How can art making and art doing allow us to experience our selves? How does an artistic practice foster the development of self, and in turn how does the development of the project of self influence the development of a socially-oriented practice?
Essentially, this is a defining article, a brief essay that sets out to reify some definition to my art, and its relationship to my self; and some definition of this self as espoused through the ensuing relationships. This is essential in coming to any consequential understanding or meaningful perspective and experience of my existence as an artist, or at least current discourse on the topic might have us consider.
As I consider my artistic practice as a means of generating, developing, and exploring my self, it quickly becomes clear to me that this is a process that could stand to be mapped out and reconsidered within this context.
Thinking back through my past practice of art, I begin to see the patterns emerge from these works. Many of the projects involved producing a representation of myself, a part of myself, an image of myself within a specific context, which I became at once subjectified/objectified. These works seem to place myself in such a manner that I could actually watch myself perform some strange activity within an equally bizarre context, i.e. pretending to bark like a Döberman pinscher on a television chained to a small doghouse in the basement of a popular contemporary art gallery. This is diametrically opposed to, say, a version of this situation in a virtual dream state.
At the time of creation of such projects, I was simply using myself as an actor, or model, or participant, as I was really the only volunteer that I knew that was available 24/7, and for free (how much better can it get?). I suppose in some small, yet unrealised manner, I was very much aware that this was a possibility of the events that were unfolding. As the work evolved intuitively from feeling, as opposed to a calculated and constructed action through thought and from concept, I might have known in the back of my mind that what I was doing was, in some context, very much introspective as it was an externalisation and expression of certain feelings towards situational circumstances of the (cultural) time, in this instance perhaps it was an expression of feelings of subordination to the media constrcuts through which we can be limited in our abilities to effectively communicate.
In other words, I knew that this was an exploration of the self, the concerns, attitudes, feelings, thoughts and beliefs I held at that point in time. Looking back upon this practice as a whole practice comprised a series of similar works, I see that in my volunteerism I was in another sense exploring myself as a subject, or an individual subject to cultural conditions, ideologies, and environmental circumstances. Considering the ontology of my existence, within the microcosm of the sculpture studio, I was an adept supernummery, a qualified extra available for free. However, within the macrocosm of my cultural circumstance (Western contemporary art culture in the early 21st century), I was an individual installation and media artist.
From this scaled perspective, at once being very different within in varied contexts; from a physical, animate body/entity to act on the camera, to an independent individual amidst a cultural field and all the levels in between, this practice which I regularly engaged with was a phenomenon of my being, my self, how I felt, what I thought, and the agency of this being to produce an expression of this consciousness. Art was a means of both advancing and developing of my self as well as moving away from this self in order to generate an understand and gain knowledge of this (my) self. In fact, this specific body of work embodied this duality of 1st and 3rd person, the subject-object situation. As a means of objectifying myself within a video object, I was able to examine my self from an alter perspective. Simultaneously acting as the subject and object of scrutiny, when in the presence of these works, I had the experience of being in the work and outside of the work at once. A personal impersonality. Similar to watch home movies of ourselves, or looking at photographs of ourselves, these types of observation are necessary for objectification of our life-world and our relationships to these phenomena.
These specific projects were more like real-time snapshots of dream sequences in their ethereal, outré characteristics. The gave me multiple perspectives as they traverse the void between the actual, the virtual, and the real. Moreover, they operated as almost a form of metacommunication, or portals into an introspection of the role that my self plays through the cultural consctructs that afford this self the possibility to become, to develop language, meaning, and communicative practices; artistic practices.
Here is a good place to contextualise my current ontological stance in regards to the orientation and situation of existence. These writings are presupposed by a philosophy that the ‘world’, its being, knowledge and experience of this existence are existent as multiplicities, all co-habiting a simultaneous existence. In short, everything conceived exists, right now! This is sort of a phenomenological theory of relativity of self reification. It is the movement of perception and of the phenomena of these states of existence that, in part, determine the emplacement of its being and our epistemological, ontological, and phenomenological relationship to this phase/form/version of being. Furthermore, existence is existent in terms of an experience or lack of experience of the possibility that a thing may or may not exist within any context, state, or representation of its existence.
