paper visual art journal –

“The unified quality of the thing is not noise at all, but is the sensual object itself…[T]he existence of a unified quality of things means that the sensual realm is already home to a certain ‘I do not know what’ that makes the marble a steady focus of my attention…we do not say je ne sais quoi in a spirit of gentle mockery, but as a true statement about sensual objects.”[1]

I recently joined art.sy. I had read about the site a few months back in Artforum and duly signed up to receive an invite when they were being sent out, forgetting all about it until a few days ago.[2] For those yet to learn about it, art.sy presents a new online facility for the viewing and buying of art. The intriguing thing about the site is not that it heralds a new way of appreciating art, or even interacting with it. The Internet has changed the way the world is apprehended, art notwithstanding: to point this out seems oxymoronic almost. Rather, what interests me is the manner in which the art presented on the site is sorted and categorised, in so doing being inserted into unforeseen contexts and arrangements: that is, by means of what art.sy calls ‘The Art Genome Project™’.[3] This system allows for the categorisation of some fifteen thousand works of art by three thousand artists on the website, according to the application of roughly eight hundred “genes”. Most artworks exist as a melange of some thirty to forty genes. These genes, in art.sy’s estimation, rest on the conceptual, art-historical or formal data that is deduced from the artwork itself, by a team of art historians and other professionals. So, presumably there is a “collage” gene and a “Fauvism” gene; but also, in all likelihood, a “green” or even a “cat” gene.

Screen shot from art.sy in a search for artworks related to “cat”, 07/02/2013; Website: art.sy.com

The categorisation of a work of art can thus be enacted not only by virtue of it belonging to a certain school or era, but also, somewhat arbitrarily, by whether or not a cat resides within the frame. Indeed, on entering the word “cat” into the search box at the top left of the screen and pressing enter, I get forty-one results, which can then be sub-divided into twelve further categories; flatness, primary mark, geometry, contemporary graphic realism, etc. Clicking on “flatness” to get, presumably, some flat pictorial felines, I am faced with a motley crew of six results, Manet’s Olympia sitting in a grid formation alongside works by Romare Bearden and Leland Bell, amongst others. The cat truly does appear as the sole unifying factor here. In this way, art.sy really is the place for collectors with unusually specific tastes: “A contemporary hard-edged colour field painting, predominantly magenta and with dimensions of at least nine by nine? No problem!” And while there are advantages to this specificity of approach, the Art Genome Project™’s system does seem to work hard to break down the actual specificity – better still, singularity – of the individual artwork. The work of art is reduced to a relation – between you, the viewer, your wishes and desires, and furthermore, between the artwork and the sum of other artworks that encroach upon this primary relation. Olympia becomes just one picture with a cat in it, rather than a singular aesthetic representation irreducible to genes. In other words, the ‘in-itself’ becomes the ‘in-itself-as-it-relates-to others’: the artwork becomes a code to be cracked.

Recently I had a conversation with an artist about the prospect of getting her work wrong. A child of post-modernism, prone to harbouring a kind of wistful, Adorno-esque residua modernism, I was quietly delighted to hear her say, yes, you definitely could. Not all readings are correct, she said, the work is not a space for projection; rather, there is a wrong and a right way to read the work, the right way following that of the artist’s intent. Now, I am not quite sure I agree fully with this position, but I do hold a great deal of sympathy towards it. All too often, a viewer or critic (myself included) approaches the work of art with already too much in mind, too many expectations, hopes or desires. Thus the work becomes the place where such tendencies are acted out, a catalyst if you will. The result is that the work of art becomes just one factor in a broad field of relations, its singularity utterly broken. However subscribing totally to the artist’s intent is not possible for me; the truth of the artwork is not reducible to the artist-artwork relation, either. If this were the case, an artwork would be seen once, the artist’s statement read, and the work immediately assimilated; there would be nothing to gain from the second, fifth or twelfth encounter. Going even further than that, arguably the artwork wouldn’t have to be experienced at all: depending on how articulate the artist was, his or her textual or spoken explanation might well be enough.

