seminar 28/5/2008

In this seminar I will present my thought process as to put emphasis on the areas of critical theory and painting in which my interests lie:
1. Karl Popper
First I will start with Karl Popper's theory of knowledge, and how I have used it as a methodology to progress my practice.
2. My approach to this methodology
Relating my practice to this methodology, I will show how in the process I have gained knowledge in my field of research.
3. Knowledge and Communication
Then I will look at different systems of communication used in images and in language, and how the two systems operate differently to fabricate our understanding and ways of communication.
4. Knowledge and Meaning
In knowledge and meaning I will slightly touch on Lacan's use of language. And will also give examples of sentences that lose their meaning when linguistics comes into play.
5. The Stranger
Lastly, I will introduce the significance of 'the stranger', and discuss whether or not knowledge is universally good and powerful.


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1//////// Karl Popper
My research this year is largely drawn from a continuation started last year, where I looked at painting and its limitations, ways to negotiate within these limits, and the problematic of the ways to go around them. My investigation into painting's capacity to reconsider its own structure last year, I thought, indicated a relationship between critical theory and the practice of painting. The exploration which I took on last year to negotiate painting's limits required a series of trials and experiments.

We may refer to philosopher Karl Popper's theory of knowledge to see how this methodology can be established. Under Popper's schema we start from a problem and try to solve it by producing a tentative theory as our tentative solution. We then put our theory to the test, trying to fail it: this is the critical method of error elimination. As a result of all this a new problem arises (or perhaps several new problems).

As the equation shown:
P1 + TT + EE = P2
Where P1 is the initial problem from which we start. It may be a practical or theoretical problem, TT is the Tentative Theory which we offer in order to solve that problem. EE means a process of error elimination, by way of critical tests or of critical discussions. P2 means the problem with which we end -- problems which emerge from the discussions and tests.


2//////// My Approach

(left) Sylvie Huang -1. "100% Wool – Brighton," 2008, yarn on wall.
(right) Sylvie Huang -2. "100% Wool – Lilac Mist," 2008, yarn on canvas, 80x100cm.

Should I apply this approach to my studio practice, here I have chosen a few examples to illustrate my progress:
At the beginning of the year I wanted to use a material that was different from what I used last year, as to leave my obsession of the paint medium. This can be viewed as P1, where I see paint as a problem to progress my investigation in the practice.

In both (1) and (2) I started from a point in the plane, working subconsciously with the string until it meets the boundary of the given architectural element, or edge of the canvas. It was a conversation between shapes and surface. This process made obvious that the string as a material had its existing dimensionality that was different from that of paint, and by sticking it to a surface forfeited its flexibility as a soft material. This was more evident in the detached areas (figure 1.2, 2.2), showing the material’s three-dimensional nature.

(left) Sylvie Huang -1.2 detail
(right) Sylvie Huang -2.2 detail

In order to faithfully explore this material, various techniques are used to negotiate the confines of image-making, such as cutting, gluing, folding, and twisting of materials, etc. I believe this process of 'drawing in space' speaks of painterly concerns that envision an interdisciplinary terrain between painting, sculpture, and architecture. These works as examples of my learning process this year to date, from which I have acquired knowledge in this specific interdisciplinary field.

(left) Sylvie Huang -3. "100% Wool – Hero Tones", 2008
(right) Sylvie Huang -4. "100% Wool – Rose Cream," 2008

Referring back to Popper Using Popper's methodology, we may sum up these particular works as follows:

P1 (initial problem) = material
Paint was restricting me, because it is associated too much with painting. Even though I was treating it in a different way, it restricted my ability to explore other materials and their intrinsic qualities. I have decided to explore the possibilities with wool yarn. Problem is, what is the materiality of wool? How can I treat a material as an object in its own right? In my case, how can I treat wool as an object?

TT (tentative theory)
My tentative theory here is by succeeding in my exploration of wool yarn, I should be able to treat any material as an object. This material has different possibilities to create different combinations. It won't be made into anything use-able, but manipulations of the material can change our perception of the material - By treating it as an object in its own right, you can disassociate it from prior notions of its destined usage (e.g. to knit a scarf)

EE (error elimination) = surfaces and dimension
By sticking this material to either a formal or informal surface, I have not allowed all its dimensions to come through. We still associate it with paint on a surface. It is merely replacing paint as a material, and not bringing the properties of the wool yarn to the surface. Therefore, I have eliminated this technique of sticking the wool to a flat surface.

