David Quigley
Some things you lose, some things you give away, schlebrügge.editor, Vienna 2007.
The Production of Reality
“Myth has been reintegrated into
reality and poetry will now become
the original element of the real.” (1)
Artists create works documenting a special relationship to reality, expressing a certain
joy or distress, capturing a moment of wonderment, or, on off days, a critical assessment of the general state of the world. As artifacts of experience, these works reveal something about ourselves to our contemporaries as well as communicating with our own future, leaving behind traces of the many decisions and ideas with which we choose to construct reality. These creations reflect fantastic dreams of myths and personal memories surrounding man and woman with the comforting hominess of the interior, the known and often warm feelings associated with being in control of nature, of comprehending its realms of complexity, but at the same time these works also struggle with the many underlying microscopic and macrocosmic dangers which linger threateningly beyond understanding. Works define and provide a foundation for what constitutes reality, but they also document a feeling of malaise, of fear and a loss of control over the conditions of reality. And indeed, there are many obvious signs of largescale explosion and the no less threatening, but inevitable implosion of our own bodies always threatening at any moment to give way to the forces of decay and death. Illusions of society, illusions of identity and illusory visions of what happened, what is and what is to come. Surrounded by partially real fantasies, confused and often moved by representations and myths tantalizingly floating around the noosphere: mind, not-mind, dreams and perceptions of reality blasting into the continuum of history. Following the traces of other’s journeys, diagnosing theirs and our own symptoms or reasons for hoping and believing, but also despairing at the moment, its singularity, which the philosophers never cease to remind us, is always in excess of its own content. Images to be taken, ‘snapped’ in photographs, reproduced, painted, animated through film and video. Images abound, closed quietly in books, painted on canvas and glued or tacked onto studio walls.
On a cloudy and cold day we met Walter Benjamin riding, almost unbelievably it seems now, the same Straßenbahn along the same dreary housing project. Verdinglichung of late afternoon after a late-capitalist shopping spree and long considerations about the merits of digital single lens reflex cameras. Of course, Benjamin was long dead and his words sprang out of an overdue library book which I had happened to bring along and my companion claimed it was not exactly by chance. It is true. I had probably known that we would encounter a similar fate that day:
Breton and Nadja are the couple who convert into revolutionary experience, if not action, everything that we experienced at first view through rain drenched windows of a new apartment after cheerless train rides (the trains are beginning to age) on godforsaken Sunday afternoons in working class quarters of cities. They bring the powerful forces of the ‘atmosphere’ which are hidden in these things to the point of explosion.(2)
The epiphany quality of the revelation of the crystallization of forces which constitute the moment. “Image is the dialectic standing still.” (3) This experience is the explosive “illumination” of the moment, a revolutionary appreciation of the everyday world which, as Benjamin would claim, could be seen more as a trick than a method. Here on a dreary day in some Central European city (I confess it was Vienna), the illumination of the moment was precisely the combination of Bob Dylan on some old mix-tape I had brought along and we were listening to one headphone apiece (forgive my romanticism), and some symmetrically juxtaposed sunbeams, which broke through the clouds for a moment, and in there somewhere a series of thoughts which had somehow managed to break through the nebulous conventions and social programming organizing what seemed to be an entire civilization into the rhythm of some abstract pattern maintenance. This particular illumination reminded emphatically that there was something more to life than just participation in the mundane reproduction of this alienated world. Artworks, much like such epiphanal experiences, can break the monotony of the machines of consciousness which continually produce and reproduce a continuum of reality disguised as the phenomenon of everyday occurrences represented in newspapers, websites and often animated on the nightly news. There are many existent ways of contriving these works with which we hope to construct our own vision of the world. At the same time, there is an obvious conflict with the seeming permanence of these given, already proven recipes. The cusp of time, the singularity of this momen “now!” seems to demand more than worn-out plans of action. The newness of the day, the almost kitschy, but no less fundamental uniqueness of this sunrise on this day in autumn, waking up to busy streets, thinking mostly, at first, about the first cup of coffee. Trying to find a way to express this, and perhaps even to find something which might offer continuity to this expression. These works are the things we do, the remainders, the artifacts of the ever-busy producing woman and man. What keeps returning is the question of realism. Realism, in the traditional sense as some form of naturalism, but also the realism of objects, that is, the realism of actual experience. Meandering through the library the other day I stumbled on Conrad Fiedler’s writings, which although for the most part are too distant to our own problems, nonetheless, addressed this problem I had been trying to understand, albeit stated with a kind of pedantic 19th century clarity:
While from ancient times two principles, that of imitation and that of the transformation of reality have been at odds with each other when determining the true expression of the essence of artistic activity, it appears that the sorting out of this conflict is only possible through positing a third principle in the place of these two: the principle of the production of reality. For art is nothing other than the means with which man in the first place gains reality. (4) Although it is difficult to see the problem so categorically, this distinction, between representing and creating reality, is important to mention when considering these works. The tension between the realities of the surface of the canvas, of the artwork as reality
and the realm of experience, of the three dimensional, visceral moment is to somehow be resolved precisely in this art as the “means with which in the first place one gains reality.” This is an aesthetic of the production, not the mere consumption of the world. The now largely forgotten art historian Carl Einstein had certainly also read his Fiedler:
True realism does not mean representing objects but rather creating them.
