When I was very small, I was given a toy kaleidoscope. It was a little tin can with a lens to look through at one end. There little coloured shapes in the can that could be shaken to change the image.
By turning the lens the kaleidoscopic image would transform, delighting my infant eye.
In a dream, I dreamt that I woke up in a hospital bed and the concerned medics were explaining that I was awake, but they did not know that I was dreaming them.
I was concerned too, that they could not see.
In the 1990s, I took an MA in Contemporary Art and Theory at Winchester School of Art.
This brought together a host of ideas, including, post-modernism, deconstruction, feminism and social theory.
I chose the ontology of performance art as the theme for my thesis. This allowed me to break down the elements of the art object as a transitory performance with a schema or artistic vision and profiles consisting of the audiences’ multiplicity of interpretations. At same time the digital universe was rapidly expanding and fractal technology enabled developments in my artistic practice….
So I’ve got my shopping list: what I’ve got to do and maybe acquire. It’s a lot of hassle of course.
Then there are the formulae, theoretical constructs, to be applied by the subject ‘I’ to the intangible object.
Interesting perhaps, for the conceptual mind to ponder.
Then beyond these two forms of mental activity, there is a third: beyond all points of reference, mere awareness.
There is no time. Relax.
And what about the viewer?
Art exists externally, in the past this was always a physical object. Latterly, it is more likely to display digitally.
But art objects also exist in the mind of the recipient.
There may be a collective experience, at a concert or the theatre, yet each member of the audience sees and hears the same performance but interprets individually. Also, each performance is unique and the individual creates a unique profile, influenced by their cultural condition.
This may seem determined, as fixed and immutable but that is not the case here. Returning to a book that I haven’t read for a while, there is another profile. The book is the same collection of words yet the perceptual ‘I’ has changed.
Is the profile I create the artwork or me?
So what about the viewer?
And the question is:
Am I just adding to the confusion of perceptions
Or helping to liberate them, as they arise?
The desire to solidify experience is reflected here;
a grasping at a fleeting moment as mine, a process of self identification
that fails again and again as time subverts it.
Embrace the failure as perception shifts…
And so
Watch the watching, as I am a construct
Cultures are partly about geography but mostly about history and the passages of time, shifting sands. Impermanence underlies all this self justification and clinging to any belief that fits. I will put myself into this box. Initially, it’s comfortable but, given time, may become a prison.
And what of this transient self: I, me, mine are labels such as actor, body and possession, mostly fiction. I am the stories I tell myself. Even this is a story. Gone in an instant of the irrecoverable present.
Perhaps the most divisive elements of consciousness that engender distrust and intolerance.
So you’re not like me, how could you be?
These are the rules and you will obey or be punished. These are the dictates of power, whose justification is social cohesion but are more accurately social controls.
Empathy, that transcends difference, is intrinsic to the mind free of judgement. But how can I maintain an identity, without the judgemental mind? With an awareness of ceaseless change, there is no need to. Interconnection is the key to understanding that ultimately there is no me and mine.
About this time, I came across the Mahayana Buddhist view of ’emptiness’. Living in London, with a bunch of apprentice hippy friends. Some of them had seen Chogyam Trungpa teach. I thought it was all a bit wacky.
‘Emptiness’ surely equates with nothingness, nihilism? But no, it’s a potentiality. There is no box which fits. Ah, there is an echo here. The mind which enfolds within itself to emerge anew in a dreamlike sequence.
Jung came to the rescue. I never went to a therapist but read voraciously. The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious rang bells. I had long since abandoned formal Christianity. Authority, religious or otherwise, was a complete turn off but here was a sense of the spiritual that transcended cultural barriers.
From the geometry of imagination to the observable world, was accomplished by Benoit Mandelbrot who introduced the concept of ‘self-similarity, in his paper How Long is the Coast of Britain? Science, May 1967.
Abstract.
Geographical curves are so involved in their detail that their lengths are often infinite or, rather, indefinable. However, many are statistically “self-similar,” meaning that each portion can be considered a reduced-scale image of the whole. In that case, the degree of complication can be described by a quantity D that has many properties of a “dimension,” though it is fractional; that is, if exceeds the value unity associated with the ordinarily, rectifiable, curves.
From there, the visual development of fractals was radically enhanced by computer modelling and digital technology.
The phrase ‘often infinite or, rather, indefinable’ is a key to my own perspective and, on occasion, perception.
Not being a mathematician, I came to this many years later. However, I think it was 1970, thereabouts anyway, my cousin and I were staying with a friend on Dartmoor. We all took a dose of LSD. We climbed the hill to Belstone Tor and sat amongst the rocks. The sky was filled with streams of light, the earth was shimmering with fractal patterns. Some time later we had returned to the house. There was a watercolour on the wall. The scene was of a rocky coastline. The waves were breaking on the shore. The gulls were crying. Their calls were quite distinct.
At some point, our friend’s father appeared. He lived nearby. Someone in the village had phoned him to say that his son, who had wandered off, was behaving erratically. They were concerned.
The father wanted to know what the hell was going on. My cousin and I were unable to explain, other than that we were all tripping. I wanted to get back into the painting. The father was perplexed. I could see that he had come to a decision to look elsewhere. “Look he’s disappearing” I observed. He was dissolving into a potential existence to my perception. “Alright I’ll go” he huffed.
