Looking for Something to Believe In
This essay commissioned by the Portland State University School of Art and Design and originally published in “Emerging/Developed,” a catalogue to accompany the 2016 BFA Thesis Exhibition.
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I’m looking for something to believe in / And I don’t know where to start / And I don’t know where to begin.[1]
Narcissus, we are told, was a beautiful man. As the son of a god and a river nymph he likely had many wonderful attributes, but chief among them was beauty. He knew this, and that knowledge led him to become vain and prideful, expressing disdain for all those around him. As punishment for this behavior, Nemesis, the goddess of divine retribution, one day led Narcissus to a pool of water. There, he saw his own reflection — presumably for the first time — and fell in love. He could not tear himself away from the image.
He stayed there, beside the pool, staring into his own eyes. We can imagine him bent, crouched, leaning over a rippling image of himself. How long, do you think, the son of a god can live without food, or water?
Did he drink from the pool, dipping his cupped hands?
How long did Narcissus crouch there, rapt, before fatigue and hunger overtook his body? How long before he fell face first into the shallow water, and drowned?
We say that Narcissus was impossibly attracted to his reflection: to an image rippling on the surface of the pool, a play of light and shadow. Perhaps there’s another possibility: it was not that quivering surface image that held the young man captivated but the depth — the impossible abyss behind and beneath the surface, where the image opened up into nothingness. The dark waters, the gaping chasm, the endless night behind wind-stirred eyes.
This is only one version of the story — there are many others, all of which are true.
It’s time, Old Captain, lift anchor, sink! / The land rots; we shall sail into the night; / if now the sky and sea are black as ink / our hearts, as you must know, are filled with light. / Only when we drink poison are we well — / we want, this fire so burns our brain tissue, / to drown in the abyss — heaven or hell, / who cares? Through the unknown, we’ll find the new.[3]
It’s dark. The lights are dim.
You’re standing in a room too small with too many people, close together, bodies touching. There is an expectant quiet — a cough, some uncomfortable shuffling.
A light comes on, illuminating figures above the crowd.
There’s a noise: towers of sound. The figures begin to move. The crowd moves. You move. Bodies begin to surge forward, backward — a wave of flesh and sweat. Bodies circle around a central point, faster, faster, inward, inward. Towers of sound lift and fall. You lose sight of yourself, become de-centered. Sound like a black hole. Sound you can feel in your chest: in the cavity of your lungs. A sonic obliteration; the dissolution of self into mass. No one can speak; the sound pushes in, forces back your voice. Your body is the crowd’s body.
There’s something in all of us that leads toward oblivion — the lure of the abyss. I found it, most often, in witnessing performances of sound: guitars and drums and Marshall stacks and the surge of the pit. There, in dirty clubs and basements, walls vibrating and dripping sweat, I became a vessel for the sound: a brief transcendence generated by decibels alone.
We find our abyss in any number of places — we drive too fast; we drink too much; we scale cliff-faces, we jump off bridges, we swim with sharks; we sit in the dark watching images of bodies dismantled, piece by piece; we dive into a writhing mass of flailing limbs under a din of noise that will leave our ears ringing well into the next day.
We lie in the sun. We walk, slowly, into the ocean.
These tendencies are connected not to a specific desire but to a question, a curiosity: what is there once we pass through the gateway? What exists outside of the enclave? What is death?
This unknowable nothing is with us always, as present as the knowable something.
A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture.[5]
Wadi Sura II is an archaeological site uncovered in 2002, in Egypt’s Western Desert. The site includes a stone shelter, the interior walls painted 8,000 years ago with images depicting animals, humanoid figures and handprints. When it was initially uncovered, it was presumed that the smaller sets of handprints on the walls were derived from the hands of infants. [6]
This is a nice scenario — the diminutive hands of newborns inset within those of their parents — but not necessarily one that can be trusted. More recent research has concluded that the hands are likely much too small to belong even to newborns, and they express variability, and so are not likely derived from a stencil of some kind. The most probable explanation, at this time, is that the prints were derived from the freshly dismembered feet of monitor lizards.
