no one can arrive in the past, before they depart from the future

no one can arrive in the past, before they depart from the future Edited correspondence between late June and early September 2011 Ciarรกn Walsh Pรกdraic E. Moore Friedrich von Bose

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30.06.2011 I want to share some thoughts that have been with me while developing the work for this upcoming show I told you about. They cross somewhere between the museumological, the power (and place) of the Subjective, and some thoughts on the fantasy of time travel.

Within the museum experience, the object of one age, recast now as artifact, becomes a fetishistic touchstone, a concept-device prompting us to roughly cast our minds into the time of the artifacts production, as we try judge the intentionality of the producer through the objects new role as avatar of history. While we are reaching back in time, can you ever imagine instead that they – they for whom we are the continuous future – do you ever imagine that they are reaching forward to our passive selves?

As we navigate the ordered museum environment, we touch upon the accumulation of objects and entities through the passive participation of the act of looking, of allowing the light to enter into our eyes. It is through this distant touching that we might perhaps engage upon tentative time travel. The casket of the present was not built fast, and is not impervious to cracks and faults which are exploitable at the point of perception. Admittedly, this impoverished play, a construction of imagination rather then science, is as physical an experience as a desert mirage, and equally as equivocal in its impressions.

Departing: I remember two films I have seen at some point over the previous few years – one somewhat of a cinematic and artistic classic, the other a popularly remembered romantic melodrama – which both use as a central plot device the active ability to travel in time by the singular means of Will. In the film Somewhere in Time, the main character drives himself back through time via a process mixing self-hypnotism, the assumption of clothing and physical referents relevant to his desired destination of 1912 (and, in a contrary sense, expulsion of all contemporary referents), and pure power of thought, or Will. In Chris Marker’s La Jetée, the main character transports himself through a mixture of some undeclared scientific process, his own strongly visualised childhood memories, and again, desire

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reformulated as Will. Each film is further joined to the other by the expression of time travel as entangled in ellipses. In Somewhere in Time the ellipses are expressed through the continuous passing of an object (by implication then, one without definable origin) – a pocket watch – back and forth through time, as a register of love, but also of loss, temporal alienation and of death. In La Jetée, they are expressed through the witnessing by a child of his own future self being assassinated within his present. Or by the murder of the adult main character before his own childhood self, however you wish to see it.

Here, time travel as ellipse does not conclude in, but rather results in, tragedy. These dramatised traumas, reflect fundamental anxieties deep within the consideration of how any future realised time travel may completely disrupt our current sense of register. I wonder also at this time two things: what parallels these fantasies – concerning the power of subjective Will in affecting a perceptible ‘time-travel’ – would have in relation to art and museum viewership? And how they reflect the mute anxieties of objects dislocated in time?

Returning then, somehow: The cracks of light and fault lines of perception make themselves felt upon the surface of our experience, through which we warp and twist ourselves through a variety of bilateral temporal functions: tendrils which grasp and stroke the constituting past, or extend ourselves towards the future of possible worlds. Thus in our ungraspable present we are forever in a state of restless shuttering, hyperactively flitting between the the past and future at such a rate as to be only visible – blurred – in the middle point, the Now.

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08.08.2011 As is so often the case, our conversation began as a matter of art and leads us deeper.

I was intrigued by what you wrote regarding your thoughts on the museum and how we consider our antecedents whose legacies reside within them. In these days I am thinking much about the museum but also a great deal about audience. About how every work of art relies upon an audience to consummate its existence and confirm its significance. The level of interest and attention invested upon an artwork and the extent to which it is disseminated via established media conduits dictates the degree to which that artwork is deemed relevant. The primary means through which the “importance” of an artwork is established is via interpretative critical analysis of content and context.

While such methods of analysis are essential they call forth only the faculties of the objective intellect. These mental processes do not register and cannot assess the qualities of an artwork relating to instinct, emotion and feeling. These super-physical, unquantifiable qualities may only be measured by the subjective intellect which assesses artwork independently according to one’s own sensibilities, instincts and responses received via pure perception. I recall mentioning this to you before. The expansion of art as an academic entertainment industry has promoted the implementation of strategies of science which overlook the fact that an artwork can potentially allow access to knowledge and sensation that is valuable because it cannot be analysed or categorised.

