Approximately equal
Skala Gallery, Poznan Poland Oct, Nov 2017 Materials
Glass 2.20mX3.00m, 3 pumps, transparent tubes, 10 litter ink, water The exhibition poses questions about interpretation, about what we see and how we experience it.
Merleau-Ponty claims that our vision is what allows us to map the world and to move around in it and explore it bodily. Our bodies and the world are made of the same stuff, the same fabric.
Our visual experience of the flow of the ink is dynamic, immediate, and non-representational. The abstract marks stand for absent things that are not part of our intertwinement with the physical world around us, but rather attest to the subjective/objective split between us and our immediate environment.
The ink painting suggests the viewer interpret it subjectively, while ideologically, it is an element of the chaos that surrounds us. The ink painting interrogates meaning without words, but also provides a place for passion to be involved.
A machine pumps the ink forward, which provides the particular visual experience of an action painting; it is a kind of automated writing machine, revealing what flows from the unconscious (Andre Breton). The outer deliberately moves back from its viewers in order to allow them to have their own personal experience of the work.
Gilles Deleuze might say that our bodies and the world are made of the same stuff, but only when we regard both to be constituted by difference. Our bodies are disorganizations (bodies without organs) interacting disjunctively with a chaotic world that gives itself to us.
Our impressions of visual sensations attest not to our intertwinement with the world; sensational vision is shocking, and shows us that our interaction with the world is always an intense encounter with what is different and incompatible.
Like Merleuu-Ponty, Deleuze regards our sensational visual experiences to not be representational. However, for Deleuze, it is not only because they are active, dynamic, and immediate. What we visually encounter sensationally are brute matters of fact. They involve the contraction of contrary forces, and in a way, are sensational (or empirical) paradoxes.
We experience them as images whose relations are never settled and never become discernible or recognizable. For this reason, they cannot be representational.
Merleuu-Ponty says that art changes how we see things. Deleuze is interested in why this is so, and he does not think it is because of our harmonious and adaptive interactions with the things we see, but rather from our chaotic shocking encounters with them.
Scientists seem to believe that they observe objects as though from a perspective detached from the world. They forget that their observations are grounded in their bodily immersion in the world around them.