The question lingered on, and so shortly after the above conversation I asked an artist friend the same question: is it possible to get your work wrong? Her reply was in a manner completely divergent from the first, emphasising the open-endedness of her work, and indeed even welcoming this potential multiplicity of interpretation. But I cannot, after consideration, subscribe fully to this view, either. For me, then, the artwork is shaded by a relation, but does not exist solely as a product of one: something else subsists outside of any relational binary.

Edouard Manet: Olympia (detail), 1863, oil on canvas, 130.5 cm × 190 cm (51.4 in × 74.8 inches, Collection of Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Art.sy, like the first artist, views the artwork as a puzzle to be solved, a code to be cracked. More than this, both put forward a notion of this code as (a.) solvable, and (b.) stable. Once an artwork has been assigned a specific make-up it remains this way: both artist and website imbue the work with an ‘inner’ intransigence of taxonomy that no person or context can engender. However, art.sy does not share this code; the essential qualities or traits that make up an artwork are pointedly not divulged. The artwork may well change in relation to other contexts and artworks, but the “essential” qualities (to which other things bear a relation to) remain fixed, and secret. The first artist, on the other hand, forcefully articulates and transmits this code, “only this is what it means!” no longer unnamed, yet cordoned off from the dual influence of interpretation and context. And so it appears both positions hijack the artworks’ supposedly essential qualities or ‘in-itself’; the only difference being their respective positions on these qualities’ disclosure or transmission.

Now to the second artist: where is she situated within this horizon? For her, the code is constantly in a state of remodelling or flux, her interpretation of the artwork far from sovereign, even as its creator. If the work of art’s essential quality is sketched at all, it is as aporia: interminably slipping from comprehensive understanding, it eludes even its creator’s grasp. In such a way, even the denial of an ‘in-itself’ permits a fetishisation, albeit of a relation. Although the work exists ‘in-itself’, it appears as though this is constantly being altered and remade as it pertains to a relation, not only the ‘artist-artwork’ relation but also the ‘artist-artwork-receiver’ (critic/viewer) triad. This positioning, although diametrically opposed to that of the first artist, paradoxically holds much in common with that of art.sy, also. Both share a ‘correlationist’ perspective of the work of art, in that the work of art’s essential quality is fundamentally that of a relation (between the viewer and the artwork; between the artwork and others on the computer screen, etc.). The ‘in-itself’ of the work of art, if there is one, is a product of this relation; it is neither fixed nor essential, but constantly in flux, a product of overlapping entities and contexts.

This viewpoint, of course, will be a familiar one to anyone with even a passing interest in contemporary philosophical thought, particularly that of French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, and the speculative realism school more broadly.[4] Meillassoux’s Après la finitude [5] (2006) acts as a riposte to the legacy of phenomenology, which Meillassoux predominantly blames for the contemporary dominance of what he terms ‘correlationist’ thought. This mode of thinking emphasises the pre-eminence of the subject-object correlation, and as such negates the possibility of the ‘in-itself’ of any object. Contra this position, Meillassoux and speculative realism broadly put forward the notion of an ‘in-itself’ independent of the subject-object relation; that is, indifferent to language, consciousness, etc. This Meillassoux does by using the example of the ancestral fossil (‘arche-fossil’): dating from a time anterior to human ‘givenness’, this fossil proves an irrefutable challenge to the correlationist: how can she think of this object as existing only by virtue of a relation, even though it exists as remnant of an era prior to all (human) relatedness? This object, in short, has qualities that subsist – and indeed have done so – outside of the subject-object correlation. These qualities, for all intents and purposes, are actually indifferent to that relation.