These are ideas that you and I have discussed previously.

I believe now as I did then that there is a widespread dependence upon tactics of intellectualisation that focus exclusively upon information learned from external sources. The abandonment of direct perception as a means of mediation has subsumed the power of the subjective intellect and rendered inaccessible the full spectrum of qualities an artwork possesses. The corollary is that certain “transcendental matters” are being pushed beyond the margins of consideration and notions regarding the potential of producing and encountering visual art are rendered irrelevant and obsolete. This situation is worsened by the increasing necessity for cultural producers to exercise arts function as a catalyst for social and political change. Though positive in many ways and it would seem that this necessary shift has paradoxically resulted in the promulgation of the insidious assumption that every artwork must be capable of achieving certain objectives or be compatible to interpretation from a particular critical standpoint.

This most significant obstacle to progress in contemporary culture is the neglect of our subjective intellectual faculties. The practices of production that are fully ingrained and the manner in which art is interpreted act as a bar for active communion with artwork via those aforementioned subjective faculties. In the act of interpretation and encounter of an object on which we happen

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to have focused our vision, one is required to devote the whole of their consciousness to the occupation of what is assumed to be rational and objective. Every individual holds an immense capacity for perception from outside sources; yet very little consciousness is directed toward dealing with them… arcane sensations that are vaguely felt are usually swiftly dissolved by the rational intellect.

Sometimes, if one is successful in excluding – even momentarily – the previous assumptions that dominate our field of sight and fill the centre of our field of consciousness when considering a given work of art, one can arrive at new ideas and eventually to what might be termed ‘personal revelation’. Vital for this process to successfully occur is silence. Perhaps these might be likened to the cracks or fault lines your mentioned in your notes? This is not the silence of audible sound but of the objective intellect. Temporary silencing of the objective intellect allows for thinking that has depth, goes beneath the surface and moves through undercurrents, operating in a superphysical psychological field. This special silence allows the liberation of subjective thought which proceeds from the very heart of our mental existence and is in contact with all that is vital in our lives.

I believe you know what I mean.

FVB

12.08.11 Cracks of light and fault lines seem to be an exciting thread in this conversation, so I will try to take this up in my reply. I would like to address this issue with a similarly critical stance towards institutionalisation (of which intellectualization is one part?), which you address, Pádraic.

Yet, I would like to situate my thoughts more in the context of ethnographic and cultural history museums (in their broader sense), since this is what I am more familiar with and to which Ciarán’s beginning thoughts relate very well – maybe, however, with possible links or overlaps with the art context (and surely there are countless examples more recently which call for the breaking down of this clear-cut distinction in the first place!). In the context I am thinking about, the introductory words by you apply very much directly: the objects of one age, or cultural context for that matter, are recast now as artifacts that are supposed to stand for something larger. They enter the museum space and start to live a second life, in which they again may get redefined several times – e.g. from ethnographic object to object of high art, reflecting rather the institutional logic where it is displayed, rather than the object’s place of origin. “One man’s life is another man’s spectacle”: this is the “genre error” that Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett refers to when commenting on the various modes of visualisation in the ethnographic museum, and this surely counts for museums of cultural history in the broader sense much more than for art institutions, as the objects on display have not been originally made for being exhibited. They have become artifacts only after being regarded to be worth collecting and depositing, and eventually maybe exhibiting.

