Post 108: Unreality

“But what might for us seem a desirable experience – an increase in our perceptions, a libidinal or hallucinogenic intensification of our normal humdrum and familiar surroundings – is here felt as a loss, as “unreality.” – Frederic Jameson¹

As an individual determines the context of the perception of previous events, the way that we interpret those occurrences varies from moment to moment. What seemed important one second has relegated itself to the background a year later when what appeared to be an insignificant occurrence finds new prominence within our psyche. Important items are lost, and parts of who we thought we were appear missing from our puzzle. How do we, as humans, navigate this minefield? How do we determine a course of action based on memory information only to have that information change from time to time?

“The train takes you where it goes.” claims Robert Perelman in his poem China. How much control do we have on our direction? Are we just along for the ride? I don’t believe that, but how much truth to that is there? Once we set ourselves to a path, it becomes more difficult to change course without concerted effort. Even in the face of new or different information, inertia is difficult to overcome. Maybe it has to be. Would it even be possible to get anything done if we were constantly re-evaluating our situation based on a reinterpretation of our historical events? Is it possible that the basic structure of our memories remain intact while only the peripheral details become altered, allowing our path to remain consistent? If entire memories that never occurred can be installed, and complete memories of actual event removed, what mechanism would allow you to keep specific important details intact?

While each of us operates in our own reality built of our own interpretation of events and memories, there needs to be enough common ground for us to exist as a society. While we may disagree as to the color of the dog in question, we should agree that there was a dog, and maybe the color of the dog is unimportant to our common understanding of the event. Maybe we all agree that there was an animal present, but our memory of the animal in question is different. Is it important to the context of the discussion what kind of animal it was? Now we can understand the “referent” (the real object in the real world to which a sign refers, the real cat as opposed to the concept of a cat or the sound “cat”.) While the actual physical cat, the accepted definition of a cat, and the word “cat” are all different things, we understand them all to be the same. Maybe this is how we make sense of all of the contradicting and arbitrary information that we have to process in order to understand.

Could it be that my idea of each of us being an individual unique being is nothing but a mythological absurdity? The Post-Structuralist position claims that “the bourgeois individual subject is a thing of the past, it is also a myth; it never really existed in the first place; there have never been autonomous subjects of that type. Rather, this construct is merely a philosophical and cultural mystification which sought to persuade people that they “had” individual subjects and possessed this unique personal identity.”² I find it difficult to believe that the concept of individual identity is simply a conspiracy created to control the masses by allowing them to believe that they were creating their own realities and interpreting their own experiences and memories. To counter this point, I find comfort in the bourgeois claim that “A human subject is, rather, a meaning making subject (minimally always “making up her mind” in experiencing and so likewise responsible for what she claims to know), a self-conscious subject, in this active, self-determining relation to itself in all experience as well as action. This “inseparability of mind and world” claim raised the issue of how rightly to acknowledge the “subjective” character of such experience and the many unique, elusive characteristics of self-knowledge.”³ Humans make real distinctions all of the time. Decisions are made based on previous experiences and the interpretations of those events.

Much like the interpretation of art, the viewer brings his own experiences and memories to the work, allowing different individuals to take away different meanings and memories from the viewing. When a child sees a spider for the first time, his memory of that event will color how he interprets spiders going forward. Children are not born afraid, that fear is learned through experiences, including the reactions of others around him. Some children become afraid of spiders, while others do not. The interpretation of the spider is a real thing, even though it is fluid and changeable. The second and third times that a child encounters a spider, the memories, real or unreal, of the previous encounters affect their interpretation. Maybe the child grows up to have arachnophobia, and maybe they grow up to keep spiders as pets.

Memory is what drives these outcomes. Memories are what drive all of our outcomes in one way or another. Just as powerful as the effect of a memory can be, the lack of a memory can have an equally powerful effect on determining the path that we take and the decisions that we make, and when the origin of these memories is suspect, decisions made based on this faulty information become suspect.

