musings on art | Ianpalmer

In the beginning ...

“If we hope to live not just from moment to moment, but in true consciousness of our existence, then our greatest need and most difficult achievement is to find meaning in our lives.” (Bettelheim 1991, p.3)

The first part of this essay relates to testament and the recording of experience and memory, the second to the visual aspects of text as a creative and expressive artform.

Prelude

Joseph Kosuth is noted for his frequently repeated mantra that artists “work with meaning”. (HolyChicTV 2010) (Kosuth 1991) Meaning is always mutable and heterogeneous. For those of a religious bent, “in the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1). Words constitute text which, when shaped into language organise, in the words of Lawrence Weiner, “our (human) essential experience” (PLANE—SITE 2018) . The past is a prelude to our present, not an alternative to it (Samuel 1996, p.332). We are all representative of our times; to which we bear witness and testament to. We possess a temporal identity and its residual mark in our memory as a consequence of our journey through lived experience and how we personally record that as memory. But what is a memory?

Current psychological theory sees memories as integral to our identity and held in neural networks across differing parts of the brain which can be reactivated. The more this reactivation occurs the stronger the memories become. However, they remain unstable and are not secure as such but by regularly revisiting them we re-consolidate them. Because they are not fixed, every time we revisit them we, through a process of re-layering, can reconstruct our narrative in different ways to suit our needs. (The Guardian 2019)

Agamben has explored issues of testament at the personal and societal levels, most particularly in relation to Holocaust survivors, and how not only do we contain traumatic memories but also how society, through the circumstances of power structures within society, conspires to allow or disallow, believe or disbelieve personal testaments. (Agamben 2002) In our poststructuralist world it is easier to question the a priori ‘givens’ within the hegemony of the states and cultures we inhabit. I am interested in testament which is by its nature is personal and a posteriori. The issues in relation to testament are part of the criminal justice system and their most controversial have been examined in relationship to Holocaust deniers. (Weizman 2015)

It is clear that everything is the consequence of an interaction between many and varied parts and wholes as well as the consequences of serendipity which prompted the state that our personalities can “never be stated with absolute certainty as to the future and, so far as the actual manifestation has gone, can only be fixed in retrospect by ignoring the play of chance and free decision.” (Jaspers 1997, p.434) Theoretical possibilities are an endless intellectual game. But to be sure, not one of us will survive intact indefinitely and no one nor state is omniscient. The unending struggle to understand ourselves and our temporal world is akin to the labour of Sisyphus. (Jaspers 1997, p.33)

He goes on to talk about the “the unknowable reality of the world” as we encounter it across our life-cycle and that even “as our knowledge of meaning grows we are forced up against the non-understandable” (Jaspers 1997, p.430) The innate tools we possess in setting-out on this endeavour relate to our genetic make-up, parental abilities at nurturance, our family life, our educational opportunities and achievements, our communities, societies and cultures. These all conspire to create, if I have understood him correctly, our (pre- or unconscious) “Background” (Searle 1996, p.129) with which we question the world and make sense of our social realities, a sort of mental map or navigational aid incorporating our hermeneutic endeavours to date.

The sources of information about our world can be learnt passively, either verbally or nonverbally, within our families, societies and cultures particularly when accompanied by the psychological process of ‘mirroring’. (Wikipedia contributors 2018) And although there is no escaping history and the hermeneutic cycle, we do not remember everything, in fact we possess a “strange tendency” to forget important things in our lives, even what is really meaningful to us. (Lehan 2011) I believe that intuition may be an unconscious fictive way of reconnecting with some of our seemingly lost memories if we are stimulated in particular ways of making art. Perhaps artistic practice is one way of ‘fixing’ important (lost) things in our personal, community, cultural and political lives so they are not forgotten, and its meaning archived for others to mine at a future time.

Green (2006, p.53) explores the issues of that which is missing from traces and the gaps in our minds’ recollections and understandings. But are there things about us that are really beyond understanding? Or are they simply constructions that have fallen in between the spaces or the aporias of our consciousness. Between the clashes of what we say and what we comprehend; events and their representation; organising systems and their befuddlements; what we’ve seen and what we believe; what we hear and what we feel; what we deem to be certain or indeterminate and how we manage such discords. Text, alphabets through textual and verbal parole (Wikipedia contributors 2019d) is one way of ordering, indexing and assigning meaning which bolsters the structuring fundamental to understanding.

Wither text?

