Encounters
on Emerging Boundary Spaces
Ari Hirvonen
Borderline Space
The drawing of the boundary lines between good and evil, right and
wrong, friend and enemy, safe and threatening, familiar and alien,
culture and nature, which organizes our way of being in the world and
of sharing it with others, has dissolved with the withdrawal of the
gods and the waning of the great ideologies. Instead of absolute
authorities, stable boundaries, fundamental essences and universal
moral truths and definitions, none of which is more valid than any
other. We are free for boundless pleasure and self-creation.
At the same time, reality has become transparent. With the fading of
boundaries and boundary-setting norms, the superior individual's
categorical imperative becomes: one must reveal. The mysteries of life
and death are explicable, the secrets of the body and the unconscious
can be brought into the light, vague moral value judgments linked to
evil are easy to ignore. The cognitive sciences, gene technology,
molecular and neurobiology are marginalizing philosophy, ethics,
psychoanalysis and poetry. The enchantment of the strangeness of being
is evaporating, but to compensate we have the assurance that everything
is comprehensible, controllable and manageable, that lack - where
there still is any - is no more than an error that can be rectified. In
fact, this is a fantasy, which only conceals both evil, along with the
deficiency and anxiety.
This fantasy, however, sparks the very anxiety from which it seeks to
liberate humanity. To alleviate this anxiety, many people decide to
seek some sort of guidance and foundation, something supreme, which
would redefine the boundaries both between good and evil, end between
the exposed and the hidden. Evenly staked-out boundary markers would
liberate people from the despotism of transparency and freedom, and
they
would attest to a unity and consistency amid the chaotic diversity of
reality. Manifestations of this longing include both neo-nationalism
and religious fanaticism, both racism founded on a fear of difference
and terrorism that whips up fear. War, too, in its own destructive way,
guarantees borderlines. Meanwhile, mood-controlling drugs alleviate
both the terror of freedom and exposure, and the anxiety induced by
acts of terror and war.
In this situation art, too, has to take "sides". On the one hand, art
can set up boundaries and reinforce existing identities and
distinctions, thus serving this or that ideology, nation or religion.
On the other hand, in the ecstasy of the postmodern, it can want to
abolish all boundaries, fixed points and underpinnings. Or then, having
been liberated from the logic of identity and from the discourse of
relativism, it seeks to bring everything into the light.
But art can also doubly challenge boundaries and identities, expressly
by calling into question both their setting up and their preservation,
along with their mono chromatically naive overturning and dismantling.
Perhaps in this situation art is a demarcation of boundaries that takes
place in a boundary space where things turn into their other and where
the boundary is an irrevocably open question. In this in-between space
the world and being in it are not manageable in their entirety, the
diversity cannot be revealed all at one go, as something that is
present. Representing and bringing to light always leave
something hidden. But, at the same time, an artwork may be
the kind of occurrence of presence in which the mind of being
peeps through, in which what exists is revealed, and in which
unconcealedness steps forth out of concealment in a certain historical
space-time. In this case, however, art does not so much define and
control what it reveals, but rather it hears what it reveals, and
responds to it and about it. This may also open up new spaces for our
way of being subjects, for our way of being in the world.
Several of the ARS 06 artworks can be seen as moving around in this
kind of terrain. By marking out the boundaries that organize our being
and our world, by calling them into question and challenging them,
analyzing
their mutual entanglement and inseparability, they reveal something
that art that holds on to the boundaries or ignores them is
unable to illuminate. This kind of "committed" art speaks to us and
hence brings out the point both of the world and of being a human in
it. Particularly the works of Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz,
Motohiko Odani and Adriana Varejao are places for opening up,
clearings, which by making out the boundaries between the homely and
the alien (and between other related concept-pairs), challenging them,
bring out something of
what it is to be.
The Glacier
In the winter landscapes inside glass spheres, snow globes,
familiar from childhood peace and harmony prevailed. We could watch
with admiration as the snowflakes fell peacefully onto fairytale,
Christmas or manger scenes, onto Eiffel towers or statues of
David. Change and the patina of time, lack and desire, cruelty and
evil, were all absent, absent from these worlds of dream, fairy tale,
mystery and holidays, worlds, in which the only god counting the time
was the snowfall.
At first glance, the works in Walter
Martin & Paloma Muñoz's Travelers
series evoke an endearingly familiar feeling. The works in the
Travelers
series each constitute their own planet, where a complete and unique
world opens up before us. These worlds are worlds of good and
evil , joy or sorrow, all of them having in common a snow-clad winter
landscape, in whose bright whiteness events occur that are both
everyday and absurd, both exhilarating and shocking, both familiar and
strange.
Now, our gaze begins to falter. It shifts from its place, or rather is
divided in two. On the one hand, it wants to see the ever-familiar and
safe snow scape with its charming figures or monuments. On the other
hand, the strange scenes and situations revealed in the works draw the
gaze. Something is not right. In this way the works call into question
the expectations, hopes and imaginings that are associated with them at
first glance, bringing us under the sway of wonder and amazement.
In many of the works we encounter peculiar situations,
disturbing possibilities, unease and confusion. Some of these worlds
can even be frightening and anxiety inducing: a stocky man dangling a
child over a well (Traveler 123);
a man goading a naked woman onto a glacier (Traveler 154), a giant spider chasing
a man (Traveler 156); a woman undressing
in front of a chained man in overalls (Traveler 164). Our gaze arrives to
early at the scene of a crime or accident, since the mantle of snow
would soon have obscured the evil beneath it. We have unexpectedly been
made witnesses to acts of cruelty, to violence and nightmares that
would have been better to remain secret. There is something strange
about the experience, since a familiar object reveals to us some
macabre aspects.
