THERE IS NO SOLUTION BECAUSE THERE IS NO PROBLEM: PROOF FOR THE SUBLIME A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS IN ART MAY 2014 By Kyle Jablonski Thesis Committee: Charles Cohan, Chairperson Jaimey Hamilton-­‐Faris Rod Bengston The broad question driving my thesis work is how can I combine my various interests in subjects like philosophy, literature, and material and then distill them into a pointed visual argument surrounding a common theme. The theme that kept presenting itself for me came from a biography written by one of Napoleon’s aids. On retreat from his failed campaign in Russia, Napoleon in a reflective moment, exclaims, “from the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step” (“Language Forums”). I felt that there was something to his intuition about this relationship between the sublime and the ridiculous that approached similar questions I am addressing in my work. Authenticity, questions of aesthetics, narrative, and the everyday, raise visual inquiry into the sedimentations of expectations we have constructed around our art and non-­‐art spaces. For this paper, I begin with a brief overview of my interest in the sublime and its connection to the ridiculous. Then, I take the reader through the exhibition to demonstrate the connections I believe were important for me to explore. My interest in the sublime is connected to the elusive nature of its experience as outlined by Immanuel Kant in his work The Critique of Judgment. For Kant, an experience of the sublime has the ability to disrupt the mentioned conceptual sedimentations that we form through reason. Reason, for Kant, was the preeminent way in which we can know the world. The sublime, for me, was the ideal experience the viewer could befall when confronted with a work of art. Describing this moment is an experience with the conceptually unrepresentable, where the faculties of reason become overwhelmed in search of an account for the unlimited presence of the material, as an event. This event is not a recollection of some mimetic process, but rather moves, through repetition, into the future present, constantly refreshing itself while offering the viewer no place to rest, no center, but a freedom, not from physical reality-­‐but from structures of consciousness that facilitate our abilities to function in a normative cognitive fashion. 2 In his work On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters the philosopher Friedrich Schiller argues that beauty, due to the experience of disinterest, is the method for bringing about freedom into the lives of people. If somehow we switch our intentions from economics to the acquisition of the beautiful, individuals would be freer from the constant confrontation with the beautiful and the experience of freedom would be normative. I am in agreement with Schiller about his insight into the relationship between the beautiful and individual freedom, but I find his approach to freedom through disinterested appreciation to be like that of a monk who diligently trains his or her whole life in search of enlightenment. Where everyday the monk goes to the master and the master says , “Look around you, everything is beautiful. Can you not see the beauty in everything?” This type of practice may go on for years in the hope of one day experiencing the world as beautiful without interest in its preservation. I am arguing that the sublime is, in actuality that very moment. Instead of the years of training, it is the instant seeing that disarms our desires for self-­‐preservation and we become disinterested with respect to our own lives; thus we can now project this experience onto the rest of the world. The attention is never on the object itself, but on the experience we have vis-­‐à-­‐vis our relationship to it. Conversely, what I want to now show is that the relationship between the ridiculous and the sublime is as closely related as intuited by Napoleon. The sublime, as described by Kant, is our inability to make sense of the world through our faculties of perception, understanding, and reason. He lays out this complicated relationship in the Critique of Pure Reason where he explains that understanding is knowledge gained through our experience of the world and reason is knowledge gained by conceptualizing these experiences. The sublime is a concept of reason that is derived from our extrapolations of relationships in the natural world, boundless and formless. The subsequent realization that our own capacities 3 share this same complexity, and that our attempts to construct reason from the natural world might be folly, and could be seen as ridiculous. Where Napoleon talks about the ridiculous I want to insert the absurd. The term ridiculous is synonymous with what I believe people historically have deemed to be the absurd. Long before Albert Camus the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard defined his idea of the absurd: What is the Absurd? It is, as may quite easily be seen, that I, a rational being, must act in a case where my reason, my powers of reflection, tell me: you can just as well do the one thing as the other, that is to say where my reason and reflection say: you cannot act and yet here is where I have to act... The Absurd, or to act by virtue of the absurd, is to act upon faith ... I must act, but reflection has closed the road so I take one of the possibilities and say: This is what I do, I cannot do otherwise because I am brought to a standstill by my powers of reflection. — Kierkegaard, Soren, Journals, 1849 (“"Absurdism”) Here, Kierkegaard points out that there are moments in our lives where our reason is unable to access the causality or purpose of our experiences, so rather than remaining still, we must act with faith in the hope that there will be meaning there when we arrive. He shows that the absurd is relative to the expectations and demands of our experience in the world and has the same decentering effects as the experience of the sublime. The artist, pointing to the absurd in the world, points to the absurd in our very existence, and by using themselves as the object of absurd reflection, allows the viewer the opportunity to become overwhelmingly consumed with an appreciation of insignificance. From this reflective moment, we return with a new recognition for the mystery of the world and similarly this limits our own ability to know that the meanings we create have a foundation that is static. 