Giorgio Agamben felt that the political life (bios) and life itself (zoë) had collapsed and created a type of politics where humans are conceived in terms of populations rather than individuals, the ‘how’ the ‘who’ of people. (Buchanan 2010)

This idea resonated with my experience as a doctor over four decades during which time I have witnessed the form of medicine, for bone fide financial reasons, becoming more statistically/numerically based/biased. It is now almost impossible to find a place in a medical journal (of repute) a paper about what happens in the consultation and the testaments of doctors’ direct experience of illness and its treatment. This is because, although integral to the ‘art’ of medicine, such testaments are not ‘statistically’ valid despite being descriptions of how statistics are ‘applied’ to ‘non-statistical beings’ in individual idiosyncratic situations.

“As time goes on we are alone with all the information we have accrued” (Edric 2003) p246) and as I write this out before typing, I realise that I am making a human mark, my unique mark and autograph of who I am, my identity, which directly connects me to the page and to text and art as a way of connecting. I sincerely believe that art is about exploring the human condition in whatever medium. The making of the mark is important to me for there is no mark (record) of my birth for I was abandoned shortly after birth. Furthermore, I bear the narrative marks of my patients over 40 years particularly as a practitioner in the arena of post-traumatic disorders. Text is perhaps my most appropriate platform from which to create, parse, connect and communicate through text in art.

Influences

During previous, largely illiterate times, text was a notational, instructional record of, and script for, performance (Wikipedia contributors 2019e). Punctuation was absent and deemed unnecessary as the text were already known and studied by their orators. Initially, in the Greek and Roman (Western) tradition, the structure of prose and poems reflected the spoken word very closely, in that there were no breaks between the words scriptio continua viz.:

initiallyinthegreekandromanwesterntraditionthestructureofproseandpoemsreflectedthespokenwordverycloselyinthattherewerenobreaksbetweenthewordsscriptiocontinua

This form of writing continues in Thai, Burmese, Khmer, Lao, Javanese, Balinese and Tibetic languages. Chinese and Japanese scripts can also be written as scriptio continua. This was a mode of writing which made possible creative and more dramatic performance-based readings whilst at the same time providing possibilities of conflict through differing interpretations and ambiguities.

Scriptio continua requires more attention and time but this was less of a problem when only a small proportion of the population was literate. It makes understanding and the passage of knowledge difficult, more subjective, taxing and ambiguous. The first partial solution to this was the interpunct (Wikipedia contributors 2019b), a mark between each word. I have been exploring such text in such a way to examine visual engagement with text presented in different ways which may appear as if foreign or simply abstract marks.

By about the ninth century, written medium had become both a visual as well as aural autonomous marker of language. Initially punctuation aided expression in recitation by identifying pauses selected by the text author. Subsequently it became a system of structural signs to aid silent reading that we recognise today (Lanham 2006, p.118) Writing was largely in the hands of scribes/scriveners in religious or royal establishments and subject to particular aesthetics. And although woodblock printing had existed since the second century particularly in China the move to typography really took off in the 1440s with the development by Johannes Gutenberg (Wikipedia contributors 2019c)of the printing press. Over the subsequent 500 or so years the mechanics of printing, modes of presentation, ubiquity of sources and the aesthetics of typography have developed displacing increasing numbers of people from undertaking the unique characterological mark of the human hand.

In Europe, the separating of words was underway between the 13th and 14th century. This parsing of text, at a stroke, aided clarity and offered readers a more straightforward way of interrogating and interpreting the author’s intentions. An analogy would be a musician examining a musical manuscript, the development which developed pari passu the printed word. The way was opened for the widespread dissemination and assimilation of knowledge (Wikipedia contributors 2019e)

I have however only really examined the 20th century in relation to art and text. In the years before the First World War textural manipulation was embraced by the Futurists in Italy as a way of propaganda directly aimed at the public. They were succeeded by Dada (Hopkins 2004) in Zürich, Paris Berlin and New York whose practitioners blatantly and brilliantly set out to subvert written, spoken and performed texts as a counterblast to the chaos and madness that was World War I. As well as the Futurists, their work was influenced by, but more radically different from, the symbolic poet Mallarmé and calligrammes of Apollinaire who were starting to explore the variability of communication through the symbolic use of language.

The commotion that was Dada was historically short but hugely influential to the development of modern art particularly conceptual. Through the use of text and linguistics in many and varied forms, they started the process of dissolution of art as an object and more concept playing liberally with developing contemporary communication systems of the early 20th century. They drew attention to the semiotic codes and systems of language and started a process of clarifying intangible and immutable aspects of communication particularly the written. They chose dissonance over resonance every time. (Selby 2017, p.91)

Text can be a diary and memorialisation, transcription and offers a kind of legibility of the internal and external environment. Artistically, it can offer a fleeting, shadowy, even transcendent view of humanity and life, certainly within the purview of an individual artist anyway (Iversen 2012).