It is not by accident that the modern museum coincides with the foundation of the European nation states, where the creation of “imagined communities” needed its cultural mediation. As much as the institution of the art museum has been analysed as “civilizing ritual”, the cultural history museum has always been a prominent “identity factory”, as Gottfried Korff and Martin Roth had written 20 years or so ago. The narratives displayed are not representations of some truths previously found “out there”, even though most museums still like to make their exhibitions appear that way. Exhibitions always reflect partial truths. And the stories are also produced at the very moment of reception. As much as we, the museum visitors as – you could say – co-producers of meaning, are not bound to certain interpretations when we go to a museum, the scope for interpretation is not arbitrary either. We go to an exhibit with a certain baggage of cultural knowledge about that which is displayed, which we cannot dismiss consciously. (And our expectations about what we will get to see is being triggered by the very institutional setting in which the exhibition is located). This knowledge has its roots as much in our individual experiences and biographies as much as it is culturally mediated. We draw from already established “fields of associations”

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which help in making that which we see intelligible. Thus, is there really something like pure perception, that we can say is untouched by those bodies of knowledge?

The above mentioned repertoires we draw from, as is probably self-evident, are often times highly problematic – they reflect dominant social and political discourses in one way or another, of which the museum has historically been an important actor of mediation in the first place; its modes of visualization have produced, historically, a certain “way of looking”, which we cannot otherwise but accept to be informing our physical experience in the exhibition.

In the cultural history context most obviously, then, the museum produces narratives that, no matter how objective they appear to be, are always one possible way of telling a story. So, what could other possible ways be then? What could be strategies to disrupt such repertoires of knowledge? And, equally so and very much related, irritate the conventionalised “museum gaze”? Which stories, legacies etc. do we want to make visible, and how do such re-negotiations force us to equally reflect upon and re-negotiate our very frameworks of knowledge and epistemic standpoints? And how can we engage in modes of visualisation that attend to the fact that the process of meaning-making is never finished?

This is the point where I think the question about cracks of light and fault lines comes in with great potential. Because it may be those situations that actually enable us as museum visitors to look at things differently, to really expand our fields of vision, our unreflectedupon convictions. And maybe because the museum experience is such a physical experience, it has also great potential to be disturbing, to enable us to unlearn things previously taken for granted. And this is also where art practices, or call it interventions (another example of a term having become mainstream?), often with an institutional critique at their core, have helped disturb museological conventions, opening up possibilities to see things differently.

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23.08.2011 Thinking of both of your thoughts on the reception of artistic and cultural entities in the museum and gallery, and the problematic of unbinding it from institutional or intellectualised approaches, my mind is drawn back a few months to some background research to a recent artwork. You are probably already aware of Zaum, (but if not, I’ll expand a little…) this form of poetry developed by – from ‘ ’ (beyond/ the Russian Futurists. In Russian it is further) and ‘ ’ (the intellect or ‘Nous’) – so can be translated as meaning the “trans-rational” or beyond reason, maybe something towards which you are talking, Pádraic? A mirror of the Dadaist word plays, I feel it more interesting as it was more aspirational, more earnest and programmatic in its attempts to divorce creative moments from everyday language. Critically, it blossomed (briefly) during the immediate Russian post-revolutionary period. Zaum – energetic, iconoclastic, somewhat semantically autonomous (though phonetically linked to Russian, as well as small pepperings of Caucasian languages) and supposedly timeless in its abstraction – it offered the promise of a new poetic language to mirror the promises of a new age, wanting to dissolve the old associations of poetry and language alongside the Bolshevik dissolution of the social structures.

Dissolving towards the future. Unfortunately, in the social and political spheres, the new age never came to pass and the poetic movement, rather then being unbridled from history, is now framed as very much “of its time”.

In the same way that there are huge problems now to linguistically translate such poetry for other, non-Russian audiences – how do you translate an abstract sound poetry that has as its main external reverent the phonetic base knowledge of one specific language? Translator Guy Bennett refers to this problem in a short essay on the problems of poetry translation, “transpoiesis” he terms it. I wonder more specifically how is it possible to capture this fleeting poetic movement in the context of contemporary academia, museums or historical publications? This is a problem not just for Zaum, but for all cultural objects and entities historically alien to us, but I feel that in its non-verbal, trans-rational formulation, the Zaum sound-poetry (sometimes printed on a page as dynamic word collages, but more often transcribed to be read aloud or performed) communicated, in discrete and specific moments, a content that was formed entirely of passing energies, aural sensations and feelings only to be apprehended by sympathetic audiences inhabiting its original zeitgeist. Is the poetry now literally ‘lost in time’? We cannot translate it to now, perhaps the only option we would have (forgetting, for the sake of argument, our possible unfamiliarity with the base of Russian language phonetics!), is to translate ourselves backwards – to put ourselves into the specific consciousness, the Nous, of that time, that moment, that place. Attempting to put ourselves backwards through the dense jungle of almost 100 years of cultural and historical

