London Round-up

One man lays a noose over the head of another man; small labels dangling off each of the figures indicate that the doomed victim is the ‘Artist’, the knotted rope represents ‘Platitudinous Phrases’ being placed on him by the ‘Art Critic’ and ‘Word Mongerer’. This sceptical moment is just a small corner from Ad Reinhardt’s collage comic How to Look at Art Talk. Tucked into London ICA’s Fox Reading Room was a collection of 27 of his ‘How to Look at…’ series of mock lectures that appeared from the 1940s to the 60s in the New York publications PM, ArtNews and Transformations. Self-described as ‘a nosegay for the art-schmeckers’, Reinhardt’s comics are a refreshing antidote and timely reminder to current debates droning on about supposed crises in criticism.

Chaotically diagrammatic and ironically explanatory, the series actually represents informal criticism disguised variously as introductions to iconography, cubist paintings, surrealist art and any number of Reinhardt targets felt like taking a shot at. It is something like Max Ernst’s 1934 graphic novel Une Semaine De Bonté (A Week of Grace) on semantic speed, using old etchings and cramming type into every corner to collect quotes, art world inanities, style surveys and quick scenester reviews. The central kernel might be the recurring scene of a man mockingly pointing at an abstract painting – ‘Ha ha what does this represent?’ – followed by the painting angrily jabbing a finger at the frightened man and demanding, ‘What do you represent?’ For all its jaunty aesthetic philosophising, Reinhardt makes it clear that, for him, abstract painting is where it’s at. In How to View High (Abstract) Art, the ‘picture artist’ is compared with a reactionary who breeds illusion, imitation and hack skills while the abstract painter carries the qualities of honesty, dignity and decency.

Reinhardt might have nodded with approval at the white and silvery canvases Jacob Kassay is showing in the ICA galleries, but you wonder what the progressive but staunch and reluctant modernist might have made of the hazy digital abstractions currently abounding in the more contemporary medium of video. The leading example might be James Richards’s double-screen video installation Not Blacking Out, Just Turning the Lights Off, 2011, which turned the Chisenhale Gallery into an odd sort of dentist’s waiting room, dimly lit with black panels on the wall and toothpaste-green carpeting. If you are here waiting for a film or any form of narrative, it doesn’t arrive. At the start of one sequence, the scene of a lit cigarette falling on leaf-covered ground looped over a dozen times leads you to almost forget the visual and listen to its quiet rhythms. We cut between scenes of hypnosis, digital images of light bulbs and running reindeer, matched with incidental sounds of footsteps, mobile phone interference and a slowed-down section of the Incredible String Band’s 1968 epic A Very Cellular Song: ‘absolutely no strife/ living the timeless life’. There is the hint of the themes of mortality and the split self if you try and bind together the disparate elements, from an X-rayed rib cage to the striking recording of Judy Grahn reading her poem Slowly: a plainsong from a younger woman to an older woman, 1971, intoning, ‘Am I not olden, olden, olden?’ Richards’s textures might sound on paper like the audiovisual outcome of Dadaist cut-up technique, but its intimacies and hidden rationale give it the feeling of something more like an ambient electronica album produced in someone’s bedroom – that peculiar mixture of the assurances of the skillful forager altered through the uncertain but acute connections of the private imaginary life.

James Richards, Not Blacking Out, Just Turning the Lights Off, 2011, installation view, Chisenhale Gallery

Richards’s short video Practice Theory, 2006, included in the concurrent group show ‘On Value’ at Seventeen, is a similar skipping musing, though here more explicitly led by a droning computer-voiced narrator lecturing on aesthetic experience. We see marines, dancers and close-ups of hands before he stops in a flat realisation: ‘Ah, so that’s how it works, I now have a more thorough understanding because each ingredient has been shown to me.’ We never get to know what that understanding might be as the narrator’s voice is drowned out by the bangs and ricochets of a shoot-out. Curated by Gil Leung, ‘On Value’ is a dense, disjointed and playful video show with slight sculptural interludes that explore the different meanings of the word ‘value’ as it moves from the pragmatic to the economic to the emotional. Going into the gallery’s basement space, a burst of laughter apparently cuts through Chris Saunders’s video Untitled (Chat Show Faces), 1993, at the point where it focuses on a series of faces from chat-show audiences on their blank, faux-innocent expressions. It turned out, though, that the laughter is coming from Stuart Baker’s Minimum Salaries, 1988, which was playing on a monitor tucked into a corner. In his video, moments of cued laughter from old sitcoms are intercut with intertitles of the job titles and earnings of each person involved in the making of such a show. The laughter is unmoored from the comedy and becomes an unsettling presence that mocks both the workers and the participants. Though Leung emphasises the exercise of judgement as the central act of creating value, the works in the show seem to point more towards an imaginative confusion, a productive blurring between the forms of ‘value’ that gives the concept its potency. This is spelled out most clearly in the conclusion of Charles Lofton’s I Like Dreaming, 1994, where the narrator details initiating a sexual encounter with a supposedly straight man: ‘his imagination and my imagination were about to have really good sex.’