I am hugely indebted to it and the many artists who have, and continue to, manipulate texts for example: Isidore Isou, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Dom Sylvester Houedard, Fiona Banner, Glen Ligon, John Baldessari, Martin Creed, Robert Montgomery, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, Stefan Brüggemann et al.

I am also influenced by surrealism both in my thinking and earlier works, particularly collages. To me it has mirrored or been a side-effect of my psychotherapeutic life as a physician and psychiatrist. I cannot but acknowledge the trace of the unconscious in the work of artists great and small. The other psychoanalytical process I suggest is inherent in the ménage a trois between the artist, the work of art and the viewer, is projection and projective identification/introjection (Wikipedia contributors 2019a). Projection is the psychological defence mechanism that ejects ‘unacceptable’ emotions from the individual out into the void (or into the work of art) to be received by another/others who can identify with the content or even introject its powerful emotions. This is most likely when the content of the work of art/text resonates with an individual’s conscious or subconscious mind.

The process is a reciprocal one and, as our subjective experience can never be objectively measured, I think works of art offer viewers, if open to it, glimpses of another human’s subjective understanding and worldview and the opportunity to relate unconsciously with the ‘unsaid’ of our lives.

I have always identified with the subversive elements and liberating possibilities that Dada offers me as an artist. Using my intuition to create unusual arrangements of images and/or words can create new collocations. I think that unusual associations and particularly the abstract of the new avenues to explore the materiality of work in a non-proscriptive way. Where clues as to the artist’s intent are offered to the viewer who, by projecting their cognitive and emotional processes on to the work, ascribe meaning-for-them. For example, see the lines of chirographic script in a more abstract way as a mark joining up or bridging spaces and its materiality (Carels & Macfarlane 2012, p.36) composed of an accumulation of particles of graphite dust and particulate matter in ink moving the focus from how we decode the lines to how do we create such lines.

Because everything that is written is coded into graphemes of alphabets into a logic of punctuated linguistic representative systems that require decoding and thereby enlivened by the viewer after having been through a process of physicochemical energy exchanges. The energy of light triggers electrical impulses on the retina and the occipital cortex which are then relayed to the appropriate cerebral networks to make possible an understanding of what the eyes, ears are hearing or the body perceiving. Everything is coded into physico-chemico-electrical impulses within the brain’s neural decoding network.

This process is now mirrored whereby the physical touch on our phones, tablets and computers is turned into electronic impulses and codes of binary numbers algorithms all of which are indecipherable by the human mind and require another computer before they can be apperceived after decoding by the viewer’s electronic equipment only then can the information be processed neurochemically by the cerebrum of the beholder. When text conforms to typographical principles of uniformity, continuity and linearity (Carels & Macfarlane 2012, p.18) but all without materiality unless printed (after another iteration of binary number algorithms) or when handwritten.

The use of text in art can be an exploration of how words affect us, stimulate narratives and myths in our minds and even encourage us to delve into the complexity of language in its many and varied forms. It can also lead to an examination of legibility/ineligibility relation to meaning. I have particularly been embracing this in my work playing with the concepts of interpretation and comprehension of text using it to create an abstract presentation contemplation.

Elucidation

Since the beginning there was the word, and since the beginning it has remained a chameleon; particularly for artists. Amongst others, Lawrence Weiner (PLANE-SITE 2018) amongst many others goes on to say that art is about the reality of life and that it acts through relationships between humans within the World. It strikes me that art, however manufactured, is a form of conversation and like all conversations has something to say, a viewpoint. Just like Lawrence Weiner, I have found that language and gesture are a more potent way of developing my art which has latterly been an exploration of text, with or without meaning, and leaning towards the aleatory. Just as in the beginning, in the end, will be the word - albeit not necessarily handwritten or typographically printed on paper and in books.

Like a picture, text is visual conversation, stating its intention by its physical form to reveal the purpose of the artist/author by uncovering the temporality as well as remembrance or commemoration of something observed, and felt to be worth recording, by one individual who considered it to be worth signifying to other readers or viewers.

Although it may be felt that texts can more easily reveal their message, this is not necessarily the case. Texts certainly hold meanings which may be clear, hidden, obfuscatory, targeted or diffuse and the meaning of which differ for each reader/viewer. Texts of a sacred nature for example provide a raft of hermeneutic scholars to service the proselytisers.