With the work that I am creating now, I am driven to include my understanding of who I am, yet allow for the possibility that I am someone else completely. A continual state of dialogue with myself is becoming the norm. I am curious as to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. I second guess myself much more than I used to, and agonize over decisions that I used to make instantaneously. I am more contemplative, but sleep less.

1 - Jameson, Frederic. "Postmodernism and Consumer Society." The Anti-Aesthetic. Ed. Hal Foster. New York: New, 1998. Page 138. Print.

2 - Jameson, Frederic. "Postmodernism and Consumer Society." The Anti-Aesthetic. Ed. Hal Foster. New York: New, 1998. Page 132. Print.

3 - Pippin, Robert. "Bourgeois Philosophy and the Problem of the Subject." The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath. Cambridge University Press. United Kingdom, Cambridge, 2005. Page 2. Print. 

Post 107: Memory of Me

Post 106: Purpose?

"I follow the Oscar Wilde theory here, that the artist has no obligation to any social cause. The artist has an obligation only to art. This business of reading artists the riot act is what the Nazis did and what the Stalinists did. You’re asking art to serve a propagandistic purpose. Art is not a branch of sociology. It’s not a branch of social improvement. Not a branch of the health sciences."

Dr. Camille Paglia

Post 105: The Struggle

I struggle, but I think that is the plan. Constant evaluation and philosophical discussions keep us sharp (or confused). There is never anything definitive. It is the ultimate in “The Butterfly Effect”. Everything that you think, affects everything else that you think in one way or another. It is very easy to get turned around and contradict yourself without even realizing it. These constant contradictions keep me thinking and contemplating and trying to organize my thoughts and ideas. I’m constantly making the translation from how I view things in a moving image format, to the still image that I use in my photographic process. This can seem to be a contradiction right from the start, attempting to translate a moving image to a still one, similar to trying to translate an entire paragraph of a story into a single, understandable word. As I ponder this phenomenon, I find that much of what resonated with me in the current readings were items that seemed to deal with the moving picture as a base.

“What I am interested in is a third, less obvious practice, namely that of artists working as archive thinkers. The works that fall into this category are not principally engaged in the construction of new archives or of the conducting of research into existing ones. And while they might do both of these things, they are above all engaged in deconstructing the notion of the archive itself. They reflect on the archive as something which is never fixed in meaning or material, but is nevertheless here, largely invisible yet at the same time monumental, constantly about to appear and disappear; latent.”¹

However flawed, failing, and fluid it may be, I understand my memory to be an archive of my individual existence. This archive of experiential data cannot be created without my passive assistance, but going about my daily business, new entries are added, some destroyed, some renovated, and some decayed. The volume of entries included is ever fluctuating, varying in quantity, intensity, and meaning. It is an archive with fluctuating degrees of permanence. Materials and meanings may change, but the archive is always there.

Through the course of a lifetime, the erasure and recommitment of events to memory takes place every time that you recall that particular event. This leaves the resulting product variable, although similar to, and referential to the original. How these scenes are altered is the puzzle. What causes details to be added or removed?

“Collecting such metonymic fragments in memory, we may come to feel familiar with a film we have not actually seen.”²

It is in this same way that we construct memories of events that never occurred, or at least were vastly different from what anyone can tell you the actual event was. Who do you believe at this point? What becomes authentic? Barring a video or photographic recording of a particular event, where is the truth to be found? Even in the event of visual documentation, those recordings were made with contextual decisions being made by the recorder and cannot be truly trusted as accurate.