P2 (problem with which we end) = colour
Amongst other techniques used I discovered how colour as a fluid medium could be a distraction to looking at materiality, for that it brings in psychological associations. Thus 'colour' brought to my awareness as P2 here in my investigation of materiality as one of the results of my experiments.

The quest into this specific genre of 'image making' abandons the depiction of subject, making painting the subject of painting. As one of the pioneers working in this field, Donald Judd believes that materials vary greatly and are simply materials (Judd, 1997). His 'specific objects' are purged of any traces of illusionism, metaphor, gesture of anthropomorphic references. Yet without these references, do we need to turn to areas outside of art and aesthetics -- disciplines such as linguistics and ideologies to interpret art?


3//////// Knowledge and Communication
It has long been my belief that art is about communication, regardless of the medium or discipline an artist works with. Yet there are different means of communication and often visual communication works on a different system from that of verbal communication.

René Magritte. "The Treachery of Images (This is not a pipe)," 1929.

To illustrate my point, here we have a René Magritte’s painting "The Treachery of Images," 1929. In this painting we see a truthful representation of a pipe, and an inscription underneath it saying "Ceci n’est pas une pipe (It is not a pipe)." Magritte knits verbal signs and plastic elements together, and brings pure similitudes and nonaffirmative verbal statements into play within the instability of a disoriented volume and an unmapped space. We may argue that the title of this painting could also have been "A pipe is a pipe." (Žižek, 1968:104).

This is an example that brings about discussions on separation between linguistic signs and plastic elements, and equivalence of resemblance and affirmation. These two principles constituted the tension in classical painting, because the second reintroduced discourse into an art from which the linguistic element was excluded, since affirmation exists only where there is speech. Hence the fact that classical painting spoke while constituting itself entirely outside language. (Foucault)

My intention here is to present an entry point to see how linguistic and visual communications operate in their own systems, and how confusing it could be when we combine the two. Each instance successfully communicates something (the visual shows a pipe, and the written is a statement that makes sense). However, each instance also contradicts the other. For an in-depth discussion or an interpretation to take place, it is preferable that one should have knowledge in, for example, the Real, the Thing-in-itself.


4//////// Knowledge and Meaning
In today's society, each discipline is more and more specialised in its own development: I would not be surprised to find myself completely alienated in the department of engineering. The acquisition of knowledge, as we have seen in Popper's theory and my application of this methodology, can be a very personal development, thus it may also be exclusive. Which makes me wonder, with the development in visual art and the interpretation of art, whether or not do we have to rely on both to make successful works of art?

Contemporary curatorial practice usually offers accompanying texts to exhibitions either as parallel writing or interpretation of the works. In a recent article responding to the Whitney Museum's Biennale exhibition of contemporary art in The Wall Street Journal Online (18 April 2008), journalist Eric Gibson writes: 'Texts written by the Whitney's curators and outside contributors are being widely (and accurately) dismissed as unalloyed gibberish.' This complaint is made significant by the fact that it comes also from artists and critics who are knowledgeable and well-disposed toward the museum and its efforts. He explains that when the writer no longer had to base his critical observations on a close scrutiny of the work of art after Duchamp -- 'He could simply riff.' This gave birth to the phenomenon in art criticism of inaccessible writing. Indeed, popular verbs with critics such as 'resuscitates,' 'references' and 'activates' may nonetheless say just about nothing. As we can see from one of the 'random quotes' from the exhibition:

... Bove's 'settings' draw on the style, and substance, of certain time-specific materials to resuscitate their referential possibilities, to pull them out of historical stasis and return them to active symbolic duty, where new adjacencies might reactivate latent meanings.

The crypticness of this passage brings to mind the discussions of French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) and his use of language, also known as Lacanese, that du Lacan (of Lacan) has been used in colloquial French with reference to an incomprehensible phrase or an exceedingly awkward formulation. This is because Lacan is known for his use of puns and play with words in his seminars. Therefore, it makes Lacanese nearly impossible to be translated into another language; and as a result, if I may add, makes this knowledge more difficult to be accessed by others.


Examples given by Corinne Maier may help us see the complexity in speaking Lacanese, in her 'travel guide' to 'Lacania.' A proper way of saying 'I am ill' in Lacanese is: 'My symptom does no longer succeed in quilting my lack of being' (Maier, 2003: 52). And a woman who wants to speak to her friend because her husband has just left her, in Lacanese, she says: 'For the subject who is now confronted with its lack of being, the hole of the loss in the real mobilises the signifier' (ibid.: 62). Here we see that Lacanese seems to be a sophisticated designer idiom for the improved description and communication of a new set of meanings.


