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BEYOND REALITY
“We shall never completely master nature, and our bodily organism, itself apart of that nature, will always remain transient structure with the limited capacity for adaptation and achievement.”*
In 1897, Gauguin made one of his flights from self-satisfaction/ self-sufficiency and the organized hedonism of civic society aimed at forcing a constant flow of advances in civilization through scientific and technological discoveries. In the realm of the constructed Other, among the "noble savages" and "primordial and naked primitivism" of Tahiti, he began work on a somewhat mystic and essentially modernistic painting entitled "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going" (Gaugin asked these questions twenty-six years after Charles Darwin partially answered them in his "Origin of Man"). Almost one century later, reduced almost to banality, these simple questions ended Ridley Scott's film "Blade Runner".
In essence, these are questions that have been the focus of philosophy, different religions and scientific disciplines over the centuries. Each of these spiritual and/or intellectual activities devised more or less imaginative explanations or sound theoretical frameworks intended to explain how the Universe arose and developed. Areas of scientific research, philosophical or religious systems that dealt with foretelling the future had special value and merit within the framework of the unidirectional, linear temporal logic of past-present-future that prevailed until recently. Forming one's own views of the future and expounding them was primarily a useful means for political manipulation, to organize fear and safeguard power, and to control obedience (thank you Mr. Foucault), but also as a profitable profession for bizarre individuals; the need for and intensity of their "mystic" talent was developed and controlled through the mass culture. Becoming a believer and then the feverish expectations as to whether the given scenario will come true are dramatic, highly exciting and crucial moments in the functioning of this mechanism. Finally, the daily communication that takes part in modeling our living space tells us that life is a complicated and uncertain network of events, a system that is subject to deterministic laws, but behaves unpredictably above all.
Owing to the fact that (natural) science is based on both the assumption that the physical world is orderly and on conclusions that can always be reconfirmed, it offers mankind the illusion of omnipotence and security. Reality, however, is something else (or somewhere else): uncertainty and instability are the basic elements that define both our natural surroundings and our culture. The most drastic example of the West's (but also the East's, North's and South's) shaken confidence in science is medicine's current inability to overcome the dispersive nature and complex features of the HIV virus.
Galileo claimed that the great book of nature was written in the language of mathematics, adding that the letters of this language were triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which we would wander futilely through the dark labyrinth. In the 19th century doubts arose regarding the adequacy of Euclidean shapes to model irregular systems. Probability and the principle of uncertainty became an inseparable part of the study of natural laws. The demand for non-Euclidean structures appeared in science almost at the same time as the shift from the paradigm of mimesis to the paradigm of modernism in art. From Aristotle to the 19th and even 20th century, the concept of imitation was the standard philosophical answer to the question "What is art?" During quite a long period of history, in order for something to receive the status of a work of art it had to imitate actual or possible reality, i.e. have the special quality of "doubling" just like a reflection in a mirror or on the water's surface, like a shadow, a photograph. Painting-art within the framework of this narrative (Vasari-like, as Danto calls it) was based on a system of studied strategies whose goal was for the painting's space to be organized in such a way that in enabled an adequate and precise similarity with reality and offered the viewer the illusion that he was in the presence of reality. This, of course, was the prevailing model in Western art based on the premise of imitation and more or less successful illusionistic tricks. The modernistic or Greenberg narrative (Danto) is a serious deviation from the concept of three-dimensional illusion for the sake of self-reference. However, owing to its strict exclusiveness, this ideologically colored model became controversial and could not be maintained since the infinite diversity of practice began to challenge it. Its utopian nature, obsessively insisting on autonomy, and horrification at the very thought of mixing or violating/desecrating the transcendental peace of everyday banalities, allowed the modernistic narrative, in an almost perverse manner, to be viewed as a special type of illusion of the possibility of art existing "unsoiled" by life, its survival in an ivory tower. However, artistic creativity itself, its active rapprochement to reality, suspended the modernistic model. This abandonment of what Danto would call materialistic aesthetics in the name of aesthetic meaning, offers a work the status of art only if it embodies meaning.
Thus, regardless of whether it is the classical trompe l'oeil effect, theoretical "error" or the consumption of "reality" by decoding its symbols and the dense network of its fluid meanings, we note that art functions as a magnificent mechanism of seduction and deceit. Science, by the same token, pretending to explain the causes and effects of living and nonliving systems on Earth and in the Universe, constantly behaves like a reflection in a mirror or even like a copy of a prototype (the concept of icons), deceiving the power of deduction.
What, then is the plot of the video installation "Quaternio Terminorum"? The video work consists of a montage of previously existing popular science programs and parts of fabricated programs of that type. I must admit that I have always had a problem with this type of education. Reporting on great truths in a popular manner, owing to its lapidarian features, is extremely attractive and well received. But, when you think over what you have heard, you realize that instead of knowledge, your head echoes with a quantity of information; over time, if you are not seriously or professionally involved in the given field, it loses its coherent structure, becomes meaningless and soon becomes a bother. On the other hand, if you are familiar with the field being discussed in the popular science program, then the mundane approach to it becomes irritating. Then again, if the program is too professional it becomes elitist... In any case, we are moving in the field of illusion, which Margareta Stanojlovi} has emphasized with her fragments of invented programs presented in an original, nonintrusive and humorous manner.
The choice of the television format to project the video work has its raison d'être in the fact that television screens and/or monitors are modern "windows on the world", places where information is produced, distributed/circulated, consumed and reproduced.
Putting a real (empty) armchair and the painted portrait of a man sitting in an armchair on a neutral background (or in neutral space), on the one hand, to face the full-sized photograph of a man sitting in the same armchair, in a pose identical to the one on the painting, with his "double" in the portrait, on the other, ties together two basic systems of representation in art (and in science), iconic and reflectional.
So, what is the plot of the video installation "Quaternio Terminorum"? Does the ambiguity of a concept necessarily lead to wrong conclusions or can its role be perceived as creating an excess that never allows the interpretation to be solitary and final? When it comes right down to it, this is the charm of interpretation - its lack of finality.
February, 1999
*Freud, S.; "Civilization and its Discontents", NY, W.W. Norton, 1961, p. 33; cited in Mirzoeff, N.; :"Bodyscapes", Routledge, London, NY, 1995, p. 19.