Gap between Image and Reality. P. II

2020

Continuation of the text describing an artistic practice that combines performative and ideomotor actions aimed at understanding and revealing the problems of the concept "Gap between image and reality". To analyze the process of formation and transformation, the artist turns to the ontopsychology of A. Meneghetti and the onto-epistemology of the "new materialists".

In modern society, a person is included in powerful information flows, in most cases the meanings of which are manipulative, aimed at constructing a subject conveniently integrated into the socio-political system, through the formation of an image of reality that distorts a person’s perception, forming a gap between image and reality.

The existence of each is organized in the interweaving of information, a unique form of action, in specific practices, through the dynamics of intra-activity — interdependent becoming, where the accumulation of agencies, human and non-human, mutually constitute each other, shaking the perception of the static nature of matter, which is not an inanimate given, it is not a thing, but an action… a clot of agency.

Performative artistic practices, like the performative dimension of matter, transform the very nature of change and causality… Through the prism of the "New Materialists", the artist tries to formulate a reconstructed vision of the image of herself and reality, being in a constant flow of material flows that ensure an "indefinite" becoming in the living and active, more-than-human.

Untitled, graphic, A4, pencil, 2020, in the private collection of D. Vrubel (R.I.P)

Capture.

Capture is Occupy according to Deleuze.

Charles Sanders Peirce believed that research is something in which all things in the universe participate…

Unlike post-conceptualism, when contemporary art is created in modernity and is an agency, creating modernity, the concept of "The Gap between Image and Reality" is a given, a transversal force that has captured the mental and the physical… A given that has opened a new field of perception, revealing those matters that do not (yet) exist. The production of art does not need an external object or subject to refer to, art is not about something, it is something in itself, an event, an occurrence, a capture, an occupation.

Capture is not an activity that must begin with a person, on the contrary, art itself is capable of engaging, releasing the suppressed, inaccessible to hearing and sight, and as an event to generate new forms, to materialize new environments in which objectivities and subjectivities are formed. Art carries out capture because it thinks through engagement.

Agency, historicity and intentionality, the keys to meaning-making, are understood not as attributes of human culture and subjectivity, but as transcorporeal interactions that take place over and through human and non-human bodies. The material world and its meaning are constituted together in an iterative process of investing matter with meaning. The performativity of the case described in the first part of the text suggests that discrete entities and the meanings associated with them arise within the relations that compose them, the very nature and possibility of change being continuously transformed as part of.....

…what?

In the semantic field there is a sender and a receiver, and agencies are the postmen who carry semantic information. Conscious cognitive perception, or precognition, is an inexplicable process of information transmission in terms of physical or biological mechanisms, for this reason demonstrative modes of knowledge production can be included in the realm of art, as incomprehensible a priori, but mediated by bodily experience.

Then, in 2018, at the foot of the Matterhorn, who or what was the sender of the concept of "The Gap between Image and Reality" and what is the temporality of this source?

From history: The theory of eternal return unexpectedly became the fundamental concept of F. Nietzsche’s philosophy of life. The thought that illuminated Nietzsche in the Swiss Alps, also through touching a rock similar to a pyramid, struck him with the understanding that a person will live a life with suffering, problems, searches for himself and the meaning of life infinitely much. But at the same time, this theory contained the highest point of thinking, since it is a rapprochement between the present and the future.

Demon sitting, A2, pencil, 2020

In the case of precognition, as a vision, the individual receives sensory information through the transtemporal action of consciousness beyond the boundaries of the recognized physical senses. More than just a presence in time, the phenomenon is defined as a logically non-inferential prediction of future events, based on a human trait known as transliminality — the transcendence of mental limitations, the tendency for psychological material such as images, ideas, affects, and perceptions to cross the threshold of consciousness, thereby increasing sensitivity to mystical experience. Transliminality resonates more deeply with the posthuman, as it constitutes material from both the unconscious and the environment, linking the indistinguishable, the unknowable, with bodily experience.