Art allows one to experiment with one’s position within the fields in which they awaken. We awaken in different fields continuously, throughout our being. The activity involved with the creation and realisation of art, the processes of art, is our means or technique of engaging with our self within these fields.
This is a technique of self, or a technical knowledge of the self which is adjacent to a relational model of work (technical) knowledge, practical knowledge, and emancipatory knowledge as suggested by Jürgen Habermas (Foucault, 1993). Foucault (1993) describes this concept of the technology of self as an additional technique of the individual within society:
“…in all societies whatever they are, another type of techniques [exist]: techniques which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power, and so on. Let’s call this kind of techniques a techniques or technology of the self? “
Art, in this context, is an agency of self, or a method of this technology of self, made possible by the cultural conditions that foster the possibility of an individual within a society. The concept of society is founded on the basis of the existence of selves, or individuals acting (working) independently and democratically within a structure that incurs interaction and counteraction, interdependence and counterdependence. This is evidenced in the relationship between self and other, as demonstrated through society.
My practice as an artist has allowed my to come to an understanding of my existence, the existence of my practice as an artist, and the relationship between my self and this practice through the emplacement of my self and this practice within various frameworks, one being my practice as an artist amongst other artists within a field of art, another being my practice as an individual amongst others within a social framework or field, such as art or the academy.
Furthermore, as this practice, and the reflection of this practice are not separate but co-exist in an evolving relationship my practice is reflexively shaped by my exploration of it, and extensions that develop through presentation and representation of this practice, .ie. media. This is a type of emancipatory knowledge production that exists (Habermas).
Because the concept of self is a reality within a broader social reality, or at least conferred by this social state, and art too is a specific form or field within this broader field of social reality, art can exist as a means of constructing the self in relation to the social reality that constitutes and contextualises the existence of the other (in this case me and the things that I do and make within this context).
Because I exist in relation to others, I perceive and experience my self as a self amongst other selves, and ‘theirfore’ constituted by this relationship. I often think that if no other existed, or was experienced in any possibility of the definition, would I exist (in the epistemological and phenomenological sense of the concept)? If the only entity in existence was my self, I would have no frame, no point of reference, no horizon to measure up against, I would correspond to nothing, relational to only a singular dimension of my self (perhaps not even ‘my’ could exist, but rather a self, which would yield to the oblivion of being or the creation of an other). I envision this as the point where either a singularity (white hole) or a black hole becomes.
Coming back down to Earth, where I exist with my practice, my peers, and all my art surrounding me in boxes it is here within these relationships that my self develops. Self projects acquire meaning through their situation in relation to other self projects within an approximate cultural correspondence.
Unpacking these boxes in a specific place, with specific conditions (physical, cultural, environmental, etc.) avails certain relations. If I unpack the art in one time and place, I might see it as valuable to a specific project, at another time and place it may remain undiscovered, unrelated and too distanced to promote capital; dependent on the strength and value of the relationships that are produced through a relational presence. However, art as capital seems to operate under different circumstances than other types of capital.
Art carries a surplus value, as Diederichsen (2008) puts it. The surplus value of art is the added bonus that releases art from the subordination to any globally dominant law, such as economic value, or meaning. Art is an interstice, a space that can exist outside of normal relations (Bourriaud, 1998). Artistic Mehrwert, according to Diederichsen, “...refers to the fact that art is ‘good for something’ and therefore has a use; it is legitimate and must exist, despite the fact that its meaning lies precisely in not being useful. “(1)
It is precisely here, that art as a field, yet a field with no edges, it is a desert of a field, slowly expanding and consuming its periphery as it gains relational ground through the multiple practices occurring within its margins.
References
Bourriaud, N. (1998). Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les presses du réel.
Diederichsen, D. (2008). On (Surplus) Value in Art. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Witte de With Publishers.
Foucault, M. “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth”. Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 2 (May, 1993, 198-227.)
Habermas, J. (1981). The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon Press.