Has there ever been a trustworthy image? All images[7] are inherently unreliable narrators. Any image manipulates the information it delivers, skewing its reception and interpretation — no image is unbiased. At one time, it may have been possible to believe an image — or, to move a step further, to believe in an image — but that time has passed.
So, what do we believe in? We might trust our dreams, our intuition, our intellect. We might put our faith in technology, leading us on a long steady pathway from the first stone tool towards some as yet unseen utopian future. We might turn to spirituality, the pulling of cards, the roll of the dice. We might turn inward, putting faith and trust in our consciousness, even as our bodies become increasingly alien and less and less our own. Each of these options is the same — we are our technologies just as our technologies are us, and they too are representations — virtual reflections of some ur-human lingering in the code of the great machine.
We try to use technology with the fantasy that it sets us above nature. Humanity is not above existence. We have technology to defy nature. We are of nature. What we produce is of nature. Technology is of nature. We must recognize the fact of nature within in order to survive. Nature does not care if humanity survives.[8]
One would think that, if there was one trust-worthy source in the world, it would be one’s self: one’s own senses of sight, touch, smell and hearing. Seeing is believing. But even that seems impossible at times. I don’t trust my memory; not entirely, anyway. My physical body feels, sometimes, like a thing alien, disconnected from my consciousness and, primarily, a hindrance. It is something I’m required to feed, to caffeinate, to medicate, to exercise and to rest in order to avoid, mask or prevent the hunger, fatigue and pain that prevent my consciousness from operating at optimum capacity. It gets in the way, feeds false information, and forgets.
The verbal protocols for the three- and four-way interactions indicated that processing-load difficulties, reported by 10 of the 30 participants, were exclusive to four-way problems (e.g., ‘‘This is what I’m having trouble holding onto,’’ ‘‘Everything fell apart and I had to go back,’’ ‘‘I kept losing information’’).[10]
The capacity of the human memory is somewhere close to 2.5 petabytes.[11] Despite this, the amount of information I’m able to absorb and process is vastly overwhelmed by the quantity of information I’m subjected to — at least it feels that way.[12] And this is considering only the information that I’m able to recognize as such — it gets out of hand quickly when I begin to consider the countless bytes of data delivered via wavelengths I’m unable to sense — or unable to sense myself sensing. As our bodies become increasingly non-organic, those wavelengths begin to open themselves up to us. It’s currently possible to implant a small silicone-encased magnet under one’s skin, and thus gain the ability to “sense” magnetic fields.[13] What we ourselves “know” from a sensory stand-point is also fluid, dynamic, and susceptible to change and alteration.
Whether I belong to a religion, whether I be agnostic or atheist, when I say “I believe,” I mean “I hold as true.”[14]
Here we run into something of a contradiction: we acknowledged early on that all images are unreliable and cannot be trusted, but in order for a work to succeed it has to be believed. This is as true of the painting or photograph as it is of the song, of the sound or video as it is of the novel, of the sculpture as it is of the Hollywood Blockbuster Film. This belief I’m referring to is not predicated on a matter of resemblance — the hyper-real is just as much an abstraction as the translation of data to sound — but of structure. We recognize that Patrick Bateman[15] is a narrator for whom “truth” and “fiction” have lost their relative meanings, but we, as readers, go along with, and “believe,” the narrative because it fits within the logic of the world it generates.
If we don’t just have bodies but are bodies…there can never be the threat of displacing body in favor of mind or abandoning the real for the virtual.[16]
As artists, we have to begin to believe in our work before anyone else will, and this is the hardest sell of all. It’s rare that we produce something that we fully believe in — that might be our last work — and that’s what keeps us searching. We find it in bits and pieces: in this brushstroke here; in this frame of video glitch; in this material juxtaposition; in this line, this transaction of sound, this phrase. We’re trying, over and over again, this iteration after that, to reach the abyss; we make work until we are able to forget our self and dissolve — to transmute and become, somehow, the body that is the work.