Meillassoux argues that such properties are those given only by mathematics, which alone can be thought in absolute terms by being able to function outside the remit of human relatedness. Thus speculative realism in effect absolutises mathematics, for it alone remains unaltered (and humanly unalterable) in the absence of human givenness. Which, in a strange roundabout way, brings me back to art.sy. Through its idiosyncratic classification, the artwork is reduced to a code: more than that, a secret, absolute code – one that remains intransigently static irrespective of context.[6] However, art.sy’s is an absolutely correlationist code, born only of an impartial and finite human relation. What art.sy effectively achieves is the formulation of a pseudo mathematics, the illusion of infinity where there are only the short-term gains of economy and reputation. After all, who are the individuals responsible for the assignation of genes? Where do their allegiances lie if not with profit?[7] Tangentially, and taking a wild example: say the cat population of the world becomes infected with a deadly and wholly unaesthetic virus, the net result being a universal and irrevocable aversion to felines. In every other regard, remarkably enough, the world is virtually unchanged. Now, would the value of imbuing a work of art with a “cat” gene be a constructive thing to do in such a scenario, hypothetical though it is? No it would not: no one would want to look at, let alone buy, a depiction of a cat, and so the feline gene would become inevitably debased. Similarly, in the wake of 9/11 any depiction of a skyscraper would necessarily suggest a plane crashing into it – that would have been a morbid, but wholly natural, thought progression. Now with this any depiction of shiny metropolis, skyscrapers gleaming in the sunlight, would have been unsavourable to the point of insensitivity; in short, the ‘skyscraper’ gene would slip drastically down the scale of desirable genes, most likely dragging other related ones down with it. Thus two structural hierarchies of genes exist with regard to art.sy’s system; one that makes artworks less or more desirable by virtue of their most defining genes; and another, which pertains to the genes’ specific arrangement within a certain artwork, which is dependent on how relevant each one is with regard to it. Both hierarchies are neither stable nor neutral, but instead always in a kind of relationary flux: imagining a stock exchange of genes comes close.

Aleana Egan: Room after room (2012), Steel 170 x 140 x 2cm; Image held here.

This may all seem a bit obvious, like it almost doesn’t need to be said. For me though, the art.sy conundrum neatly articulates a paradoxical desire accompanying any consideration of the art object: a petulantly divergent two-pronged desire, that is, furthermore, absolutely crucial. Two incompatible breeds of expectation are at work here, the art object thus becoming the site of a virtual tug of war. For the thought of art.sy being an apt vehicle for the systematic treatment of art remains an aberration; “‘Olympia’ cannot be reduced to a configuration of so-called genes!” Indeed there is a real vehemence present when the art object is couched in such reductively comprehensive terms. But curiously this intensity can also be matched when art is described by virtue of its ineffability or elusiveness: “For Christ’s sake, it’s just a painting – a configuration of line and shape in pigment on canvas – with a cat in it!” This dual nature is why the thought of speculative realism heralds not only a kind of ecstatic, nihilistic freedom (from relativism, from anthropocentrism, etc.), but also a kind of ontological dread: the object is indifferent to me; to language, and human mastery: that a certain something else simply doesn’t need me. This applies to all objects; dead, inert and separate, not only those described as ‘art’. A Moebius strip in-itself, the object forbears any attempt to exhaustively subdue it. For if I had full mastery over it, it would no longer fascinate; at the same time, if the potential of mastery was not present, neither would it hold me there. In it there must be present a promise, but one whose deferral is neither relational nor symbolic, but structural.

In conclusion, I wish to say that I had previously considered writing another essay, much different from this one. That essay would have served as a guide to the one you read now, if it had been written, and it may be yet. Using the form of a paragraph, the essay would comprise perhaps five or six of these condensed essay forms, and each would deal with the same work of art; the intention being to practically elucidate questions begged by speculative realism and, in a different way, art.sy. Both appear to take up the artwork’s challenge, or at least attempt some semblance of a re-evaluation. But to spend time with the work or art is always a question of its continued re-evaluation. Truly engaged consideration inevitably enters the same endgame as speculative realism, whilst at the same time negating any claims made by art.sy as to the essential, intransigent – but ultimately graspable – properties of the work of art. The work of art I was to write about is by Aleana Egan, that recently rested, slender and calm, on the walls of the Douglas Hyde Gallery.[8] Its title is Room after room, and it has stayed with me, somewhat inexplicably, from the first time I saw it.[9] It is complete in that it dictates nothing: about it, or me, or how that relation should be performed. It provides the open place for a thought, but a thought that attempts to think it through materially, as an object. For although it means something, the artist’s intent being most likely the strongest guide for figuring that out, even that is not enough: “I hear you say what it means, but…” This openness of the work is that of an ill-defined promise, but a promise that always remains a promise of something. And though the artwork’s promise might be deferred, necessarily and structurally, its fulfillment is always tangible, necessarily and structurally, too.