Most texts, and works of art, at some level must address what it is to be alive and in the world. The only place to start this endeavour is the past. The past is our starting block for life and our involvement in the process of being human and our personal hermeneutic cycle (Mantzavinos 2016). If life was clearly understandable there would be few texts on the subject and even fewer religions. Of course, the delusional amongst us can, and do, tend to believe absolutely in some sacred texts and naturally want us to share their beliefs and delight. Similar behaviour is mirrored in some political circles (Steyerl 2011). Even the less delusional amongst us, can ignore or forget our unique personal approach to understanding the world and our place within it, is analysed through our own personal prisms.

The process of education dictates our introduction and exposure to information generally in textual form. It is impossible to not be aware of the tsunami of information available in the modern (media) world. In this situation the problem rapidly becomes one of how to manage, comprehend and contextualise the plethora of data relentlessly served-up in compressed forms to individuals whose attention spans are rationed by the onslaught. Consequently, the time available for immersion and contemplation is diminished and where content or stuff is replaced by style and volume of fluff (Steyerl 2009). Art is now a major stakeholder in what has become a virtual marketplace.

The first steps in understanding are self-reflective, to be aware of who we are and what our “Backgrounds” are. We all have a place from which we view the world and the view is enhanced when we understand the differences between our own personal biases and those of others (Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science 2010) in negotiating the ‘unknowable reality’ of Jaspers.

My biases include: foundlingism, sexagenarianism, being a psychiatrist, Gestaltism, supporting Arsenal, generally heterosexual, male gendered, a selection of age-related afflictions as well as Caucasianism albeit of Pictish extraction. Clearly, I am a refugee from the “foreign country” of JP Hartley (Hartley 2015), washed up on the shores of UCA Canterbury. Just like me dear reader, it is a country you will visit in due course.

My practice has developed as I have come to understand more about the power that visual marks, be they in the form of graphemes, drawings, words or sentences, offer me as I explore issues related to meaning and its relationship with an art and text (Selby 2017). This process is impossible without the understanding of time. I like the idea that text is an attempt by its author to, if not arrest the relentless tide of time, then to at least create some ripples in it; the-time-of-our-life-remaining that is.

Illumination

All artworks are a present to viewers. Conceptual art’s present offers and requires from them a different form of attention and engagement. The offer can be playful, political, poetical and intellectual.

Released from the diktats of representational art but falling somewhere short of total abstraction, conceptual art has given a primacy to text which by their very presentation alter the apperception of an audience because they bring with them all of the semiotic burden of language, it’s langue and prole. Words can be confounders or enlighteners in situations where they are used outside viewers linguistic experience and the work may not even be a physical object.

The use of text in art is important because all viewers from the same or similar cultures, age and education share lexicons and their attendant syntactic constructions. Text offers a direct communal language and connectivity with an audience in the dialogue of engagement understanding; should an audience decide to participate in this process.

I am most interested in the presentation-process, particularly when problematised. For example; when the position of text is unusual, meaning of words is obsolete or archaic, languages foreign and uncommon graphemes or symbols are used all of which can offer a more intriguing and playful befuddlement in the search for meaning, or not.

But playfulness in the positioning of textual work is not new. The ancient Greeks inscribed capital letters which aligned both vertically and horizontally in a grid-like way (stoichedon). In boustrophedon text is bidirectional where every other line is inverted or reversed and has to be read in an opposite direction, traces of this can be seen in mirror writing, for example on the bonnet of emergency ambulances the word ambulance is printed in mirror text in order to be read the right way around in a driver’s rear-view mirror. Leonardo da Vinci wrote many of his personal notes in this fashion seems to have a genetic basis. Another interesting and very challenging presentation is the Roman Sator Square which contains a five-word palindrome

Practice

The first tension in using words in deciding to use words relates to whether or not they are used to communicate, consolidate or subvert meaning and whether or not they are to be legible -which harks back to the earlier discussion of scriptio continua. Even text, as opposed to a visual image, is at root an abstract series of marks that is decoded by the brain into meaning. Reception theory suggests that text does “not properly exist until it is read” (Buchanan 2010). Which then begs the question of under what conditions makes it meaningful?

But there is also the use of stylistic elements and the pervasive influence of the overt or covert lattice-work/grid (grids the book) i.e. the mathematical structure and underpinning of how and where to place text now nearly reified in electronic communications. This is of paramount importance when text is to be used as a form of communication of information, but such considerations can be subverted.

But style is inherent in the grammatical structures of every culture. As a European I start at the top left-hand corner and work my way down to the bottom right-hand corner. This reflects in part and in a more orderly way, the saccadic movement of the eyes when confronted with an image. I have taken the definition of saccade i.e. A brief, rapid movement of the eye from one position of rest to another, whether voluntary (as in reading) or involuntary (as when a point is fixated) (Stevenson 2010) as a starting point for my exploration of text, randomness and grids.