Performative actions, like magical passes, are not simple physical exercises, but rather a key to transformation, to changes in one’s perception of reality. Performativity helps to overcome mental limitations, relying on one’s own shift in perception to attract the sensations of the future to strengthen the current sense of reality "here and now".

The human body is in the temporal gap of the present and the future, only insofar as it is a sensation, a feedback of generalized information in the form of a perceived cognitive result, expressing freedom in the power to make decisions to determine the real through action, rewriting and becoming — a methodological tool of the subjective.

Sitting Demon, A2, markers, 2021

Subjectivity is the philosophical "I".

Philosophy, being a form of textual animism, allows one to delocalize, to leave oneself through the movement of reflection, to reveal oneself in expression, thus realizing the most complete expression of oneself. Experiments with feelings and attitudes towards how we see the world through spatio-temporal sensations, not just sensations on a mental level… it is an assembly of mind, body, non-human and surrounding world. What precognition requires from the body is a-temporality, a quantum existence in two simultaneous points in time. This distributed body immediately seems to be separated from nature into remote depths of knowledge, located simultaneously within the real and the abstract, forming an internal "landscape of touch"…

…to itself, reviving an uncanny sense of otherness of oneself, greeting the stranger within and awakening other beings in infinite space and time… a cacophony of polyphony of repeating intra-acting stories. These are tangled tales… Isn’t "touch", by its nature, already an invitation, an involvement… an encounter with the infinite otherness of oneself, a touch with the Other… with all the strangers inside, including the "I".

Making closer contact with this infinite otherness that lives within us, around us and through us, awakening us to the non-human that we may be: it may well be irrational, unfeeling, innumerable… an infinite number of indefinite entities scattered in different spaces, times…

Linkage.

"I carry my landscapes around with me… inside me," Joan Mitchell, an American artist of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, often repeated. She created her works from the point of view of poetic devices, preferring metonyms, seeking to connect herself with her art through pictorial segments that were essentially sensations, thus appealing to the desire to empathize with an aspect of the world. Her works should be seen as random glimpses into her own nature, which manifested itself through connections with the physical world.

She spent hours studying the canvases from the farthest point of the studio, simulating in a sense a panoramic view of memories: "I paint from a distance…". Joan’s canvases were as contradictory as she was herself: sharp shards of color and gracefully curved brushstrokes intertwined with myriads of sharp and pointed lines. A brilliant colorist, she endowed the color palette with alphabetical or musical symbols, translating poetry and music into painting.

For J. Mitchell, the connection with nature was of great importance; she told how she realized that there was art in the world when she felt the wind on her face, looking out from the balcony of her house onto Lake Michigan. On her canvases, she reproduced hurricanes and whirlpools, and in the 1981 work "Edrita Fried", measuring almost 3×8 m, the dynamics of her brushstrokes create the feeling that at the moment of painting, Joan herself became the element of the wind.

And this whole assemblage, connecting feelings and visions with pictorial segments, poured out on me from a small Instagram icon on my iPhone, capturing my attention with a perceptual flow, becoming the final puzzle in the Linkage Mitchell-Vrubel-I, drawing me into a state of obsession and affect, with the intention of rewriting the images of the Demon from M. Vrubel’s paintings in the technique of abstract expressionism.

Seated Demon (fragment), oil on canvas, 2021, 2,5×4.65 m, CCI Fabrica

Affect and emotions revolve around a person who perceives and feels, but affect, unlike emotion, cannot be "owned", it is in "free floating", and being uncontrollable, nevertheless, it is extremely corporeal, enhancing susceptibility, turns the body into clay for modeling, is able to change the direction of events and influence their consequences.

Such an implex, a combination of artists separated in time, Vrubel-Mitchell, from different eras, trends in art, visual content, included me in an iterative game… a new round of understanding the concept of "The gap between image and reality", through performative painting, learning the nature of expressionism.

