Manifesting Possible Futures

MANIFESTING POSSIBLE FUTURES: Four Conditions In July 2008, my wife Anita and I visited the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, a gathering of events and artists to celebrate the theme, Revolutions - Forms that Turn. We took a ferry to Cockatoo Island, lying low in the Sydney Harbour, an aging has-been of past human endeavours. There were relics of a ship yard as well as convict cells and abandoned buildings. As we stepped off the boat, I was immediately drawn to a low hole in the sheer granite wall that confronted us. We wandered through a tunnel cut into the cliff while eerie music played along with us. We emerged, finding huge buildings big enough to construct ships but now mostly empty caverns. The scale of the work that once took place there was magnificent. Hooks capable of lifting hundreds of tons were now suspended uselessly in space; engines and gears equally huge, lay idle. And in amongst these Titans of the past, artists had placed their works as part of the festival. We ambled our way to a large broken building that housed the works of one Mike Parr. It was well out of the way for a good reason. Only those who can “abandon all hope” should enter this gate. Here is what the program guide said about Parr’s work as an artist: In the derelict and dilapidated building of the former sailors’ quarters and naval ‘academy’ on Cockatoo Island, Mike Parr theatrically stages a presentation of 17 of his most daring and demanding performances since he began exploring the field in 1971 to test the emotional and physical limits of the human body. This dramatic installation on Cockatoo Island, titled ‘MIRROR/ARSE’, presents filmic documentation of his performance works in a deliberately episodic and disconnected way, as the viewer enters into corridors and rooms with peeling walls, collapsed ceilings, undisturbed rubbish and pools of water. Just as the viewer’s encounter with the architecture of the space is traumatic, so do Parr’s works explore trauma and subjectivity. Parr, in the great Expressionist tradition, denounces and is outraged by the brutality of the world we live in. He is revolted by it, and creates poignant artworks where the viewer is confronted with revolting situations, hopefully achieving turns that form consciousness. That’s what the program said and we actually saw videos of the artist subjecting his own body to various forms of mutilation or showing us equally graphic acts of horror. Just one example: he allowed someone to stitch his face into a contorted mask of horror to register his “artistic response” to the treatment of illegal immigrants here in Australia. He had no anaesthetic and we were spared none of the pain as the sutures were sewn into his face and pulled tight. Having read the program description and also seen the exhibit, I was startled by the choice of the word “poignant” to describe his work. The word springs from a root peuk which does not mean what I felt like doing and what the artist actually did in one display. The root is an image of pricking, which certainly conveys pain, and to be poignant is to be piercingly incisive, as well as skilfully to the point. However, this word also carries a meaning of being moved, touched by the skilful astute application of pain. The sponsors no doubt had in mind that Parr’s work, graphic as it is would have the effect of revolution on the audience, i.e. move us, or turn us in some way by a skilful application of pain. But this emphatically did not happen, at least to me. Where I was supposed to be moved, I was instead frozen, my psyche barely able to function at all beyond registering the stark horror of what he was doing, what he was portraying. I could not imagine at all, let alone imagine into the acts of horror, perceiving within their underlying logical structure, some seed of a new possibility. My psyche was immobilized by this art, not moved at all into new fresh channels of thinking or perceiving. The shock of this art I suspect induces either reactions (dissociating, numbing etc.) or fascination. I am equally sure that there were some observers, who were willing to see the world the same way that Parr does—as a primary seat of brutality and horror, in which the human body is merely a lump of meat. This episode contains all that I want to say in my book. It illustrates the necessary conditions for a transformation in reality or, to put it another way, a simultaneous transformation in the form of consciousness and world. We may tentatively articulate these conditions as follows: 1. The individual effort of participation with an aspect of possible futures; 2. The enactment, by this individual, of his or her participation, thereby becoming a mouthpiece of this future; 3. The willingness on the part of others to make a move towards “seeing” (conceiving) the world the same way the individual does; 4. The gradual congealing of that conception into the way the world is perceived, the world thus becoming, over time, “that way”, resulting in cultural forms that give expression to and strengthen that new reality. When these conditions are met then we, as psychological beings, and the real world in which we live, transform. We end up living in that world. It becomes really so! These four conditions are succinctly outlined and examined in the following passage by Owen Barfield (Saving the Appearances, pp.145-146): Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. As long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature . . . [b]ut . . . when the fact of the directionally creator relation is beginning to break through into consciousness, both the good and evil latent in the working of imagination begin to appear unlimited.… we could very well move forward into a chaotically empty or fantastically hideous world. . . . We should remember this, when appraising the aberrations of the formally representational arts. . . . in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has in some way experienced the world he represents. And in so far as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who themselves are willing to make a move towards seeing the world in that way and, ultimately therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should remember this, when we see pictures of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motor-bicycle substituted for her left breast.