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The Dream of Reason

Introduction by Elysa Lozano



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The Dream of Reason was presented as an exhibition at London's temporarycontemporary, 8 June--2 July 2006. This artist-run converted distillery was the location for the display of projects by artists Anthony Discenza, Tom Dale, Lauren Kirkman, Frederick Loomis, Elysa Lozano, Inês Rebelo, Alexander Ugay and Roman Maskalev. Video-based works, site-specific installations, drawing projects, text-based works, sculpture and film were presented to the public with an accompanying publication.

The exhibition's title sets the tone of the premise for this project and works as an umbrella for the gathering of the different artists, each one selected based on their ongoing practices and the questions addressed in their specific contributions.

"The dream of reason" was chosen as a reference to the 43rd plate in Goya's series of etchings Caprichos (1797--1798), in which the words "El sueño de la razon produce monstruos" (the sleep of reason produces monsters) appear next to a human figure surrounded by demoniacal animals. The English translation of the Spanish text is ambiguous, as sueño can mean both sleep and dream. If one is looking at the picture, one cannot avoid wondering whether the man in the etching desires to awaken reason, or if his dream of reason has actually created the monsters. The exhibition, through the artists' works and publication, explores a range of possibilities between the two extreme interpretations of this ambiguity.

On one hand, dreams are built into the production of technology and science: A yearning for something greater, or the motivation to create something as yet unknown, drives the production. Many times a creative leap beyond the rules is necessary to progress to the next step inside the walls of a laboratory.

From another point of view, the scientist's processes and mechanics also become fantasies in the public imagination, as in science fiction. When one looks at a more or less popular image of a near future (utopic or dystopic), it seems there is a door open to immense imaginative possibilities. Technology opens that door, through which we see a hyperbolic distortion of the present. What we see in the present, then, is the belief in technology to usher in the future.

The Dream of Reason was set up at temporarycontemporary as an experimental laboratory, which uses as its platform the spheres of science, technology and rigorous processes, embedded with fantasy and dreams. The selected artworks examine these spheres in their analogous roles as tools, but the discrete moments of clarity in individual works spark against each other, distorting a single method of understanding and disagreeing on the end result. Or, in other words, the adopted tactic in the exhibit's curation, instead of setting up a rhetorical consequence of a sequence of arguments, presents different views on the proposed ambiguity through the artists' works.

The choices for this exhibition and the adopted tactics emerged naturally from a series of conversations, impelled by our practices as artists and curators, which were also published in the catalogue of the exhibition. The following is an edited version of this conversation:

Elysa Lozano: Do you remember when we were talking about the show . . . back in the beginning, before anything happened, when we were sitting at our computers just talking about ideas?

Inês Rebelo: I just remember e-mails, in the summer, when I was in Lisbon and you were in San Francisco. I remember one specific e-mail I sent to you. It was full of everything.

Lozano: Yes, I remember that e-mail. There was something about Borges, about the map.

Rebelo: Yes, the Borges text about representation [1]. It talks about a group of cartographers who were charting every part of an empire, until the space was mapped at a 1:1 scale. So, the last map matched the size of the objects it was mapping. Lately I have been relating this to another map in Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark [2]. But this one is a blank page in the book. The map is empty and there are no traces of land or anything. It is completely empty. But one can see the words North, East, North Pole, Equinox written around the perimeter but in the wrong places. Strangely, there is no South.

Lozano: So, basically on Carroll's map the world is square: It is a blank two-dimensional square. The map is just those words written around the outside of the square, but there is nothing on the inside. All that exists is the description of our ways to divide the world. But there is a difference between the Carroll map and the Borges one. In creating their map at a 1:1 scale, the cartographers wanted to be so precise that it ended up being absurd. The Carroll map is about what is useful, about what we consider useful.

Rebelo: So we can say that the 1:1 map reflects some kind of pursuit of knowledge. That is why the cartographers were doing more and more maps, more and more detailed. It was to reach the point where the map occupies the same space as the actual land.

Lozano: I remember that there was something in the Borges text about how, in his story, the 1:1 map was disintegrating over time. In certain places you could see that the map had become part of the land. It is a good metaphor for how we understand things, when the map becomes part of how we actually see the land.