Abstract expressionism, in its time, continued the liberation of art from any control of reason and logical laws, becoming a creative earthquake, changing the landscape of contemporary art. Women expressionists preferred metonymy (not metaphors) in their works, which served as a tool for studying the role that desire plays in the works of female artists. The metonymic connections of nature are not known in advance in concrete terms, but are established through intuitive needs, but remain in a suspended state, like an infinite number of clues that are slowly revealed over time in the form of painted fragments, fragments that undergo a constant transformation in terms of disintegration, renewal and reunification. One of the greatest strengths of the metonymic strategies confirmed by the art of American expressionists is the mystery of fragmentary references to themselves, their nature, immeasurably vague and constantly rebellious: being an eternal riddle, each time with immersion in a new work, it was reconstructed and rediscovered anew in the process of creating art.

Nature expresses itself in the subject, who finds in expression the fullness of himself, thus the concept of human life as expression sees in this not only the achievement of a goal, but also the clarification of this goal.

Switching between object and subject is an important component of posthumanist thinking in the theory of affect, where the "object" belongs to the more-than-human realm of other species of animals, plants, elements and forces.

Joan Mitchell and M. Vrubel, creating their own world on canvas, plunged into a state of affect with a "jump", releasing the elemental forces of nature. For Vrubel, as well as for Mitchell, the connection with nature was important… "I do not interpret nature, but nature interprets me to me" — he said., thereby nature is personalized, turning into a lively interlocutor. Landscapes in his paintings are not just a background, but an environment that participates in the action and expresses the mood: nature enslaves man, absorbs him into itself, the characters take natural plant forms or start the process of becoming an animal.

Vrubel discovered a fundamentally different attitude to the language of art itself, a different poetics, and different principles of artistic expression. He dissolved images in color and spots, crushed them into mosaics, in order to then find new combinations of planes and colors: thus, surrounded by cooling lava, dull purple, silvery-lilac, ash-pink shades, falling from the canvas, the flesh of the Demon (Demos — soul) emerged from painting. Having found this main image of his in Lermontov’s romantic poem, Vrubel not only complicated it under the influence of the worldview of the new era, but also endowed it with the qualities of his Alter Ego.

Both artists, Mitchell and Vrubel, turned to the poetry of the Romantic era, where the landscape corresponded to the inner state of a person. Mitchell was inspired by the poetry of W. Wordsworth, where his poem "Tintern Abbey" describes the development of human consciousness as a sequence of changes in several internal "I", each of which corresponds to a special internal landscape and psychological portrait of the hero. This echoes Vrubel’s series of Demons, where the landscape in the paintings corresponds to the internal state of the character, and the Demon itself is a constantly transforming Alter Ego of the artist.

Flying Demon, oil on canvas, 2021, 2,1×6 m

According to Nancy, the artist does not draw forms, but a force that gives the pictorial signs the energy of presence. And this force is often expressed in deformations, in the transformation of the objects of the image into monsters: spasms, convulsions, strange broken poses of Vrubel’s Demons can be understood precisely as a manifestation of the energy of force that transforms the body into a stage on which trauma is represented.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, the artist is already an accomplished schizophrenic due to the fluidity of his thinking, capable, as in the case of the concept of the "monstrous body", of beginning as one thing and continuing as another, violating the familiar boundaries between types, forms, images, object and subject, being the liberating beginning of himself as an individual and a revolutionary force for society.

In such Linkage as Vrubel-I-Mitchell, I was drawn in by the presence of a similar childhood trauma associated with speech, which led to affectation of the psyche, but opened up other forms of cognition and interaction with the surrounding world, attracting various agencies and self-disclosure through art.

Performative painting in the technique of abstract expressionism, existing at a deeper level than categories and codes, opens up new ways of interacting with the body through a still unorganized level of affective qualities, creating the possibility of new perceptions, percepts and new affects.