4 As an artist working with philosophy my interest now is to take the reader through my exhibition in order to make explicit what my intentions are with each piece, and how they connect to one another in a way that helped me to work through the questions I was posing. The first thing the viewer sees when entering my installation is a title wall. Applied on the wall is text that reads there is no solution because there is no problem: proof for the sublime. The first portion of the title is a quote derived from Pierre Cabanne’s book Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. This insight by Duchamp may have been a response to the idea that in some way we are in a state of figuring things out, or moving forward. I think he may also have been critiquing the cultures emphatic embrace of the scientific method, where they pose a problem or a question, and then offer up solutions for the questions; acting surprised that their offerings were exactly what the problem was looking for. Now, there are important problems that life may pose, like the problem of a cancer growing in a body, a problem where our life may depend on the solution. I am not sure what Duchamp would say about these categories of problems, but I can imagine he would have some response. Maybe he would imply that we were misreading his proposition, or that we need to see the cancer not as a problem that needs to be solved, but that we need to change our relationship to our understanding of the problem/solution structure. This would be my one critique of Duchamp and his work. He always seemed as if he was disengaged with life on the most visceral level, floating above the muck, not willing to get his aristocratic loafers dirty. Setting Duchamp’s mode of being aside, I want to return to his insight about there being no problem; therefore, no solution. When this mode of questioning enters into the world of philosophy and art, it begins to usurp the foundations of metaphysics and empirical knowledge. 5 In 1921, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein published the Tractatus-­
Philosophicus where he lays out in detail a similar insight to the one that Duchamp expresses: 4. 4.001 The totality of propositions is language 4.002 Man possesses the ability to construct languages capable of expressing every sense, without having any idea how each word has meaning or what its meaning is – just as people speak without knowing how the individual sounds are produced. Everyday language is a part of the human organism and is no less complicated than it. It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought. So much so, that from the outward form of the clothing it is impossible to infer the form of the thought beneath it, because the outward form of the clothing is not designed to reveal the form of the body, but for entirely different purposes. The tacit conventions on which the understanding of everyday language depends are enormously complicated. 4.003 Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical. Consequently we cannot give any answer to questions of this kind, but can only point out that they are nonsensical. Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language. (They belong to the A thought is a proposition with a sense 6 same class as the question whether the good is more or less identical than the beautiful.) And it is not surprising that the deepest problems are in fact not problems at all. (Feuvre 225) Here, Wittgenstein gives us the same insight in the form of a philosophical proof. He does however go on a bit further in the explanation of why there are no problems in the questions we are posing to the world and ourselves. He explains that it is our inability to account for the complexities of the formation and understanding of the structures and functions of our basic use of language that enable us to pose questions that seem to probe beneath the surface of understanding. What we are then actually performing is a gross simplification of these complex relationships, that are being infinitely mistranslated, leading to questions that are not unanswerable, but absurd, when viewed in relation to the origins of the thought as language. In this light, I think Duchamp’s insight was elegant because the simplicity of his proposition creates a conceptual loop where thought and language chase each other’s tails. He offers a solution to the problem of there being a problem to begin with. This insight is directly connected with Kierkegaard’s concept of the absurd except that Duchamp wants to do away with the need for faith. He thinks we should acknowledge the absurdity of our existence and see it as a problem that does not need faith to be solved, but one that can be done within language. Language is the tool of reason, and I think Duchamp was getting to the core of this by linking the problem and its solution with the limits of our language because