The Message of Art

Not only is no man an island but, simply, there is no individual. This is the message of art. Not the “artist's message” which, like the putative individual, doesn't exist or, if one insists on presenting it as a discrete phenomenon, exists only on the level of total opacity and incomprehensibility.

It is precisely this chasm of subjectivity which art touches upon. To confuse it with a personal or individual profundity is, simultaneously, to mystify the human animal and to deny unknowability to human experience. It is to indulge in the magical thinking that justifies material inequality by cultivating the illusion of access to infinite self-hood and to escape from the truth of the impossibility of an unrelated self.

The face is the basic node of human communication. It has been through/with/by faces that the majority of us have come to the identity we currently advertise and to the personality we exhibit (taking personality as that encrustation of possibility dried in the sun of the contingent relationality that has made up our social environment).

Before the face is the other, the face is the self. One is what one sees and even when one sees oneself, one becomes two. So the greatest threat to the other, as an other, is that it is assumed into the self-hood of the subject which is the only agent capable of recognising – and so manifesting – the other.

Consciousness is the breakdown in the order of material efficiency (physical process). To say all art is useless is on a par with conceptualising original sin: it insights that necessity is infinite and impersonal, a universal constant or ground that doesn't need any subject to exist.

The mothering of invention is not the field of human genius but its matrix. The subject as such, whether inspired or not, is the radical openness to this void of ownership – this unrelenting and unconscious drive to produce. 

Here then, self is negative experience. It is what is not present: a lived absence that opens a gap in the illusion of the permanence of an ever changing world.

Remarks on mark making, marks and suggestion

To limit oneself to the suggestive power of the first mark made on a plain field and to then proceed through the growing complexity of suggested and suggesting marks to suggested and suggesting groupings of marks and then, to the suggested and suggesting final state. This is how I work.

The final state suggests its finality. The first state (the plain field) suggests a finality. The first mark suggests finality or another mark. The suggestion of finality contains the action of suggestion itself and the discrete finality of each subsequent suggested mark.

Each suggestion is a finality in itself – finalised in the mark made. The suggestion may be more or less complex, more or less precise and the realisation of the mark itself may be more or less faithful to the suggestion it realises.

The final state does not equate to a statement but, rather, to a suggestion: a suggestion itself the product of an involution of suggestion. The final state may suggest a statement but it cannot state a statement. Any suggestion of finality does not add up to a final statement.

Q. What is a picture? A. An idea for a picture.

This idea is the product, not a finished picture in itself. The picture in its physical form is only worth the picture-idea it is capable of evoking. The potential of a work is the cognizability or imaginability it induces and can support.

The idea is not distinct from the object that evokes it, rather, the evocation is the result of subject coming into contact with it. 'Subject' could be formalized as a discrete object (a human animal) but the cognitive/imaginary field cannot ever be reduced to reification in a particular material complex (i.e. human organism) as this cognitive manoeuvre itself must take place in a perceiving and judging subject. The reducing agent is not reducible but infinitely relational and relatable.

The infinite quality (or intimation of infinity) that art seems to possess, is that quality in ourselves (in this experience we call 'being human'). It is a reflection of this experience that art effects – a projected reflection reflecting a projection.

Art only imperfectly lends itself to utilitarian purposes (such as mild social engineering via curatorial thematizing) not because 'it' struggles to say anything but because 'it' will always say more. Of course, by 'it' I mean 'we'. The art object, whatever its material and conceptual status, is a cache of communicative potential only in its ability to be perceived/conceived/received.

Perhaps this inutility is lamentable to a mind that hopes for an insect-like evolution of the human species – i.e. a constant and minimally reflective industriousness. I very much hope such a mind is absent and always will be. In answer to this disposition, art is inherently and immanently a future and utopic project in so far as it attends human beings who are not set on a goal; who are suspended¹, however briefly, from the causal chains of necessity and desire².

1Suspended, as in 'removed' but also, so as to fully profit from the verbal suggestiveness of 'suspension' and 'chains' as in 'slacking' or 'hanging around'.

2Perhaps the reason for much debate sticking on the necessity and desirability of art, is that art is an ontology of the obstruction of these engines of activity?