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F(or)EVER]
We are here to receive the invisible worlds. Not just the freight of our histories, our stories, all of the visible nowhere that is with us everywhere. Nor only love, repulsion, and desperate belief, even if these have long signaled the army to the field of death, or propelled the mother into the dark surf after her child. Not time, of which we can only say “it traps us.” Of which we can only say, “it does not exist.” There are other worlds.
by Quentin Hardy
My painting got chosen for the 4th Beijing Biennale 2010. I decided to go, since I was to be a speaker at the Symposium that took place a day after reception.
I will write abouit the trip later. For now, here is the speech that Quentin Hardy helped me with ( and did most of it)
Alterrealism and the Present Challenge of Art
With great honor I join the other artists here for the Beijing Biennale. The organizers of the show have set for us high goals. They, and all of us here, hope to depict something of the sense of environmental crisis, efforts social progress, and shared spiritual unity, as caused by the modern world. We cannot hope to solve these problems, or even depict their magnitude in a world more closely connected than ever before, yet we do well simply by striving for a better understanding of them.
The idea of a Biennale was first floated, excuse the pun, in Venice in 1895. As such, it was created at a time when people stepped from their early industrial revolution and into the modern age of Einstein, and the twilight of the Imperial World. The idea of International Art, and a global brotherhood of artists, was a celebration of a newly connected globe, and an assertion of national greatness among the relatively small number of participants.
What does a biennale mean today, in the age of instant global connectivity, and many nations strive with other transnational forces? What is the role of the art, and the artist, in this time of crisis – which, as our Chinese friends know, can also mean “opportunity” or simply “change.” The changes we see around us are too numerous and dizzying to list, but let us spend a moment on the crisis, and the opportunity for renewal.
The old modern world and the modern artist troubled each other. Art concerns itself with an invisible world whose past, present and future are memory, imagination, and desire. The media of paint and stone are means to inhabit that world and be re-energized by it. So too are videotape, or performance spaces segregated for an art experience. The ultimate aims of aesthetic transport and information about being human remain invisible. Even when the artist responds to historic events, he seeks to escape time.
Our modern world is dominated by the physical and the time-rationed. The undeniable triumph of methods of scientific enquiry and their final physical expression in industrial power have reshaped the globe beyond the imaging of any human not from the relatively recent past. We have even bioengineered ourselves.
Ignoring that power is more than vain sentimentality; it is a lunatic impossibility. People who travel and trade largely in the invisible world, artists and their kin, struggle for appropriate roles and voices against this unprecedented and inexorable process of global modernization, the tyranny of the visible.
Even an artist’s success became problematic. Do well, and art became a highly valued and traded commodity. Artists are raised to the status of seers to enhance the marketing of their gift, with few people improved in the process. That is flattering, but it made distant the invisible world that we timelessly want ourselves and others to see and explore.
Art in the world created at the same time as the Venice Biennale eventually became as a kind of super journalism, and the artist a mere commenter on the world. Andy Warhol noted that advertising and fame are powerful influences. Jeff Koons saw Michael Jackson and his chimp as simultaneously iconic and tacky. Damien Hurst showed that we react to a stuffed shark mostly as a living object, even when it is encased and consists largely of formaldehyde.
Similar points could be made about the vertical categorizations of fine art photography and performance art, to name two responses to technology and commoditization. Likewise the categorizations like feminist art, queer art, and outsider art – worthy in identifying the downtrodden, perhaps, but too often marketing categories too. With their success, they are tamed into statements, even indictments of the world, to be thoughtfully consumed before moving on to the next piece of art.
In hope of better ways to resolve the problems of art’s invisibility and the relentlessly physical world, I have dedicated my craft to a new sensibility, which I call Alterrealism. Alterrealism takes as a given the reality that, in an age dominated by software and instantaneous connection with an infinite amount of people, facts, stories, and computational tasks, we may become direct conveyors of the invisible world.
