…a few conversations over the last couple of days have made me consider the place of writing and criticism within my practice… While blogging has spurred me to ‘produce’ things/ images for presentation every day, I’ve been increasingly feeling the vacuum which opens up when there’s no ongoing conceptual impetus behind these sketches & pieces… Obviously (rather too obviously) we make images as a means of communicating in an alternate lexicon to words, and the image’s potential for ambiguity & nuance is why I’m an artist and not a writer, but the textual accompaniment (or coexistence) with art work is crucial for so many reasons* that I feel it’s definately time to make some efforts to reestablish that equilibrium…
In the upstairs of a sticky & unpleasant smelling pub, a friend remarked how good he considered it was that “…the world is getting smaller”… He underlined this musing with the example of the iphone and applications which facilitate owners to essentially carry a mobile library of books with them, wherever they happen to be… another friend, who’d been looking increasingly uneasy with the direction of this approbation, interrupted at this point with the argument for the need of physical, tactile, tangible texts (the kind that have their history creased & stained into the pages, which smell like books, which you can annotate and leave bookmarks in, which you can remember through handling)… but which also (i should know) accrue library fines…
But this is where my first point of departure begins, namely the increasingly miniaturised interfaces through which we engage with the world… and the channels which facilitate this (nearly) new relationship…
I can’t deny that telephone, email (and now skype?) has facilitated people to make (or remain in) contact with people who are physically distant, which can almost exclusively be interpreted as a positive development… but, when our words, thoughts and identities become increasingly something online, removed from daily reality (the facebook status qualifies “What’s on your Mind”, life reimagined in tweets etc), does this lessen our ability to exist in real time?… or to embody a live moment or experience without the ultimate commentary/ status update, the reflection and re-presentation of it through the digital medium?…
There’s some haunting truism here echoing up from Baudrillard’s 1976 Symbolic Exchange and Death …
“…Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another, reproductive medium… the real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death…It becomes reality for its own sake, the fetishism of the lost object: no longer the object of representation, but the ecstasy of denial and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal…”
I love facebook. It’s a disgusting confession but… I really do. It’s a crutch which allows my normally socially inept self to talk to people I wouldn’t usually… to tell of states of mind/ experiences which would usually remain buried beneath all my reclusive, incompetent traits… to project an image of myself which is infinitely more astute, interesting and colourfull than the genuine article… In other words, to be the person I’d like to be in real life but could never concievably be…. On the other hand, I fucking hate facebook. The slavish resignation to all the above… the giving in to a life and personality which is so completely disembodied from the real, flawed reality of face to face interaction….
But, returning to the iphone… At the touch of a 6cm x 11cm screen we can access a world of information… but can we?… What the cencorship of google China underlines is just how much of the information we access online is increasingly institutionalised… And even before that, who writes and posts the majorty of websites?… I don’t know but would hazzard a guess it’s probably the more affluent, time-rich people with the best internet connectivity and education?… does this ‘world wide web’ diversify our potential experiences and perspectives?… or increasingly serve to affirm our western dominated viewpoints, consolidating and cementing what we know of the world through the existing media and circles we move within?…
I suppose I’m inclined to be an unrealistically romantic person who’d extoll the value of the tactile & tangible above virtuality, but not entirely, and not always. I just think, as with everything, it’s important to look at what we read and experience with a certain degree of questioning sceptisicm… because, of course, our weakest blindspots are the things and aspects of life which we take for granted…
*(that I’m not going to unneccassarily tackle here)