at these limits of our language is where Kierkegaard needs faith and Kant experiences the sublime. By making connections with the various works underneath the title, I wanted to create an allegory for the title where the use of repetition of time and narrative are meant to underline the critique of the idea that somehow some problem is 7 being solved. The work offers no solutions, but offers the opportunity to create imaginative solutions between the works themselves (Plate 1). Underneath the text, and in front of the wall, sits a nineteen-­‐inch tube television on top of an antique sewing bench. The television is connected to a DVD player that is concealed to the viewer, in a storage compartment in the seat bench. Playing on the television is an animation of a charcoal drawing, which I edited out of a previous piece, and then set to play on an endless loop. The animation itself is black and white. The imagery portrays a spool of yarn being unwound to reveal a cup that is concealed inside. The cup lifts momentarily off the surface, gets put back down, and is rewound again with the thread. Next to the television, in one of the two small storage spaces beside the bench, is a stack of zines that were created with a photocopy machine, and made to fit inside the empty storage space. The zines contain both a visual and a textual based narrative. The visual component is the image of a light bulb originally printed from a woodcut print. The textual component is my grandfather’s memoirs. The memoirs were placed on the left side of each page and the light bulb was placed on the right. On the cover is an image of my grandmother and my grandfather on my Father’s wedding day. In the image, my grandmother has a missing arm that was not a digital alteration, but the result of cancer in the bone. When reading through the text itself, it offers what feels like a subtle slippage of linear time. To get across to the viewer that I was implying a linear narrative, I used the light bulb image to give the illusion of approaching an object at a distance. I started with the smallest resolution that the photocopy machine would allow, then moved up the largest, and found the images in-­‐
between by evenly dividing the page numbers needed. When considered all together, the elements that make up the title wall installation, offer a richness between the physicality of the weaving bench, the subtle advance of a personal narrative moving back and forth in time and the illusion of the string being wound and unwound around and empty vessel. The 8 objects have enough in common that we could build a dialogue around them where each individual work represents a thought. These combinations of thoughts could then go on to reinforce a concept. One that would be, like the philosophical questions above, reduced to the absurd if probed deep enough into the abstractions being made about our ideas and assumptions projected onto the works. In short, I wanted the configuration to have the complex ease like that of the relationships between the objects of our everyday experience. As the viewer passes the title wall, zine in hand, they have various options of where to go next. Multiple works, opportunities, or moments compose the installation space itself. I want to offer an experience to the reader of being a viewer walking through the main section of the show while I describe to them the visual and conceptual intentions for my work. (Plate 2) On the right-­‐hand side of the main entrance is a table constructed with rough, unfinished, industrial plywood that has been cut and mounted on the body of a “readymade” table. The table itself is placed against the gallery window, which is transparent, however, it does offer some reflection back to the viewer. On the end of the table, closest to the window, a generous amount of various sized model pine trees have been loosely inserted into predrilled holes. The pine trees are positioned in an imagined landscape based on my outdoor experiences. When they reflect into the window they create a holographic space beyond the table, which extends into the space outside the gallery. The window’s holographic image, or print, allows the viewer to experience his or herself experiencing the work. I applied text on the table, using an analog label maker, which read grab a ball and play with yourself and practice makes practice. Next to the table on the floor is a drilled out tree trunk filled with yellow foam ping-­‐pong balls. Aside the trunk of wood is a concrete block that holds a homemade plywood ping-­‐pong paddle. The viewer is meant to take the paddle from the stone, grab a yellow foam ball, and play with his or herself over the 9 toy trees lined up at the end of the table and against the window. I choose the rough pine plywood top because it gives the visual analogy of a topographic map. The piece is also meant to have a subtle sound component where the viewer hears the repetitive ball bounce off the window and the table. The yellow ball represents the sun. The table represents the Earth. Together they represent space without time, and through their use the viewer supplies his or her own sense of time. Playing their holographic self, this individual can experience a heightened sense of becoming through the connection between being and time (Heidegger). The viewer needs to play this piece to complete it. It was not intended to be visually appealing. Continuing into the center of the installation, the viewer sees three different sculptural elements that align diagonally with one another (Plate 3). The first piece is a cactus plant, in a cobalt blue vase, filled with oversized rocks and a little bit of soil. The