art is one of the ways in which the universe examines itself. Tries to work itself out. It uses humans, amongst other things, to do this. Not that there is an active principal involved. That’s just language. its more just a principal.
Does Huyghe illustrate or manifest Object Oriented Ontology? Do I illustrate or do I manifest? Or both?
When I work I manufacture the apparatus to allow for the data to come through like constructing an oil rig. Or are we all oil rigs between the conscious and unconscious?
I am in the material like a witness to a demolition. I definitely strive to be indefinite, for indefiniteness, in a definite material.
Research based art is ironic and metaphorical. Unintentionally. Which is ironic.
Language and Illustration is on/of the surface. Metaphor is of the surface, groping beneath the surface. Good art is from beneath the surface.
Kant? Kierkegaard? Deleuze? OOO? its a matter of personal taste, not of Truth.
A by-product of being conscious is being separate. A by-product of being separate is being conscious.
if there is a Hyperreal Object then surely it is Consciousness. An object to which only Occidentalism has been oblivious.
object/subject. passive/active. Allow yourself to be, for example, tired versus actualise your tiredness. Allow yourself to make art or actualise your art making? What is the nature of involvement?
Every new advert informs you that what you bought before was shit.
Definition of avant-garde? Linear. Its about trying to demolish previous structures, for its own sake.
Philosophy is the love of knowledge. Art thrives in not-knowing. In the Uncertain. Am I too certain in what I do? It might come across like that. The shapes are definite. Stone is a definite material. I have a definite skill set. But I am using all of these things to express and probe and narrate and investigate and interrogate and research subjective and objective Uncertainty. Conversational. If one used a less certain material to explore uncertainty, that is, a deliberately uncertain material, one would be making a certain, closed and non-conversational statement and would be in danger of being literalist.
Last night I dreamed I was riding on the back of a brown cow walking with a dog. Not being a cow, or a dog, however, I could not have dreamed ‘them’. I can only have dreamed a ‘my cow’ and ‘my dog’. If I am active/subject in the dream then the cow and the dog are the ‘me cow’ or the ‘dog-me’ ie if the dream is a product of myself then it has created a ‘my cow’ and ‘my dog’ based on my experience. Or rather my unconscious is using the my-dog as a symbol to probe my ego. If however I am passive/object in the dream then I didn’t dream either cow or dog. I experienced/encountered a ‘dream cow’ and a ‘dream dog’, or indeed, The Dream-cow and The Dream-dog. Therefore, now I am awake the cow may still be walking with the dog. I might still be on it’s back. Or maybe someone else is.
Similarly, I’m not interested in visually presenting concepts. That is for illustrators. Or rhetorical and ironic art. I’m more interested in presenting the interest in concepts that are interested in us. Like symbols. Symbols are not man-made. They are manifested. A symbol is the subject and we are their objects. They act upon us. If we attempt to act upon the symbol, that is, claim it as ours, commodified and exploited, it deteriorates into drama, irony and metaphor. That is, representational.
For example, Did Hemingway first read about the Fisher King and then use him as a trope or metaphor in his own semi-autobiographical oeuvre? And if he read about him first (there is no evidence that he did), then where did the author of that story hear about him? And if not then what? How did the Symbol of the Fisher King come to manifest in Hemingway’s work? And if, as I suggest, the Symbol (subject) used ie acted upon Hemingway (object) then is that what makes his work so resonant? The Faustian Pact? To have the Symbol speak through you?
I may start with a difficult problem, say, make an art object about knowledge, and fail, but at the very least I will have made an object that is about the problem of knowledge. However this object would then be illustrative of the nature of the problem and hence Illustration rather than sculpture. I would prefer to make an object, or rather be involved in the realisation of an object and then see what it might be about.