Abstraction brings us into the abyss, through a reflectivity of the self and a preoccupation with what cannot be fully known. In all cases, here, we find an underlying logic that constructs the space of the work: the diary of repetition; the Fool’s Journey; the interaction of the Humours; painting as idol worship; as icon; as grazing; interface of screen-object; interface of systemic-control-objects; credit-data as sonic interruption; image as architecture as self; as language; queering of language; object as dream space; the mise en abyme of the self caught flickering for eternity between screens. It’s that structural logic that allows for belief in the work — that allows for the viewer, and artist, to temporarily suspend skepticism and walk headlong into the abyss.
These days, airplanes and radios belong among the things that are closest to us. When, however, we refer to “last things,” we think of something quite different. Death and judgment, these are the last things. In general, “thing” applies to anything that is not simply nothing.[18]
Every thing — every image,[19] object, item or relic — exists on a continuum of the real, the representation and the abstraction. This cup is both a cup and a representation of the idea of a cup, insofar as it captures some amount of that essential cup-ness. The only real cup is that archetypal cup — the only real thing that archetypal thing, the thing that predates and defines thing-ness, the ur-thing — the cup that initially defines cup-ness. The thing, also, is inevitably linked to the human body as the source of the corresponding ur-thing: the cup derived as representation of cupped hands scooping water from the spring.
As artists we strive to represent something that has never before been represented — to generate some new ur-form, from which further forms iterate and evolve. Most of the time we fail to produce anything, let alone that ur-form — that new never-before formed form, and instead produce yet another representation.[20] Each representation is derived from and of the self — from the body, the mind and lifetime of experience and sensory information filtered, processed and iterated. Our work is inexorably linked to our body. We find the ur-cup in our cupped hands, just as we find the ur-forms of our work in ourselves: the retina as screen; interlocking neural systems and structures; the dark spaces when we close our eyes; the first sounds we heard, still in the womb, slow and deep.
What we see in our work is a reflection of our self, in some form or another. We sometimes deny it, push it away, turn our back, but it’s there, always. But what’s there, we instinctively know, is just the surface of something: just the edges; the outline; the faintest breath. We look at it, and we can see that there’s something more. There has to be, somewhere under the surface.
And so we look. And keep looking.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.[21]
To return to Narcissus: Narcissus leans over the pool, gazing into the water. There, he sees a play of light and shadow rippling across the surface — an image, reflecting back an abstract representation of his own visage. Thirsty, he reaches out and dips his cupped hands into the water — the image explodes, the surface disturbed by his touch, crashing outward. He withdraws his hands, sipping water, and as he watches the image reforms as the surface becomes, again, still.
He repeats this action, over and over again. The image explodes, and reforms, over and over again.
Behind the surface of the image is something else — he glimpses it each time the surface fragments. Something deeper — something mirrored within himself.
He tries to get closer.
Closer.
Closer.
Closer.
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[1] The Ramones, “Something to Believe In,” Animal Boy, Sire Records, 1986.
[2] “File:Narcissus-Caravaggio (1594–96) edited.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, last modified August 5, 2015, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Narcissus-Caravaggio_(1594-96)_edited.jpg
[3] Charles Baudelaire, “Le Voyage,” trans. Robert Lowell, La Fleur du mal, accessed March 19, 2016, http://fleursdumal.org/poem/231
[4] Electronic Arts Intermix, accessed March 19, 2016, http://www.eai.org/title.htm?id=1973
[5] Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” On Photography (New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1990): 5. http://www.macobo.com/essays/epdf/onphotography.pdf
[6] Kristin Romey, “’Baby Hands’ in Cave Paintings May Actually Belong to Lizards,” National Geographic, February 26, 2016, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/02/160225-sahara-rock-art-stencils-egypt-caves-reptiles/. Photograph by Emmanuelle Honoré
[7] By images, let’s just say all works — an image might be two dimensional, three dimensional, or four dimensional; it might be composed of pigment or matter or objects; it might be composed of visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory or some other stimuli; it might be inherently imperceptible.
