Perspectivism and Uncertainty
While presenting my work for the semester Michael asked me a question about how much the site I had started with really informed the work I did. If my project had become about documentation itself, how important was Merri Creek or the Koonda Lat bridge to the project. Or more seriously, had I really engaged with the site - in a way encouraged by, and considered important to the unit.
I found it quite difficult to answer on the spot, because I always feel like Iâve been caught off guard in moments like this, and gave a fairly back-footed answer. My reasoning simply being that the lens through which we view an image is inseparable from from it.
So I might begin by expanding on this answer slightly, then trying to let my guard down some what, and deal with the accusation I may have neglected my original chosen site, and consider ways I could reintroduce it, or let it further inform the resolution of this project of documentation.
The recognition of the Anthropocene is an important step toward acknowledging the futility of trying to perceive a world free from human contact. But to go one step further, I hope it becomes a key to recognising the lack of boundary between the observer and observed. This human-touched-world doesnât remain âout thereâ for us to observe, the Anthropocene begins with us and extends out into the world, simultaneously creating it and us.
From Colleen Boyleâs PhD: âPhilosopher of science, Ronald Giere, cuts a middle road between these waring factions and introduces the concept of perspectivism as a way of recognising that âscientific claims may be in part socially constructedâ and that âthe practice of science itself supports a perspectival rather than objectivist understanding of scientific realism.â
The âismâ affixed to perspective by Giere denotes an ideology. That is a collection of beliefs and ideas held as true. Perspective, as Boyle writes is often a dirty word in the context of science, whose aim is omnipotence, and because of the shame attached it is often mis-recognised, or not seen at all.
Arts job, is then to âmake strangeâ, to undo the cloaking of ideology.
No one could see the colour blue until modern times:
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2
A quick example of one aspect... based on the work of one scholar in particular, William Gladstone, a few articles have blossomed recently exploring the idea that people could not see the colour blue until recently. The story goes that in almost all civilizations and cultures, the first colours to be given names are always black and white, followed by red, then green and yellow more or less interchangeably and then almost always lastly, blue.
Various experiments have been performed that essentially demonstrate that the way we see the world greatly depends on the way we are taught to. If I try to address a site, but all I really see, hear, touch, ect. is what Iâve been taught to I create a powerful feedback loop with the past and sense nothing new.
Geochemistry & Other Planetary Perspectives
from Art In The Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environents and Epistemologies.
Ursula Biemann is Swiss artist, writer, and video essayist. In this piece she explains some of the research and background on her films Egyptian Chemistry and Deep Weather.
âal-khemia, the contemporary Arabic term for âchemistry,â is based on the ancient word for the place we call Egypt; it means âthe Black Landââ (p118)
In the essay she mentions being influenced by the metaphysics of Bruno Latour and Graham Harman, and the quantum physics of Karen Barad. (p188)
Egyptian Chemistry does not directly address the power brokers behind Egyptâs uneasy move from the old hydraulic state model to a neoliberal market model of water management because this style of critique limits generative thinking by reproducing state narratives. (p120)
The consideration here of the methods and aesthetics of the final project are inspiring. The consideration of meta-languages in extending the conversation.
The methodology and aesthetic of Egyptian Chemistry sets out to unhinge patterns of thought rather than affirm them. (p121)
Here we see a recognition of the interference and influence of a way of understanding on the thing to be understood.
It elicits a shift from epistemological questions about how things are known toward an ontological inquiry regarding how reality is characterized as coming into existence. (p121)
Many of my projects seem to bend back toward an Ontology of sorts. It might be a good idea to familiarize myself with the fundamentals of Ontology and employ itâs tools while making my own work.
Drawing on quantum physics, I could no longer assume a pre-existing and static world whose observable features possessed a priori values that could readily be recorded and interpreted. (p121)
This is how I came to feel about the site I was documenting.
As Barad has convincingly argued in Meeting the Universe Halfway, it is the questions, choices, movements, equipment, and directed observations that generate a specific material reality which the artist-scientist co-produces, and of which she is a part. (p121)
This sounds like a fantastic book. This is exactly how I came to see the work I was making in relation to the site I had chosen.
According to Barad, practices of knowing and forms of being cannot be isolated from one another. [...] Baradâs account suggests that video recording does not represent but generates reality. (p122)
So the photograph of a site, can not be separated from the site.