Hidden in plain sight on the dimly lit black wall in Seventeen is a piece of black fabric with a coin printed on it in black. Ben Vickers’s Bitcoin, 2011, was a Euro-style coin with 0s and 1s circling a large B which, by the time you figure out what it represents, feels like a one-liner – information is the new currency. The current Euro crisis only makes the joke louder. No doubt we will be facing many more economics-themed artworks for some time to come. However, Duncan Campbell’s film Arbeit, 2011, at Hotel’s new space does feel, in its subject and rambling detail, on the money, so to speak. A 40-minute second-person monologue in black and white, it is delivered like a eulogy to economist Hans Tietmeyer. Tietmeyer is currently Vice-Chariman at the Bank for International Settlements, but had a key role in integrating the Deutsche mark following Germany’s reunification and was one of the main architects of the Euro currency. The narrator, a former colleague or some acquaintance – we never learn which – has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of his subject, as we go from Tietmeyer’s mining background, his attempted assassination by the Red Army Faction and his later bureaucratic rise. But we don’t really get to know Tietmeyer better. Campbell’s previous self-conscious biopics of Bernadette Devlin and John De Lorean relied on more apparent fictions and stylistic devices intercut with archive material. Here, it is woven more seamlessly into the film itself, Campbell voicing his unease with both the fiction of presenting his findings and claiming authority over his subject in other ways. The narrator constantly apologises for his diversions and the potential inaccuracy of his portrayal but at the end makes a long and extremely detailed list of things relating to current economic crisis in which Tietmeyer might well be implicated, but he insists that we should ignore and forget. ‘Your life belongs to you, Hans’, he says, but we don’t quite believe it.

A more willing or conscious dispossession takes place in ‘The Peripatetic School’ at the Drawing Room, bringing together nine artists from across South America. Each artist deals with a certain kind of movement or travel as the basis for their work. In Nicolas Paris’s series of 19 drawings of himself running, each drawing differs according what he found on his run that day so that next to a purple shoe heel his running man wears high heels; next to a comb he has careful lines of well-combed hair. Mateo López’s installation Nowhere Man, 2011, is a temporary room with a bed and desk shoved into a corner, the latter filled with notebooks, tape and drawing tools – all convincing stand-ins made out of paper. From a European context, ‘The Peripatetic School’ might sound like it relates more to the anarchic possibilities of the Situationist dérive. But here, responding to the particular political and economic situations in São Pãulo, Buenos Aires and the Peruvian Amazon, it feels like a case of picking up the pieces –  the flipside of the diffusely economic anxieties and crises brought up in Seventeen and Hotel.  The best response to a crisis, the artists seem to suggest, is to just keep on moving.

Published in Art Monthly, December 2011 – January 2012, No. 352

Maria Zahle

Checking his reflection. Leaning in towards the mirror, out, then in again. Walking away, looking back over his shoulder. Testing it. He hops, skips then jumps past, returns with a white hat. Leaning in again, he circles his reflection suspiciously, crossing the surface’s threshold and back again.

Harpo Marx’s bodily imitation of Groucho’s President Firefly in Duck Soup (1933) holds until a third impostor stumbles in on the scene, giving away the game. The infamous ‘mirror scene’ itself has its own doppelgangers pre- and pro-ceeding it – from Chaplin’s The Floorwalker (1916) to Harpo’s own re-enactment of the scene in a 1955 episode of I Love Lucy, to countless cartoons and on to the shattering mirrors of Inception (2010). The figure of the double has, since the Victorian psychoanalysts, been seen as a threat, a wayward other who threatens the self it mimics. But we don’t really need the advice of a literature scholar like Debra Walker King to point out, “the fictional double is always with us.”