[8] Steven Parrino, The No Texts (1979–2003), Jersey City, NJ: Abaton Book Company, 2003: 43
[9] Quinn Norton, “A Sixth Sense for a Wired World,” Wired, June 7, 2006, http://www.wired.com/2006/06/a-sixth-sense-for-a-wired-world/
[10] Graeme S. Halford, Rosemary Baker, Julie E. McCredden and John D. Bain, “How Many Variables Can Humans Process?” Psychological Science 16, no. 1, (2005): 75. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/pdf/ps/mind_variables.pdf
[11] Paul Reber, “What Is The Memory Capacity of the Human Brain?” Scientific American, May 1, 2010, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memory-capacity/
[12] A list of my currently open browser tabs — Window 1: Gmail; Yale Union: Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, a screening; Google Drive; GDrive Spreadsheet: Book Mailing List; The Center for Land Use Interpretation: The Gunnison Bay Research Program; PSU Gmail; Headlands Center for the Arts: Artist in Residence; PNCA Gmail; Artnews: PS1's Sprawling ‘Greater New York’ Show…; Elizabeth Jaeger: Sculpture; The New Inquiry: Closing the Loop; Gizmodo: Watch These Two Rattlesnakes Battle It Out in Elaborate ‘Combat Dance’; City of Portland: Arts Tax; Audience & Avatar, Brody Condon: Modifications; itch.io Dashboard; Rhizome: Review: Who Run the World?; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery: Charles Long; Parking Lot Art Fair — Window 2: Wired: A Sixth Sense for a Wired World; EAI: Minor Threat, Dan Graham; Google Image Search: “dan graham minor threat”; lovewisdom.net: Understanding Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art”; Huffington Post: Apocalypticism: The Lure of the Abyss; Wikimedia Commons: Narcissus-Caravaggio (1594–96) edited.jpg; Gizmodo: I Have a Magnet Implant in my Finger; textetc.com: Translating Baudelaire 1; Google Image Search result: Biohackers insert cyborg chips under…; fleursdumal.org; The Film Experience: Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Under the Skin; Google Image Search: “monitor lizard claws”; macobo.com: onphotography.pdf; National Geographic: ‘Baby Hands’ in Cave Paintings May Actually Belong to Lizards; Susan Sontag Foundation: On Photography; Wikimedia Commons: Casper David Friedrich — Wanderer above the sea of fog.jpg — Window 3: issuu.com: Eileen Isagon Skyers: Vanishing Acts; YouTube: Day 16 — Easy Breezy Beautiful Yoga — 30 Days of Yoga; David T. Fortin: Indigenous architectural futures: Potentials for post-apocalyptic spatial speculation; Bulk Apothecary: Beeswax; downlode.org: Philip K Dick: How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later; The New Foundation Seattle: Career Incentive Funds; Wikipedia: David Bowie; Autodesk: Fusion 360; Riley & Associates: Taxation & tax deductions for the self-employed visual artist; Superficial Structures: Jason Dodge; Lewis & Clark Gmail — Window 4: Wikipedia: Underworld; Wikipedia: List of UFO religions — Window 5: deoxy.org: Philip K Dick, How to Build a Universe The Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later — Window 6: Google Image Search: “nick cage jim carrey looking at art”; Alison Van Pelt Art: Jim Carrey, Nicholas Cage, at Alison Van Pelt show
[13] Dann Berg, “I Have a Magnet Implant In My Finger,” Gizmodo, March 22, 2012, http://gizmodo.com/5895555/i-have-a-magnet-implant-in-my-finger
[14] Julia Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe, New York: Columbia University Press, 2009: 3
[15] Of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1991.
[16] Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001: 86
[17] “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” The Film Experience, July 22, 2014, http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2014/7/22/hit-me-with-your-best-shot-under-the-skin.html
[18] Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002: 4
[19] See note 4 on the expanded definition of “image.”
[20] This is by no means a failing — it may be impossible to produce an ur-form, as all ur-forms might be an intrinsic part of us, or an archetypal mind-form.
[21] Philip K Dick, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978,” deoxy.org, accessed March 19, 2016, http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm