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awareness would be an exercise of placing ourselves momentarily outside our own consciousness, as we might if we were attempting to engage in a solitary game of chess against ourselves.

An impossibility, surely?

FVB

04.09.11 I really like your example of Zaum and the underlying problematic of translation and understanding. It can serve as an example for many forms of representation practices, and definitely for museum work.

The communication of content requires something we as museumgoers (or also as curators, if you like) usually do not bring: inhabiting the original zeitgeist. But does that make the poetry, or the object for that matter, entirely lost in time? Maybe the question should not be how to better, or even fully, be able to understand (even though we should try harder to travel in time!) – but rather to think about the cultural works as constantly taking on new layers of meaning that have neither been intended by the original artists, poets, makers... nor is the production of these layers under anyone’s steady control.

If I go back to the example of objects from a distant place and time in the museum setting, these objects have their very own histories. They have been usually made for something (yet, not for the museum), have been objects of some sort of trade or exchange (whether free or forced, or something in between), then entered the institutional setting of a museum, and went to the storage. There they may have lain around in numerous cupboards, taken out for study, and, for the sake of the example, they have eventually qualified to be shown in an exhibition space. They may even have been lent to other institutions in other countries, where they may have been exhibited with much different stories attached... thus in their biographies as museum objects, they have for sure taken on very different layers of meaning (which could be made much more fruitful use of for exhibition work than is usually done). As much as these objects have lost many or most of the meanings or functions of their prior life, they have taken on new ones that constitute, together with the manifold interpretation by curators, academics and other informants, their value as agents of communication. So would it really be so appealing to step outside our own consciousness (in the chess example it at least helps to still know the rules to play by) – or do we gain much more from acknowledging that cultural mediation is always a process of translation? And that as much as something is getting lost, there are new things acquired?

PEM

13.09.11 Already we are almost at the Autumnal equinox and reading through our correspondence of recent weeks it seems to me the three of us are seeking – and perhaps willing into being – the emergence of views of reality alternatives to those which have become established as legitimate in this society, which seems to be dictated by a technorational consciousness. A society which obscures possibilities of viewing reality from different perspectives. What led me to this thought was your discussion of Zaum, as you may recall Ciarán, these are ideas that has preoccupied me for some time and is connected to my research into Ouspensky and his impact upon visual culture in the early decades of the 20th century. I agree entirely that while we cannot (yet) travel in time we must do all that is possible to return ourselves to the context in which a particular work of art emerged from. I have been striving to do this now for some time. In fact it is by excavating the origins of certain artists work that I have managed to develop a methodology that sustains me through what I feel is an all too often brutal and bleak present. It is my belief that the Modernist Project in particular has been subjected to a rather skewed analysis that has become orthodox. So many facts and histories are obscured by the dominant reading. It is perhaps as you say unfortunate that Zaum never did come to fruition in terms of bringing about the new social and political age. It has indeed become something of an anachronism – but this does not mean that the very concept and the cultural impact of that concept cannot present us with ways to enhance our present. You focused specifically upon the linguistic aspects of Zaum, and how it may be considered in this way. The aspect of Zaum as an idea/occurrence that holds most potential for me relates to my own research into Suprematism.

