The Fountain Will Hopefully Carry the Cistern Overflows

Covid–19 arrived inadvertently at a time when epidemics were believed to be contained in tropical nations of the post-colonial age. By the time the pandemic hit, it interrupted our accelerated and unsustainable style of living where comfort is championed through capitalism and safety is assured through security from terrorism and religious extremism. At our accelerated industry, suddenly putting so much of the world’s commerce on halt meant destabilizing the economy to the point where a lot of the heinous exercise of power and  humanitarian crises unfolding today can be somewhat traced back to this phenomenon revealing how fragile and intertwined our structures and fabrics are. Even though some nations seized this opportunity to maintain their markets in times of global scarcity, most others closed their borders, invoked states of emergency, and set strict lockdowns on their people. For many, the long wait that followed contained so much uncertainty and individual self-reflection through solitude and confinement, we have yet to work through a lot of our current alarming situation regarding mental health issues. In the following text, I will try to analyze how the process of making and interpreting art can be healing individually with ourselves, socially in our communities, and ecologically with the world.

Considering how susceptible we all are to both physical and psychological affections when confined in our own spaces has led me to consider chance as a meaningful factor to which we are all bound by. The reasons for such a pandemic are still unknown, but we could argue that it involved a phenomenon that took our societies by surprise. Chance takes a big factor in the course of our lives; it can play to our advantage, or against, and as life flows into us like water into the container of our bodies, there is only so much we can contain before we overflow. Chance has also been used in artistic practice as a method for reconciling us with our essential contradictions as it actively pushes us out of control and towards a chain of reactions that lead us to unexpected places. It allows us to work and surrender to a greater natural law. In this text I will reexamine chance as a creative force by comparing Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s discussions on human ambiguity and his regard for modern painting with his and today’s context. Marie Anne Watts’ introduction on Chance: A Perspective on Dada will clarify the use of chance and the indeterminacy principle in Modern Art and I will discuss it in my reading of Lee Lozano’s work relationship to failure, providing a contextual analysis (1) from Geraint Evans’s lecture on the subject of Failure in Camberwell College, London, and following it with workshop practice in Etching and Lithography with Brian Hodgson and Charlotte Brown respectively at the same institution as further and secondary contextual analysis (2). 

Following this, I will discuss how this discussion illustrates my studio practice in printmaking and photography informed by a fragment of William Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” from Proverbs From Hell. This evidence of working through with the surprise element, or fortuitous feedback, will provide evidence of “putting accidents and indeterminacy to a formative use” (Watts, M.. “Introduction: Chance and Dada”. Chance: A Perspective on Dada. University Studies in Fine Arts: The Avant-Garde, No. 9. University of Iowa. Page 3) and will introduce the mystical experience where it can lead towards by reflecting on Lisa Chang Lee’s (3) lecture at Camberwell University with regards to the ideas of the path of the Tao. Eventually, I hope this text will suggest how many other radical and active practices related to creation and interpretation contribute as healthy ways of detaching from reasonable expectations and promoting more sustainable networks. We will continue by mentioning such an example with humor, in literature, during what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the ‘classical’ phase.

In The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio transcribed a collection of tales shared by him and nine other friends while taking refuge from The Black Death during the 1350’s in Florence. In these short stories events unravel in such a way that some characters’ candid intentions are often comically revealed as contradictory to their social norms. This example from early Renaissance literature echoes what many of us were recently forced to cope with as of 2020: indefinitely having to bear with others—and subsequently with ourselves—in a limiting time and space. According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as long as we are ‘mediated’ by our culture and bound by the other, it is only when exposed to the world and by the people in it that we can continuously re-create our own self-image (Merleau—Ponty, M. “Man seen from the outside” The World of perception (1948). Routledge Classics, 2008. Page 66). In his words, “we do not start out in life immersed in our own consciousness, but rather from the experience of other people. I have never become aware of my own existence until I have already made contact with others; my reflection always brings me back to myself” (Merleau—Ponty, M. “Man seen from the outside” (1948). The World of perception. Routledge Classics, 2008. Page 65). During this time, many of us were left to imagine this continuous exercise of self-reflection from our well-known and most intimate spaces, and so an essential exercise of our freedom was restricted insofar that our self is only supposed to “develop into a free agent by way of the instrument of language and by taking part in the life of the world” (Merleau—Ponty, M. “Man seen from the outside” (1948). The World of perception. Routledge Classics, 2008. Page 66). In a continuous state of confinement, self-reflection is literally reduced to our own and smallest physical and social spheres to the point where the available feedback bounces back so quickly, our contained selves become strangely overwhelmed and exhausted in places that should normally feel like a place of comfort and rest. In these cases, the body and the mind are restricted from a natural learning input that should only take place normally when experiencing the unlearned and unexpected. 

