Carlie Norma Germs
Boorloo (Perth), Western Australia.
07/03/2022 Art_Thoughts
seeing yourself seeing yourself seeing yourself seeing yourself seeing yourself seeing yourself seeing yourself seeing yourself seeing yourself seeing yourself
in 2021 i had the opportunity to travel to Tasmania and go to David Walsh's institution of art MONA - I would reccomend it to anyone, there is something there for everyone - however I felt as if it was (almost) all there just for me - proving once again that i am a teenage boy trapped in myself - just as David is clearly a teenage boy living out his cosmic wet dream fantasy in a throughly damp Hobart.
the work i saw at MONA by James Turrell and Rioji Ikeda has been living rent free in my head ever since - these are some thoughts that I transmogrified into text as research for Honours recently.
Turrell describes his light installations as non-vicarious art, they must be experienced first hand by the viewer to understand the work. This for me is the necessary precondition for a work to be "viewer activated", the work cannot be adequately documented through video, photograph and sound recording and transmitted to an off site viewer. When Turrell's artwork is operating without a viewer its just some LEDs changing colour in an empty meditation egg - sort of like a tree falling in a forest with no witness - perhaps this is a bit human-centric but I have no way of asking the photons produced in Seen Unseen if they are enjoying the experience. It's existence is unremarkable - in this state my bedroom can be described as a (poor) facsimile of a turrell work - a sparse room with a couple LEDs changing colour.
A camera cannot document the ultimate outcome of the work, it can document the architecture, but neither a photo nor video can document the unique patterns that the light creates upon meeting an optical nerve (and its
human container) within the works self contained environment. You could go as far as to say the materiality of James Turrell's work is ultimately human - through the manipulated stimulation of a viewer, artwork is achieved.
Super Symmetry however operates independently without a human viewer. The human experience of viewing it is almost unpleasant, the extremely digital sound palette, the computation pace of information display, eyes continually adjusting between the brightly backlit silica ball platforms and the dark corridor of data screens, to slow to make sense of the constant visual activity. Initially writing this I was totally focused on the "interaction" that I experienced in the Turrell work, all I could see was its absence in Ikeda’s work. After reflecting on it and speaking to my friend and the person who I experience the work with I realised the closed loop was perhaps part of its point. Fully independent of human interference these elements are merely a by product of its function as a totally dehumanised perceptual system. Its continual function in the absence of human viewers is more a statement about the relationship between human and computer or possibly more specifically data. Perhaps this is how Ikeda felt as an artist at CERN or perhaps that's the relationship he observed between the research scientists and their subject particles. This might be relevant to Barad's description of Bohr’s reality questioning assertion that "there is something fundamental about the nature of measurement ... that given a particular measuring apparatus, certain properties become determinate, while others are specifically excluded."[Quote from Page 19 of Karen Barad's 2007 text Meeting the universe halfway]. I think this speaks to Super Symmetries closed loop.
I want to clarify that I feel the transitory experience of entering a museum, gallery or considered installation space and viewing any artwork ~painting, digital media work, sculpture all alike~ usually offers us the "aura" that Walter Benjamin pontificates on, I value this experience, its choreography, ritual and reverence. I have no wish to belittle its significance to artists, gallery's or viewers - in fact I think it can be a little bit forgotten in art school where we do a lot of research, reading about and looking at images of conceptual art and not alot of going to gallerys to view artworks.