The weirdness of the works is not just a matter of coming face to face
with something totally unknown or alien, but of a dialogue between the
familiar and the strange. This feature of the works can be illuminated
by the German term unheimlich,
meaning unhomely or uncanny. According to Freud, unheimlich, is unquestionably the
opposite of the German word heimlich,
meaning homely, intimate, and of heimisch, meaning familiar, native.
Hence, it is not far to the conclusion that the uncanny is the same as
the non-homely. But heimlich means not only
pleasantly homely, but also hidden, secret, kept from sight,
specifically that to which the word unheimlich refers.
And so, according to Freud, heimlich ultimately
becomes one with its opposite with the word unheimlich. Thus, the unheimlich brings out the way the
homely , the familiar, the intimate, that which produces pleasure and
security, is always linked with something concealed, hidden,
uncommunicative; the way that something concealed and uncanny resides
within the familiar. The uncanny is something that is repressed (un-)
familiar and homely, which surprisingly appears from beneath a
repression. According to Schelling, the unheimlich is something that has
come into light even though it should have stayed hidden.
In the works the cozy miniature world that we expect is opened up and
shown to be violent and steeped in evil. The reassuringly familiar is
turned into the peculiar, the homely into the strange, the good into
evil, the safe into insecurity. At the same time as the drama of this
miniature world may horrify us, the kitschy innocence and superficial
beauty of the glass domes remain unchanged, their mode of being as
objects - or as shapes and as matter - is preserved as a kind of
homeliness, on which the eye can linger. What makes this a baffling
experience is specifically the inseparability of the manifestation of
the event and the object, so that we encounter the strange and the
familiar, the frightening and the safe, simultaneously. In fact the
status of the glass-globes as artworks is about the strangeness
revealed
from beneath the expectations set up by ingrained memories and
aesthetic beauty, or about bringing the concealed into uncolcealment.
We no longer so much look at works as experience them (as oppressive),
which opens us up to the unexpected elements revealed in the
world of the works.
When we move on from the viewing into the world of the works, we also
notice that the uncanniness does not remain solely on the level of
cruel and nightmarish occurrences, since the world of the works reveals
something "more fundamental" about our human way of being in the world.
There is thus something about the entire Travelers series that makes
our flesh creep, the reason for which we can only suspect. Even the
jubilant Traveler 155, in which a boy does push-ups into the air
supported by a girl's hands, triggers gloomy emotions.
The time in the worlds of the works has become frozen in its own
momentariness, in the tension between the past and future. These
worlds of eternal snows, into which the people are enclosed, are
bleakly desolate despite their beauty. Culture comes across as having
been no more than people's outer garments. The human, homely, familiar
world of civilization, technology and laws has withdrawn into its
hiding places, leaving people in the midst of raw, unprotected and
strange nature. On this glacier of the real the symbolic order is no
longer a guarantee of fixed points, a horizon, or identity. Everything
is slightly out of kilter. Where the world as we encounter it in all
its everydayness is filled with rules, order and shape, these works
bring to light something about the unruliness that could at any moment
overturn the order that we take for granted. This groundlessness of
being is in fact the fundamental order that makes it at all possible to
distinguish between order and disorder.
On a more general level, the worlds that are unfolded in these
works and the unprecedentedly strange events taking place in them
reveal something strange. The origin and goal of being are unknown and
inaccessible to human knowledge. Being a human is haphazard, fraught
with uncertainty, and ephemeral. The perishableness of humanity is
accentuated by the menacing trunks of dead trees that have
petrified into timelessness. The only certainty is death, which is both
possible at every instant and inevitable for everyone. The human
figures in the works testify to this certainty with their own fragile
existence. Nobody can die their death for them . This death has to be
died alone. The works thus reveal the finiteness and mortality that are
intrinsic part of being-in-the-world of the human figures contained in
them. Thus, what they do reveal is Heidegger's Sein Zum Tode, being-toward-death.
We can gloomily intimate that soon the snow will have covered over all
the traces of humanity, even though a man in a suit is still helping
another across a river (or to the bottom of the sea) (Traveler 157). But it is
specifically through mortal human beings that the world gets its point,
it being expressly in the finite human being that the struggle
goes on between good and evil. People are thrown into the world of the
works, without themselves having been able to make a choice in the
matter or about the foundations of this world. Since they cannot
control their existence down to its foundation s, they simply have to
stand in the world with their own gravity . This all emerges all the
more clearly thanks to the inability of the human figures in the
desolation of the snowfields to flee or withdraw into the everyday
meanings and norms endorsed by culture, morality and law. Hence, the
works put on view humanity's being in the world without masks, without
definite norms and fixed points, with no certainty other than our
finitude.
Thus, in the familiar glass globe and in the
beautiful snow scape a strange truth opens up, a truth for which, for
our own peace of mind, it would be better to remain hidden.The viewing
experience is not, however, marked by any fear of death, departure or
the dissolution of the foundations of our being, which would be a kind
of momentary mental weakness. It is more of an anxiety in the face of
our most basic possession and of what cannot be ignored - in fact, an
anxiety in the face of our being-in-the-world. The most uncanny thing
is thus not the strangeness of this truth, but specifically the fact
that it is a person's most basic, closest and most familiar thing there
is.
[...]
Ari Hirvonen
LL.D. , Adjunt Professor of Philosophy of Law, University of Helsinki,
Finland.
"Encounters on
Emerging Boundary Spaces", by Ari Hirvonen, was published in
ARS 06, Kiasma's cataloge, 2006.
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