Marisa Zahle, Foot on the Ground (Leaning), 2011, image courtesy the artist

Groucho’s circling, entering the space of the mirror before returning to his own, is an interpretative dance, questioning and verifying the presence what he sees. The double here is a necessary entity, a figure that then allows us this act of interrogation. We can can find this same circling, double-take in the work of Maria Zahle. Her sculptures and works on paper remain resolutely abstract, but are moored in the precise, messy particularities of everyday life. On the surface, Zahle’s work might appear akin to the work of the Zurich Concrete artists like Verena Loewensberg and Richard Paul Lohse; colours appearing in self-evident lines, playfully mute. But like in her series of Tape Drawings, it is the tacky red and yellow tape you find at supermarkets and vegetable stalls that inform the drawings.

Zahle’s Foot On the Ground series presented here make no bones about their act as a bodily double, they stumble, pause and lean. Clean plastic feet held to the ground with churned up chunks of stone and concrete. The titles of each work already tell us what they’re doing. But then what? They form an unlikely family, hanging around, or more like some sort of gang of the signaling arms of train semaphores gone astray. But a semaphore implies a use, the sending of a message. These just stand there, like some angular Chaplin-like characters, or made as if Buster Keaton had turned his hand to Constructivism.

Maria Zahle, Foot on the Ground (Stumble), 2011, image courtesy the artist

The mark of Zahle’s work is self-evident; we know how each piece is made, the imprint acting as its own index. But we still find ourselves inevitably involved in the act of trying to scrutinise, to try and figure things out. Zahle’s work seems to involve a particular back and forth, physically and conceptually swaying, repeating. Hers is a admixture of unique actions and general materials, looking at moments of discrete pronunciation, where the form they are given threatens to become just hollow abstraction and dissolve into an unmoored sign, a floating semaphore. Her practice uses a careful combination of rough, found objects with sleek fabricated materials to place both on an uneasy threshold, where the pure form still has a worldly sense about it, where abstraction can articulate its own precision, and where art might supplant the semaphore.

Text commissioned by Arcade Fine Arts on the occasion of the Sunday Art Fair, October 2011.

No Comment

A bus stop ad: overtimed Halloween-themed shopping incitement. A zombie hand clutches a Sony Ericsson phone. Across the bottom of the poster: “MISSING our DEALS will HAUNT YOU.” With the small size of the ‘our’ and ‘will’, what you read at first glance is: MISSING DEALS HAUNT YOU.

Heading down Procter Street towards High Holborn, an LCD billboard stretches across the building the road passes beneath.  An epic frieze from the film IMMORTALS lights up the air with cold browns, with a grim, determined young man in gold armour on one side, and a grizzly, aged man swathed in dark robes on the other. The simplicity of the presentation, the lack of details such as a director or any of the actors, and also the dull predictability of the image itself, makes it feel like a made-for-TV full length feature. Spielberg’s Tintin currently running in cinemas is filled with transmorphing cross-fades between scenes: a desk top becomes a city scape, the close-up of a hand’s knuckles become desert sand dunes. In Holborn, the light begins to change. Henry Cavill, grimacing in mid-attack, cross-fades to a face placed in exactly the same position within the screen’s frame. Theseus’s war cry becomes the conservative prim smile of Helen Mirren.  She leans into a soft white sweater, next to the words: our troops are the real stars.

Takashi Murakami

Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, London, June 27 – August 5, 2011

Having established himself pushing the logic of cheap thrills to their surreal conclusion, for his latest solo show Takashi Murakami has made another thrill so cheap it’s free. A two metre tall school girl perches on a low plinth, cheery for all the world despite her angular, massively oversized box-shaped head balancing on a triangular body. Visitors could take away a perforated paper sheet to assemble their own 15cm high Big Box Paper Ko2 (2011). I’d actually stumbled upon one of these little dolls previously, unaware of its origin; but then noticing that the flat-bottomed base included the detail of the girl’s underwear, I knew it was from the Murakami stables.