Art that attempts to use symbol tends toward irony and the symbol decays into metaphor, the binary – the idea and the object, where both are somehow secondary, the primal is removed and the work is linear: 2-d, non-conversational. When the Symbols lost interest in Hemingway HE BECAME The Fisher King, deteriorated and died an empty used up shell. Did he kill himself when he became aware that he didn’t write anything at all?
If as the sufis say ‘the apparent is a bridge to the real’, the apparent being the material and the real being the non-material, is the material required by us to avoid being overwhelmed by the real?
There is Exchange Value and Integral or Personal Value. Exchange Value is exterior. Integral Value is inherent. Value can be concentrated or diffuse. Integral Value is wordless. Something that has Exchange Value is spoken or expressed and easily commoditised ie cheapened or made available. If Integral Value is expressed it becomes diffuse ie more readily available and therefore cheapened. An example of something that has Integral Value is Intention. If Intention is expressed it is done so in order to discover its Exchange Value. However an expressed Intention loses its integrity and becomes diffuse and non-inherent, that is, external to itself. So can a thing that has Integral Value be made available without being cheapened, either for the producer or the consumer? yes, Integral Value does not have to be expressed or spoken to be communicated. It is entirely resistant to any explanation. It has Integrity.
One should avoid accumulating an excess of artistic intentions.
Is Post-modern art art that resembles art? Does it matter? (Baudrillard?) Have we entered The Ironic Age? Which is, of course, The Post-Ironic Age.
Words are exclusive – they both trap and protect us. We cannot cope with immediate Universe-reality as it is a non-dimensional, non-human place. Without words Everything is flat. Imagine a wordless mind interpreting a blackbird flying between two green bushes.
Anything that cannot be commoditised is Untrue. Anything that cannot be put into words lacks Value. Anything that lacks value cannot be commoditised. Therefore the Ineffable is Untrue and is without value. However, thoughts require words. Try and express what you are thinking without words to yourself. You are on the edge of the wordless abyss. Words and grammar explain the world to you. Without language the world is flat, simultaneous and appalling. Like Plato’s Republic excluding Illusionary painting as Untrue. my work is not about the unknowable, the ineffable, but about how and why we require and search for it. Thus I use sand blasting to expose and obscure. Plato’s Republic is Ego’s Paradise. But it wont suffice. Its borders cant keep out Consciousness. Like Language it seeps through and while Ego mans the barricades, The Witness is already inside.
What is that sense of you? That feeling of you-ness that you have? And what is the nature of that sense, that feeling? The Ness-ness? And so on…the ness-ness of ness-ness-ness etc
Ponge: “the object is always more important, more interesting, more capable (full of rights): it has no duty towards me, it is I who am obliged to it”. I agree and yet he goes on, in The Banks Of The Loire for example, to impose himself upon The Wasp. Indeed, in true colonialist fashion, he places all words under his command and sends them into battle with the object, in order to categorise, subvert and colonise it too, going to Proustian lengths in the process. I am interested in this Object Imperialism and how we harvest value from nature, that is, everything, for our own creative ends, be they poetry, painting or sculpture at the expense of the objects innate identity or truth. Thus we anthropomorphosize the cosmos. I also find it interesting that I struggle with finding the right word for the set that might be called Everything, Cosmos, Universe, Creation. In order to categorise or label an object I become, or have to be, outside of it. Language then requires externality, but we crave internality. The result is alienation and nausea.
As artists we can only produce more objects, or rather a recombination of already-objects. That is to say, things that are acted upon by the subject, ingested, consumed. But we can attempt to make objects that describe our requirement for the non-object, or the search for the reconciliation of subject and object, otherwise known as Truth, the search for which creates Meaning.
In my work I make something and then try to see which archetype, if any and if such a thing can be said to exist, might be speaking, which symbol might be manifesting. Like making a subterranean lake to prove or measure the existence of neutrinos.