Rebecca O’Dwyer is a writer and researcher currently based in Dublin.  She holds a BA Fine Art Sculpture (2008) and MA Art in the Contemporary World (2010), both from NCAD, Dublin.  In 2012 she commenced a doctorial research at NCAD, focusing on the figure of transcendentalism in contemporary art.

* This essay was originally published in Paper Visual Art Journal’s Limerick hard copy edition last August. We will be shortly making the PDF of the hard copy available on the site.

______________

[1] Graham Harman (2007) On Vicarious Causation in Collapse Vol. II Speculative Realism. London: Urbanomic, pg. 214

[2] The article where I first learned about the project was Michael Sanchez Pandora’s Black Box, Artforum, March 2012. Available at: http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id=30331 (Accessed June 2012)

[3] Presumably, that ™ is there to supplement the system with even more gravitas.

[4] Speculative realism takes its name from a conference held at Goldsmiths College, London in April 2007. The conference featured presentations by Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux, and was chaired by Alberto Toscano.

[5] This then appeared in English translation as After Finitude (2008), trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum)

[6] The choice of the word gene, also, is very interesting. For me there is a kind of odd religiosity present in the equivalence between the biological and the aesthetic domain. The artwork, like the person, is formed and bound by this configuration of genes, but the primary aesthetician/biologist remains absolutely out of the frame.

[7] Although art.sy claims pedagogy as a crucial motivation of the venture, a quick look at some of its main investors makes it difficult not be cynical: they include Dasha Zhukova, founder of Moscow’s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture; Wendi Murdoch, film producer; Peter Thiel, founder of Paypal, board of Facebook; Josh Kushner, managing partner of Thrive Capital; and Jack Dorsey, creator of Twitter.

[8] Egan’s solo exhibition day wears at the Douglas Hyde Gallery ran from June 1 – July 18, 2012.

[9] Room after room (2012), Steel 170 x 140 x 2cm.  An image of the work available here: http://www.marymarygallery.co.uk/index.php/gallery/category/C2/aleana_egan/P3/ (Accessed: 4 July, 2012)

-

All too clearly do I recall being dragged around garden centres as a sullen pre-adolescent by my mother and hers. For them it was an occasion in itself, though they never seemed to need anything in particular. In any case, we would load up the car with pots and compost and shrubbery, and return home to further subdue that outside terrain known as ‘garden’.

Mairead O’hEocha: Gorilla Ornament, Arboretum, Co Carlow, 38×53 cm, oil on board, 2012; Courtesy mother’s tankstation.

Both artificial and somewhat superfluous, the garden centre is a strange place to start, and yet it is here that Mairead O’hEocha sites her new body of work. A succinct collection of seven paintings, mostly in oil on board, The Sky was Yellow and the Sun was Blue firmly embeds itself in the rural garden centre of my childhood. In these works, however, the spaces are washed out and cavernous, punctuated only by a bizarre proliferation of garden paraphernalia. In one particularly striking work, Gorilla Ornament, Arboretum, Co. Carlow, said faux-gorilla sits center stage, a surreal cacophony of refracted pastel hues. In another, Plant and Frog, a large palm plant sits between two ornamental garden frogs. In limbo: not yet bought or appropriated to other surroundings, the tawdry curios of these paintings fully divulge their singular oddity. Their strangeness is echoed in the works’ execution: the painterly decisions – that of colour and line – serve only to further reinforce the surreal quality of the subject matter. To me the colours resemble those that peek out and shimmer as light hits oil; always unforeseen, but strangely natural at one and the same time. The sky might be yellow, or mauve and pink for that matter, but there is somehow a ‘rightness’ in its surreal incongruity.

Mairead O’hEocha: Plant and Frog, oil on board, 46×55 cm, 2012; Courtesy mother’s tankstation.

