When I was at art college during the early 1970s I became very interested in conceptual art and in particular how it was related to performance. My tutor Keith Arnatt was heavily involved in this area and his seminars and teaching methods were designed to help you organise your thoughts around such issues as whether or not certain philosophical or intellectual propositions could be realised as art works.
Keith Arnatt: 'Trouser word piece'
In this case his photograph was positioned alongside a text taken from John Austin about the slippery nature of 'the real' or 'reality'. He used Austin's analysis as a satirical meditation on the nature of a real artist, a term often used at the time to put down those people who were seen as amateur artists. Art then as now often suffered from snobbery.
In the case of 'I'm a Real Artist' Arnatt measures art against himself but in the early 70s it was two Dutch artists that seemed to exemplify this area of work, Stanley Brouwn and Bas Jan Ader.
Stanley Brouwn
During the 1970s, Brouwn produced work developed from thinking about his own unit of measurement based on various parts of his body, such as the ‘Stanley Brouwn foot’, which measured approximately 26 cm long. Brouwn would often record the numbers of steps he needed to take to get to and circumnavigate various cities, collecting his accountings on numerous filing cards, that would be collected together and placed in filing cabinets. For example, his exhibit for Documenta 5 was of several grey filing cabinets; one of which held 1000 cards, an outline of a 3000-step walk and measurements of the length of strides between 840 and 890 millimetres. I was very taken with this type of work at the time and made my own body rulers, as well as a set of scales calibrated in relation to myself, that were used to weigh art. Well at the time it seemed a good idea. Looking back I realise it was the work of a young artist that was still working through the implications of what was going on around me and one of the things going on was the advancement of data collection, something that at the time I was aware of but not yet worried by it.
The idea of measurement is something I have put up blog posts about several times before. We all know our own bodies as something to measure other things against, things are either bigger than us, smaller than us or of a similar size to us, and we tend to think of scale, as something calibrated against a human measure. Therefore it is to be expected that various approaches to the idea have come up over and over again during human history. But Bas Jan Ader had very different ideas about measurement. He set sail alone in July 1975 in a 12½ foot dinghy called Ocean Wave from the coast of Massachusetts intending he said, to cross the Atlantic, aiming to reach Falmouth in Cornwall. However he was never seen again, disappearing into an idea that was also a stark reality. Bas Jan Ader was measuring himself against the immeasurable. The Atlantic Ocean is immense, far too big to really imagine, something was going on in Bas Jan Ader's head that meant in setting out to sail it in a 12½ foot dinghy, he was testing himself out against the ineffable. When it comes down to it we are small frail creatures, and our obsession to gain control over nature is both foolish and hubristic. Numbers have always given us some sort of false idea of control and we need to guard against the idea that in collecting data, we are in some way able to use it to control the world. It will when it wants to, swallow us up, just as it did Bas Jan Ader.
Nearly a year after his departure, in April 1976, a Spanish fishing crew found his empty boat off the coast of Ireland.
Humankind as the centre and measure of all things was a Renaissance concept. Leonardo's drawing above represents ideal human body proportions and illustrates an idea of human-beings as a standard against which everything else could to be measured against. Its inscription in a square and a circle comes from a description by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius in Book III of his treatise De architectura. However, look at how Leonardo positions the square in relation to the circle. He sits the circle on the bottom edge of the square, thus dropping the square off centre, and the corners of the square project through the edges of the circle. This allows him to square the circle of how to fit a human body into the two geometric figures without too much distortion. It feels to me that he drew the geometry to fit the figure, as much as fitting the figure to the geometry, something that if true resonates with other ways of thinking about humans as part of nature. Rather than being some sort of pinnacle or controller, human beings are things that are in constant interaction with nature, being shaped by their immersion in the world and their interaction with it. I would like to think that Leonardo had intuitively recognised this, realising that humans need to fit in, and that they did not have to try and shape the world in their own image.
This issue of how we interact with the world is illustrated by one of the medical problems set out by Daoist thinkers of the 15th century. In the illustration of 'Problem 18' preserved in the Zhengtong daozang, we have the following 'Problem'. The male faces south; he turns his back on yang (Active) and faces towards yin, (Receptive) like the heavens above. The three yang channels issue from the earth; therefore the chi is described as 'floating' in the male. The female faces north; she turns her back on yin and faces towards yang, like the earth beneath. The three yin channels issue from the heavens; therefore the chi is described as 'floating' in the female. These conditions can be recognised by feeling for the pulse rate. The radial lines surrounding the wrist indicating where this problem can be recognised. If the body is not in tune with its environment things go wrong and pulse rate is an early sign of this. Daoists believed that we need a balance between earth and heaven, nature and humankind, body and mind, as well as a need to achieve harmony between male and female elements. In contrast we often find ourselves working with contrasts or opposing forces, (black or white, wrong or right, male or female, good or bad) but the Daoist forces are complementary and they interact in a dynamic system that is constantly in movement as it seeks to achieve balance. This is more like a moving body, you constantly readjust your body's relationship with the ground as you walk, by taking care to be in harmony with where you are you have far less chance of falling over.