The first technical artistic decision on the journey is how and where to position text in each medium (ground). This need not be textural but can be auditory or visual or even textural. I have chosen to use two-dimensional grounds and to consider the concept of the page as a map where in all of the information is presented at once although an explanatory legend may be required, or not. In addition a map is associated with the ideas of space and mapping is something we do whenever we enter any space thereby making it a place (van der Zandt 2012).

Language is composed of words structured in a particular way and composed from alphabetical graphemes and suffused with semiotic coatings and which require decoding which we have learned from childhood.

I have also explored the coding issues we unknowingly confront every time we look at a computer screen where our physical touch on keys and screens is turned into the electronic coding i.e. numbers, albeit binary which to an uninformed audience would seem to be composed of random numbers.

But where to start on the page? I am experimenting with using generated random numbers to inform this. Their use immediately generates a series of questions. For example (a) where to go next, (b) how far to go, (c) in what direction? And then what use to make the lines created? Should they be simply lines, guides for writing or outlines of shapes? If using the lines to write upon, in which direction should the script be written?

The whole performance is a deliciously random and enticingly creative a journey into the befuddlement of the new and there seems a corollary here with the work of life.

Postlude

The movement of the text on a page or computer screen, be it forwards or backwards, boustrophedonic, parsed or unparsed, may be a metaphor for the human desire for direction and certainty in life, for structure, certainty, licence, creativity, insight and understanding mirrored, minimised and made manageable on a page. The human condition, corralled and controlled therein where, in a safe place, the random acts which perturbate our lives have been mastered, mitigated, or at least explained. It may even provide solace for our greatest ontological fear of our death which we all consign to our deepest unconsciousness in order to get through each day. This fear is however resurrected at times of life-threatening trauma (Hawley & Matheson 2010, p.127)

When presented with difficulties we naturally seek information from friends, family and colleagues. Literature may also illuminate the darkest corners of anxious minds and provide a kind of text map to negotiate our lives. Importantly, the time taken to read literature is likely to produce an understanding of the context of its generation. This may not be the case with information gleaned from the Internet, particularly the news media where a very large caveat is in order which in Roman would be caveat emptor which means ‘read the small print’. How many of us think critically about news? But a moment’s thought will reveal that only the uncommon or unusual makes the cut. Good news is certainly bad news as far as the media is concerned as it does not ‘sell copy’. In statistical terms news has a problem with denominators which they generally don’t draw attention to but without attention to this it can feed personal and societal anxieties and then we can mistake uncommon things for common things, especially given the attention given to seduction through style and presentation, above substance.

In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr describes familiar symptoms while trying to absorb text of any length: “My concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread and begin to look for something else to do.” The book’s main contention is that our highly plastic brains are being rewired by the demands of online existence: an increased knack for mental multitasking comes at the price of our ability to think deeply (Dowling 2019).

The exponential growth in the provision of, and access to, information can pour petrol on the flames of misinformation by also eliding the thought that there is not enough time to give it full attention. This is an old trope which Seneca (c5 BC-A.D. 65) nailed when he said, “life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given for us the highest achievements if it were all well invested.” (Seneca 2004).

It involves motivation, education and desire, but we all can take time to identify the cant and hypocrisy of vested interests and the polemical, political or Political not only in historical documents but also in the here and now. Only desire and time makes possible the immersion, questioning and contemplation required to negotiate the daily cacophony of competing narratives in our sensory lives in order to sort the ‘stuff’ from the ‘fluff’ (Lanham 2006, p.5). All of which begs the question: is art ‘stuff’ or ‘fluff’ …. Answers on a postcard please.

Thank you for reading this essay.

April 2019

References:

Agamben, G., 2002. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Zone Books.

Bettelheim, B., 1991. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Penguin Books.

Buchanan, I., 2010. A Dictionary of Critical Theory, OUP Oxford.

Carels, E. & Macfarlane, K., 2012. Graphology: Drawing from Automatism and Automation, Drawing Room.

Edric, R., 2003. Peacetime, London: Black Swan.

Dowling, T., 2019. Would life be happier without Google? I spent a week finding out. The Guardian. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/17/would-life-be-happier-without-google-i-spent-a-week-finding-out [Accessed April 17, 2019].

Hartley, L.P., 2015. The Go-between, Penguin UK.

Hawley, A. & Matheson, J., 2010. Making Sense of Disaster Medicine: A Hands-on Guide for Medics, CRC Press.

HolyChicTV, 2010. HolyChic.com: Joseph Kosuth, Youtube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoD5au1UCdI [Accessed April 15, 2019].