From hypersexualised nurses, spurting erections and a smiling clitoris, here Murakami picks up again his long self-appointed role as the armchair Freud of the Japanese psychosexual terrain. Pinning the primal scene of Japan’s sexual identity in its cartoons and comics, he’s made a career out of transposing the exaggerated attitudes and physiques of these anime fantasies into sculpture and paint for art audiences to ogle. She might be able to bounce around in her ‘sexy maid’ outfit on screen, but brought into physical being 3m Girl (2011) leans forward under the weight of breasts the size of the rest of her giant body, trying to make her inability to deal with the load look cute. She’s just the latest, slightly taller, model of an ongoing series that Murakami started in 1997 with with Miss Ko2 (of which, in this show, both Nurse Ko2 and the Big Box girl are updates) and the breast-milk spurting Hiropon, an army of vacantly doe-eyed clones that bring out the patent absurdity of what, in the mangaverse, is meant to be alluring.

Adding a slightly different tact in this show to swell these ranks, Murakami traverses one wall with four sets of painting triptychs. One set is a direct reproduction of a turn-of-the-century painting of three nude women, done in a realist style, the title spelling out his intent: An Homage to Seiki Kuroda “Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment,” Reinventing the Spirit of the Meiji Cultural Enlightenment in the Modern Age, 2011. The other three sets are the results of handing the figures over to three different manga character designers; and though there are slight variations between the three, the most remarkable difference of the ‘translations’ is the uniform use of the anorexic teenager as the body for this ‘modern age.’ Standing between the row of girls and the show’s tiers of genitalia, it’s apparent Murakami’s diagnosis of Japan’s sexual psyche is of a never-ending, pubescent phallic stage.

While Kuroda’s work did cause a stir in his time, this doesn’t feel so much like a ‘homage’ as Murakami ingesting him into his art machine. Murakami has often used elements of Japanese art history as the MacGuffin to put outlandish porn-pop explosions in a gallery space, incessantly trying shock the audience. But this isn’t all that outrageous, and his diagnosis is pretty obvious- sure, this is satire, with all the hyperbolic language, but none of the bite. Drained of any critique, you feel more like he’s just getting a chuckle out of the sexual proclivities of anime fans. His method hasn’t progressed since the naked, morphing Transformer-style female of Second Mission Project Ko2 in 1999; but this has given way to hear another, quieter voice in his work behind all the stylised quotation marks, sounding like an old-fashioned parent yammering on about the dehumanising effects of pop culture.

First published in Art Review 53, October 2011

‘Narrative Show’

Eastside Projects, Birmingham, 15 July to 10 September 2011

Narrative is a tough beast to kill. Even the most staunchly non-narrative artist has to bend to the exigencies of a career, working in series or within a chronology and biography. Narrative is even implied in the audience’s encounter with a work – the journey into a gallery, their trail around the room and out the door again – which becomes an experienced story with a start and an end. A look around the contemporary art world would reveal no shortage of consciously constructed narratives. In addition to the traditional narrative forms of performance and sequential image (moving or not), there has been a glut of scripts, short stories and correspondence presented as artworks, many of which use a bland, listless terminology that suggest that today’s storyteller’s persona is that of the cultural theorist.

Eastside Projects’ ‘Narrative Show’ steps straight into the middle of the issue and unravels, spinning wildly outwards from there. Presented as a play in five acts occurring over five months with over 14 artists, curators and writers involved, the exhibition undertakes countless transformations, punctuations and interjections. Three of the acts are one-off live performance events: an opening enunciation, a climax and a closing denouement, while the acts in between seem to be when the show is just on. Though that ‘just’ is partially revealed through ‘Fixed Positions’, 2011, a series of photos Stuart Whipps has taken from set points in the gallery throughout the duration: walls have been moved, rooms have been taken down, posters flyposted on top of each other, monitors put up in different places, and an elevated platform covered with dirt erected. A sibling to Eastside’s overflowing ‘Abstract Cabinet Show’ from 2009, this would seem a continuation or culmination of the curators’ self-conscious deconstruction of what an exhibition programme can be. Even the walls have history: much of the original layout of the show was what remained from the Carey Young exhibition which ended in January, while several panels, at some points leaning idly against another wall, were from a mobile wall system designed in 1986 by Austrian architect Adolf Krischanitz for the Vienna Secession.