O’hEocha’s style thus might somehow be considered realist, but of a loose and subjective kind. For me, her work is best described as situated on a realist trajectory, as if entering into, or indeed departing from, realism. One work, Bird Feeders and Saplings, Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow, seems to visually support such a view: these delicate and sparsely hewn forms stand in processional grandeur, creating an avenue-like effect through their sinewy forms. For me, the desire to enter into their trajectory is enticing, though its destination never wholly articulated. What is suggested is a kind of wish to interact with the works formally; thwarted and bent out of shape; misshapen and fully ‘wrong’ on the level of colour, they delimit the frame of an oddly tantalising and wonky realism. In another work, Freezing Fountain, Lusk, Co. Dublin, the fountain is transformed into a spiky geometric palimpsest: linear sketches of stalled, frozen jets of water come to resemble something a classical abstract modernist might garner from such a quotidian scene. Certainly, moving closer to the painting, the work further elucidates its debt to abstraction: the attempt at space is reduced to a flattened plane of colour and line. And yet the works never fully renege their allegiance to realism; O’hEocha’s work sees fit to find the abstract tendencies implied by bondage to what really is there.

There is both something of the ruin and utopia in O’hEocha’s subject matter: ruin, because these scenes appear as empty in their contextual zero-ground; they subsist in the hope of a deciphering futurisity that will bestow them with meaning: utopian, because within this hypothetical future clings still a kind of promise, forced and artificial though it may be. This duality in mind, the paintings’ execution teeters paradoxically between sheer banality and revelatory luminosity: a sidestep out of the predominantly grey and mauve colour scheme permits the subject matter’s reappraisal not as dead sites, but as sites simply on hold, waiting. A noticeable trait is that the sites depicted are empty of people, and so possibly they wait on humanity. Taking another view, these sites and the objects that populate them might simply be waiting on a context outside of exchange value. Taken as they are, they are purely that – decorative and wholly artificial, they exist as objects performing nothing but the uncanny desirability of objecthood. As signifiers of exchange value, they are resplendent: empty of use or context, these objects wait to be bought, appropriated and fattened up with context and use. O’hEocha’s clear decision to title every work with a deliberate specificity of place and content – for example Preformed Ponds and Water Barrel, Co. Dublin – resembles a fight against this vacancy; by binding these sites and objects to real ones, she attempts to imbue them with a life-force she knows to be absent.

Mairead O’hEocha: Garden Pond Centre, oil on board, 2012; Courtesy mother’s tankstation.

The rural garden centre is a strange premise, though: born of the desire to reclaim, tame and aestheticise the land, they are sites rooted in the wish to check nature itself. The question of taste rears its head with O’hEocha’s garish frogs and gorillas, and exotic plants wholly alien to the rural environment outside, ever redefined. And yet there is a strange optimism about these places, also. As aesthetic objects and sites, there is a luminescence that supersedes their status as pure exchange value; caught in the optimistic gaze of O’hEocha’s works, a preformed pond becomes the possibility of transcendence, the sky an unseen wash of pinks and greys and greens. The brilliance of an unspoken promise is transmitted in every work – the promise of painting, surely, but also the promise of aesthetics or beauty more generally. Wholly artificial spaces and objects though they might depict, O’hEocha’s paintings articulate the hope or promise of beauty that pervades and supports the everyday.

Rebecca O’Dwyer is a writer and researcher based in Dublin.

Brendan Earley and Kevin Cosgrove’s Nor for Nought, at mother’s tankstation, is a show in which very little happens: directly counteracting the desire for action or stimulation, the work explicates a space wherein such properties are stopped dead in their tracks. The two very different kinds of work – Cosgrove’s modestly sized, figurative oils, and Earley’s sculptural assemblages, which act almost like thwarted readymades – exist in a relationship jointly informed by the language of making both in and of itself. The objects in Cosgrove’s paintings – a car, a tractor, a small dumper truck – are both created from something, by people or other machines, and furthermore are proponents of creation; they are created for the purpose of further creation. Here, however, they lie dormant, and oddly so. The paintings appear almost as portraits of these objects, studying them in unproductive cessation. Adjacent to Cosgrove’s studies of the things and places of making, Earley’s sculptural forms thwart traditional expectations of productivity or usefulness. The materials used – aluminium, plasterboard, fibreglass, a reassembled IKEA kitchen, workbenches, and so forth – all point to an interest in making as process. There is a sense of incompletion, however; the workbench, typically used as a prop for the creation of something, becomes the final resting site for that which it creates (Pieces of the City are Forming like Islands (2010), and Workbench (2011)). Function breaks down as the work ceases to be passed on to another locale, and thus put to use. Instead, it gathers the site of production – the workbench – to itself, and realigns itself as useless, aesthetic. In both bodies of work, the site of non-creation, where function or purpose breaks down, is viewed productively, and enacted upon to make something new.

