Return
to the real world: a reply to Richard Larter
In our last issue Richard Larter offered some thoughts on the
art world, politics and thought itself. Here, Chris Jones responds.
“We guess by analogy” (1).
To answer the question “Is the real world real?" Richard
Larter created his own and termed it the “art world”.
In a muddled flip of writerly irony, he sought to expose the benefit
of perception active within the practices of art by gleaning authority
from the abstract world of “scientific facts”; a rigid
domain of static perception functioning antithetically to lively
acts of artistic perception. In a manner reflecting the argument
structures used by economic and political bureaucracies so rightly
raising his ire, Larter engineered an “art world” by
manufacturing an argument filled with abstract “societies”
and fictitious “theys”. To do so, he first poured into
the argument’s mould the great unwashed “ours”,
“us” and “we” of conventional analytic research,
(characters who only befriend fictive analysts tenured high within
ivory towers: see Jean Baudrillard et al). When full, he then
sculpted each new resident into neat and trimmed points arranged
carefully within the growing body of his text. When ready, he
rounded the finished piece to form an article finally representing
the shiny sphere of an “art world”. But Richard, to
whom were you referring when describing the ”we”, “suffering
from being considered unimportant”? Who were the “we”
of the “art world” that “stupidly imagine”
democracy for instance? (To stupidly imagine is perhaps the first
step in any worthwhile artistic project, and an effective technique
whilst engaging seriously un-stupid, un-imaginative, political
practices). And who were the “our” whose collective
“mental activity” you claim to know the “truth”
about? Finally, who were the “us” you perceived continually
lied to by “fourth rate Presidents, Prime Ministers, Ministers
and Government officials”? When was the last time Bush, Howard,
Kemp or Keating lied to you; when was the last time they even
spoke to you? The “art world” you created to succeed
as an argument certainly doesn’t include me and I consider
myself one of the many gallery ghosts who’d expect a swift
invite to its opening. By couching your claims within rhetoric
floating high upon clouds of assumption, you raise serious, challenging
and I hope popular issues, surrounding the vital topic of perception
within the practices of contemporary art. To point out just a
few of these issues, and hopefully generate discussion around
this topic, I will refer to your article that raised them, (published
in vol.1, no.2 of A Public of Individuals), as case study
for mine.
Throughout
your argument you privileged the elitist mode of perception sustained
by Cartesian dualism, an inherently authoritarian structure raising
intellectual minds above the ambiguities of their supposedly unthinking,
untrustworthy bodies. For example, from the fixed locality of
your writing station you perceived “our extremely ignorant
and imperfect world”. How did you do this from the fixity
of a seat? Only with a detached mind’s eye perceiving information
through a telescope, forged by the hand of Galileo perhaps, could
you survey with such a broad vision. Extending this privilege
to dualism you added, “We do not know how we think –
this is a scientific fact”. Scientific fact is thought, what
else could it be? Scientific facts are thoughts written as words
into books and computers. They present as terms demarcating abstract
themes and authoritative explanations; they are concepts and ideas
interpreting, and wholly distorting, the sensational world of
things and objects. To argue “we do not know how we think”
because this is what science thinks is to extend self-reflexive,
circular arguments spun by rationalists installed high inside
towers of academe, set fast to their seats in long forgotten postures,
warmed through by the romantic glow of a two-bar heater and pumped
full with the rarefied oxygen of idealism. What these and other
examples from your article expose is a lack of subjective awareness
in the process of analytic perception; in other words, you disregard
the I in your eye. This disregard, all too common within analytic
research and writing, forms a gap between the perceiver and the
perceived creatively filled by abstract thought and concepts;
concepts which are wholly divorced from the details of life in
order to sustain bold discussions about manufactured “worlds”
dis-located far from their actions therein. These actions, full
of blood, shit, sweat and moments of real reality manifest paintings,
installations, interactive environments, photographs, textiles
and performances. These are the responsible marks from the grounds
of the living earth; embodied interactions of subjective dialogue
presented within the moving acts of artistic practices, not practice
concretised within the fixity of an abstract “art world”.
My want to expose your body from the process of thoughtful perception
may seem a rather odd intention. But it is only by admitting the
multi-sensorial function of the body into the process of perception
that one can responsibly and accurately analyse phenomena perceived:
it is also the only way to fully embrace perception within the
processes of art. By admitting the body to the process of perception
you, as analyser of objects perceived, are compelled to a direct
and lively relation with the “facticity” of the object
as Maurice Merleau-Ponty would write. Consequently, during perception,
you become bound to an awareness of all the influences effecting
that facticity as they correspondingly interact with your nearby
perceiving body; influences affecting the process of remembering
as it brings to mind thoughts of childhood sight for instance.