The two days I visited offered very different experiences, though on each occasion things immediately shouted and jostled for attention. The sounds of Jemima Stehli’s videos of the post-punk band If Lucy Fell drone, buzz and steamroll around the space, punctuated on the second visit by the occasional chirps of Mighty Titan, a fidgety mocking bird apparently being trained to repeat the words: ‘Du vergisst dinge. Du musst.’ (‘You forget things. You have to.’), though he seemed a bit performance shy while I was there. The work of Glasgow’s Poster Club was originally a separate project for the second gallery space, but was absorbed over the months into the voracious, expanding maw of the ‘Narrative Show’. These projects work more like narratological white noise, providing crisscrossing textures and an atmosphere of joyful anarchy, but within this there are actually several texts quietly trying to tell a story. A screen gives up a selection of chapters from Sally O’Reilly’s novel in progress, with the working titles of Crude or Oil!, 2011, a Ballardian pulp thriller in which a disillusioned art critic attempts to instigate an anti-art movement by entering the oil industry. So far, there are already some brilliant satirical art world moments: a panel discussion with thousands of teeming fans, or the underground meeting of the Land Art cult of ‘Terra-ists.’ On the denser side of fun are the scripts of Nathanial Mellor’s continuing Ourhouse Episode Three: The Cure of Folly, 2011, the script of which was pasted across two walls, eventually to be partially obscured by a giant ‘Whistleblowing’ poster by the Freee group.

A workshop around current possibilities for whistleblowing with Freee was the only event of the show I caught, and that was more in preparation for their exhibition in the space later in the year. The dirt platform dominating the space on my return visit provides a great, unsettling view of the room, but is the set for the video William Pope L is producing for his subsequent solo show. The structure of Helen Brown’s sound piece Novelette, 2011, spells it out: a series of interviews with over a dozen audience members –with an emblematic cross-section of backgrounds from a cleaner, and a careworker to a philosophy student – give their impressions of the gallery, which are then edited down and re-recorded by one voice. Their layered insights (‘It’s like the science museum, it’s got this atmosphere like you don’t know where you’re going.’) are a red herring: they know that no matter how mixed up their narratives, they will still become absorbed into the overarching story of the gallery. The questions posed by ‘Narrative Show’ are not about narration itself but Eastside Projects’ own processes of exhibition-making and consumption. This is a gallery narrating its own narrative, the narration of which is the promulgation of narratives: ‘We put on exhibitions.’

The exhibition is an experiential manifesto of an exhibition space attempting to continue pushing at its own boundaries. With different works being set off at various points and the inclusion of many works that exist only in performance, any view – or review – is necessarily fractured and incomplete. So like any manifesto, it might exist more in its self-proclamation than anything else. But the curators seem well aware that they have set themselves the impossible task of attempting to articulate processes, not products; the narration of the unfinished, the never finishing. Within the narrative of an artist-run institution, this is no doubt an interesting and entertaining exercise for the curators themselves. But this same plot, seen from the point of view of the person coming into the space, treads a fine line between bewildering indifference and challenging engagement, falling dizzily just on the side of the latter.

First published in Art Monthly, issue 349 September 2011

‘Rain’

Cell Project Space, London, 30 June to 31 July 2011

The group show ‘Rain’, curated by artist Nicolas Deshayes is, on the surface, made up of the same slick, post-minimal cool that was flaunted to the point of implosion in the recent V22 Young London show. But despite sharing some of the same line-up, ‘Rain’ retains what that show lacked: a critical argument and a sense of direction. The text generated around ‘Rain’ would have us believe that that argument is centred on the ambiguous attraction of contemporary mass-produced materials, and on the theme of water and its reflective gleam as the central textural metaphor. The works by the eight artists gathered here, for the most part sculptural, do all involve the arrangement of mechanical and digitally produced artefacts. The titular lead image or images for the show, though, are three images of rain falling on the ground from different directions; each frame is doubled to create a six-frame sequence that can be read as a narrative of the rain gradually changing its slanted path. Tom Godfrey’s lithographic comic print Untitled (Rain), 2011, does not have that industrial veneer, but it does make a sombre story out of minimum means. Its emphasis – and as a cipher consequently the exhibition’s emphasis – is not so much the precipitous content but the way that it is made: how framing and contextual repetition manage to create a sense of duration and mood. An unlikely reinforcement comes from the five plastic dustbins suspended from Cell’s ceiling. Matthew Smith’s Word for Pleasure, 2011, hung in two sets that look at first like they are swinging around on an industrial conveyor belt, but they also have a foreboding sense of a military rhythm to their disposition, flying to something like the march of Paul Dukas’s 1897 The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

