SM 402
Studio Work
and Ontological Reciprocity.
Whilst putting together this section and thinking about phenomenology, body language, art and ontological reciprocity, I began to get the feeling that I was losing interest in the subject. How could this be? This was the most interesting, the ultimate part of my investigations. The stepping stone to everything else, the foundation of my studio practice, without which there is no point. It occurred to me then that the studio practice was, in fact, out of sync with the dissertation and this was probably why the writing had stalled. The previous thinking about art as occupation was directly related to my studio practice at the time, sandwiched as it was between employment, chores and written research, but it worked well because everything was of a piece. The work, to quote Paul Crowther, had an internal relationship with the artist. And then it didn’t. So I immediately went down to my studio and started to draw, with the idea of ontological reciprocity in mind. The fact that we do not look out on the world from inside but ‘inhere’ in the world, interacting through all of our senses, drawing information from what we perceive, but also filtering what we receive through our perceptual and cultural situation; reacting to the world according to the filtered received input, and reproducing the very relationship with the world from which we were formed, as art or life.
Of course we ‘reciprocally’ relate to the world all the time, but I decided to pay conscious attention to the process during the new drawing, taking an intentionally ‘pre-reflective’ double awareness of the world in which I inhere. Previously drawing was merely an exercise in occupation and sensory aesthetics, but now it was struggling to take in the world and be influenced, without the tedium of directly representing the visually perceived.
So I looked out on my garden, at the patterns of sunshine and shadow through the flax leaves. I went out into the warm sunshine and the cooling wind; listened to the rustling leaves; to vehicles driving along the street, and the distant sound of the city. I listened for the blackbird but it was absent. I could not see the city or the harbour from down in the leaves, but I could imagine the ripples on the water casting a pale texture across its surface, and the slight haze across the city buildings at this hour of the afternoon. I took a close look at the flax leaves, their leathery, fine-veined surface, like finely shaded pencil-lines in green, yellow and red oxide. I turned the leaves over, and the other side was pale; number eleven pastels, perhaps, whereas the fronts where number five. I looked at how they grew, several fronds springing fan-like from a common base. Some were speckled with browns and oxides near the soil. Some were tattered by the wind, and almost uniformly yellow. Others had bright stripes like coloured wools in cloth. I cut some green and yellow fronds, and dried brown strands from the base, and gathered some old, weathered, partially mulched fibres, pale grey from oxidising in the sun. It was cool and moist beneath the leaves, and the grassy bank where they grew was steep and slippery under my shoes.
On beginning to draw, it was difficult to make any progress. The old habit of drawing from life was strong in my mind and the newer habit of occupation and sensory aesthetics refused to admit the world. Repeatedly I would find myself searching tediously and logically for relationships between pencil lines and leaves, and then slipping into the ecstasy of aesthetic forms and movements for their own sake, ignoring the leaves altogether. Somewhere there has to be a space where drawing takes unconscious pleasure from the world experienced, and aesthetics arise out of recent sensory engagement, without visual representation of the facts. Perhaps it will take a little practice. Perhaps I need to spend more time absorbing the subject in the world. It seems easy to be absorbed in one's self and exclude the world, and equally easy if less interesting, to recall in memory what has been seen and reproduce it as drawing. But neither of these is enough. I want the external sensorial world and the internal sensory aesthetics both at once. I want the associations from accumulated sensory experience of the past to combine with the bright and exciting present moment; because one's internal history as source must surely get a little stale without renewal. I want them both at once, playing off each other like the flickering sunlight in the leaves outside.
Simultaneous ontological reciprocity perhaps.