Brendan Earley: They Bedded Down for the Night, woolen blanket, foam, plastic ties, melamine, 2011; Image courtesy mother’s tankstation and the artist.

The title of the exhibition, Nor for Nought, also gives some shading to the pairing of these two artists. The title cites a passage from the Bible, a tract in which Paul puts forward to the Thessalonians the value of earning, and working for sustenance; it is a reward in itself, once it has been earned. Recompense exists in such a scenario, regardless of what form it takes. There is value, he suggests, in the simple process of work. As previously mentioned, both Cosgrove and Earley appear to share in this view. Both, through their varied depictions in the breakdown of function or usability, negate a dominant demand for an end result that is finalised, or useful. In such a way, they glean a view of working that accepts the half-done, the static or abandoned, as befitting the labour that precedes its formation. The pleasure in working is its own reward; it does not stipulate a clear and defined outcome or product. That is not to say that the artworks contained in the exhibition are neither finished nor complete – they are – but rather that they use a breakdown in function or activity as a starting point in productively giving rise to a product that diverges from both.

Kevin Cosgrove: Workshop (with cardboad), oil on linen, 2011; Image courtesy mother’s tankstation and the artist.

The exhibition itself contains paintings by Cosgrove and a collection of sculptural forms by Earley, which quietly intersperse the painterly depictions of the things and places of making. An unoccupied yellow workshop, emitting that too-bright fluoro-hue common to offices everywhere, hangs above Earley’s The Lights Are On (2011). This floor-based assemblage combines a thwarted IKEA kitchen, plastic ties, foam, and fluorescent tubes. The exchange between object and image on traversing the gallery is intriguing; one might imagine the objects being made in such spaces as Cosgrove’s, but the question of function creeps interminably in – just what kind of space would this be if given over to the creation of objects such as these? Do such spaces make any sense once the prerequisite condition of function has been abandoned? There is an almost belligerent celebration in the subversion of the object’s expected uses and narratives in Earley’s work, for example in his alternative, counter-intuitive usage of flat-pack constructions. Furthermore, another piece, Don’t Look Back (2010), uses mahogany – generally seen as an almost precious wood – in such a way as to render it virtually invisible. This wall piece comprises an aluminium form perching above a sheet of mahogany affixed to the wall, over which a sheet of black glutinous perspex is overlaid. It is infuriating both formally and ergonomically. And yet it is here that the work is interesting: to hide away that which is most valued is to run counter to economic expectations. Function does not come into the equation, but rather a dominant expectation founded on the consumerist predicate; in any case, to use mahogany here simply seems wholly function-less – MDF would have done the job just as well. It is not dissimilar to the approach taken by Cosgrove in his paintings, as he meticulously paints, pointedly in oils, spaces in which nothing is happening, or machines which at the moment he paints them, have ceased to function. A prevailing disinclination towards light and contrast – most of the works are of a similar breed tonally – further iterates the humdrum quality of these spaces and things. And yet he works towards representation of these scenes, running counter to an expectation of what, really, a painting should be. This is still life in the truest sense, empty of people, devoid of activity, and thus still yet a site of possible creation or epiphany. Another work, Workshop (with cardboard) (2011), shows a grimy workshop, all gnarled shapes and forms seeping out from a soot-black darkness. Sheets of cardboard are haphazardly thrown onto these surfaces, and out of the darkness jumps a luminous gold shade; so extravagant it appears as almost baroque. There’s an excessiveness present here that seems out of place, and it is this that holds the viewer. In other works, a swath of light serves the same purpose, pointing to a resonance which supersedes that which is represented in the work. As with Earley’s work, these paintings present us with a moment of resistance or intransigence.