plant and vase sit atop one of the homemade ping-­‐pong paddles. On the handle of the ping-­‐pong paddle I again used the analog label maker to print the words hold me (Plate 4). The text hold me was meant to elicit an emotional response from the viewer toward the paddle. I want the viewer to identify with the paddle as an object capable of having feelings. This would be an absurd idea based on our empirical knowledge, but would not be that far removed from the mystical idea that all is one behind the illusion of forms. Also, I did want this response to be subtle, so I placed the text on the area where the viewer would hold the paddle if he or she were to use it functionally. The artwork piece is a large latex weather balloon that dangles over the cactus, and is attached to a leaf blower, which is attached to the top of an A-­‐frame ladder (Plate 5). The leaf blower is attached to an Ardueno programming unit, which is attached to a “power tail” and will send a pulse turning on the leaf blower once every ninety minutes for one minute. The ladder itself was not new and was covered in various speckles of paint and other signs 10 of use that I did not intend on. It did however have a sticker on it with the word Johnson, and I again used the analog label maker to add the text faithfull horizontally along the metal folding armature. The word faithfull is a reference to the Old Faithful Geyser, which I modeled the timing of the balloons expansion on. My intention in using Old Faithful as a subject is to allude to the historical philosophical usage of the sublime as something positioned in nature, particularly in the complexity of a landscape. My reason for changing the word faithful to faithfull was to allude to the way in which the experience of the sublime is used to justify a belief in God. Unlike Old Faithful, the viewer would not know when the balloon would inflate; this person would just have to be there, by chance, when it happened. This aspect of the work could be linked to the idea of the sublime as an “event” or something of a rare experience, and not of the everyday. As the balloon inflates, it is near to the cactus, but placed obviously not close enough to damage it. The leaf blower produces hot air, so I installed a length of black PVC pipe that extended off the end of the blower. On the other side of the ladder, opposite the cactus is an air-­‐circulating device that you would normally see on top of a building (Plate 6). The practical function for this object would be to remove the rising hot air from the ceiling of a building by harnessing the outside air movement to spin the device, thus drawing out the rising hot air and circulating the cooler air. This analog device is extremely elegant in design, which allows it to function without any man-­‐made energy input. I placed a small battery-­‐operated fan inside the device after dissecting some of the inner structure so that it would appear to spin without anything outside acting on it. Originally, my idea for this was to be a reference to Duchamp’s bicycle wheel, and to go about setting up a few logs around the object, so it would be like sitting around a campfire. The mysterious perpetual motion was meant to engage the viewer’s constant unconscious internal narrative. Alleviating them to be present in the moment and allowing them access 11 to the free play of the imagination that Kant talks about in the Critique of Judgment as being the apex of the aesthetic experience. The free play of imagination is a product of disinterested viewing, where the viewer takes a desireless position relative to the object, which temporarily frees them from his or her own particularity of taste, or what Kant calls the agreeable. In this state, the imagination is freed up to make associations and connections that would normally be inaccessible to our everyday experience. Schiller also calls this “play” and it is again, for him, this moment that contains the most freedom an individual can experience (Schiller). I did decide to edit the literal idea of the campfire, but liked the use of the “fan” object because of the intended effect of perpetual motion. The placement of the object on the floor was important because it visually acted in opposition to its normal function and placement. However, conceptually it was interacting with the balloon as it inflated with the hot air. The “fan” object also adds another layer of sound to my installation by causing an industrial repetitive squeak every time it rotated on itself. The sound was meant to further lull the viewer into the aesthetic state of disinterest that would allow him or her to suspend judgment and create more opportunities for imaginative free play. Moving along the same axis in the installation, the viewer comes to a wall with a mid-­‐century modern chair covered with a seventies orange upholstery. Underneath or piled to the left side of the chair is large mass of individually folded bright white socks, that when viewed singularly, or one by one, have a form to them that is anti sculptural because of the indefinite softness of their composition (Plate7). Ten feet above the chair I installed a yellow plastic milk crate. The bottom of the milk crate was cut out and inside I constructed a ramp return system of balsa wood, Formica, and fishing line. The viewer is meant to take a sock, or socks, off the floor and toss them towards the milk crate similar to a basketball hoop. When the viewer “makes a basket” 12 the sock slides down the wood/Formica ramp and trips the fishing line that is suspended down the center of the exit space. The fishing line is connected to a micro switch, which is connected to an Ardueno