How to read the pulse
The woodblock illustration above from Waike xinfa zhenyan zhinan was published in 1887, 400 years after the Zhengtong daozang. It sets out correspondences between the three sectors of the pulse -- cun (Inch), guan (Pass) and chi (Foot). These differences in pulse rate can be linked to internal organs of the body. The left arm cun pulse corresponds to the heart, the left arm guan pulse corresponds to the gall bladder and liver, and the left chi pulse corresponds to the bladder and small intestine and kidney; the right cun pulse corresponds to the centre of the chest and the lung, the right guan pulse corresponds to the stomach and spleen, and the left chi pulse corresponds to the large intestine and kidney. This set of correspondences is not however as closely knit into a need to achieve harmony as the Daoist text. As advancements are made, sometimes we lose awareness as well as gain new insights. We are in our present age very used to the doctor feeling our pulse, the measurement of which we tend to think of as either regular or irregular, rapid or slow, strong or weak, any deviation from a norm being a sign that something could be going wrong. However if we simply link the data to a machine, we may well find ourselves controlled rather than advised as to what is best for us. A weak or too rapid pulse may simply mean we need to restore some sort of harmony with our environment.
The artist collaborative team Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese, LIGORANOREESE, have used FitBit data to develop work that visually presents signs of the body's ongoing changes. This helps grow awareness rather than leading to control, something that is an essential difference between how art and science tend to operate in our present society.
LigoranoReese: IAMI, 2014 Woven fibre optic thread, plexiglass, metal and custom software
Looking at LigoranoReese's work, I am reminded that the Leeds Arts University is literally over the road from the University of Leeds and that the university is very involved in materials science and the investigation of possibilities of interaction between disciplines is something that is not thought about as much as it should be. This situation is often duplicated in other cities, whereby art departments and institutions have become separated from the various science departments. Measurement is central to both scientists and artists and perhaps it is an idea around which both groups of thinkers and makers could forge a new collaborative future. The fact that they have become such separate disciplines is indicative of something going wrong in our society and just as we need to become more and more sensitive to our environment, we also need to foster communication between ourselves and nature and all the various approaches to working with the world. We are not separate from nature we are part of it, just as the arts are not separate from the sciences, it is just that words tend to create difference. Science is simply looking at stuff and exploring what it can do, and art is simply looking at stuff and exploring what it can mean, but if people forget what things mean, they can make poor decisions and fail to see outside of their own world view.
I am particularly worried at the moment about how statistics and science are used to try and control us. Every morning we are told the government is 'following the science' when it comes to justifying decision making and this is usually followed by a set of statistics to explain why one decision is better than another. Of course by the afternoon some other interest group will have another set of statistics to set against the ones we were given in the morning. Both interest groups are though now becoming slaves to a 'technic' view of reality, one that sees data, science and statistical information as central to their world view. Data it would seem now replaces religion, as something we are supposed to put our trust in. Art because of its amorphous unpredictable form, may be able to put a fault into the data stream, and if it can just lever that fault-line open a little, perhaps it could give us an escape route, back into a life not governed by numbers, one that allows us to live our lives with a degree of quality, a quality of life that is about watching moonlit shadows in the woods at night, feeling the richness of the soil in our fingers and smelling the air as we listen to the sound of wind in the trees.
The lesson being that we are all linked together by a common reality and unless we begin to work together to see how we can harmonise with that reality, we will gradually find ourselves more and more isolated from the reality that we inhabit. We are part of our environment, not separate from it. The more that we can understand that the more we might realise that we are a collective force and not a set of isolated individuals. A collective that includes those that we tend to think are unlike us, as well as those things we don't think of as human at all. As various shamans have stated when asked to define what humans are, sometimes certain rocks are humans and sometimes other animals are humans, it just depends on the situation; non of us though; people, animals, plants or materials should have our reality reduced to data and statistics.
See also:
Reading matter
If you want to read about some of the issues surrounding a 'technic' dominated society try:
Technic and Magic by Federico Campagna
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