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(Published in Dialogue No 13, Dec-Jan
2000)
1. Turn on the TV or
tune in to whatever audio/visual medium is beckoning and it’s as
natural as getting out of bed. Putting on the news is like putting
on your shoes; we don’t even think about it. We immerse ourselves
naturally into the socially agreed world of signs and signifiers,
far away from lived experience without a thought. This of course is
common knowledge. We don’t withdraw from the synthesised - as though
we are missing something - we bathe in it. We happily tune
out our senses when we tune in. You think we are looking and
hearing? Not likely. We don’t look, we read and we don’t
hear, we decipher. Of course we do. Socially, it is up to the
brain to make sense of what we sense - otherwise sound and sightings
would just wash over us like a warm shower. We decode the rabble of
media info coming at us through a screen of social signifiers:
words, images, signs, symbols and sounds that conceptually stand in
for actual events.
Berthot / Centi /
Clough / Kapoor /
Kngwarreye
2. There are many
now who still maintain the theory that ‘nature’ is human invention.
We all know what is meant by this, but it may be more accurate to
say that we invent concepts for nature rather than the condition
itself. The problem is, it is impossible to grasp that the
matter-world does not belong to us, impossible to
‘acknowledge’ that there may be a larger picture, larger than the
socially arranged culture-world we live in. Why is this? Well as
soon as one tries to finger the actual presence of a condition that
gave rise to human consciousness in the first place - which
maintains us still - we extinguish it. If we apply the critical
distancing of objectivity in order to better know it, we simply
convert it back into yet another concept. The point is, that
anything independent of our constructed environment cannot be
articulated - perhaps that’s what independence really means. But it
could be argued that we have another mode of recognition apart from
our intellectual systems of interpretation; we have our sentience.
Intellectuality and sensing things (as all living things do), is the
human entity’s dual interface with the world.
Marden / McKeever /
O’Donnell / Petyarre /
Scully
3. One of the
interesting things about computer-based art is its ability to create
the illusion of movement. But there is a kind of art which is not
about movement but mobility. Mobility comes from the mind’s
potential to operate outside the programmed certainties of the
message; technology’s inevitable message. This art may speak of
a kind of experience that is not pre-empted by the world’s program
managers. So, while a considerable amount of media-derived art
concentrates on the politics of the everyday (and lucky for us that
it does) another kind might address something as basic as our own
sentience. While some art interrogates the assorted mannerisms of
the society it stems from, there is another practice which presents
a different kind of visual field, one that cannot be read like a
webpage. Instead, this ‘visual field’ simply bears direct evidence
of the human subject as an inseparable element of a specific time,
culture and place. This art does not want to overturn or subvert
anything even if it provides a kind of material Yin for
virtuality’s Yang. In many respects, the materials and the
process of making is also the subject of the work. But rather than
‘mastering the medium’, artists who work in this way are trying to
form a kind of alliance with materiality and their practice develops
out of that alliance. In the end, the work celebrates the phenomena
of a specific social individual interacting in the world of material
substances and the forces that animate it. This art observes the
essential, mutually inclusive relation between culture, body and
world.
Sanpitak / Tjapaltjarri /
Vongpoothorn / Watson /
Winters
4. The significance
of this ‘essential relation’ is embedded in the work’s layers, in
the residual evidence of the body’s affinity with matter. But of
course that’s not all there is to be found here. There are always
‘figurative’ elements - but not the kind that turn up in textbooks.
Being unnamed, these elements test the limits of language and
meaning and in ways which may not be possible using the conservative
text-based processes of our constructed world. Essentially, it is
because this work is body-centred both in production and in
reception that it can provide a source of mobility away from the
media’s message and away from our regulatory infotech systems. Of
course this has nothing to do with trancendence, it is far too
materialist for that. Lyotard (remember him) says, “A thought sees
repeating in its water the formation of eddies that surprise it.
Little arrangements of colours bloom and fade. Thought gets lost
here and yet suspects, in these buds, the recurrence of a secret
activity that is its own, although it doesn’t recognise any
possession of it.” It is possible that the critical phenomena of our
own sentience is being overlooked as active ground which may have
more relevance than we imagine into a pre-packed, technocentric
future. And it is feasible that, in a short while, a careful
investigation of this subject might turn out to be more socially and
politically crucial than many others.
©Robert Hollingworth
Adapted from an essay on the work of Tony Ng, Jan 1999 |