The quest is essential, the doorway is key and the experience is waiting. The artist as a pilgrim, as an explorer. The romantic hero cast against his chosen landscape whether that is Friedrich’s natural world or Blandy’s cultural environs begins to perform a task of a search inside themselves for a deeper meaning. The reflection of this must, however, be onto the audience, a re-imagining of the quest in the viewers mind. It is a shift of perspective, the recounting of discovery and of experience that will involve the viewer in having their own.
The gallery space is liminal in nature; it is outside of the ordinary. The white space removes all that is not important, isolating the work and elevating all that is shown to a new level of importance. The gallery is a place for experience. The viewers active movement through the gallery door, symbolic of the opportunity for experience (the door as a link between two scenes through which the protagonist willingly chooses to pass rather than its converse implication as a barrier where the protagonists’ movement has to be earned or granted) creates the conditions for an experience, connected to an artwork, to occur.
It is the involvement of the viewer through their observation that is key. Michael Snows ‘Solar Breath, Northern Caryatids’ is a video projection of a window with its curtains, moved by the wind, slapping against the pane. Whilst we are observing a phenomena and an idyll, we are also drawn to the gallery itself. The outside may have been brought in, but how much does it alter or re-imagine the white cube space? Snow transforms the wall into a window; the space is transformed rather than changed, temporarily becoming a different environment. This is a re-staging of the easel painting, the video becoming like “a portable window that, once set on the wall, penetrates it with deep space.” (O’Doherty B, 1999, pg 18).
“The work, in effect, poses this "problem" of perception and we as viewers must draw from this special case all the "general case" metaphysical relationships that are encoded within the language of the piece” (Youngblood, 1970 pg 71). The video work uses the lens to show the viewer exactly what the artist has seen. As much as it includes the same distinction between what is shown and what is not shown as painting, the decision to focus the lens on a particular place means the viewer sees through the artist’s eye; moving image becomes more direct in its communication. The inclusion of audio to accompany the image in Solar Breath intensifies the atmosphere, and the questioning of the links between the two develops further the possibilities of experience for the viewer. This is more Dogme95 than John Smith, the audio a simultaneous recording documenting Snows presence within the space; the viewer joining him in his room. A removal of audio, however, would intensify the effect of the image and instead invites the viewer to impose their own soundtrack, whether music, voiceover or deep thought. The removal of one aspect of expected stimulation creates an uncertainty and disorientation.
The experience comes not from just observing, but by choosing to participate. It is this inclusion of the viewer in the work, whether as a reflection akin to Lacan’s mirror theory of observing the artists quest in comparison to the viewers’ own, or in questioning the decisions and relationships of elements within the work. Disparity creates the space for this interpretative involvement of the viewer; the effect of the presentation creates the environment for it to happen. The artwork is a representation. The artist admits that there is an unpresentable yet attempts to represent it, is not governed by rules but searches for them, just as the postmodern cannot exist “without a shattering of belief and without discovery of the lack of reality of reality in reality – a discovery linked to the invention of other realities." (Lyotard, 1992)
Lyotard’s ‘Great Zero’, the space between the representation and what it represents, offers the experience to the viewer; a questioning of what the representation represents, and the implied relationships therein. It is Lyotard who describes the sublime as relational to reason, that active engagement of our internal conditioning and perceptive experiences leads to an engagement and experiential interpretation of the artwork. This considered, the experience is within the viewer, a connection between the internal knowledge and the external stimulation; for Kant the experience of standing in front of a natural wonder (a mountain, for example), leads to a sublime notion resulting from an inability to comprehend the entirety of what is seen; the experience is of “reason exceeding all presentation, pain in the imagination or sensibility proving inadequate to the concept.”(Lyotard, 1992 pg 9) The viewer may not make the same connections as the artist, he relinquishes control of the interpretation; however this consideration is far less significant than the creation of space for the viewer to employ their reason and to interact with the work.
As a result the idea of differed desire, linked with that of loss, becomes instrumental. We cannot fully perceive, and we cannot create the experience. If it is immeasurably linked to an internal connection with the external, then an expectation of what might happen, perhaps a desire to re-live a previous experience, results in the sublime always being just out of the protagonists reach. Thus there is a link to the Romantic, the desire for the unreachable and the mourning of loss; a nihilism considered by Nietzsche whereby the highest values are in a transcendental realm unreachable by mere mortal humankind: God, comprehension of creation and unrequited love are all unachievable.
“When ordinary vision—conditioned and enculturated by the most vulgar of environments—is liberated through aesthetic conceptual design information…We see through the filmmaker's eyes. If he's an artist we become artists along with him.” (Youngblood, 1970 pg 72) The sublime experience is out there. We may not be able to find it, but by placing oneself in a position where it may, the experience can occur. The artist, as a pilgrim encounters it and reflects his encounter to his audience who, in turn, might find themselves encountering their own experience. The key is the willingness to experience, and the subsequent involvement in the search and in the artwork. If the artist allows the viewer in, the viewer not only becomes part of the work but takes it away with them. The implication is that the viewer becomes integral to the work, not through any direct involvement but by their own perception.
Bibliography
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