In attempting to reconcile these ideas, this particular passage from Marcel Proust helped to ease the anxiety that I was creating:

“What we call reality is a certain relationship between these sensations and the memories which surround us at the same time (a relationship that is destroyed by a bare cinematographic presentation, which gets further away from the truth the more closely it claims to adhere to it) the only true relationship, which the writer must recapture so that he may forever link together in his phrase two distinct elements…”³

This directs me towards an easing of the mind, creating “reality” based on the current interpretation of events. Much like when we “re-remember” an existing memory, coloring it based upon our current experiences and feelings, we are creating a new reality that is easier for us to understand and interpret. Can you imagine being a fifty year old man attempting to understand the interpretation of events remembered by a three year old boy? This would seem to lead to a life of anxiety, attempting to circumvent the newness of the vision of a child. Maybe what is important is how those events are processed by you as you are now. Proust backs me up again with this line:

“In comparable fashion the interval between our mental eyepieces in time, the interval between the juxtaposed impressions, must also be in scale to human life if they are to assume temporal depth.”⁴

I think back to my education in photography as a California Romantic and studying the work of Ansel Adams; viewing his prints, made from the same negative at differing times in his life. Looking at a print of Moonrise: Hernandez printed in 1941 versus looking at a print from the same negative in 1975 reveal a different interpretation of Adams memory of the scene based on the experiences that he had incurred since the original making of the photograph.

As Adams memory and interpretation of what he saw that November afternoon in 1941 changed, so did the resulting image that was printed. All of them are different, and all of them are authentic and based in the reality of Adams mind as he understood the scene at the time that each was printed. This doesn’t make any of them “less accurate” than the others; on the contrary, it makes each of them equally accurate at the time they were made.

This reconciles the idea that memories can change and still be accurate, but what about the memory of an event that never happened in the first place? I think that it is here that I find solace in the words of Andre Breton:

“Surrealist collages are “slits in time” that produce “illusions of true recognition” where former lives, actual lives, and future lives melt together into one life.”⁵

This answers many questions for me, or at least offers a beam of light into the darkness. In a paper written in a previous semester, I profiled the work of collage artist Hannah Hoch, and while unable to make a tactile connection to her work at the time, Breton immediately brought her work back to mind. While working as a Dadaist as opposed to a Surrealist, I believe that some of this description might still ring true for me in the way that I related to her work. Continuing with my theory of each of us being an artificial construct made up from our faulty memories, I cling to this idea of artist Roni Horn who was describing her experience in attempting to photograph actress Isabelle Huppert as a “self-impersonation”.⁶ Lauren Sedofsky elaborates on this idea that it “conveys the imitation and imposture, the self-alienation or no-ownership approach to personal properties, which lie at the very basis of personation, while at the same time it reminds us that for each of the personae, no original exists.”⁷

1 - Orlow, Uriel. "Latent Archives, Roving Lens, 2006." Memory: Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Ian Farr. London: Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited, 2012. Page 204. Print.

2 - Farr, Ian. "Not Quite How I Remember It." Memory: Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Ian Farr. London: Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited, 2012. Page 17. Print.

3 – Shattuck, Roger. "Proust’s Binoculars." Memory: Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Ian Farr. London: Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited, 2012. Page 36. Print.

4 – Shattuck, Roger. "Proust’s Binoculars." Memory: Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Ian Farr. London: Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited, 2012. Page 38. Print.

5 – Foster, Hal. "Outmoded Spaces." Memory: Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Ian Farr. London: Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited, 2012. Page 56. Print.

6 – Sedofsky, Lauren. "Portrait of an Image: A Portfolio by Roni Horn, 2005." Memory: Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Ian Farr. London: Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited, 2012. Page 119. Print.

7 – Sedofsky, Lauren. "Portrait of an Image: A Portfolio by Roni Horn, 2005." Memory: Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Ian Farr. London: Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited, 2012. Page 119. Print. 

Post 104: Here We Go...

Uriel Orlow: Latent Archives, Roving Lens//2006

          "Responding to and stimulated by this, there has been a marked increase in contemporary arts practice concerned with memory. Two sub-trends immediately come to mind: on one hand, works which in one way or another simulate memory process and create fictional archives by way of collecting and classifying things or through the use of a narrative. On the other hand, a group of works can be identified which reject the imaginary or symbolic archive in favour of the real archive, making use of documentary sources or found footage., be it to address historical themes or to subvert given interpretations of events. The role of the artist in the former group of works could be described as that of an archive maker whereas the artists in the latter group work as archive users.
          What I am interested in here is a third, less obvious practice; namely that of artists working as archive thinkers. The works that fall into this category are not principally engaged in the construction of new archives or in the conducting of research into existing ones. And while they might do both of these things, they are above all engaged in deconstruction the notion of the archive itself. They reflect on the archive as something which is never fixed in meaning or material, but is nevertheless here, largely invisible yet at the same time monumental, constantly about to appear and disappear; latent."