These influences might involve the colour, speed and proximity
of the locality in which you’re remembering; the shape, line
and contour of your body whilst in the posture of remembering;
perhaps the temperature surrounding and interacting with you as
each memory arises; or even the mood in which you’re in whilst
remembering. By admitting your wide and lively body to the process
of perception - your I to your eye - you are bound within a fascinating
and responsible interaction within the variegated life of the
object’s perception. If, on the other hand, recourse to the
fiction of rational authority is relied upon to attain meaning
from the thing, all you will perceive, as layers added to the
thing, will be hackneyed dusty themes; concepts regurgitated from
a tome or google searched web-site destined to “excite the
mind” of your reader, as Descartes would write. This application
to the thing with abstract interpretation is the antithesis of
artistic perception, sensing momentary freshly essences within
the lively living “thingness of the thing” as Heidegger
would write. Instead, like fetish applied to an old wooden cross,
it is the essential project of power.
Power’s project is the control of the perceived thing through
authoring its explanation and interpretation. It relies upon talking
loud and effectively to others about things unperceived, in the
way I’m writing here and now with this buzzing screen through
words about intimate thoughts and feelings that, as marks on the
distant page you now perceive, control your attention whilst reading.
Power is inserted between perceiver-thing relations by an author
controlling explanation and interpretation of the thing perceived.
This control, usually inserted as the filter of language, allows
an author with intent to authorise the process of explanation
and interpretation and thereby argue that what is perceived is
actually an example of something else or, in certain cases, is
something completely different. An example of this process is
evident when a “salesman” explains an assemblage of
metal and paint as interpreting a dream machine fuelled by freedom.
Similarly, it was evident when “The Australian Government”,
(abstraction par excellence), explained images of what appeared
as people, motionless in a small area of water, as interpreting
illegal acts involving a particular racial group of men “throwing
children overboard”. These images, in their thingness, were
simply photographs that, if perceived as such and without the
filter of authority; that is, in an aesthetic manner, would have
read as such. Consequently, the “readers” of the images
would not have been engulfed by a redneck tide, interpreting them
as proof of murder, and thereby voting accordingly. By explaining
the “children overboard” images as interpreting murderous
activity, the government displayed a clear act of attempting to
authorise perception, thereby exposing a desperate attempt to
claim the reins of power. But, if the readers had perceived them
in an embodied manner as signs laden with significant and immediate
meaning triggering a direct personal response; not an indirect
impersonal response controlled by government, destined perhaps
for presentation on a canvas, on a textile, on a video-wall or
through action at the gates of Woomera, the mind-games of control
exercised by the government would not have gained control of any
personal, embodied perception and actions that follow.
But
it’s these mind-games that sustain your argument Richard.
By claiming a meaning exists out there somewhere in an “arts
world” is to repeat an idealistic, intellectual and therefore
dis-embodied analytic process of perception, authorised on high
from the vestige of some crumbling ivory tower. When the presence
of an ideal is presented as replacement for an absence in meaning
at the object perceived, in the form of an image of “child
murderers” or a group of “us” and “we”
termed an “art world”, it suggests the presenter of
that ideal perceives the bodily-perception-of-individual-subjectivities
under analysis; people that is, as unnecessary to that process.
Consequently, the people under analysis need not exist to be written
about. This wholly unethical and arrogant process of creating
meaning for the purpose of argument, dis-located completely from
the field of people’s experience, enables authoring systems
to control the explanation and interpretation of non-existent
things within that field, indefinitely. Consequently, if the systems
of idealistic manufacture are maintained by the language machines
of religion, economics, politics and conventional academe, they
will argue perpetually, with heightened power as their target,
there’s always more to life than meets with the body; it’s
just that you can’t see it. And to this convenient equation
they will perpetually add, as they already do, if there is more
to meaning than perceived by the body then it’s controlled
by an unperceivable entity on high; a god, a profit margin, a
truth or ideal; all meta-authors of unperceivable contexts installed
within the dwelling of some meta-unperceived. But how can there
be more than is perceived? How can there be more to a perceivable
world than meets with a perceiving body?
1.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge,
2002, p.481.
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