“The adult himself will discover in his own life what his culture, education, books, and tradition have taught him to find there. The contract I make with myself is always mediated by a particular culture, or at least by a language that we have received from without and which guides us in our own self-knowledge. So, while ultimately the notion of a pure self, the mind, devoid of instruments and history, may well be useful as a critical ideal to set in opposition to the notion of a mere influx of ideas from the surrounding environment, such a self only develops into a free agent by way of the instrument of language and by taking part in the life of the world.” (Merleau—Ponty, M. “Man seen from the outside”. The World of perception (1948). Routledge Classics, 2008. Page 66).

This is probably a major reason why enduring confinement leads to difficult, pressurized and even sometimes tragic situations that many are still experiencing intensely individually, socially, and politically today.

Going back to The Decameron and reading about Merleau-Ponty’s comparison between his context and the ‘classical past’ in Boccaccio’s satire, Maurice Merleau-Ponty concludes that “modern consciousness has not discovered a modern truth but rather a truth of all time which is simply more visible—supremely acute—in today’s world” (Merleau—Ponty, M. “Classical World; The Modern World” (1948). The World of perception. Routledge Classics, 2008. Page 82).  In the modern world, he explains, there is evidence of a ‘precarious situation’ in which we are all left in due to the nature of our reason embedded in our ambiguous system: “We truly are in what Hegel called a diplomatic situation, or in other words a situation in which words have (at least) two different meaning and things do not allow themselves to be named by a single word” (Merleau—Ponty, M. “Classical World, Modern World”. The World of perception (1948). Routledge Classics, 2008. Page 81). Here, as he defines his modern world as one distinguished by this ‘diplomacy’, I disagree in considering Boccacio’s skilled use of humor as a successful and playful method of exposing such ambiguities of character into his own narrative as he, I believe successfully, presents also a “kind of knowledge and art that is characterized by (the same) difficulty and reserve, and (similarly) one full of restrictions” (Merleau—Ponty, M.“Art and The World of Perception”. The World of perception (1948). Routledge Classics, 2008. Page 79) all the way back in classical modernity.

In his time, when “Leaving the sphere of knowledge for that of life and action, (where) we find modern man coming to grips with ambiguities which are perhaps more striking still” (Merleau—Ponty, M. “Art and The World of Perception”. The World of perception (1948). Routledge Classics, 2008. Page 80). When calling into his own ‘diplomatic situation’, he possibly refers to having witnessed what had prophesied early in the twentieth century through quantum theory ((Watts, M.. “Introduction: Chance and Dada”. Chance: A Perspective on Dada. University Studies in Fine Arts: The Avant-Garde, No. 9. University of Iowa. Page 3). During his seven lectures read live on the French National Radio in 1948, Maurice Merleau-Ponty took on the opportunity of commission to publicly examine the predicament of modern thought “more or less well (…) through the way the world is revealed to us by our senses in everyday life” (Merleau—Ponty, M. “Man seen from the outside” (1948). The World of perception. Routledge Classics, 2008. Page 61). Just three years before, technology had allowed physicists to crystallize modern theory into what is still ironically called ‘war deterrents’ with the advance of technology. Two bombs had been dropped on the Japanese people as they were forced to experience the horrific disasters on their islands of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Having witnessed these and many other atrocities of the Second World War, Merleau-Ponty lived and wrote his existential philosophy as a shocked humanity had no choice but to advanced on modernity, marking the beginning of the ‘Post-war era’ and the start of what is still considered ‘contemporary’ thought in culture today. 

