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Is the real world real? Richard Larter on vision and how little we know about it.

When I was a schoolkid I thought that we all shared what we saw and that we shared the same conscious experience of sight. I realised that the blind, colourblind, and people with eye damage did not share this with us. However I imagined thatwe all saw in the same way and that our mental pictures would be similar.

When I read about 'stream of consciousness' this reinforced my thinking, and certainly the way we used language to describe our thinking, our recollections, gave me the idea that we shared a visual vocabulary.

As a young man I soon realised that this was untrue and for many various reasons people see things differently. You could even say they see things subjectively.

My subsequent activity as a visual artist has always contained an awareness of this. When thinking of society I am aware thatthis is true of all aspects of our mental activity. People select viewpoints, they prefer and choose certain books, magazines and newspapers, and opt to ignore others. The same is true for films, television programs and videos. Likewise for radio listening, music, eating habits, sports, amusement and most other activities. They choose, or are induced to choose preferences in these matters, we usually call these 'lifestyles'.

The choosing of lifestyles is greatly influenced by the media; radio, TV and the Press. In these days of corporatism the interests of the global corporations are obtained and enforced by the trivialisation of politics and the economic totalitarianism which has led to the compliance of all mainstream political parties, on a worldwide basis. This means that anywhere in the world a General Election is incapable of electing a government that can effect real social or economic changes. This, we still stupidly imagine, is Democracy. We accept truly fourth rate Presidents, Prime Ministers, Ministers and government officials. These people lie to us; think of Mad Cow disease, atomic waste, so-called 'non' prisoners of war, the greenhouse effect, mass starvations and the arms trade, to mention just a few.

So what has all this got to do with visual art, I hear you mutter. Well, as it happens, a great deal. In a world where bureaucracies and managers flourish, the visual arts have become the responsibility of bureaucrats, whose understanding of visual art is tempered by the economic prerogative.

Only a manager can understand our work; we are all clients; the artist needs a welcoming accreditation from one or other compartment of the art bureaucracy. Without such accreditation, or almost 'a licence to practice', the individual artist is virtually decreed 'not to exist'. As with all bureaucracies, those who are paid to look, only look at a small selection they choose to look at. Today the art world is like a large cellar, with only a small torch illuminating but a very small area. Those who have intellectual pretensions turn to other disciplines to explain what they choose to think is happening in the visual arts. They, the non-practising, feel it necessary to explain our art by what they choose to think we are thinking.

We do not know how we think - this is a scientific fact. We cannot say that when we look at something, we know what another person sees. When we see something in our memory, or mind's eye, we cannot verify what another sees. So how meaningful is a discussion? The science of the mind has not advanced sufficiently, we do not understand consciousness. You are reading these words, but who can say what it means to you? Consciousness is your own unique subjective experience. We do not understand the mind, there are lots of theories but no real breakthrough has been made.

In our extremely ignorant and imperfect world the only sensible way of dealing with the visual arts is to look. But how that 'looking' affects our thoughts, memories and imagination is subjective. We can try to share our subjective reactions to looking, with other people, and a dialogue is possible just as long as we remember that all our seeing is subjective. It is blatantly stupid to expect others to share or agree with our subjective reactions to looking.

Many such discussions however are pleasant and enjoyable as we reveal our minds to one another. Society at all levels is made up of such sharing, it is how homo sapiens passes on information. In science there are verifiable facts, that is information. Also there are assumptions and hypotheses; these are not facts but they can be useful for kick-starting thinking and ideas.

Today in the visual arts we suffer from being considered unimportant, the subject not worthy of too much attention. We also suffer a lack of interest from those who are communicators in the media so that a few scrappy reviews will suffice. You can have a retrospective show reviewed shortly and in a puerile manner by a fellow artist with an image reversed and mis-captioned. But what should we expect in such a world as ours?, with G.W. Bush and John Howard, corporate greed almost worshipped, and where the bottom line is considered the most important element in any human endeavour.