Living in the Subjunctive
I am beginning to see how my work might interface between self and an era of climate chaos: in the non. The ‘non’ spaces, the sections of the world and my art and so many experiential parts of experience that have little to do with one thing nor another: the not easily categorised, not easily sorted, not easily placed in this drawer or that. I am learning to see where binary thinking is unhelpful, where the opposite of black is not white but not-black and where the opposite of truth is not false. I read climate conspiracy thinking and it strikes me that the absence of truth is not false in this case, that there is a sort of truth-ish-ness and a false-ish-ness that overlaps and underlaps much of it and makes it so confusing. Art is confusing, the present mass extinction is confusing too. Tim Morton talks about the experience of ecological crisis as being like jet lag and that makes sense to me - the internal signalling that it is definitely time to go to bed at two in the afternoon is not false, the melatonin says so, the circadian rhythms of one’s biology is pretty certain about that as exhaustion takes hold, locked in an inescapable contortion of perfunctory yawning, but it doesn’t mean the clock on the wall telling you it’s just after lunch is equally, not wrong.
An embodiment of these planetary shifts is impossible - in the same way that all this ecological mess is not my fault personally but it is in that I am one of the billions of the species that made it so, and that means I am also only one person and that means my lack of affect in the cause correlates to my lack of affect when it comes to damage control. Is this perhaps where all the frantic and possibly, often ineffectual recycling comes from? Does it come from a frantic, binary DO SOMETHING meaninglessness? Is that what I am doing with my compost? Art making expresses and quietly caresses the ‘non’ in all of this, which is not meaningless.
The ‘wake up’ protestors have it all wrong in that sense because there really is nothing to wake up from: the distortion is the reality. Just as Tim Morton says, a music score of notes is real but it doesn’t become a reality until the violinist picks up her instrument and enlivens the codified traces on paper into music, sound I can feel between my ribs and hear vibrating through my occipital bones. I feel mass extinction deep in my rib cage but also the clock on the wall says situation normal.
I think my work might operate in this sphere of non-ness, of caressing and handling kindly those feelings of disorientation and grief, the worry, the lack of affect, the hope and the hopelessness. Tending the human and more-than experience in this crisis is by no means ineffectual, making art is caring for the patient. It is not emergency medicine, it won’t stop the bleeding, but holding hands might make it hurt a bit less.
For the first time I see paint as the obvious expression of this non space, the fulcrum in the see-saw of endlessly binary thinking, the obsession with this or that and the refusal to see that neither doesn’t mean nothing.