(emphasis by me)

Post 103: Next on the Agenda

I'm thinking 8' x 8' might work quite nicely.

Post 102: Installed

Karl Drerup Gallery, Plymouth State University Faculty Show

Post 101: Back in the Studio

Post 100: Phase III Complete

Phase III Complete. That's it for a month or so, as it is going up in a gallery tomorrow. We'll see what the gallery going public thinks.

Post 99: More Progress

Post 98: Sunday Morning in the Studio

Post 97: Blue Jay

8 1/2" x 11" Cyanotype

Work in Progress

Jumping around a lot the last couple days.

Overall size 44" x 30". Cyanotype and gum bichromate on BFK Rives (so far).

Random Thought

"We have art in order not to die of the truth."
—Friedrich Nietzsche

Or is it the other way around? Is "art" the truth we use to combat the lies?

Paper 2

“The claims that are made and the stories that are told in the name of memory can alter people’s understanding of the world and, of course, alter the ways in which they act in or upon that world.”¹ – Joan Gibbons

The above quote was taken from page 1 of the Introduction of Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance by Joan Gibbons. I could have stopped there, having read those words, confirming and reassuring the theory that I have been wrestling with for the last several months (maybe much longer, but I’m only referring to consciously), but that would have been too easy. The entire basis for the work that I am currently creating stems from the idea that we, as people, are artificial constructs based upon our faulty memories.

Dr. Joseph LeDoux of the center for Neural Science at NYU explains that memories are physical constructs of the human body, built with specific proteins, which with the elimination or addition of these proteins can be erased or manipulated. Each time that a memory is recalled, it is reconstructed from scratch, creating a copy of the originally recalled memory, with the original being erased. The more a memory is recalled, the more that memory is recopied and reinterpreted in the light of today, and the more it becomes about you, and less about the original memory. He continues to say that the most realistic and reliable memories that we have are memories that we have not thought about since their original creation.

Dealing with the faculty of memory in my work, help here was in the offing, “Proust was to recognize and comment on the important role that memory has as a creative power in bridging the gap between past and present in a way that connects personal truths to a wider audience or readership.”² This is a distinction that needs to be made. The memory that I am attempting to work with is not an institutional or social memory, but a very personal one. One in which the way that life events are recalled, constructed, and manipulated to make us who we are, impact our thinking, the way that we envision our character, and the way that we interact with others and the world.

Artists like Doris Salcedo, Kara Walker, and Krxystof Wodiiczko deal with the larger institutional memory, using their work to illustrate larger concepts and ideas that they may have no direct relationship to (other than being a member of the human race) and initializing conversation about cultural and historical events. While this is a valuable and important goal, my aim is on the much smaller target of personal memory.

I take no position on the benefit or detriment of this personal memory manipulation, simply acknowledge its existence and attempt to be aware of its capabilities. In the case of Alfred Russel Wallace (a natural scientist who proposed the theory of natural selection prior to Darwin), credit for the theory was deferred due to the manner in which he came upon his hypothesis. “Wallace reconstituted his existing knowledge (re-remembered it) spontaneously in a dream-like state, and was prompted to do so by the objects that surrounded him in his fever…”³ At the time, this espousal was discounted as the delirious rantings of a malaria ridden man in the midst of a fever, while shortly thereafter, Darwin provided his laborious research to back up his theory. While both men came to similar conclusions, the path in which they took to get there varied greatly.

