Substance is enduring, form is ephemeral – Dee Hock
What is it that makes a body recognisable? Or a face, or a limb? And what are those liminal spaces betwixt figure and fantasy? The particular line that acts as a barrier between understanding what we see and becoming confused or mystified by it.
How much, for example, can the artist leave out and have the eye fill in by itself? That is, without any congruent mark to define that certain aspect: what is shown is innately what we suppose; a symbolic cue that we know and identify with. Can a mark in a cave, distorted and faded, yet clinging onto the material substance it has left suggest enough information to have it speak “and I am like you, but we are not the same”?
Image Credit: http://home.custertel.net/~dahl/petroglyph/photo.htm
Within the context of this idea, I’d like to focus on some prehistoric art – particularly pictographs. As we can see above, the hand is immediately recognisable because it is not too far removed from reality, and is only of interest in the thinning of the proximal phalanx on two fingers. This alone stirs curiosity, because if these were like the other fingers, it would be completely. . .normal.
This basis of abstraction and extenuation–of the real with the imagined–I think, forms much of the immediate distinctions between the two realities. Our own eyes and brains seem to need more of a symbolic sameness to connect the thing shown with the thing known, rather than an exact copy. For example, the now heroically diversified smiley face can be seen to represent the face by simply using a shape and lines, all forming in the right spot, and all suggesting more than what is shown to us at the same time. The idea presents itself within and through the image, forming a precise duality.
Look at this. The smiley doesn’t even have a nose, let alone the fullness and vivacity that the bald man has. And yet, we know that the smiley represents more than it shows, simply through its abstraction and distortion, while holding onto the integral qualities. The smiley is as much a pictograph as the hand is. Does this suggest we are moving away from complex imagery in favour of more easily recognisable distortions of the world? Could the images of real people and their faces and bodies be not as exciting or interesting to us any more? Probably not, but there is a definite connection between our modern symbols as to the ones used in the past.
Back towards the art of the past, an image of human pictographs expresses a similar situation as the villainous smiley does to our bald man. But, like our hand above, there is an inert substance to these images that ascends the smiley. What is it that makes a body recognisable? We barely have visible heads in these pictographs…and the torso and anatomy itself is almost a slab, like a rock monolith or dark resinous block of wood. Still, and evermore, we see them as people. We have come to valorize these images with as much importance as a full figure with all its features. Is it not completely baffling ?
Or is this the precise nature and mission of art? We disassemble what is seen and cast almost all of it away, while leaving something that is so instinctual and essential to our nature that it promotes the feeling of unity, of a universal connectivity that endures beyond time. I believe this is something to think openly about, to discuss and to share.
I’ll leave you on that thought.
All the best,
Tom.
His Empty Space 