programming unit. When triggered, it sends a pulse to an electronic display that counts up in positive integers. The unit will continue to count up until it reaches five then it will to return to zero. The Ardueno unit is installed above the orange chair. Next to the electronics I printed, with the analog label maker, the text fore⋅most. The way in which the text is written implies I am intending the viewer to consider the definition of the word foremost when using the piece. My goal is for the viewer to be seduced by the desire to throw the socks, putting him or her in a position to experience either temporary success or failure. After a few tries, the viewer may realize that the counting machine has looped back on itself, which should indicate that its purpose is a separate function other then adding integers. Then, if this person takes into consideration the definition of fore⋅most, it would be clearer that the work is about questioning the privileged position of the concept of progress within our cultural narratives as well as the practice of metaphysics. Again, moving on counter-­‐clockwise, the viewer sees a group of fifty, eight by eleven inch works, framed, and hung in a disjointed salon style. (Plate8). I wanted the framed works to have the feel as if I started to hang the pieces from left to right and then ran out of room, forcing me to hang one off the edge of the wall encroaching into the threshold of the viewer’s walking space. Also, I wanted it to seem like this was unnecessary because there is still abundant wall space to the left where the work could hang. The works inside the frames are what I call whiteout drawings. These drawings are made by using photographs from a Readers Digest book about the diversity of Southern African landscapes as a starting point. In response to the photos I apply strips of white out from “readybought” dispensers to 13 create various interventions on the landscape. The images from the book itself were either full-­‐page photo bleeds, or pages that contained both photos and supportive text. The first artwork contains, in the background, the image of the of the Drakensberg mountain range. (Plate 9) In the foreground, a small hill slopes from left to right. On top of the hill is the symbolic tree of the African plains, the Umbrellas Thorn. Underneath the image there are two columns of text. I employed white out to lay down small sections that fill up the foreground of the image. This creates a multi-­‐stable image, where our attention can slip from foreground to background. This shift represents how, like language, the background (thought) is being disguised by our focus on the foreground (language). Going back at the image, the foreground could be expanded to stand in for an idea or belief that we hold about the material or conceptual world. We have been conditioned to approach our interactions with a certain focus on how we expect the situation, or idea to appear, and so, over time, these choices of focus become insoluble within the field of possibilities and harden on the surface where they then become the sedimented ways that we experience the phenomenon of the world. This is not a new insight. In the work I want to give an example of how the artist can interrupt the viewer’s expected focus on habitual elements and shift attention from focus to fringe, or from the foreground to the background that supports it. Hopefully, once the viewer has this experience of shifting between potential outcomes, this visual experience will carry into his or her conceptual lives, and through this process, an expansion of the imagination about the possibilities of the world will follow. I want to address the text underneath the image, along with a small descriptive passage. On all of the pieces I worked on, where text was supplied by the book, I treated the text as an instance of where the idea of language is being disguised by thought. I imagined that hidden somewhere within all the text was the truth about the image, waiting, with the aid of my process to be revealed. I was approaching the text the way a poet would approach 14 the material world, which would be being sensitive to the poetic moment, and then attend to the various ways in which it shows itself. After working through all the supplied text underneath the image, I was left with the statement, “easy as cannibalism.” This statement arose because I was thinking about how to expand the imagination and break up our sedimented expectations with such a simple technique of switching the emphasis of our attention from the focus to the fringe. An example of this is when teaching students to draw they almost always start by clinging to the contours of the object. This technique rarely meets their expectations. I then show them that if they switch their attention from the object itself to the space around the object they can reach the same outcome without the attention on the object, which they have problems drawing to begin with because they are drawing what they know about the object, and not what they are actually seeing. “Easy as cannibalism” explains that what I am looking at would be simple in theory, but difficult, and possibly nauseating to practice continually. In some of the other “white out drawings” I became more attracted to the build up of white out that amassed, in strips, from the dispensers. In the example of Untitled (Plate10) I chose to work within the landscape, as an image, and to build up a material event that seemed possible within the parameters of the perspective of the image. This way of working was a return to the idea of the sublime as an event and as a representation of the unrepresentable. My