The object of the frame asserts itself discretely throughout the show. The sickly neon yellow aluminium frame of Anders Clausen’s Colour Picker 1, 2010, matches the shade on the computer screen image it holds. Deshayes’s own Collective Naturals, 2011, is three panels mounted on a rack as if part of a department store display of posters or carpet swatches. What is on offer are mottled terrains formed from what looks like vacuumed rubbish bags, the frames around them the same tint of dark brown. Three strips of shiny grey and blue silicone sit on the low surface of Short Supplies, 2010, by Magali Reus. Frozen into bends and curls like a monument made to bits of discarded ribbon, they lie slightly upraised on a matt off-grey rectangular slab that looks like one of the gallery’s floor tiles. A frame is a separation, both physical and metaphorical; it denotes a particular space to be read. Here, it is not so much that the works disclose their partitions and deliniations, but more that the frames that hold them have been ingested, that the content and its framing are consonant.

If the frame as a construct is a creator of context, this absorption implies that the works are their own context, which might explain their sense of a tautological state of being. A smug matter-of-factness. But like Godfrey’s comic, the other works in ‘Rain’ find their content in the placement and juxtaposition of bounded spaces. At one end of the gallery, a stage light shines down onto three glass panes forming a miniature bus shelter perched high on the wall, the mirrored stripes on the glass creating a spectrum of red and green that gives way to a strong, sinister blue. The title of George Henry Longly’s Traditional Classic Fade, 2009, recalls film editing techniques and the framed cinematic screen, but it reinforces an almost noir-ish atmosphere, that time spent here, waiting at this odd bus stop, is dense, mirrored and circular.

The desire Deshayes speaks of seems to be a desire for mutable connection, the possibility of intimate engagement despite – or even through – the ubiquitous use of impersonal, glossy materials. He makes his point not just through the material surface, but more in the way that the show links industrial manufacture with its necessary correlate – repetition. Repetition signifies production, the production of both space (a product) and time (that taken in producing); ‘Rain’ suggests that in the sustained use of this surface, repetition can also create a space where we can invest or insert our own personal narratives.

First published in Art Monthly issue 349, September 2011

Feedback: David Beattie, Karl Burke, Chris Fite-Wassilak

Walking on tarmac that stretches in all directions. A one-story box building in the distance, long shadows and a slight stick on the soles from the heat. This is the surface that we are used to walking on. The day before it was a field, damp and squishing beneath the feet, little pools pushing to the surface. Before that, it was wood panels, in an air-conditioned court hall now used for public display, each echoed step sounding like it was shyly trying to be as quiet as it could be.

But this is in another place. In a universe of infinite space, and the finite possibilities of life within that, it is more than likely this is several places. At once. An alternative you, the same, or perhaps slightly different on a distant planet very much like this one. A whole range of alternative selves scattered throughout the cosmos. Not exactly parallel realities, but close enough to empathise, to know the whole range of choices they might have made in their lives.

There is an open, unresolved problem: how do we know how we understand the world. How do we know we, you and I are us, that the city is separate from the country, that what we feel as human is different from that of the centipede. As a hardened sceptic like Austrian philosopher Paul Feyarabend pointed out in his book Against Method: all of our conceptions of the real are arrived at via the unreal, via the imaginary. We have to conceive of the real, conjured up like a half-forgotten dream.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty attempted to draw out this question from the phenomenology of Heidegger and Husserl in the 40s and 50s; there’s a seductive openness in his essay on painting, ‘Eye and Mind’: “visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing.  But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongations of itself; they are incrusted into its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the same stuff as the body.” Yeah, we say. Yeah. His notion of a ‘chiasm’ that links our inner experience with the outside world, effectively merging them, is a powerful conception of how we relate, exist, and know the world. It’s no surprise to our proof-laden minds that he was mocked as an idealist; Adorno, ever the Hegelian pragmatist, said the phenomenologists “do not connect to the reality of society.”

