Encountering,
not knowing
July 2014
Written for Sarah crowEST’s project SELVEGE, ORDER, RUPTURE, West Space.
How are cuts being made, undone and amended?
With – scissors and questions, with a mixture of ongoing concerns and histories,
with the ever-varying surfaces of agglomerated stuff, with the rubbing of linen
and skin and world, with sun and warmth and cool and shade, with infra-thin
masses of digital imagery,[1]
with a particular orientation and stance or a stern look, with an invitation –
a pinch to respond and be responsive.
I didn’t know not knowing until recently, when I saw Meryl Streep say on YouTube
that she knows less now than she did 27 years ago.[2] Years ago I would have rushed to say
that it isn’t Streep that is the knower, per se, but a world of shifting (un)certainties – a world that she is
perceiving, feeling, articulating parts of.
O. Right now I’m certain that I can, not
know, and that in not knowing (becoming), life is full of a shifting range and
mix of possibilities underway, within and beyond which the potential to become other/wise opens with sensation.[3]
I feel the need to attend to the
complexities that unfurl in maneuvering away from the joy of knowing (capture)
to the joy of not knowing, responsibly. Because, it is precisely in this
unfurling maneuver that I find myself encountering a troubling range of
extrapolations and productive contradictions.
In an interview from 1997 now published on Vimeo, Agnes Martin
articulated painting as a practice of turning
your back to the world.[4]
Martin makes a strict cut between her work and the world. As her painting enters
“the world,” Martin says her responsibility for its activity in the outer world
ceases to concern her, in a practice of intentionally vacating her mind, and
moving on. The responsibility comes to those who are at any moment handling and
arranging the work, storing it, perceiving it. In their literal materiality
these acts are profound, as they provide an expectation of individuals to act
neatly (as an ethical fabric) in the various roles that Martin envisages.[5]
For today’s artistic, social, ecological and political climate such an approach
seems untenable – as people negotiate their direct and diffusive complicity
across a range of systems.
In the not knowing of the affects of your practices out there
in the world - one entrenched
articulation of not knowing (ignorance) can be unfolded: the definite
uncertainty that comes with an unawareness
of events blocked out, unseen, going on elsewhere. This could also, more dangerously,
be the choice not to confront events you’ve participated in producing.[6]
In a documentary also found on Vimeo,
avant-garde dancer-choreographer Deborah Hay discussed the way she noticed the
habit of orientating her dancing to an assumed and often imagined front.[7]
As this awareness emerged, Hay’s relentlessly experimental practice kicked in,
and she began to undo this habit by making a dance in the round, engaging infinite “fronts” by breaking free that
rigid convention. Turning her back sensitively to the world only to face the
world freshly.
I’m now encountering not knowing as becoming – unfurling from and
producing, complexities. I see it operating with such depth in the open practices
of Sarah crowEST. Moved beyond its associations with ignorance, not knowing is
an activity (even a strategy) that is attentive, tumultuous and abundant – rather
than an inactive lacking in any way.
In this instance, knowing appears rather lacking to me, a shallow engagement, a
simplifying and generalising rest from reality.[8]
[1] All so
unaccountable.
[2] Meryl Streep, Barnard commencement speaker, 2010,
Columbia University http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-a8QXUAe2g.
[3] The development
of my thinking here also links to presently re-reading Nietzsche’s text ‘Beyond
Good and Evil.’ The quote below and the segment it is pulled from has
engendered a period of experimenting with how I might unravel the complexities
of a knowing/not knowing dynamic, in terms of the multifarious material-social
cuts that are made in the production of artistic processes and perceptions
today. I think I’m proposing to move on from the designation of not knowing (in
art) as ignorance, into not knowing as an activity as far more attentive than
knowing.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond
Good and Evil, Penguin Group, (1973) 1990, 55
‘… only on this now firm and
granite base of ignorance has knowledge hitherto been able to rise up, the will
to knowledge on the basis of a far more powerful will, the will to
non-knowledge, to the uncertain, to the untrue! Not as its antithesis but – as
its refinement!’
[5] I feel no urge
to hold Martin’s work to this articulation. I am picking this out from a vast
array of material, discussion and writings on Martin. Ultimately my use of her
phrase is a tiny slither of her approach to work. I think this tiny slither is
full of potential, but it also goes along a line of logic that I think needs
opening and complication.
[6] Taken to its extreme this process can produce acts
of great evil and injustice. It was most dramatically called to my attention
recently by the film Hannah Arendt (2014),
which follows Hannah Arendt’s (The
Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951; The
Human Condition, 1958) controversial coverage of the 1961 trial of ex-Nazi
Adolf Eichmann: ‘[he] transported people to their deaths, but didn’t feel
responsible for it. Once the trains were in motion his work was done.’ (quote
at 39m:34s)
Framed in terms of an audience, a mirror, an imagined, almost
automatic assumption of a front to perform to.
[8] Just
as I’ve attempted to reveal some of the contradictory and complex notions of
not knowing here, knowing also needs
to be treated with a simultaneous opening out. Knowing could be argued as a
necessity for survival, I think of the knowing required to undertake the
actions of the State. But it also must be considered at an interpersonal level
as the entrapment of things for the sake of being certain, when certainty isn’t
necessarily in the right. What I’ve been enjoying most about doing this
thinking is that it is continuing to unfurl complex contradictions – pertaining
to everyday actions.