Expedition to Complexity
Vol 2 : Dejargonising & accessibility: how to communicate with the Other
Artist in Residence at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Emma Hislop sails with the S.S. Forefront but brings her own boat. In a three part series, Hislop gives her insights, reflections and opinions on her time with the Foundation, her understanding of a circular economy, and what it is they and she are trying to do.
Compare fine art and economy and you will find mutual inaccessibility. Jargon is prevalent in every industry — even now I’m not quite sure what I’m signing up for as I look at my studio lease. It’s important to bring in impartial and unique persons to any industry to prevent this. With fresh eyes, the amateur becomes the expert on what the outside sees, and identifies hidden blindspots — like systemic jargon. I joined the Foundation as an amateur of circular economy and, to their credit, they saw the value of my potential as a recent graduate, giving me the platform of an expert, forming where I stand now, as an emerging artist. The Foundation provided me with the freedom to explore their work, teams, plans and practices. With this information, I am able to give an honest, unique perspective on not only their work and the circular economy concept, but our world today and the part of it that we forget: its soul.
Systemic jargon keeps open and honest discussions internal, completely stalemating creative thinking, and closing the door to collaboration. You can’t hope to broaden your reach if you only reach out on your terms; make it a little uncomfortable — no risk, no reward. It’s simple, to start an honest effort, invite the Other into your personal space, your sphere, your home.
The inaccessibility of fine art is famous. ‘Art-speak’ has become so embedded that all contemporary art is met with complete disinterest by any other industry or public. The only contemporary artwork my parents know, for example, is Tracy Emin’s, ‘My Bed’, due to its notorious controversiality, with many asking, “how is this art? My five year old could have done that”. How does the art world respond to outsider comment? With internal, systemic jargon. A circular economy shapes systems into ouroboros — the self eating snake — and so does this kind of response.
Communication is, first and foremost, about understanding. It’s not about creating new terminologies and languages, but about reconnecting with a forgotten, integral method that emanates from the world soul. I call it the mother tongue. I have reverberated this through a video essay “Anima Mundi” on Open Tongue, an online archive of my transparent working process for the duration of the residency. I’ve tried throughout the residency to channel myself in an exposition of the mother tongue. To do this I’ve found that acting as a bevelled, convex mirror, taking in information before reflecting back a response. I have become a tool of circular economy. My alias as convex mirror absorbs language, ideas, data and conversation, bends and reflects back. I have become an autonomous device of the mother tongue. Whilst I reflect a distorted vision of these inputs from the Foundation, they have become something ‘other’ than reflection. All is not quite what it seems. I am reminded of the Blade Runner replicant.
During a visit to Dundee Contemporary Arts, I explored Santiago Sierra’s Black Flag exhibition.
“It takes the form of an immersive photographic and sound installation documenting the process and performance of planting the universal symbol of the anarchist movement — the black flag — at the two most extreme points on earth: the North and South Poles.” (DCA Archive)
In the space, I was surrounded by photographs, sound and, in the centre, a large vitrine. Inside lay a large black flag. How could this be? The images clearly showed Sierra at the North Pole having planted the flag, the audio encased the sound of this flag whipping in the violent polar wind, the text described the rebellious act of leaving the flag in place. But here, in front of me, clear as day, protected as an artefact — said flag. Infuriated and confused, I queried with the invigilator. The flag is a replica.
“1: an exact reproduction (as of a painting) executed by the original artist
2: a copy exact in all details” (Merriam-Webster)
It cannot possibly be an exact copy. It does not have the marks of wear and tear, of use, of handling, of its experience. Ridley Scott’s replicants cannot pass the baseline test, and the word replica requires some re-definition. Nothing can accurately replicate or reflect — something is always lost into the aether. Like the angel’s share of whisky — the process of whisky making and maturing that causes a 2% loss of volume per year, which is said to fly up to the heavens, necessary for it to become drinkable, and critical for its flavour — everything has to go somewhere.
Biomimicry, a school of thought where humans try to echo nature, more mimc than replica. Often seen as learning from nature to solve human problems, biomimicry becomes a bastardised version of itself. As humans are part of nature this definition is inaccurate. We are biological after all, wouldn’t learning from nature mean learning from ourselves? Not to mention the debate of our creation of the word nature to create something Other from ourselves. It’s not the approach that’s flawed, it comes down, once again, to definition and terminology. Perhaps this is better told as an organism or species echo. An echo speaks truer; things are lost and gained — they go out and come back changed. Artist and Theorist Brandon LaBelle writes of this in ‘Lecture on an Acoustics of Sharing’,
“I approach the echo as a means for orientation: the auditory reflections that surround us capture a given sound and return it; the echo brings this sound back into the environment, to teach us the dimensions of our surroundings — We gauge the material envelope of place through these reflections of sound. Echo, in other words, locates us through a repetition, or a repeat, and what I’d like to further like to suggest, a recital: is not the echo a ‘citation’ of a sound, re-figured or re-staged? A quote that re-speaks the original? In this regard, we come to orient ourselves by way of reflection (in the double sense of the word), highlighting the echo as a type of mimicry: a sound that comes back to us, yet as if from another body.”
Organism echo attempts to articulate one’s perspective of experience. My experience of the world led to my principles around ecology and art, anothers’ may have caused them to have the opposite — creating an Other. Strengthened by the voices that surround us and the language they use, an echo is a reverberation of words already spoken. Choose them wisely, it’s unknown what they might reflect.
All views included in this article series are the artist’s own