Having more or less presented what Merleau-Ponty concludes as “the ambiguities inherent in our own political situation” (Merleau—Ponty, M. “Classical World, Modern World”. The World of perception (1948). Routledge Classics, 2008. Page 83) by how they are limiting in different contexts, it feels right to continue his doubts on whether painting, or at least “some paintings posses an unsurpassable plenitude” above such a semantic conundrum unsurpassable by our own nature and language (Merleau—Ponty, M. “Classical World, Modern World”. In: The World of Perception (1948). Routledge Classics, 2008. Page 82-83). As a response, the philosopher briefly considers: “Perhaps the painter responsible saw it as a merely first attempt or indeed as a failure”. But, how could failure mean anything different to a complete success in this a-logical discussion? What if precisely failure is what defines the contemporary artist, as has been suggested by Geraint Evans, couldn’t it be traced in modern painting too? During his lecture on Failure (1), Evans starts by wondering about the role of the artist today inviting other artists to “fail!, and fail again!”, to find perhaps in failure a creative tool, to inhabit places of discomfort, see how that may feel like, to become exposed to others freely; then maybe overcome fear. He asks to ask absurd questions, and by doing so, maybe also leave a mark that suggests perhaps just what is missing, what has been overlooked or suppressing other things; suppressing us. 

Failure, perhaps similarly to chance, he continues, “can be a method for stumbling with the unexpected; maybe finding something there”. Evans provided a number of examples also: some artists gathered as collectives in protest or emancipated from an unfair community, others engaged or shared with communities from outside of the accepted audience, some put themselves in danger or made themselves vulnerable to public scrutiny, some did what they wanted or needed to do, some disappeared…  Perhaps it is specially whilst at failure that the experience and evidence of a single—or many—tries proves emancipation from the very mechanisms by which we are naturally bound by as humans in our society. Who would we be falling for? At moments writing this very text, have I not feared to fail myself? Have I failed my expectations? Perhaps that does feel like a small victory. What could I ever continue to do with these now-fading expectations other than to continue to suffer by avoiding more stuff for longer. 

Similarly to Jas Van Adder or Martin Kippenberger did by failing so radically, in one of her many fragmented and aphoristic sketchbook notes, the American painter and conceptual artist Lee Lozano (1930-1999) tried accessing what Hans Arp and other mystically inclined Surrealists searched for resorting to “chance as an access to unknown, universal correspondences, to a universal order beyond any construct posited by Western casual and logical thought” as Anne Marie Watts wrote. (Watts, M. “Introduction: Chance and Dada”. Chance: A Perspective on Dada. University Studies in Fine Arts: The Avant-Garde, No. 9. University of Iowa. Page 4). In the following fragment, she seems to conjure what famously echoes in Hans Arp’s Gesetz des Zufalls: “Do I want to study from books as a weapon to use when participating in (the) world? Or do I want to search for new knowledge/info systems, invent other ways of learning for myself?” (Gees. J.01.20.2024. Lee Lozano: Shoot. Pinault Collection. URL: https://www.instagram.com/p/C2UuVcLKJO3/?img_index=1 Accessed on 01.22.2024). Lozano, who performed her Language Pieces as evidence on how closely related nature, life, art and language are through social withdrawal for life, for example, is a great example of success through great failure. Her flaccid tools and fragmented bodies lie somewhere between intimate sexuality and frustration, and her Language pieces directly reveal dealing with the hypocrisy of living as an artist amongst the politics of art and social worlds. Going back Merleau-Ponty’s contradictions of our ‘political situation’, Lozano’s determination to withdraw socially, as well as her most expressions of her intimate self both transmit energetic outbursts of genuine, self-reliant spontaneity. In this context, Merleau-Ponty might complement how our faulted reason informed by the sediment of knowledge through social life confronts the hidden world of perception and intuition by theorizing about painting as a simultaneously individual and social practice, somehow suggesting an alternative to his very own previously presented provocations:  

“Rather, as in the perception of things themselves, it is a matter of contemplating, of perceiving the painting by way of the silent signals which come at me from its every part, which emanate from the traces of paint set down on the canvass, until such time as all, in the absence of reason and discourse, come to form a tightly structured arrangement in which one has the distinct feeling that nothing is arbitrary, even if one is unable to give a rational explanation of this. (Merleau—Ponty, M. “Classical World, Modern World”. The World of perception (1948). Routledge Classics, 2008. Page 72).