In the course of my research, this book Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid by Dany Nobus and Malcolm Quinn has been recommended by my critical studies supervisor. In which I find the notion of the knowledge economy extremely insightful as to grasp the ideas I have been pondering for sometime:

A form of dependency in which we are all potential knowledge specialists, and therefore perpetually in debt to someone else's knowledge. Rather than establishing a commonality of understanding, this situation consolidates the rule of the individual knowledge ego. (Nobus, 2005: 1)
With the knowledge economy we have today, it has drawn to my attention whether the fabrication of knowledge can be standardised. In the case of an educational institution, such as the university, where admittedly the individual knowledge ego thrives, understanding others becomes potentially more and more difficult. In order to gain access to another person’s knowledge, we may constantly find ourselves in a repeating process of studying and trying to interpret.


5//////// the Stranger
Or, we may go even further to suppose that we may be ceaselessly in the pursuit of the knowledge of others' without formulating our own's, simply because we want to be able to understand others, and we do not want to appear not as knowledgeable, or 'stupid.' It may be useful at this point, to introduce 'the stranger' which I find helpful:

Derrida[1] has reminded us, from Plato’s dialogues it can already be seen that it is often the stranger who formulates 'the intolerable question', who unwittingly challenges the authority of the master, who is not scared to jeopardize the hospitality he has received. [...] The stranger speaks from ignorance and thus forces his interlocutors to break the silence that governs mutual understanding within his presence, as Simmel[2] put it, physical proximity and social remoteness, geographical nearness and mental distance, the person of alien origin occupies a privileged position, which gives him the opportunity to cross boundaries and somehow be exonerated by reason of ignorance, and which can make him privy to secrets that will never be revealed to any 'regular' inhabitant of the community. (Nobus, 2005: 67)

1. Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby, Standford, CA: Standford University Press, 2000.
2. Simmel, Georg. “The Stranger,” trans. Donald N. Levine, in Donald N. Levine (ed.) On Individuality and Social Forms, Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1971. 143-9

This suggests that ignorance may be as powerful as knowledge in effective communication and understanding. It is a concept I still find puzzling and difficult to realise, but nevertheless a concept I feel that I could relate to. In my interpretation, if we could apply this in the case of visual art, perhaps it is worth approaching the work without an overload of context, and allowing our visual sensory to explore, relate and connect.


(left) Wassily Kandinsky. "Farbstudie Quadrate," 1913. Image source: http://www.artcyclopedia.com/goto/prints-329769
(right) Sylvie Huang. "Untitled." 2008.

Here we have two works that have perceptible similarities, such as in colour, saturation, and use of geometric forms. While Kandinsky (1866-1944) links colour to musical harmony, Huang's choice of colour refers to commodity objects. Putting these two works of different contexts side by side, we may be able to see them from a stranger's point of view for at least a brief of a moment, that regardless of the contexts these works set within, they communicate directly and instantly of a combination of colours and forms that stimulates our instinct response.


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References
　　　　 Judd, Donald. "Selected Writings." Donald Judd Sculpture, Prints, Furniture. Centro Cultural de Belém, 1997. 11-21
　　　　 Judd, Donald. "Specific Objects," Arts yearbook 8. New York, 1965: 74-82; reprinted in Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975. Halifax Nova Scotia, 1975.
　　　　Foucault, Michel. "This is Not a Pipe (1968)." Retrieved 13 May 2008.
　　　　Gibson, Eric. "The Lost Art of Writing About Art." The Wall Street Journal Online: 18 April 2008.
　　　　Maier, Corinne. Le Lacan dira-t-on: Guide français-lacanien. Paris: Mots & Cie. 2003
　　　　Nobus, Danny and Malcolm Quinn. Knowing Nothing Staying Stupid: Elements for a psychoanalytic epistemology. New York: Routledge, 2005.
　　　　Liddle, Rod. "The Countdown of the World's 'Public Intellectuals'." Times Online: 4 May 2008. Retrieved 10 May 2008.
　　　　 Rose-Carol Washton Long. "Review: Kandinsky, the Language of the Eye by Paul Overy." The Art Bulletin, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Jun., 1971): 273 (review consists of 1 page). Published by: College Art Association.
　　　　Popper, Karl R. "Knowledge: Objective and Subjective." Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem: In defence of interaction. Routledge, 1994: 1-23.
　　　　 Žižek, Slavoj. "On Radical Evil and Related Matters." Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993: 100-5.