In this podcast episode Selin Genc collaborates with Orestis Lepine to interweave prose and music to explore the feeling of vertigo she suffers during her artistic process. Drawing on various creative traditions such as Land art, Colour Field Painting, speculative fiction, and cartography, she attempts to chart her predicament and find traces of analogous experiences in the works of others.
The literary references mentioned in this podcast can be found in Italo Calvino’s ‘Collection of Sand’, 'Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings', and Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Dreamtigers’.
Transcript:
Through the expressive tools of language and visuality I come closer to myself and to the world around me. Yet amidst the kaleidoscope of available images and ideas floating in my cognitive space, it is difficult to discern what it is that I want to pin down. Like a collector delicately preparing a butterfly for display, my task is tricky. A vast nature before me, I am set out to pluck a singular, infinitesimal insect, to sever it from the fabric of its surroundings and isolate it from this totality.
“Nature is an infinite sphere, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” Robert Smithson, the land-artist, quotes Pascal, the mathematician. Atoms, microcosms infinitely small, cluster in multiple centres, such that the whole is an irregular shape that is more than the sum of its parts, a macrocosm infinitely large. My human experience of this Nature, how I am situated in this web or crystal of relations, is also nebulous and stratified. In the expanse of networks we are situated in, it all seems so vast yet so encapsulating. I oscillate between feeling agoraphobia and claustrophobia as my perception treads on the frontier between openness and closedness.
In his lecture Multiplicity, the novelist and essayist Italo Calvino opines “The universe and the void (...) often seem to mean the same thing”. So I ask- is the cosmos expanding, or contracting? Evolving into complexity, or disintegrating into entropy? Can a blueprint map its structure in stark objectivity, or is it composed of a concoction of vaporous gasses, ephemeral and fluid, hallucinatory glimpses of unstable subjectivity? How to stabilise this vertigo is a major predicament I face as a creative. To reconcile, in varying degrees, the tension between exactitude and ambiguity, empirical data, and coarse, yet inventive, human perception... It is at this point in creative decision making that I find myself faltering. Whether to find infinity in the microscopically minute, to find uniformity in the galactically illimitable, or conceive other combinations of boundlessness and confinement; equal choices, all mere fractions of the entirety of possibilities, leave me petrified as I stare down a blackhole, infinite and abyssal.
***
My temperament is inclined to follow calculated, justified decisions. The world is made up of patterns, and whether visible or hidden, I seek to channel such order. I am driven by knowledge. As a result, I find free association intimidating. Being endowed with such freedom seems to be entangled in great responsibility in itself. I doubt my ability, with the limited sensory and cognitive capacities I have as a creature, to be able to discern even a single strand of exactitude, of objective truth. The inability to fathom the fragment, let alone the big picture... In my freedom, what choice am I to make, what image am I consigned to evoke? As Socrates famously said, “I know that I know nothing”.
***
Such self-doubt stifles me, and I feel that my most earnest creative production is when I depict this very inability of knowing: the only thing I can truly know of. I am satisfied and feel consistent when my work is a testament to a limit, and thus a release of the overbearing responsibility. When I find myself once removed from such ungraspable reality, I can work from a safe distance, looking at it as a predicament to study. Lately I have gravitated towards collage as this medium fully affirms its own fragmented nature. In collage, representation is overtly constituted by relationalities, prone to fluctuations, each part replaceable to create another combination of possibilities. As the surrealist Max Ernst formulates in his statement titled ‘What is the Mechanism of Collage’: “the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them….”
I am fascinated by maps, as they also strive to capture a reality, yet are condemned to present a partial truth. I see my creative work as analogous to cartography. First I isolate the parcel of land I want to depict. Then I settle on methodologies and limiting parameters by which I can operate, from which a particular version of the terrain is extracted. It is perhaps this partiality that makes art interesting, in its demonstration of a choice, of negotiations between openness and closedness, and of particularity in the expansive sea of multiplicity.
***
One artist whom I believe to have been troubled by similar considerations, though in the medium of painting, is Mark Rothko. His Colour Field paintings stimulate that very feeling of vertigo. Across a Rothko one becomes aware of, through encounter with deep and vivid sensory input, her own sensory perception, and consequently its shortcomings. This engulfing aura hints at the existence, with its overbearing infinity and weightlessness, of a “Total Phenomenon”, or as Valéry puts it “All of consciousness, relations, conditions, possibilities, impossibilities”, while also leaving the subject minuscule, uncomprehending, and even claustrophobic before the sublime.
Often, two fields meet in these paintings, creating a horizon. Smithson writes of the paradoxical nature of horizons: “Quite apathetically it rests on the ground devouring everything that looks like something. One is always crossing the horizon, yet it always remains distant. In this line where sky meets earth, objects cease to exist (...) it is closeness in openness, it is an enchanted region where down is up.” In my art I feel like I am walking on this tightrope of the horizon, one finger gesturing the heavens, the other downcast, anchored in earth...
***
I would like to conclude with an excerpt from a short-story called ‘On Exactitude in Science’ written by Jorge Luis Borges and translated into English by Andrew Hurley:
Comments