Software is, after all, an invisible product, nothing more than a series of statements about how to organize something. Our economy, for better or worse, rests on computed risks that have relevance only to other risks, and transactions that fly about us in wireless connections. Our relationships and our realities are virtual, and many of our allegancies, like the allegiances among the artists here today, have no corrallary in physical geography.
What is alterrealism’s response to this changed world? It is to embrace, as more real than any particular product, the invisible realities within us. I respond to the felt and the intuited as more real than their physical manifestations. I delight in the reality that our days begin in dreams, they do not end there. I attempt to convey the ever-becoming of intuition as a more real guiding force – not as a mystic descent, but as a recognition of its primacy.
The work of mine that the organizers of the Beijing Biennale have chosen, Exextinct No. 1, uses objects of the mechanical world as subordinate actors in a narrative of generation and precise physicality within its timeless ritual. As such, even the deepest identities of gender, threat, and renewal are alive because of an imaginary continuum that authors the particular physical manifestation.
To the extent this is an environmental statement, it is one of the triumph of unseen patterns that care nothing for time, for they are above it. As a work regarding the themes of shared unity and social progress, the primacy of the invisible, and the threat and promise of the rituals with which we evoke it, is evident.
In much of my work the casual consumer will see aspects of the pained and the broken. It is not broken to me, for they are rich in life, rich in emotion, and vessels of memory and action. Emotions of necessity are complex, and need to be seen as the invisible forces that bring us life. The complexity is still one thing, only understood by struggle and meditative acceptance. Its vocabulary reveals itself from within.
Make no mistake: I believe that our final destiny is of our own making. It is the invisible within us that makes us creatures of light, who by seeing that can achieve a new balance. It is the invisible patterns within us and among us that we now rediscover, learning once again how to love ourselves in perpetual, invisible change.
Thank you.
and more writing…. by Quentin Hardy.
Modern man has remade the physical world beyond recognition to any previous age. In consequence mankind is also remaking – in ways more urgent than ever – its age-old relationship with the invisible. These are the worlds of emotion, the subconscious, historical forces, Heaven and Hell, the self and the soul, plus the nameless dimly perceived and the still unseen worlds that guide, mark, vex and delight us.
Altrealism is a response to this paradox of the triumph of the physical and the reassertion of the invisible. As a means of tapping unconscious realms of experience to bring forth glimpses of that experience, Alrealism aims to unite personal inner worlds and larger social patterns, seeking commonality of expression – the terms of experience. Altrealism describes worlds we have both within ourselves and beyond our limited physical senses, bringing them to our shared physical space to renew it.
Altrealism has precursors in the so-called (still!) “modern” age of a century ago. As its name suggests, surrealism was one forebear, and the most influential. Surrealism was grounded in the same hopes for human transformation, however, that stoked philosophies of destruction from Russia to Germany to Cambodia. “Making man new” meant killing as a cost, and it exhausted our civilization for decades. Surrealism’s goal to “ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them” now seems like more deluded totalitarianism.
Man is never made new, Altrealism knows. But man must recognize anew of what he is really made. Altrealism is the artistic, playful journalism of our explosive invisible worlds – the stuff of which we are really made.
First, we must appreciate our achievement over the physical world. We have inherited and exploited a triumph of the scientific method, made real through engineering, with results that surpass previous dreams. Our forebears moved rivers or [and] leveled mountains [erase end of phrase up to the semicolon] as the final victory of their civilization; we fuse atoms, adjust molecules, and tinker with proteins inside DNA [as commerce] as commercial activity. We ease our loneliness among the billions of stars as we consider terraforming new planets. We wrap this world in fiber optic cables, construct cities for a billion or more people, and melt the glaciers of millennia. We are masters of the largest and smallest, for better or worse.