The pertinent argument that I am making is that each of us manipulates and reconstructs our memories based on what works well for us. Much like creating an artwork, we stand in front of our memories, sharpening some things and toning down others. We paint over parts that we wish to look differently, while erasing some things altogether that we have no desire to deal with. We are not filing cabinets that store memories on paper, all orderly so that they can be gathered quickly and without alteration. Artist Susan Hiller states, “My “self” is a locus for thoughts, feelings, sensations, but not an impermeable, corporeal boundary. I AM NOT A CONTAINER…”⁴ We are fluid beings, capable of interpretation and reinterpretation of our own history that allows us to remake ourselves over time, perhaps even imperceptible to our consciousness.

Janet Murray calls this “procedural authorship.” A framework is arranged that contains a multitude of information and the viewer organizes it for themselves based on their own experience and baggage that they bring to the viewing.  “Here, memory is not a quest for the authenticity of the past or an excavation of the past so much as it is a backward looking exercise which is more about creating mutable and multiple perspectives through which the past can be experienced.”⁵ As our brains self-organize the information that they are given, an argument can be had over why the brain chooses to arrange things the way that it does, with some people clearly opting for the path of least resistance with their memories construction, and others creating an apocalyptic version of events that creates chaos in their life. I would argue that this chaos is caused not only by the way the memories are constructed, but by the way that one chooses to react to this particular stimulus.

The flip side of this malleable memory is the memory that is painstakingly recreated to create a sense of comfort. Korean artist Do-Ho Suh recreated his family home out of silk so that he might fold it up and bring it with him wherever he traveled. He “recreates as diaphanous architectural space of his familial home in Korea, a house that was already a recreation, modeled as it was on his father’s 1970’s creation of a house that was a careful duplication, down to the recycled materials, of what had been a civilian style house on the grounds of the palace complex in Seoul.”⁶ There is a security in familiarity, and the rigid documentation leaves little room for variability and potential untruthfulness.

These are the ideas that inform the dialogue of my current work; knowledge and malleability, the construct of identity, the procedural authorship and self-organizing of memories, and the impact that this has on your humanity.

1 – Gibbons, Joan. “Introduction.” Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007. Print.

2 - Gibbons, Joan. "Introduction." Contemporary Art and Memory:  Images of Recollection and Remembrance. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007. 3. Print.

3 - Gibbons, Joan. "The Ordering of Knowledge." Contemporary Art and Memory:  Images of Recollection and Remembrance. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007. 125. Print.

4 – Hiller, Susan. “Susan Hiller’s Painted Works.” Susan Hiller: Recall, Selected Works, 1964-2004. Gateshead, Baltic, 2004. 19. Print.

5 - Gibbons, Joan. "The Ordering of Knowledge." Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007. 138. Print.

6 - Saltzman, Lisa. "What Remains." Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2006. 94. Print. 

Residency Summary

Part I – Residency Summary

I was eager to arrive in Boston for the third of my five residencies on my way to hopefully earning an MFA in Visual Arts from Lesley University College of Art and Design. I felt like the semesters worth of work that I was bringing was reasonably coherent, even with a few side roads that may or may not lead somewhere at a future date. Being passed the point of no return in the program, it was time to start working towards an end goal, and I felt like I was on the right path.

During this residency, the discussions relating to my work revolved around two main points. What was I really talking about, and how does the work I am presenting represent that idea. As always, there were conflicting opinions about both of these queries, but I can speak to the first with some clarity. Throughout the semester, the work that I was creating found its own path. I let the work lead the way, while I simply followed along and tried to decipher its meaning. I know that I was certainly interested in the fragmented image, and the reconstruction thereof, but the reasons eluded me for much of the last few months. Following Residency 2, I was interested in human perception, and how that perception differed from one person to another, but found that attempting to resolve that idea elusive in the manner that I wanted to pursue my work. It seemed to me that what I was really interested in pursuing was one person’s multiple and changing perception of events that may or may not have actually occurred in their own life; memory.  The discussions and critiques had during the course of Residency 3 brought this idea into clearer focus for me, and allowed me to differentiate between “memory” and “dreams” which I may have been initially using interchangeably, when in fact they are two very different things. In my first meeting with my new advisor, Stuart Steck, we were able to hammer out some of the themes that I was really working with:

·         Fictions and truth. How we perceive them and how they are shaped

·         How mass culture shapes expectations to become reality

·         What if there is no distinction between fact and fiction?