(Untitled)

Lee Lozano

The State of Lee Lozano and Hauser and Wirth Gallery (Personal archive)

2023 Frieze Masters, Frieze Art Fair. London

In explaining the modern artworks’ meaning and function by its self-assuring presence, he gathers “that ‘form’ and ‘content’ of an “spectacle that is sufficient unto itself” (Merleau—Ponty, M. “Art and The World of Perception”. The World of perception (1948). Routledge Classics, 2008. Page 72) where they “cannot exist separately from one another” (Ibidem.). This presents the modernist tautology by which the very nature of the physical artwork is considered, to say the least, ambiguous as well. Is it fair to suggest, at this point, that perhaps the existential French philosopher has suggested the non-determinist, modern work of art to be an active human creation? In discussing works of Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty describes them as  ‘complete and perfect’, and follows by stating that they serve as approximations “subject to interminable analysis because, like modern ‘unfinished works’ their meaning is not univocal”. (Ibidem. 78)

In my experience, the processes of printmaking have been successful by how they have proved to be contradictory by design and lead towards progressively indeterminant and richer outcomes. Both Lithography and Etching techniques are intensely methodical, precise and yet largely unpredictable. (2) Etching, in one hand, also notoriously called “The Infernal Method” by William Blake, is a traditional printing technique that has been used in the West since around the time of Lucas Cranach, and Albrecht Durer since the XV century, at the time when the printing press gave way to the high renaissance and Mannerism by allowing for making copies by the great masters available to the wider public. Aquatint, sugarlift, spitbite, colophony add to other types of experimental mark making one can leave unto the metal zinc or copper plate. The temperatures,  dangers, smells, colours, textures, mediums and even sounds around Brian’s Workshop at Camberwell College relate to the atmospheres of steelers and inhabitants of the underworld.

It feels medieval, and just as it is a noble and precise craft, it also leads towards a variety of accidents that make the image richer with each step. The “Ghost Fig Tree” that I am working on, has yet to advance. Lithography, on the other hand, includes just as many steps in treating the surfaces, preparing the inks, papers and other materials; however, according to Charlotte, it involves a much less logical process. The stones must come from a specific quarry  discovered much recently somewhere in XVIII century Germany, and while they are not engraved, they are treated on the basis of water repellent oil or grease based mediums onto which the lithographic ink does transfer to the paper meanwhile the clear parts must be kept wet. At the end of each session, I’ve treated my dark, heavy stone with white spirit, asphaltum, white chalk, resin and non-drying ink on top to let it rest. 

The Cistern Contains; The Fountain Overflows

William Blake

Mosaic

Gallery flor no. 17. Tate Britain, London

Every time I come back and start a new print, very different things occur to my stone’s image, just as if it were revealing itself to me while having a conversation. Technically that’s not ideal, but I have found very interesting outcomes while seeing the tree’s dark background react against it and around the drawing, growing as like a glowing spectacle that sprang from within its trunk. Perhaps it is now offering me what it asked for me to give before, back when my hands where in atrophy and I needed to open up to someone or something sometime ago before coming here. A few weeks ago, at the Tate Britain, I came across a mosaic on the floor. It had a phrase that describes the image, and it felt like I related emotionally to it: “The Cistern Contains; The Fountain Overflows”. It is a fragment from one of William Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” in Proverbs From Hell, where he, at his 33 years wrote very symbolic, moral advice on how to prepare for a better living. I came across it having recently experienced how overwhelmingly intense London can be, and it is still difficult not to interpret having come across it as significant or synchronic. I remember Lisa Chang Lee’s Lecture (3), at Camberwell, as she introduced the Tao as “the path, or the creative force” according to Jerome Luther and Lao Tze. Lee is an artist, curator and educator Based in London and Beijing and had an artistic upbringing in portraiture, Chinese traditional calligraphy, and music.