Greater still though are our different invisible worlds. Many of these are in service to the physical, but may rebel from control. Few of us care what an atom looks like, though we hear that it is largely empty space, dominated by the incessant motion of particles. We know, however, that it is we. This discovery and exploitation is, like all others, the product of a culture of desire, spurred by insubstantial dreams of consumption. We define ourselves by credit scores, potential to act or achieve, and loyalty points. They do not exist, in any meaningful sense, except their domination of our thoughts.
Our sense of human history was long dominated by theories of impersonal economic forces at work; these have lately fallen to an equally discredited impersonal “magic” of the marketplace. The recent eruption of global terrorism is in itself more a shout of negation, a “no!” to an accepted flow of history by dominant forces, than the terrible bombings that are its manifestation. People flock to its invisible rage, blind to the absence of any way forward.
Our durable cultural legacy includes for many ideas of Heaven and angels, somewhat less so Hell, and for others the equally immaterial subconscious and its urges. Even as we dominated the physical, we cling to vague awareness of ever more invisible forces and worlds. At times, death alone seems the one unchanged invisible world, though we shun its complex and terrifyingly simple presence.
The great lodestar of today, the Internet, is the greatest exemplar of this physical/invisible paradox. We know it consists of fiber and computers existing somewhere, made meaningful by billions of lines of computer code. Software, however, is a most insubstantial thing – it may rest on disks or inside silicon, but its essence is a series of statements of how the world might be arranged. Turn it on, and it is so. The essence of the Internet is our collective experience of it, however, a largely imaginary activity of connection, observation, recognition and change. With the personalization allowed as the system matures, each of us will possess a configuration of the messages, images, and connections perfect for us: In effect, not one Internet, but billions of individual Internets, in continual change. Or, as they used to say of God, our center will be everywhere and our circumference nowhere. The delight may in fact be palpable.
We have discovered new and invisible attributes of ourselves, such as the “hive mind” of our intersubjective intelligence. It is constituted in common with others, based on interactions with others, a shared perspective that is interdependent and fluid, depending on changes happening in others and in ourselves, and socially constructed. We are, it seems, in some invisible way capable of discerning lost objects and unknown prices through aggregation of our small, ungoverned contributions to addressing a problem.
The intersubjective, still being explored, throws our sense of the individual into doubt, even as we seek newer software to measure our ever-shifting collective behavior as a basis for action. Follow the behavior of the group, it goes, and we build the best possible product for the individual.
On top of these non-physical outcomes of the physical world of computers and the market, there is the undeniable world of emotional response. It has become increasingly hard to place, as the invisible is harnessed to better serve the physical. Friendship was once a coequal recognition, a lifelong bond. Now it is a choice on Facebook. Love is managed in prenuptual contracts, to be consumed without unforeseen consequence. Rage and anger are unhelpful, and must be managed. Joy, real joy, is frightening and disruptive. To feel something is merely that. Feelings no matter how deep are discouraged as a guide to action, and are thereby denied. Or else, they are terrifying forces of truth, justifying invasions. Either way, we do not know where to put them in this world.
Small wonder, then, that easy and foolish sarcasm dominates so much of our discourse and entertainment. It is the ideal secular religion for a consumer culture that has abandoned any physical-seeming teleological end, one in love with the method and a process. Sarcasm allows us to be in on the joke, to admire the process and its insubstantiality even as we consume. We are left somewhat hollow for knowing it was a joke, however, and must therefore consume again.
We have known that our dilemma must end in crisis. We feel it every day – even the casual nihilism of process is abandoned. In time, we have gained the courage to stop.
The solution we seek is Altrealism. Alrealism acknowledges the longstanding frustration with the domination of the method, adding to it an observation of our dilemmas in the invisible worlds created by the visible. The artist has always known this, but became caught up in the domination of the physical, often with sarcastic commentary posing as comprehension.
By acting as an observer and reporter of the great invisible, Alrealists return to the primacy the invisible as a source of action and creation in the physical world. We are reporters of the felt and the intuited, with scouting reports from the motive regions, the place of creation and suffering. We are the reporters of the felt and the intuited.
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