And he continued:
But now it is time to save the act of viewing as creation; so that painting can now be a kind of poetry; for through composing one creates a new reality. (5) Through producing, we try to record, to capture and change these moments into the new reality as our own defense of reality. Here it is important to keep in mind that this production could be understood in the sense of the production of material things, but also in the sense of a production of a play, movie or of experience itself. It is a question of the production of the real conditions of experience and the corresponding stories and myths which describe the surplus-value of everything about the present that is more than the present, that is, the moment grasping the future in composing the world to come.
But what methods? What media? What is this coming reality to look like? Right from the start questions arise and, aside from the perennial historicist clairvoyants, the answers appear to be beyond the grasp of any one certain category or periodization. In fact, the heart of the matter appears to be able to return to some kind of zero-point, to be able to start again, to forget the many given paths, opening one’s project to various manifestations of potential worlds. Through juxtapositions, montage-thinking, dislocations in time and space, it might be possible to avoid some of the categories, whether art historical or psycho-social, which reduce our fantasies to somebody else’s phantasmagoria (curse you damned Verdinglichung!). To produce an immanent mythology, right here, right now! Again we could return to Walter Benjamin, perhaps because the incompleteness of his projects reminds us of the need to begin anew – here especially to the legendary Arcades Project. Fragmentary observations pulled along by the current of the work, impressions gathered in prolonged Spaziergänge through the second arrondissement in Paris, in patient work in the library, finally collected in notebooks and files, only to be published many years later after his death. Outlining a method of expression which is closer to collecting and citing, organizing the given world, although not strictly according to any kind of taxonomical or bureaucratic categories. Collecting but also reformulating and transforming, weaving personal experience together with others’ experiences and works, sifting through a mass of images to arrive at a painting which serves as an artifact of personal or trans-personal experience. In this sense the dual methodology, that of this short essay and of Katrin Plavcak’s work, is to provide a staging which is to chronicle the present but also to construct it. This production of images is intimately linked to a different kind of living, often represented as different life-forms (from the chemosynthesis of black smokers somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, to the space utopias beyond), reflecting the living world but also the artwork without movement, a transitional reality left behind in the traces of works.
1 Einstein, Carl, Georges Braque, (1934), in: Berliner Ausgabe Werke III: 1929-1940, (ed.) Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar (Berlin 1996), pg.409
2 Benjamin, Walter, Der Surrealismus, (1929), in: Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. II:1 (Frankfurt 1998), pg.300
3 Benjamin, Walter, Das Passagen-Werk, in: Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. V:1 (Frankfurt 1998), pg.578
4 Fiedler, Conrad, Moderner Naturalismus und künstlerische Wahrheit, (1881), in: Schriften über Kunst, pg.128
5 Einstein, Carl, Georges Braque, (1934), in: Berliner Ausgabe Werke III: 1929-1940, (ed.) Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar (Berlin 1996), pg.326