interventions are meant to transform the image, from image, to event. The event would be a place where we experience that something happened and the mystery of that thing is the same as the mystery of our being. The images lose their identity as a mimetic recording of a place, observed at a distance. They become active in the presence of the immediacy and repetition of the mark, which continually refresh, in the moment, as an event. The density of the material that builds confronts the viewer with the fact that, “yes! Something did happen here… and it is still happening here!” The white out is not only being 15 used to reveal the concealed, but also is resurrecting the images of our past and then setting them in motion as the ever-­‐present event. The mystery of the world is not being represented, but is presented to the viewer in such a sensitive manner that it would be easy to overlook if we are not careful. I intended these works to be challenging on an individual basis. By making them in a large quantity, the viewers would be tempted to casually breeze through assuming they absorbed all there was without consideration for the works as individuals. I like the idea of people missing the value in my work, assuming it is easy, not seeing the fastidious manner in which I attended to all my pieces. In this sense the work has a sense of irony. One of the primary ways I approach my work is with irony. Soren Kierkegaard, in his book The Concept of Irony, discuses the joy the ironist gets in the false identification with the practice they wish to attack-­‐using this position to drive the odious practice to the limits of its lunacy. Kierkegaard goes on to exclaim that, “the more naïve the ironist’s stupidity appears to be, the more genuine his honest and upright striving seems, the greater his joy. Thus we perceive that it can be just as ironic to pretend to know when one knows that one does not know as to pretend not to know when one knows that one knows” (Feuvre 72). This is the very aesthetic of irony that I employ in my work. I include things that appear within the installation that make the viewer feel as if I were unaware of what I was doing. If the clumsiness of the construction was unintentional, then maybe an accusation of the clumsiness of the concept is a justifiable extrapolation. I want the viewer to question his or her own values placed on assumed appearances of things and situations. I want to give the perception that my work is being something that is what this person perceives it to be. Sometimes I pretend to not know what I am doing, or I will listen intently on a conversation in which I know very much about and then pretend to know very little for the very sake of attending to my freedom. I do this because: 16 “Irony, however, has no purpose; its purpose is immanent in itself and is a metaphysical purpose. The purpose is nothing other than the irony itself. If, for example, the ironist appears as someone other than he actually is, his purpose might indeed seem to be to get others to believe this; but his actual purpose still is to feel free, but this he is precisely by means of irony-­‐consequently irony has no other purpose but is self-­‐motivated. We readily perceive, therefore, that irony differs from Jesuitism, in which the subject is, to be sure, free to choose the means to fulfill his purpose but is not at all free in the same sense as irony, in which the subject has no purpose.” (Feuvre 73) In this quote you can substitute most ideological practices for Jesuitism. This sense of irony is different than hypocrisy, because a hypocrite will try to appear good, while in actuality they are corrupt. Where as the ironists are always making themselves, “seem to be other than he actually is” (Feuvre 74). Because the, “moral categories are too concrete for irony” (Feuvre 74). This “seeming to be other” can be a frustrating thing for people to encounter within an art because they are unsure of where the authentic intentions are. For me, irony is a way of exploring the structure of the self as a relational object. Taking into account that I naturally work with irony, and like mentioned before, sometimes I appear other than what I actually am. What may appear to be dilettantish behavior, when probed deeper, reveals itself as a serious interest in what I am engaged in. Kierkegaard argues in The Concept of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates that Socrates method to truth was irony. Socrates used irony to maintain a psychological distance from identifying with an argument in order to tease out the truth between conflicting opinions. Take the example of the larger balloon piece in the show, which is set to go off for one minute every ninety minutes in an attempt to mimic the natural event that occurs at the Old Faithful geyser. We can examine it from multiple readings. One of them being irony. 