Lee worked with Etching and aquating, screen printing, and often thinks about the subject of the internal versus the external. As an opening statement she asked the audience in the auditorium to wonder “what are you familiar with?”. In her work, she searches for the stories that can reflect the politics, colonization and perception of the rural and abandoned landscapes. She then talked about letting nature speak in humanized codes and about music through her work as a method for turning inwards towards the headspace. One work by her in special caught my attention: in “Serenade of the Woods” Lee translated the natural dynamic behavior of a particular forest in a visual and sound melody so that we could interpret them. In the context of this reflection, considering the complex relation to ourselves, other individuals, and the experience world, how can we expect to interpret the rest of the natural world in our ambiguous terms and language? Eventually she suggested  that “the moment you accept you don’t know, you learn”, and then she mentioned the “Theory of uniformity” and told us about ‘rhizomes’ and how stems grow from the same root. Perhaps there are ways in which we can consider other, more organic forms of understanding  perhaps alternative to the binary, contradictory nature that has been examined thus far.

In general terms, Merleau-Ponty considers our reasoning as contradictory, and so bound by this essential limitation, it is both challenging to both understand ourselves and also make ourselves understood. In his introduction to the written version of the seven Lectures, Thomas Baldwing summarized Merleau-Ponty’s relationship between self consciousness and the individual’s communication with the external other as also contradictory as much as we are always mediated by a language that we have learned from others and which is dependent upon their use of it (…) In the inescapable ‘ambiguity’ of human life, Merleau-Ponty accepts our own actions even though the significance of everything we try to do is dependent on the meaning others give to it” (Baldwin, T. The World of perception (1948). Routledge Classics, 2008. Page 24.). Considering a life that sounds as unbearably difficult and continuously full of confusing experiences with spaces, objects, and people, Merleau-Ponty mentions in his lecture on Sensory Objects “We have endeavored to consider them as they are experienced naively. (Merleau—Ponty, M. “Art and The World of Perception”. The World of perception (1948). Routledge Classics, 2008. Page 61).

To my experience and understanding, the philosopher has suggested that the political space that we share has become a landscape where our limitations and ambiguities will make it always difficult and specially always insufferable when if we are either left to repeatedly experience our own personal personal history into the individual sphere, or thrown into an onomastic desert, where nothing encountered matches a any memory based on known experience. Perhaps a helpful and even meaningful attitude lies in between the opposite extremes in relation to an external force through alternative means of expression and learning. In her introduction to her book Inside de Freud Museums Joanne Morra set out “to concentrate on working through and examined its relevance as a mode of understanding how we encounter, curate, interpret, and write about artworks. (…) Looking for the ways in which knowledge is produced through artistic and psychoanalytic practice has been a guideline” Morra. J. (“Preface and Acknowledgements”. Inside the Freud Museums. I.B. Tauris & Co. 2018). Similarly, two papers from the International Journal of Art Therapy, 2015 consider the following hypothesis: “(…) A clinical vignette helps to illustrate how art response as method of communication can be used when words have been unavailable, particularly in conditions of high affect arousal and avoidant attachment patterns. Needs further research” (Hausteen-Franklin. D. And Camarena Altamirano. J. “Containing the uncontainable: Responsive art making in art therapy as a method to facilitate mentalization.” International Journal of Art Therapy, 2015. Vol. 20). And, secondly: “Interdisciplinary investigation poses art psychotherapy’s uniquely advantageous qualities in contrast to other therapeutic interventions. Specially in contrast to verbal and cognitive behavioral nature” (Chong. C . “Why art psychotherapy? Through the lens of interpersonal neurobiology: The distinctive role of art psychotherapy intervention for clients with early relational trauma”. International Journal of Art Therapy, 2015. Vol. 21).