On religious and mythic art – The Religious takes place within Eternity, thus no time, no space, no mass, just Awe. The Mythic takes place within a dialectic ie Modernism as Rodin makes a torso of the church of the Academies, Brancusi spears Father Rodin, Moore ingests Brancusi et al, Caro disembowels Father Moore, Gods versus Titans versus Man versus Gods.
Artists expend much creative energy jostling for position, trying to create some elbow room in the overcrowded spaces of art history, contorting themselves to join the dots, like a game of time travelling, self-categorising Twister – ‘Look! Here is something that hasn’t been expressed before in a way that hasn’t been used before and here’s how it fits within The Canon!’ ‘Novelty!’ they cry, and ‘Relevance!’. Sometimes, however, with correct intention, that is, the need/requirement to discover, this works viz Charlotte Prodgers curated set of self-portrait paintings in a landscape using open sided fluid framing and spoken narrative about narrative.
we cannot use symbols. If we think we are using a symbol, that is putting a symbol to our use, it transforms or deteriorates into metaphor. Symbols use us.
Why do we try to go deeper looking for answers when we can just go deeper. If we are looking for meaning it implies we have lost it or that there is none. It means that when we think we have found It, and we all think we have found it in some size, shape or form, we stop and go no further. For two and a half thousand years Artists have, with growing urgency, been trying to think of a way to get into Platos’s Republic. Only recently has a concerted assault on the border begun, by disguising themselves as, or even becoming, searchers of The Truth. But even as this becomes possible, they are infiltrated or distracted by, the search for The New.
If a poet uses an object, say, a red leaf floating down a river through a city as a metaphor for something or other, eg to help us understand our place in the universe, as a symbol, what am i a metaphor for? the poet is an imperialist, helping herself to all objects for her own ends, placing herself at the centre of things, alienated, striving to get back in.
the geology of self: sense response thought emotion instinct: all occur on the surface of World. Its where we spend all of our time. but what lies beneath? and what lies at the core? A diamond? A spinning ball of magnetic molten iron influencing migration with magnetic waves? ( both are scientific theories for what lies at the heart of the material world) The journey has barely begun. Forget space and the bottom of the deep oceans. The journey within is the great adventure.
As an artist I feel that I am excused from having to break down my motivation into ever smaller pieces of Why as though i should be on the trail of some kind of Truth Particle. That’s the job of philosophers and psychologists. They only require proof. I require necessity and the right to not limit the description of my experience to words.
can art be metaphor? In other words should there be some intention behind the work or does it then fall into other categories like satire or politics and therefore ‘mere’ Illustration? Much of what is called Art is in fact Illustration in that it accompanies words and lives. Even true minimalism illustrates the artists intention not to illustrate.
as art migrates to the internet is it recontextualised and thus rendered Kitsch, as illustrations of peoples lives digitalising art is like putting it on a life support machine
Does the unconscious have intention?
Gustave Meyrink wrote ‘…mankind does not father ideas; we are merely sensitive receivers for all the ideas that…the earth generates’. (The Green Face, 1916). Is this Arendt’s World? is there such thing as reality? Or only Inside and Outside?
am I a Surrealist!? I fucking hope not. I’m not a big fan of surrealism
Does rolling news cause or enable memory loss? Is memory loss an exploitable resource or just a convenient phenomenon?
Im trying to concretise a personal language that helps me communicate with myself about the mechanics of the unconscious and conscious minds. But its like chasing shadows.
Is contemporary art consuming itself? Is this the self-referential nature of (post) post-modernism? Nicolas Bourriaud says that “meaning is the precondition for art to exist’ but what does Meaning mean? In fact what does ‘precondition for art to exist’ mean? Is Meaning defined by the presence of Code, Clue, Sign and Symbol that lead to Truth or is it just that the work is imbued with the Meaningful Intention of the producer (artist) and consumer (viewer?) He also talks of the viewer as being The Active Witness or Beholder as though the viewer activates the passive object but surely by internalising an exterior stimulus the viewer is consuming it?
JON WHITBREAD ART 