The agency of image-making is not located within the assumed intentionality of the film maker who wants to represent a situation, but is found instead in a filmmakerâs process and her direct contribution to changing configurations of materials, politics, and knowledge. (p122)
This point about process greatly interests me because it is the active and verb-like part of the other dimensions mentioned. The becoming, the being.
Fieldwork is central to this ontological orientation [and] takes place in a series of present moments. There is something absurd about trying to locate and define the qualities of a particular place based on flowing water. (p122)
Of course I love this absurdity.
So this idea the site could even be abandoned doesnât really hold in this way, as it remains a genus or source for later work, even if later works have evolved beyond superficial connection to that site.
Egyptian Chemistry is an expression of the disrupted and re-emerging material bonds that form non-verbal narrative configurations. I wanted the project to move the boundary inside, toward the innermost dimensions of a composite reality. (p.123)
This non-verbal note is also important, as the word language is often bound to its verbal aspect, but I think art (as a philosophical practice) has strong linguistic ties, but is not necessarily bound to text-language, yet still performs as and makes use of symbolic systems.
These components do not line up as a simple causal chain of reactions, as they constantly shift and create strange feedback loops - nor are they soley the result of specific economic policies. Each element interacts to create hybrid ecologies [...] (p.125)
While referring to specific water chemistries in Egypt, I still think thereâs definitely something to the style of thinking around dealing with subjects with multiple dimensions thatâs worth hanging onto.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEnXtzBBCKo
The Humanities in Europe Interview Series - Dr. Ursula Biemann Â
âArtists are like a kind of compost heap, where they work through a lot of things, and then bring it out again.â
Images Do Not Show: The Desire to See in the Anthropocene by Irmgard Emmelheinz
from Art In The Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environents and Epistemologies.
âThe radical change in the conditions of visuality under the Anthropocene has brought about a new subject position, or point of view, announced by the trajectories of impressionism and cubism (anti-humanism), and subsequently between cubism and experimental film (post-humanism), and then from experimental film to digital media (a non-grounded form of vision).â (p.132)
This whole essay - and particularly things like referring to impressionism and cubism as âani-humanâ really struck me. Though admittedly a lot of it goes over my head I think thereâs a lot here worth spending more time with.
âThe proliferation of images [results in a] cancellation of vision.â (p.132)
Breaking up the word image by looking at itâs variants, and then treating those as meaning entirely different things is a greatly productive exercise.
âCubism decomposed anthropomorphism through its break with Renaissance point of view.â [...] Renaissance perspective made the pictoral plane analogous to a window. [...] Moreover, with cubism, both duration and a perspectival multiplicity became embedded in the picture plane.â (p.132)
Michael Snowâs experimental film La Region centrale (1971)
âSnow explores the generic properties of the filmic apparatus by using it to intensify and diminish aspects of normal vision.â (p.133)
I look into Snow a bit later on and love what I find.
âTo paraphrase Rosalind Krauss on minimalism, the film subverts the notion of a stable structure that could mirror the viewerâs own self, a self that is completely constituted prior to experience.â (p.133)
I feel that if I want to run down this path I need to spend more time with Kant.
âIn an era of ubiquitous, synthetic digital images dissociated from human vision and directly tied to power and capital, when images and aesthetic experience have been turned into cognition and thus into empty sensations or tautological truths about reality, the image of the Anthropocene is still to come.â (p.138)
She uses the word tautological a few times in this essay, often derisively to suggest an unproductive effect - something that self references and goes no-where. But I used the word in a positive sense to describe my own photos, which are tautologically described as photos, even though they stretch the definition. Even Snowâs films can perform the same function: a film is a film if and when it is a film.
In short, images of the Anthropocene are missing; thus, it is first necessary to transcend our incapacity to imagine an alternative or something better by drawing a distinction between images and imagery, or pictures.â (p.138)
Perhaps the problem is this idea that there can be an âotherâ. What if everything that could be simply was, and it becomes the function of art to simply reveal its virtuality? Like Snowâs films that evoke in the viewer a feeling of: âI didnât know a film could do thatâ.
