Intro

This blog is an outlet for my writing on and around various ideas, themes and processes that relate to my work as a visual artist.

Warning

Much if not all of what will appear on this blog will seem pretentious, opaque, dubiously polemical and may give the general impression of an unwise head banging repeatedly against a brick wall.
These appearances will not be deceiving.

The erotic qua ontic

Styles of leadership - a visual essay

The other other

Trinity

Discourse

Lacanian smile

Being coordinated

4 modes of becoming

4 modes of Being

Visual equations

What...?

The shadow of what isn't

Actions - consequences

All actions have consequences – these consequences take the form of actions. Practical knowledge/ expertise, is predicting/knowing consequences of actions. Impractical knowledge is 'knowing' the actions themselves: this is problematic, as to know and to act are incommensurable – i.e. there is a formal gap between them – they are not the same thing (even though 'knowing' [as symbolising] is an act and acting [being] is knowing, as in experiencing the contingency of reality – i.e. the risk, the unknowability, the incalculability of consequence {to 'be with' a sequence: to accompany life's progression, regression, twists, turns – but what accompanies? : the What is twofold: the symbolic non-self 'Self' and the Real, unconscious, subject-void. The two are mutually constitutive: the impersonal thought-world gives the personal, unconscious human animal the sense of being 'personal', embedded in the Real as 'reality' – Geist/Langue is the ephemeral field that ontologises contingent particularity into universal Being.}

Back to the beginning: if all actions have consequences and consequences are actions, shall we say actions are symbolic moments within an endless stream of action – that to name an action is to belie the endless, Heraclitean finitude by the fundamental symbolic obstruction: naming? To name would be to lie if there was another name 'divinely' inscribed in the chaos of contingent reality. The Real thing is not worthy of the name and the name is not the Real thing but, without the name, the Real thing is lacking precisely this dimension of the Real itself: not only its lack, but the perception of the lack, achieved through the failure of the name.

This suggests that freedom (knowing-action/ not-acting) is possible because the symbolosphere is Real precisely as far as it fails, and, in failing, gives the Real its voice. This voice is the silence of not-knowing: an undeath beyond finitude but bearing its stamp. This undeath is living: living the examined life.

Prime concern

Process & Product

The following was provoked by a question posed on the Facebook group N e w A e ѕ т н e т ι c.

Terms:

• Product, taken as the result of a process.
• Process, taken as that which will result in a product.
• Process as Product, e.g. Roman Opalka's 1 to Infinity (1965-), a work which involved the filling of canvases with numbers while counting them into a recorder. Each canvas became a detail in the larger unfinished (and by definition unfinishable) work.*
• Intention/Will, as including both working from/to a plan, schema or concept and working to no plan: i.e. contingently, through accident and chance.
• Action, as doing/undoing/not-doing: doing/undoing, as actions [i.e. process]; not-doing, as finishing [i.e. product].
• Telos, as the expectation of some end [i.e. some satisfying realisation of  a pre-existing concept, or some satisfying realisation not previously conceived of].
• Satisfaction, as the condition for not-doing.

Having crudely set out these terms, let me even more crudely apply them to my own practice.

What is my process? What are my intentions? At the outset, I do not know what I want, I never do (I used to but I never quite got it so I stopped wanting it). 

Having started, what I get are various dispositions and compositions that change with my doing and undoing - these cannot be called phases or stages until there is a final product of which they could be said to be phases or stages. There is no guarantee of reaching a satisfying end, only doing and undoing.

Both necessary [i.e. to suggest a definite form] and contingent [i.e. to randomise and open up possibilities] marks can be deployed right up to the end of a picture. There are no hard technical rules in my practice regarding telos. A process could end  (a product begin) with a blob or a calculated fine line.   

A satisfying end, as defined above, is, for me, the point where the willful acts of doing and undoing are exhausted and a certain resistance from the work obliges me to not-do, to stop. What, in process, was contingent, capable of being or not being (through doing and undoing) now, as product, just is: it cannot be different - it is necessary.  

Let us imagine two reasons for satisfaction:

1) a product being the realisation of a pre-conceived object/idea, with process being fidelity to the       concept.

2) a product being the realisation of an un-pre-conceived object/idea, with process being fidelity to     the ghost of an idea that will only emerge through process [i.e. cannot be said to exist ideally               separate from the work]. 

The second reason is the one that motivates me. I make pictures to experience the haunting that the product exerts on me before it is realised. 'Haunting' is a clumsy word for what I'm describing but it serves in so far as it suggests a trace, something at the limits of consciousness. Or, perhaps better said, this ghost is my unconscious/subconscious - 'me' in the broadest and least sanitised sense.

I then, as artist, am the machine - the processor - and my products are communications from a blindly determined object (myself) to itself - the catch being that the 'self' so addressed is not the one that produced the address! The production redefines the producer. Making remakes the maker. 

* In mentioning this example, it occurs to me that, conceiving as we do of individual works as being part of a larger 'body' of work, might not these bodies themselves be both  products (histories of production) and processes (technical and thematic shifts over time)? 

I 2 U, 2015

You there, 2015

The Emptiness Inside, 2015