Rebelo: The Goya etching seemed to point in the same direction as some of the ideas we were thinking about. And the fact that Arthur C. Danto highlighted the ambiguity in the interpretation between sleep and dream [3] opened the door to thinking about the relationship between rationalized and systematic processes and the production of monsters. Is it the sleep of reason that produces monsters or is it the dream of reason? If we think about only one of the words, we would automatically assume that Goya selects a position in regard to the idea of reason.

Lozano: Are you saying the difference would be between dreaming for reason to be gone or dreaming, meaning wishing, for reason?

Rebelo: Yes, it is a very enigmatic sentence. To say the sleep of reason produces monsters points out that if you do not use reason, monsters will be produced. But when one reads "dream" instead of "sleep," the sentence becomes about an excessive use of reason, as well as what reason would dream the most, what it would want the most.

Lozano: This ambiguity seems similar to how we structured the show. One of our goals from the beginning was to open a platform from which it could be possible to present different perspectives. It is as if there were points radiating out like spokes from a center. The ideas that we started with are the center, and the artists' works are the spokes, creating a kind of bicycle wheel, with each artist shooting out into their own universe.

Rebelo: The bicycle wheel is a very deformed one because the distance of each point from the center is not the same. The wheel would not be very functional or aerodynamic.

Lozano: It seems to me that the relationship between a central idea and the interpretation of it (even that sort of non-aerodynamic one) relates to your work with the scientific illustrators.

Rebelo: Well, from my experience talking with the scientific illustrators I collaborated with to do this project, I learned there were very specific conventions of scientific representation, of which I was not aware. For example, when we view a scientific representation of a specimen, the wing or leg may appear distorted, when actually the image maintains the true proportions of the actual part. The representation has to be skewed in order to be "truthful." Although their drawing will not reflect what I experience through my eyes, it adheres to a specific code in scientific illustration, which allows for "accurate" representation of the specimen.

Lozano: So it is not a perspectival view of the wing. You have instead a sort of idealized view of the wing, which is supposed to be truer than what you can see.

Rebelo: As the record gets closer to the reality, it dissolves, as did the map of the cartographers.

Lozano: I see it in a different way. The wing is never going to be two dimensional in the real world, so this particular situation ends up raising questions about the language of representation. It is not that the scientific illustrators are trying to make a 1:1 map. They know the limitations of the process. Rather, if you know the code, you can translate their representation into what it indicates, kind of like the process of reading a map.

Rebelo: Yes, you make the translation in your head, but when you talk you use the conventions.

Lozano: But the early cartographers drew different types of maps. I remember one example from very basic physical science in high school. There was a park and a man walking his dog. The man goes from one entrance to the other along a straight path, but his dog walks all over the park. In the end they go out the same exit and the distance they have traversed from West to East is the same, but the dog has traveled a lot more and discovered in a very detailed way all the attributes of the park.

Rebelo: That is a good analogy for how we see the exhibition. Each artist has a different perspective and different approach to processing the information of discovery and through those different processes, we can see their distinct position in relation to their subject matter.

Lozano: Yes, although we would have to imagine more than two walkers! But it is true that they all go into the park---they are all dealing with similar subject matter in a way. But that same park ends up being a very different place for each of them. And when we get all of their "maps" in the same room, we can see, just like in your example of the scientific illustrators, that they are creating the park through each of their maps.

Elysa Lozano
London, U.K.
E-mail: ; .

Inês Rebelo
London, U.K.
E-mail: ; .
References

1. Jorge Luis Borges, "Of Exactitude in Science," in J.L. Borges, A Universal History of Infamy (London: Penguin Books, 1975) p. 131.

2. Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark (London: Penguin Books, 1998 [1891]).

3. Arthur C. Danto, "Shock of the Old: Arthur C. Danto on Three Goya Biographies" Artforum 43, No. 7, 49--52 (March 2004).

4. Elysa Lozano, "Tum Tum from Planet Lum Lum," Leonardo 40, No. 1 (2007), p. 15.

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Updated 28 February 2007

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