âAlthough it is relayed by the optic nerve, the picture does not make an image.[24] In order to make images, it is necessary to make vision assassinate perception; to ground vision, and then to perform (as an artistic activity) and think vision as a critical activity. [25]â (p.138)
â[O]nly cinema is capable of delivering images as opposed to imagery, conveying not a subject but the supposition of the subject and thus substance.â (p.138)
âAlterity is absolutely necessary for the image, as the image is an intensification of precense; this is why it is able to hold out against all experiences of vision.â (p.138)
This goes back to what I was saying at the beginning - is interesting but will take a while to unpack.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYr_SvIKKuI
I loved this short section from La Region centrale and the short I saw from Back and Forth. Both made me smile as soon as they started. As I mentioned earlier, Snowâs films gave me that wonderful feeling âI didnât know a film could do thatâ.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nir7aNK5794
The aim is âto bring out the content thatâs latent in these techniques, so they donât disappear in their use.â
I love this way of describing the process of art without using the word ârevealâ.
He goes on to give panning as an example, where it might be used to follow an action âyouâre not supposed to think about panning, youâre supposed to follow the actionâ. To âbring out the content thatâs latent in zooms and pansâ
I feel this is exactly what I was trying to get at with my own work this semester. If I took a photo, there was no doubt a lot that had gone into it that I might not recognise. My decision to document the site in a particular way is informed simultaneously by the site and ideologically by the way I had been taught to see the site before I even got there.
By focusing so hard on these preconceptions, or lenses I hoped to be able to reveal something about the site unable to be seen before. So, in long answer to this question of whether I had abandoned the site itself in favor of a project about perception, Iâd still argue that you can not have one without the other...
[Image, essentially means âlikenessâ, similar to analogous]
That by not considering documentation, and representation, youâre more likely to make work that creates an image of the lens instead of one using it.
While I stand by my reasoning above, I accept a certain amount of my responsibility to deal with a particular site, was neglected in favor of a personal project, and I wonder how the project might have turned out differently if I had chosen other tines in the path.
Like Irmgard Emmelheinzâs complication of words like âimageâ and âvisionâ Iâd like to consider ways this question of whether I addressed the site I had chosen or not could be resolved by thinking about things like the difference between âplaceâ, âsiteâ, âlocationâ, and so on.
A great inspiration to me, Robert Irwin, is in many ways the father of this âresponse to siteâ or âsite specificâ approach. Below, his work at San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla, was simply three square holes cut into the glass of the galleryâs windows, allowing the viewer to see directly into the bay.
Of course, Irwinâs long-term interest is in perception, light, phenomenology, and so on. He isnât interested in glass, or the bay as such, but what he does is allows the space - through sheer duration of exposure, sometimes weeks spent there all day, every day - without making any plans or assumptions
 to reveal itself. In the same way Snow wanted to reveal the latent qualities of film, Irwin seems to want to reveal the latent qualities of a particular space.
Irwin intends to bring no intention. He has taste, and possibly a few key technologies or materials, but with each new place, the aim is to merely tease out what is already there to be found. To do the least amount possible, for the biggest effect.
Matthew Barney on the other hand seeks out and uses locations for their characteristics as connected to other sites, objects, subjects, mediums ect. When planning the Cremaster Cycle Barney had initially intended to create a piece of âland artâ but was so inspired by the location, that features of the landscape, as well as local histories, and his own connections to the place generated a much deeper and more ambitious project than the one he intended.
The Guggenheim gallery seen below was used to film and display the work created. The Order a short at the centre of the Cycle was deigned for the space, the location is a character in the film and the narrative performed within it, particular to it.
In future Iâd like to draw on both these approaches where they feel appropriate, and like Irwin, perhaps simply spend more time with any site I hope to work with not documenting it, but just looking, listening, feeling...
Considering my own work, artists Iâve researched, and other students responces in class, I think I have a clearer idea of how to tackle questions like this. First and foremost addressing the language used:
Location to mean the geographic area, itâs location on the globe, its physical relation to other locations, and itâs contemporary configuration. Location is externally referential.
Site, would be a combination of this greater geography, and physical elements within it. A location does not refer to a tree, but where a tree is. A site on the other hand can contain a tree.
Place, would be more psychological/cultural. A site may contain objects, but not subjects, it may contain structures, but a place is where events happened. Place is durational.
Environment, would then be the same contents found in location, site, and place, but considered conditionally. Environments produce, and are produced. They donât take place in time, like place does, they are time, they are the time of site and place.
I could go on, but of course this question of how far I strayed from location, site, place, or environment becomes far more complex. Iâm assuming the question was not meant to be answered, so much as provoke; and it has.