Khlebnikov’s transrational idiom and his use of cosmological (could I say cosmic?) terminology is ultimately analogous to Malevich’s Suprematist paintings. Both share concerns with exploring the cosmic consciousness of a new spatial dimension. In fact, there are several historians who claim that Zaum is ultimately the literary equivalent of Suprematism. It would seem that in their work these figures succeeded in beclouding the distinctions between the categories of artist, scientist and occultist. Returning to that seductive notion of time travel – while it might be that time travel may not be something available to us at this point, I do believe that it may be possible for thoughts and vibrations to be exchanged over periods of time.

You will perhaps think I am irrational to entertain this idea but I shall share it with you nonetheless. Could it be that an art object – such as a Suprematist painting by the aforementioned Malevich – could radiate superphysical or subtle vibrations which may be received through visual sensation by a viewer long after that object has been executed and released into the world? Could it be that the thoughts and sensations which the visual sensations produce in the mind of the viewer could be similar to those which had previously arisen in the mind of the thinker/producer in the process of producing that

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artwork? The fact is that in the end it matters not whether or not such fantastical ideas are a reality. As with the concept of Zaum it is all about potential and possibility. Regardless, of whether or not science can prove the possibilities of the phenomenon I proposed above, or related types of thought exchange via artworks, I really believe we must now strengthen our understanding of the power of thought.

This power has been weakened in the process termed evolution.

Since I am one who permits my rational mind to be overruled by my fertile imagination, I appreciate that my musings may seem somewhat fantastical and naĂŻve. It seems to me, however, that it is preferable to eschew incredulity and view the material world through a lens of enchantment. In our hyper-modern milieu, so-called logic substantiates and explains the systems that surround us and dictate how we lead our lives. I sign off with a quote by Simone Weil who I have been attempting to read of late. The quote seems somehow relevant to the various threads of our dialogue:

One can never really give a proof of the reality of anything; reality is not something open to proof, it is something established.

It is established just because proof is not enough.

It is this characteristic of language, at once indispensable and inadequate, which shows the reality of the external world.

Most people hardly ever realise this, because it is rare that the very same man thinks and puts his thought into action‌

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Contributors Ciarán Walsh is an artist currently based in Berlin, whose researchbased practice, encompassing sculpture, installation, video and works on paper, draws heavily on historical imagery, science-fiction and marginal knowledge. In addition to this ongoing studio practice, he co-curates the artist’s publications project, The Reading Room (Berlin).

Pádraic E. Moore is a writer, art historian and curator, practices unified by an approach to excavating art historical narratives.

Currently Exhibitions Curator at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, he was a participant of the postgraduate programme Curatorlab at Konstfack (Stockholm), and curator-in-residence at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin).

Friedrich von Bose is scientific assistant at the Department of European Ethnology, and the Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies, at Humboldt-Universität (Berlin). Among his research interests are both theory and practice of exhibiting in the contexts of art, ethnography and consumer cultures, and he occasionally curates exhibitions.

Image Credits 1 Video frame from “Somehwere in Time” (1980, director: Jeannot Szwarc)

3 Installation at “0.10. The Last Futurist Exhibition” (1915, Petrograd)

2 Photograph of video frame from “La Jetée” (1962, director: Chris Marker)

4 View of original production of “Victory over the Sun” (1913, Saint Petersburg)

Published for the exhibition: Ciarán Walsh this brief visual pattern Pallas Projects, Dublin 7th October – 5th November 2011 www.pallasprojects.org

Pallas Projects/Studios is a publicly-funded, non-profit, and artist-run organisation.

PP/S foregrounds the role of the project as a constant agent of discourse and transformation. Pallas Projects collaborates with artists, curators and writers to engage and develop current Irish contemporary art, through solo projects by Irish and international artists, alongside occasional thematic group exhibitions, and initiated exchanges with artists’ groups around Ireland and abroad.

ISBN: 978-0-9554819-4-9

Published for the exhibition: Ciarán Walsh this brief visual pattern Pallas Projects, Dublin 7th October – 5th November 2011 www.pallasprojects.org

Pallas Projects 23 Lower Dominick Street Dublin 1, Ireland

This project is kindly funded by:

Design: Conor & David

the Arts Council; Dublin City Council; Goethe Institut