Frameworks, Artworks, Place: The Space of Perception in the Modern World

by Tim Mehigan, Editor
Consciousness, Literature and the Arts 11
Rodopi Press, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2008
260 pp., illus. 2 b/w., 8 col. Trade, EUR 52,00
ISBN: 978-90-420-2362-8.

Reviewed by Dr Eugenia Fratzeskou (London)

eugenfratz@yahoo.com

The relationship between consciousness and what we define as reality has been a fundamental and much debated issue predominantly in art, as well as in philosophy and psychology and has initiated significant changes in science and the humanities in general. There have been crucial turning points in our comprehension of human perception, due to which the borders of those fields are questioned, as the definitions of the self, realism, art, memory, knowledge, experience, vision and their relationships are changing. Such changes have radically challenged the notion of truth and objectivity and altered our understanding of the processes of identity formation and becoming, as the existence and workings of chaos, complexity, desire, and the unconscious are brought to the fore. Such changes are reflected in the Post-modern negotiation and even, the dissolution of the boundaries between the self and the world, objectivity and subjectivity, body and mind, chaos and order, particularly in art, performance, phenomenology, psychology, history and politics.

Frameworks, Artworks, Place presents a selection of essays by literary critics, art theorists, historians, and visual artists who engage with the question of embodied space and situated consciousness in our constructions of reality and art. The emphasis is placed on exposing the unexpected slippage, unsettling conflicts, and the mental spaces of exchange that occur between the self and the world and how they are revealed in art. Pure and detached observation is questioned and the trauma in Post-Holocaust art is discussed in depth as the construction of knowledge and visual representation are revealed by investigating historical, contemporary discourses and art practice through a psychological and phenomenological approach. Prof. Tim Mehigan’s editorial introduction “The Space of Perception” is followed by three sets of essays on Perception, Perspective, Representation, Representation, Consciousness, Imagination and Constructions of Self in Space. The contributors are Dirk de Bruyn, Khadija Z. Carroll, Barry Empson, Louise Fairfax, Ron Goodrich, Ewen Jarvis, Uli Krahn, Peter Leech, James McArdle, Ann McCulloch, Paul Monaghan, Kim Roberts and Rose Woodcock.

The essays offer diverse viewpoints on the space of consciousness. Being and becoming are redefined as fluid, transformative and precarious, as the self faces his highly complex and alienating modern and post-modern condition. The arguments focus on the reciprocal relationship between the observer and the observed, as the observer transforms the world and he is also transformed by it. The observer may attempt to impose his own constructs of order and reality on the world for gaining control and power, despite the constant failure to achieve this desire, as manifested in modern science and history. The problem of achieving detached observation and objectivity is discussed under the light of the complexity of perception, desire, unconscious drives, irrationality, scientific and social conventions that challenge the structure of consciousness and the possibility to fully understand and control the self. It is argued that reflection may be proved to be a rather simplistic process for understanding consciousness. Those insights raise questions about what does ‘realism’ actually stand for and the issue of representation of space in art in terms of what has been concealed and what can be revealed by the artist.

The publication presents interesting investigations on how new (re)presentations of space may be feasible through phenomenology instead of geometry, for visualising the workings of human vision and perception. Such (re)presentations of space are created for revealing the complexity of the reciprocal relationship between the observer and the world, questioning thus, the hidden abstraction and flaws of perspectival geometry as a means of reducing the world and our subjective experience of it into an ‘object’ which can be measured, understood and thus possessed. Influenced by the impact of holocaust, modernist art introduces a radical break with representation, content and description for introspectively revealing trauma through exposing the mechanisms of perception and the semiotic system of the artwork itself.

The concluding essays offer particularly revealing in-depth investigations of the strategies of displaying and experiencing art as part of the Post-modern construction of “discontinuous historical realities” (Bhabha’s phrase, p.217). As Carroll explains in her investigation of the Colonial acts of renaming, “the inability to grasp matched with a desire to control” and thus, possess (p.214). Such realities therefore, have been the product of the non-neutral act of renaming and the classification of cultural material for constructing the desirable evidence. That mechanism of fabricating knowledge aims at diffusing the original value and context of any cultural material that is too novel and unique and thus, exceeds the existing social and scientific norms and expectations.