Kevin Cosgrove & Brendan Earley: Nor for Nought, installation view, 2011(Foreground: Brendan Earley: All the Lights are On, reassembled IKEA kitchen, plastic ties, foam, florescent tubes, 2011); Image courtesy mother’s tankstation and the artists.

It is not for nothing that this exhibition appears to say little, or to deny a sense of finality. It is in this repudiation of a normative cycle – work, progress, completion – that both artists celebrate the process of making as an activity in itself. In offering an alternative finality, dependent on moments of inactivity or subversion, both Cosgrove and Earley put forward an alternative notion of finality. This is something that exists in a symbiotic relation to incompletion, and finds its own resting place – in time and space – through the simple acts of making, and of working.

Rebecca O’ Dwyer is a writer currently based in Sydney. She holds a BA Fine Art Sculpture (2008) and MA Art in the Contemporary World (2010), both from NCAD, Dublin. She plans to commence doctoral studies at NCAD next year, focusing on the role of transcendentalism in contemporary art. O’Dwyer is also co-editor of the publication Not Drowning but Waving,and compiles a personal blog at:

www.rebeccaodwyer.wordpress.com.

On my second visit to Suzanne van der Lingen’s exhibition Ark at the Joinery, Harold Camping, a Californian evangelical radio-prophet, predicted that the world would cease to be as we have come to know it. Come 6 pm on Saturday 21st of May 2011, Jesus Christ, he predicted, would gather the faithful to his bosom and embark on a five month project of misery for those left behind: The Rapture. And so I kept my eye studiously on my watch, all the time hoping that I wouldn’t be ‘raptured’ so I could spend some time at the Joinery. With cynicism like this, it looked unlikely anyway.

Suzanne van der Lingen: Untitled (La Nostalgie des Origines), 2011, stereoscopic print; image courtesy the artist.

And yet it seemed oddly fitting that my visit occurred within these last few hours, or rather, not. In the exhibition, Van der Lingen explores the thorny concept of truth, more specifically any kind of objective, literal truth. A palimpsest of stories – personal and archival, absurd and historical – structure the work and give it layers of meaning, which neither solidify nor elucidate ‘truth,’ but rather deny and obfuscate any approximation of it. The search for literal truth – and here I cannot but think of Camping’s skewed and elementary interpretation of the bible – is, as she suggests, doomed from the outset.

The work comprises a series of manipulated prints, derived from the artist’s grandmother’s personal photographs; a book ‘Ark,’ which resembled a visual and textual bibliography of the surrounding works; a text based wall piece documenting a conversation between her grandmother and an archivist, and a claustrophobic video piece in the gallery’s adjoining space. In their totality, the works enact an intelligent and subtle interrogation of the notion of truth as some higher, literal concept. The truth she presents us with is fragmented, not static within historical or personal ephemera, but always remade subjectively or through the demands of context. The truth is predicated on how we approach it, and consequently on how it is reformulated. Additionally, the past she represents does not become more truthful or self-evident by virtue of the fact that it is past; if anything it becomes only more inchoate with the sedimentary accumulation of time.

Suzanne van der Lingen, Ark, book, 2011; image courtesy the artist.