Affect… you can get lost in a state… Affect is an "anarchy of impulses", a "struggle of motives", a breakdown of paradigms of thinking, when all states of the soul: emotions, will, desires, thinking cease to function normally. In such a tense field, the spontaneous and the meditative, the will and the bondage gain strength, freeing meaning from its chains, releasing it into the meaningless, you still remain in the realm of meaning… apathy (a sure sign of the approach of the demonic) and heightened attention…

Performative painting in its expressive form expresses itself in the struggle of the conscious and the unconscious, action and reaction… simultaneously. You enter this state through a "breakdown", it is connected with the moment. The body is a collection of impulses, but at each moment there is only one correct choice that determines the optimal action. The gesture is always spontaneous, but releasing my hand and body for a stroke, moving along a six-meter canvas, I want to know exactly what my brush is doing. Freedom in my work is quite controllable within the framework of the given criteria: to rewrite the image of Vrubel’s Demon in the expressive painting technique of Joan Mitchell.

Painting itself is the development of other realities… what develops by chance, a coincidence of a hand gesture, but still an ordering, conscious person, this is a force that can be trusted. Not the performance itself is a magical action, but gestures and bodily actions found intuitively, contributing to the release of the suppressed.

Holding multiple processes in performative painting is a technique that you go through to learn how to manage it, to get out of the disintegration of affect and not to get carried away, falling into the "cosmic vortices" of abstract expressionism… A technique with which you can come to a conscious expression of will, when inner hearing and vision become sharper, until new series of thoughts, new perceptual streams appear, when affect becomes conscious.

Demon defeated, oil on canvas, 2021, 2,1×6 m

The unconscious is not a dark place of accumulation of monsters or chaos, but the perfect order of human life, it is a global set of information continuously coming from the outside, it is a projection established in history, due to which we see only a part of ourselves. Without being aware of itself, the human unconscious can remain a "lost space".

In the context of the socio-political, abstract expressionism is uncontrollable, because it is based on the principle of uncertainty and the established model of the unconscious, which, being a kind of "objective subjectivity", can tell what things, inner landscapes and social relations inhabit it. For example, one of Mitchell’s colleagues, Lee Krasner, never named her works, relying on analytics and suggestions from friends: she was surprised one day, instinctively realizing that one of the paintings should be called "Eye", because the painting "watched" her while she was painting it.

Expressionism undermines the human in man, allows one to tear the percept out of the objective perceptions and states of the perceiving subject and to tear the affect out of experiences, to extract a block of sensations, pure existence.

You are not in the world, you become together with the world, you become in the process of its contemplation.

Percept is a landscape before man, in the absence of man… You do not simply perceive the percept, but enter it and are included in the composite whole of sensation…

…you blossom like a peacock’s tail instantly, softly.......this fluffy multitude expands in space through the dynamics of breathing…vibration gradually manifests itself as a scattering, intensifying simultaneously with the awakening of receptors-eyes, raising their eyelashes from sleep…

…in these embraces of pure energies, the demonic, unnameable, fatal, alien, clinging, is removed…that which strangled and entangled…

…there will be no fight.

…it is already manifested and defeated…

The gap between image and reality is no longer a static state. Gaps are something that must be done, it is breaks that create the individual and perhaps this will have to be done many more times.

The feeling of time accelerated and carried in space as if it had broken a dam…

I will never return to my former self.....and my story is just beginning…

literature:

1. Karen Barad. “On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am” (v1.1), 2012

2. Antonio Meneghetti. “Introduction to ontopsychology” / Roma, 1992

3. Lecture of K. Anokhin on youtube. Lecture 2. Hypernetwork theory of the brain and consciousness. 2018

4. Isabelle Stengers. “Reclaiming Animism” / e-flux journal Issue #3, July 2012

5. David Zwirner Books. “Joan Mitchell: I carry my landscapes around with me”. 529 West 20th Street, New York, 2019

6. Beliy Gorod. “Mikhail Vrubel.” Moscow, 2008

7. Mikhail German. “Mikhail Vrubel.” Avrora, St.Petersburg, 2010

8. Mary Gabriel. “Ninth street women”. 2018, Little Brown, Hachette UK

9. Rosi Braidotti & Maria Hlavajova, “Posthuman Glossary”, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018

10. G.Deleuze & F.Guattari “What is Philosophy?”, Columbia University Press, 1994