·         Is an object truth, or can the representation of an object be just as truthful (think Joseph Kosuth)

As always, the Artist Talk portion of the Residency was highly beneficial, this time, perhaps even more than the talks from the last two residencies. There wasn’t a weak presentation in the group, and I found things that I could attach to, things that seemed particularly pertinent to me and my work, in each and every one of the lectures.

The Professional Development seminar with Laurel Sparxx was highly informative and worthwhile. She imbued the class with her own experiences and a seemingly authentic desire to help us all succeed by eliminating many of the business and social pitfalls that can befall neophyte artists. The introduction to the gallery scene and the meeting with Steven Zevitas was very beneficial to everyone in attendance as well. She provided us with many beneficial resources as well.

The critique portion of the residency was as beneficial as always. I had several sessions with faculty, visiting artists, and the resident critic graduating students. I found something that I could grasp onto from all of these sessions. The success of these sessions was attributable to many factors. First, my work was much tighter and I was much more prepared to discuss the issues that needed discussing. I knew where I wanted to go, and that helped immensely. I was also much more understanding of the many ways in which useful information and opinion could be provided. Having had many interactions with most of the critics, there was much more of openness and a comfort level in the discussions.

Another valuable aspect was the makeup and curation of the crit space that I was in. There was a lot of discussion amongst the group, and they all had valuable insight to offer for all of the artists in the space. The continued curation of the individual spaces was an interesting and ongoing process.

Many gallery visits also added to the benefits of the residency. Trips to the ICA, Fogg Museum, and all of the galleries on Harrison Avenue provided valuable exposure to art. The highlight of the trip to the ICA was clearly the Arlene Shechet exhibit. While primarily a ceramicist, I was particularly enthralled by her work with cotton and pigment, creating high relief paper prints. At the Fogg Museum, the viewing of the Rothko murals was a contemplative experience, leaving me physically exhausted.

Part II – Response to Critical Theory

Critical Theory III revolved around discussions of non-Western art, and how that work was described, displayed, and interpreted by the Western art world. Many other subjects were covered, all periphery to the basic discussion. Talks of collection and archive were touched on, the function of museums, and discussions of resonance and wonder.  We discussed how items needed cultural context, and the idea that “seeing” is more cultural than biological.

One of the key components of the class was the lack of a universality of man. In contrast to Steichen’s “Family of man” exhibit, we are not all similar despite our differences, but we are all different despite our similarities. I find this argument to be a slippery slope. While the accusation that the universality of man is fraudulent because the items of similarity are cherry picked to make the argument, isn’t the same thing true of the opposition? Isn’t that how all arguments are made? Picking the points that support your case and arguing against those that do not?

Another item that I found particularly interesting was the argument that when looking at an item in a museum, you are looking at it through a colonial lens without realizing it. Adding cultural context to the item adds an additional lens through which to view it. This begs the questions as to whether anything can be truly appreciated simply for what it is, without the cultural context being provided. Without any cultural context or supporting material, an item cannot have resonance, but only wonder. What if you then viewed the same item a second time? Does then the context of the first viewing provide resonance for the second viewing? Is that resonance valid? These are interesting questions to ponder, with answers that are surely elusive.

Bingo!

“The claims that are made and the stories that are told in the name of memory can alter people’s understanding of the world and, of course, alter the ways in which they act in or upon that world.” – Joan Gibbons

Interesting Read of the Day

"My "self" is a locus for thoughts, feelings, sensations, but not an impermeable, corporeal boundary. I AM NOT A CONTAINER." - Susan Hiller

Phase II Complete

Don't ask me how many phases, I won't know until it is done.

Detail Shot

Recycled paper, cyanotype, gum bichromate, oil paint. 1 out of 35 pieces.