wasteland, preparing himself in the sunny spots, the Albedo, the Light for the journey into the swamp, the Wyld Wood of deep consciousness. But did Hemingway know he was using ancient memes? His novel Fiesta also seems to use themes of wounds, bulls, infertility, chivalry, Amor, fishing, whilst ostensibly narrating a straightforward semi-autobiographical tale. Or is this a case of (Jungs) Archetypes forever bubbling up and nudging us in a particular direction? Is Hemingway referencing memes and archetypes or are they referencing him?
And does that nudge come from our instinct? from nature? reminding us that we are non-material as well as material beings, participants of and not just witnesses to the void that is Everything?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, Penguin, New York (1964), 2014 Edition
Barthes, Roland, Image Music Text, Fontana, London, 1977
Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, (1955), Bodley Head, London, 2015
Berger, John, Ways of Seeing, Penguin, London,1972
Bickers, Patricia, Ed. Talking Art 2, Ridinghouse, 2017
Borges, J.L, Labyrinths (1964) Penguin Modern Classics, 2000
Breton, Andre, Manifesto of Surrealism, 1923, theoria.art-zoo.com
Campagna, Federico, Technic And Magic: The Reconstruction Of Reality, Bloomsbury Academic, London 2018
De Chirico, Giorgio, Mystery and Creation, theoria.art-zoo.com
Deleuze, G and Guattari, F, A Thousand Plateaus (1987) Bloomsbury Academic,
Eastham, Ben, Pierre Huyghe Strange Attractors, Art Review vol70 no7 October 2018 p50-57
Freud, S, On Dream, 1901, theoria.art-zoo.com
Fried, Michael, Art And Objecthood, 1967, theoria.art-zoo.com
Greenberg, C, Modern and Postmodern, theoria.art-zoo.com
Groys, Boris, In The Flow, Verso, (2016) 2018
Harman, G, Object-Oriented Ontology, Random House, 2018
Hemingway, E, A Big Two-Hearted River, 1925
Koons, Halley, Steinbach et al, From Criticism to Complicity, 1986, theoria.art-zoo.com
Judd, Donald, from Not About Masterpieces,1984,t heoria.art-zoo.com
Judd, Donald, Specific Objects, 1965, theoria.art-zoo.com
Lock, Hayley, Falling Into The Void (collaged text)
Lyotard, Jean-Francois, What Is postmodernism?, 1982, theoria.art-zoo.com
Malevich, K, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism In Painting
Materiality (Ed. Petra Lange-Berndt), Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2015
May, Todd, Gilles Deleuze, An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 2005
Mitchell, W.T.J, Image and Word, 1986, theoria.art-zoo.com
Morris, Robert, Notes On Sculpture, theoria.art-zoo.com
Murdoch Mills, Christina, Materiality as the basis for the Aesthetic Experience in Contemporary Art, University of Montana, 2009
Ortega y Gasset, Jose, The Dehumanization of Art, 1925
Pistoletto, Michelangelo, Omnitheism and Democracy, 2012, theoria.art-zoo.com
Ponge, F, http://www.poetryfoundation.org
du Preez, Amanda, (Im)Materiality: on the matter of art, Image and Text
Proust, M, Swanns’s Way (Trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin) Vintage, 1981.
du Preez, Amanda, (Im)Materiality: on the matter of art, Image and Text
Read, Herbert, The Meaning Of Art (1931) Faber 2018
Russell, Bertrand, A History of Western Philosophy (1946), Unwin, London, 1987
Sauvagnargues, A, Deleuze and Art (Trans. Bankston), Bloomsbury, London, 2018
Steyerl, Hito, The Wretched Of The Screen
Tradowsky, P, Kaspar Hauser (Trans. Wood) Temple Lodge, 1997
Williams, Raymond, When Was Modernism?, 1987, theoria.art-zoo.com
Videos and lectures
Pierre Huyghe in conversation at Serpentine Galleries, 2018:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emYOOVRzG8E
What is the Creative Act – Gilles Deleuze 1987 (English Subs)
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.
Moss on leather

Algae on concrete

Rust


