On Connection and Reconciliation – Question 4
You make references to tribal art. Is your work not just a form of escapism in its connection to something that is outside your immediate environment and connected to the past?
By not intending to literally transcribe the zeit geist, I feel that perhaps I am better positioned to articulate deeper preoccupations from a view point that extends in either direction from now. In Carola Giedion-Welcker’s introduction to her book published in 1937, Modern Plastic Art: Elements of Reality, Volume and Disintegetation, she says;
Plastic art is visible and tangible. It is derived from the formation of actual bodies.
In periods of great religious activity this art was the vehicle of various cults that enshrined the memory of the departed or symbolized the conception of immortality. Plastic art, therefore, became an essential part of human culture almost from the outset. From the remotest times symbols, which were in no sense attempts at direct portrayal, were employed as intermediaries for man’s relations with the gods, the stars, the seasons, life and death. Their impersonal and spiritual function was part and parcel of a far wider complex of nature, religion and cult, the tribe, or state, and its monuments.
These matters are as relevant today as they ever were. Since the renaissance our relationship with nature has changed as did our collective engagement with religion after the enlightenment. What I am doing is calling on events preceding humanity the concepts of which have a direct bearing on our sense of place in the universe. The debate between Creationism and Evolution is a case in hand. Processes that led to our being here and will continue long after we have gone. At the exhibition Eternal Metamorphosis at the Dissenters Gallery in 2008 a view arose that my work was in some way frightening. It was a world devoid of people yet full of life. I consider this exclusion of humanity not one of negation. It is an affirmation of a process on which we depend but have no control. The process of contingency. Evolution, yes it is the mechanism ascribed to our existence, but contingency is why we are here. The why is so much more potent than the how.
We exist because every single ancestor survived, every single creature that anteceded us for billions of years, the countless fusions of gametes, each and every offspring leading to us survived. We depend on the original Eve having lived long enough to give rise to further generations of Eves, ad infinitum. Had a single link in this 3 billion year old chain been broken you and I would not be here. Chance works this way, a priori the probability is near to zero, after the fact the outcome is absolute certainty. The inbetween is awe inspiring.
I am not escaping into a world of make belief and fiction but confronting head on the fragility and magnitude of all that there is. The work is not about people, it is the result in people. The absence of a human subject says something that could not be said by direct reference to society or the individual. Poetry depends on what is not said and the merest hint is sufficient to open out a new world. In the end all we can ever do is whisper.
J.G. Ballard put it very eloquently,
Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs… Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory.
— The Drowned World, J.G Ballard, Millennium 1999, p 41.