DASART ESSAYS

The essence of any art/viewer dialogue should be communication. However, - there are shifting power relations involved. The viewer brings mental baggage to the encounter, just as the artwork projects attitudes of the artist, and inherited characteristics that contextualise or categorise. If one wishes to communicate in a more powerful way, the artist has to be aware of these "power relations".

Why do we make these art objects and what function do they serve?

This is actually a complex question but I believe that we invest the objects with a ritualised life. We give them life, but in a death-like manner. Their ritualised aspects are all imaginary. However, these objects are presented in "real" space and time, although their contents are in a stasis or death (timeless and spaceless). I say "real" because I doubt reality's existence; that is, I see humanity as living in a changing continuum of the imagination. We establish a web of information which traps us into certain patterns of understanding. These patterns can only be altered from within the system. The function of the artwork is to break these patterns to allow some new communication to take place. Gradually History will consume the new communication.

When we speak of "decolonising space and time", we are referring to this issue. The Dasart exhibition in conjunction with the Victorian art at the Tatham Gallery highlights this. The Victorian art epitomises certain attitudes and exudes a sense of comfort, affluence and imperialistic ambition. This type of propaganda has even taken precedence over skills of design such as a Renaissance old master might exhibit. The demands of the milieu have conquered the art and even the modern viewer venerates these works, ignoring their underlying deceit. History has digested this inadequacy but still the viewer remains transfixed by the image. He has conquered the work and becomes indulgent before it, admiring skills of rendition. The work has meanwhile become less potent and exists only as a relic of a past age. It has been contained within its frame of reference (gold and ornate). The objects and designs which have been ritualised by the Victorians are nevertheless invested with a life that goes on to colonise the mind of the future because we preserve and revere them. Locked within these objects are the attitudes and conventions that led to Imperialism and Colonisation.

Our mission is to decolonise this space and time, even though this takes place within the framework of a museum. The works exhibited should have a sense of movement, or becoming. In this context, conventional 2D paintings will remain trapped within the framing convention and be too easily categorised. Conventional sculpture would also have this problem.

For us to reach our goal of saying something powerful within this overwhelming Victorian context, we need to accept the metaphor of the virus, which is an organism with no life beyond what it can borrow from its host. There is no way of knowing the structure or ways of the virus - it simply invades and mutates the organism's cells in order to multiply. Therefore, we accept the environs of a museum, or gallery (despite, or even because it is elitist) as an appropriate place to project our imaginative seed.

While it is romantic to think that art can have an impact on the streets, it is realistic to realise our birthing arena is in the art system. This system will always eventually consume us but with ever increasing attention to the methods of the metaphor, we may renew ourselves perpetually i.e. we simply change our form.

We are harnessing the energies of the imagination and directing them at invading the viewer's space. It is an act of aggression to remove the frame; it is an assault to lay claim to the space in front of the frame. We need to put a barbarous siege upon the public imagination. The space has to become an activist. We break from concepts like a fixed viewpoint, passivity, viewer dominance, the painting as window, recorder or informer. The painting now becomes animated and actual. Materials are used for whatever meaning they can carry. Space becomes layered, physically and conceptually. The idea is telescoped.

What do we mean when we speak of coming off the wall?

There is another aspect to works coming off the wall, that is the concept of time. The viewer standing before the static work has invested that object with a ritualised energy. As I drink from the cup so the cup drinks of me. A work which projects off the wall, carries that projected potency to within the viewer's safe distance - it becomes more aggressive and demands a longer time for assessment. A new fantasy has to be created and projected by the viewer who has passed from a position of domination to that of submission. The energy of the work is now in a position of power and influence. An idea can be seeded.

There are many ways one can approach the challenge of this exhibition. For example, one can take an academic type of approach and make literal art that comments on how the Victorians are seen in the present day. This frame of reference runs the risk of projecting ideas that are already contained within the culture and merely presenting them in a new way. Much installation work uses this approach e.g. Barbara Kruger, Adrian Piper and Christian Boltanskis' work. What is evident here are the specific references they use. Ideally work done in this manner should present new or unique perceptions about the subject.

Another way could be more intuitive and metaphorical. Instead of the simile which acknowledges the given and says it is like this, the metaphor inhabits the imagination and becomes the reality. It would no longer take Victorian art as a starting point but would simply BE. Works done in this manner would be less readable but possibly more resonant than literal art.

In the context of collaborative, or corporate works,I believe it is essential to hold onto the ego while creating space for the group ego. We are projecting ourselves, after all, whether individually or collectively. The old surrealist game of exquisite corpses where each person contributed his part of a drawing without seeing previous contributions can perhaps act as a model for us. An extreme case here would be for each member of the group to make his contribution without seeing or knowing what the previous person has done. It could also work if people discuss what the various contributions will be beforehand. The collaboration can even be more specific and comprise of a group working on a single piece. Unfamiliar juxtapositions can stimulate unforeseen perceptions.