17 Again we can return to the text from Kierkegaard where he talks about irony as a tool against the recognition of the entire world as vanity. How irony functions in this case is that it: “sees the vanity, but it diverges in making its observation, because it does not destroy the vanity; it is not what punitive justice is in relation to vice, does not have the redeeming feature of the comic but instead reinforces vanity in its vanity and makes what is lunatic even more lunatic. This is what could be called irony’s attempt to mediate the discrete elements-­‐not into a higher unity but into a higher lunacy” (Feuvre 74) One aspect of the balloon was to critique the vanity of some of the other works that were purposed for the show. They were extravagantly large works of monumentality in both material and concept. The vanity of the artist included; that we have some insight into the world that is exclusive to the art world. The balloon: grand, imposing, and filled with hot air. I want to show the vanity of the artwork by pushing the lunacy of that work. I think Professor Groeniger was right when he felt, as an artist, that in someway he was being “laughed at.” Not in a way that he found offensive, but one that should be thought of as a question of how can we as artists define the nature of art? Do we need the institutional frameworks of the art world to define our conceptual work? The irony that I see is that the sublime is the ridiculous and the naming of the ridiculous as sublime is an act of vanity. What would the faith-­‐based institutions look like if our relationship to the unknown were seen as ridiculous and not sublime? Another reading of the balloon piece when considering that the viewer has to be present to experience it is that when it did expand, it was actually not that grand at all. It was a non-­‐event event. In this way it connects back the everyday experience, where we anticipate some event in our lives, only to ponder after, in hindsight, that it was much more 18 interesting before the thing actually happened. In a way, there is a hyper-­‐experience in the anticipation of an event, maybe unreal expectations are placed on it, ones in which reality could never meet. I wanted to play with the expectation that the work should always be present in the form you expect. Is it in fact the artist’s job to create entertainment or a spectacle for the viewer to ponder the sublime moment? My last piece of work is a video piece that I shot and edited of a paper mache ball, constructed out of newspaper and then set in front of a small fan up to give the illusion that the ball was an self animated object. The video played on a small black flat screen television, and sat on top of a turned over pedestal that I had modified. Across from the television are two small-­‐unfinished plywood boxes of differing heights (Plate 11). One of the boxes is a seat for a viewer to relax and watch the video, and on the other was a tape player, which played classical music. Next to the tape player I used the analog label maker to print duration 6:30 min to let the viewer know that there was indeed an end to the video. The television for the paper ball video was from my living room. I turned the pedestal on its side, drilled a hole through the top, and left the bottom facing out to reveal the machinery behind the illusion. These are objects of the everyday, a DVD player and the power cords, which are as complex and important to the video piece as the images that were being displayed on the television. The exposed elements are fundamental to the grounding of the video work. They make explicit that this is not only a recording, but every aspect of the installation is important to the concept. People express a desire for an authentic work of art. What could be more authentic than not hiding the process? Attending to the everyday? Not using technique to edit instinctual choices? It seems what people desire is the safety of participating in an experience they have already had in a different way. When considering the installation in its entirety, with a nod to the subtle complexity and clumsiness of the everyday, it was in fact an offering of a new experience with the safety of the old. 19 The value of the artwork is in the connections that the viewer makes between each of the pieces and his or her place within the installation. The show itself was laid out in layers with an attention to the everyday experience of moving through the world. This meant that things could be crooked, folded, exposed, on the ground, elevated, functional, and touchable. The viewer was invited to consider how each piece builds toward the “whole”, what I was calling a proof for the sublime and what relationship it had to the ridiculous or absurd. By understanding that the sublime is the absurd we can embrace the world as a mixture of absurd relationships that offer us new connections that will refresh the way that we are able to experience sensual data with new perspectives on the possibilities of their meaning. 20 Bibliography: "Absurdism." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 21 Apr. 2014. Web. 25 Apr. 2014. Cabanne, Pierre, and Marcel Duchamp. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. New York: Viking, 1971. Print. Feuvre, Lisa Le. Failure: Documents of Contemporary Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2010. Print. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. New York: Harper, 1962. Print. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Print. Higgie, Jennifer. The Artist's Joke. London: Whitechapel, 2007. Print. Kant, Immanuel, and James Creed. Meredith. The Critique of Judgement. Oxford: Clarendon, 1952. Print. Kant, Immanuel, Paul Guyer, and Allen W. Wood. Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print. Kierkegaard, Søren, and Lee M. Capel. The Concept of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Print. Kierkegaard, Søren. Repitition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology. New York, NY: Harper Torch, 1964. Print. "Language Forums." Du Sublime Au Ridicule, Il N'y a Qu'un Pas (Napoléon Bonaparte). N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Apr. 2014. Morley, Simon. The Sublime. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010. Print. Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters. New York: Ungar, 1983. Print. Tanke, Joseph J., and Colin McQuillan. The Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012. Print. 21