But tracing Ponty’s growing influence on culture currently being produced, you can also trace how it endured these criticisms, or rather grew a thick skin by being lumped, merged and conflated with a range of thought developed in the past 50 years. This includes the New Age quasi-Buddhist spiritualism of the ilk found in Ram Dass’s popular hippie guidebook Be Here Now (1971). It also includes modern physics – both Einstein’s general theory of Relativity, which put bluntly casts even time as subjective, and quantum physics, with its invisible particles giving a hazy science that almost mocks Ponty’s interweavings (‘Ew you smelled it?? That means it’s part of you now!’).

What this mix has produced, we believe, is an impasse. A way of thinking that proposed a wider sense of consciousness, a conception of connection to both the human and nonhuman, has instead come to promote individuation. There is the feeling that those caught up in the wonders of the world made flesh are incapable of then actually engaging with this world. It’s no small comment that Caitlin Smith Gilson in her 2010 book on Aquinas and Heidegger referred to Husserl in passing as ‘the man who would be king.’ This is our wider contemporary understanding of this thinking; the individual’s private world is the god-like centre of all experience. In cultural spheres, this is still tiredly expressed through a common mechanism: a one-sided attempt of trying to make the audience aware of their own act of experiencing.

Sensing yourself sensing.  This is not enough anymore.

Tucked away in a footnote in her essay for the exhibition ‘The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas,’ curator Johanna Burton noted, “Such self-directed interest has, of course, proven itself in many cases radical…Yet these initial operations of interpellating the body of the spectator have been arguably normalised and…one might consider the possibility that today’s foregrounding of the audience produces not individual bodies with differences, but rather an interchangeable public, or mass.” Nowadays, you might have Olafur Eliasson telling you a work is yours because he’s bestowed the second-person into the work’s title, making explicit the work addresses you, yes you particularly. The experiences he impresses upon you are enveloping and immersive, which at first seem like clever illusions, but no- they are actually deconstructed phenomena, opened up, and re-presented back to us so that we might understand how we see the world around us.

Eliasson’s brand of awareness, and, we would argue, the wider cultural understanding of experience currently being promulgated, is of an inward wondering and revelation. A sort of indulgent swim inwards into our own deep oceans, but with the sense of a blindfold being removed. By someone else. As Daniel Birnbaum described the work of James Turrell, “nothing is revealed- it is revelation itself.” There is the sense in popular proponents of self-awareness that we are meant to be becoming aware of the mediation between ourselves and our environment, and that that mediation is determined and opaque, that actually nothing is as it seems.

Everything. is. exactly. as it seems.

At this point in speaking about installation, interactive, dare we say ‘relational’ works, maybe we can openly acknowledge a mutual relationship without any of the inferiority complex signs of having to speak about dependence, or the way that it has been said that the viewer ‘is’ the work. Neither an audience nor an artwork ‘need’ each other. Each simply is. The context of where they meet might determine some politics, create a sense of hierarchy- ie the museum’s perceived speaking down to the public. Art movements constantly yearn for a relationship away from this perception of authority, for a hierarchy-free relationship where the feedback loop is open and unregulated, but it finds itself constantly stumbled, constrained, held by habits of viewing, by galleries with opening hours and hidden door buzzers.

Despite phenomenology’s critics, the intertwining need not always be a happy one; perception is not just flowing between you, but can sometimes be forced upon you, or indeed confused, indifferent, indirect. Here, sensing, thinking, knowing and being are all are one. So what does that mean for the publicly displayed and communally experienced artwork?

Maybe the most the artwork can do is express its limitations, to attempt to articulate that it is already entangled. To enunciate what timbre and atmosphere that forming relationship might be. To ask you to not just recognise and reflect on this, but to also move within and around it. Maybe we can admit that an equal relationship is, in this context, unrealisable, but insofar as it can be imagined in this space, not impossible. We can suggest impossibilities, to hand them over to the unreality of imagination: the possibility beyond not just sensing yourself sensing, but also to attempt to sense what others- human or not-  are sensing. To sense what your alternative selves are sensing.

An essay published in conjunction with the exhibition Feedback: David Beattie, Karl Burke, Chris Fite-Wassilak at the Galway Arts Centre from 2 September to 1 October 2011. Printed as part of a book sleeve released at the opening of the show, a book collecting responses and thoughts around the show from artists, writers and audience members will complete the publication project, designed by Rory McGrath (OK-RM) and Gregory Ambos, at the show’s conclusion, available for free on request.