The large prints, in particular, demonstrate Van der Lingen’s singular approach. Selected from her grandmother’s personal childhood photographs, they were initially stereoscopic prints with the capacity for three-dimensional apprehension; two photos, indistinct by themselves, merge and enable understanding, in the process giving the illusion of depth, and indeed presence. Here they are separated, enlarged, and fused together once again, only now they do not fit. This skewed fusion demonstrates the image as composite, palimpsest: estranged from their original context they become unreadable and empty of presence. Something emotive subsists in them, however – perhaps some kind of Barthesian purity of punctum – and the eye tremors on looking as though in memory of their ‘stereoscopic potential’[i] i.e. their now irretrievable presence. Furthermore, the images take on a series of references which bear no relevance to their initial context, that of the artist’s grandmother. To me one strongly resembled a particular work by Manet; another recalled the composition of Gauguin. In any case their supposedly inherent truth becomes flooded and distorted by a multitude of other unrelated reference points. As Craig Owens says of allegory[ii]: “one text is read through another, however fragmentary, intermittent, or chaotic their relationship might be.”[iii] As a direct descendent of these images, the artist is still unable to pin them down and uncover their truth; the presence or truth once contained therein has been nullified through her act, which elucidates the movement of time, the alteration of context and perhaps most poignantly, the unreliability of memory. As with the viewer, her attempts are fundamentally ill fated. Rather than be overcome by the poignant of this state, however, Van der Lingen finds a kind of Herzogian-‘ecstatic truth’ in its movement. Engaging with the past in a ‘work-like’[iv] manner, she dialogically interacts with a potential that negates a desire for ownership or truth.

Suzanne van der Lingen: ARK, video projection, archival and found footage, 2011; image courtesy the artist.

The video piece goes further in illustrating this dialogical approach to the past. Here the artist moves away somewhat from a purely personal engagement with material, though it acts forcefully as a thread linking the entire exhibition. Archival naval footage, textual quotations and an interview with a man who believes to have found Noah’s Ark, all allude back to the prospect of a search for meaning or truth. The artist’s grandmother lost her father at sea, and certainly this underlies these more impersonal sources. Her failure to find out what had befallen him is echoed in the artist’s failure to pin down meaning, where she can find no traction. This in turn is echoed in the ludicrousness of attempting to locate the object of a biblical parable. The search, in a sense, undermines the higher concept of that which we are searching for i.e. truth. As Svetlana Boym says with regard to nostalgia, ‘only false memories can be totally recalled[v]’. Truth, in all its shifting, erratic transcendence, cannot be approximated by an engagement with literalness. However, mirroring a contemporary belief in genetic determinism, this approach is followed all too often. As in the case of the search for the Ark, or indeed the eschatological non-event, the attempt to attach literal meaning to both cases actually negates the prospect of either as such. Searching for either belies a lack of belief or faith; stifling them through literalness only suggests that allegory demands too much from us, it must be contained.

Suzanne van der Lingen: Ark, installation shot, stereoscopic prints, 2011; image courtesy the artist.

To describe Van der Lingen’s work as allegory situates it in a distinctly temporal locale; more specifically, within a temporality that is neither linear nor comprehensible, but chaotic and dispersed. The matter she unearths and explores, be they personal or objectively allusive, all share one common trait: they cannot be situated comprehensively within time or space. As such – flipping Boym’s assertion on its head – they cannot be totally recalled by virtue of the fact that they are true. Truth here does not bear any relation to transparency or literalness; with ‘true’ is denoted something that remains elusive and yet tantalisingly close, the family photo which remains unknowable even though we are familiar with those whom it depicts. Truth is truth because it is irreducibly unknowable, therefore demanding the presence of belief or faith. Van der Lingen’s work accepts this: the search for semantic truth is ultimately doomed, but this searching paradoxically remains more important in the cultivation of belief than actual sighting of it.

Rebecca O’Dwyer is writer based in Dublin.

__________

[i] Suzanne Van der Lingen in conversation with Tadhgh O’ Sullivan at the Joinery, 19^th of May 2011.

[ii] Allegory might be an interesting way of looking at Van der Lingen’s work also, especially alongside Craig Owens’ insistence of its specifically temporal nature. This is induced by his use of the word ‘palimpsest,’ which describes a scroll typically written on over and over so that multiple layers of text remain visible under the most recent inscription. Meaning, in allegory, thus has a distinctly temporal dimension.

[iii] Craig Owens The Allegorical Impulse (1980) October, vol. 12 (Spring 1980) pg. 69

[iv] Dominic La Capra in Jennifer Roberts Mirror Travels: Robert Smithson and History (2004) New Haven & London: Yale University Press pg. 5

[v] Svetlana Boym The Future of Nostalgia (2001) New York: Basic Books pg. 54