AN EXTERNAL INTRODUCTION
I sit here speaking.
Who listens?
You.
Other voices are present.
Me is broadcasted through a large sound system.
My Self is the voice
coming from a
small speaker.
I am here in front of You and You think it’s Me you’re seeing.
Nevermind My Self.
I know and You know
only I knows My Self.
And who could care less than Me?
What do I sound like?
The same as Me and My Self.
Me is BOLDER, LOUDER than My Self or I.
My Self is calm, quiet, rational.
I have the voice of the average person, questioning, at times emotional, searching for a way to express who I am.
Who do You sound like?
You sound like Me.
You sound like My Self.
You sound like I.
BEGINNINGS OF AN INTERNAL CONVERSATION
Who am I? I asked My Self.
Why You are Me and I am You.
How can I be You and You be Me? Am I not one?
No, I is never one.
I is a multitude of Me and You;
My Self included.
Sounds true to Me!
If I is never one, what is the true self?
When I present the self in its multiplicity,
I present the true self.
How can I present a true self without knowing all of who I am?
Don’t make a liar out of Me!
Will I betray My Self by not presenting the multiplicity of who I am?
My Self is weary of this discourse.
Sigh
When telling an honest lie
of who I am
I never will not betray My Self.
An honest lie? How can a lie be honest?
A lie told unwittingly is not honest
if the possibility of its dishonesty is not recognized.
An acknowledged lie is an honest lie!
Acknowledging the possibility of dishonesty leads me no closer to the answer of how can I know who I am if I do not know all of who I am?
Who looks back
from inside the mirror?
I see Me.
I rarely looks in a mirror!
Stop annoying, Me.
Just ignore Me like My Self!
Who is a self portrait of?
My Self?
It is I.
And Me!
Me who I saw in the mirror?
None other!
Don’t You see?
Me, My Self and I
in the mirror,
the self portrait,
are all of us
You’re seeing,
You see?
When You don’t know all of who I am,
when You make a self portrait,
You portray my true self
because that portrait contains more than Me
it contains My Self and I, not just You!
Why do I want to know
who I is?
Haven’t all artists and philosophers since the beginning of
human existence asked this same question?
Part of becoming is understanding who I am.
Do I think knowing all of who I am
will help Me become more My Self?
Perhaps.
Truth interests Me!
I care less for knowing the honest truth than I do for telling a dishonest lie.
Could I accept knowing
all of who I am
is potentially improbable and
possibly impossible?
Recognizing the potential improbability and impossibility of a conclusive knowledge of who I am is not the same as acceptance of a conclusive identity, is it?
Do I think ‘all’ is always inclusive?
I need to think about all this. I don’t want to close any doors.
Conclusive, inclusive, ‘clus’ is central to both, and it means ‘shut’
up to Me, it’s time to move on!
INTENTIONAL STARTS AND UNPREDICTABLE OUTCOMES
What do I do all day?
I go into the studio and stand between the easel and the wall. Sometimes You are with Me.
What do You and Me do?
I do not know what You and Me do; I know what I do. I look.
Look at what?
What I see and for what I can’t see, but try to see.
Sounds like sitting on a see-saw to Me!
A case of “now You see Me, now You don’t”!
I does not have to listen to Me.
If I could
answer the question,
please before Me drives
My Self crazy.
What I am doing when I am looking, seeing and not seeing? I make; a making that precipitates others to look, to make
Hey, listen to this quote from an opinion piece by the philosopher Alva Noë
in The New York Times on October 5, 2015:
“Art disrupts plain looking and it does so on purpose. By doing so it discloses just what plain looking conceals.”
I purposefully disrupts
Sounds like Me!
the process of looking,
revealing the unseen
when I make art?
How am I disruptive?
Noë wrote
“Art is itself a research practice, a way of investigating the world and ourselves. Art displays us to ourselves, and in a way makes us anew, by disrupting our habitual activities of doing and making.”
Disruption of habits is such fun for Me!
This very clear to My Self and I.
When I ask who I am through the art I make the validity of the routine way of seeing I as all there to I is questioned.
Merely asking the question is the disruption.
Yes, the process of my questioning from which the questions themselves emerge is passed along to You for your consideration.
What I makes is questions.
Questions are asked, not made!
How can I answer a question that is made not asked?
It is consideration of the questions, not necessarily the formation of answers I finds important. I make the work of art as a conduit for the circuitous relationship between You and I.
And You and I are the same.
This isn’t new to Me.
Nor to I.
It seems to Me we are back where we started.
Sometimes I just need to repeat My Self.
Enough. Move on.
This relationship between artist and spectator is the merging of you and I as discussed by the philosopher Richard Wollheim in his lectures on what the artist, I, does and what the spectator, You, sees. In this relationship passivity cannot exist; what I do is seeing as the You see and what You see is doing as I do.
What I says sounds obvious to My Self.
It sounds like a truth to Me!
This should please Me. According to Flint Schier:
“Wollheim opens up a truism that we have not fully appreciated: the fact that a painter, as he paints, must face his canvas. ...the artist in failing to face his canvas has failed to face his audience. “
I makes a mirror in which
You see more than
just You, Me, My Self and I.
Yes, I make mirrors reflecting not the actual, but the potential and the possible.
Like a fun house mirror?
They’re a bit more than that.
To make the mirrors I make I need to look into them. Only by looking in can I see what is and is not there; what is there and still not here.
The mirrors I makes disrupt the reality
of both reflection and reflected.
Fun house mirrors amuse Me!
This failure that Schier cites impacts not just the relationship of You and I, but also the nature of what art does according to Alva Noë.
The mirrors I make are disruptive openings leading to alternative understandings of potential and possibility contained within the world and ourselves.
Is looking into these openings
an action precipitating a reaction
to what I see and does not see?
Reaction is a natural occurrence in the relationship between You and I, therefore looking into the mirrors I make it is natural that the action of looking precipitates a reactive seeing similar to the ‘reactive attitude’ posited by the philosopher Peter Strawson and brought by Schier into his discussion of Wollheim. This ‘reactive attitude’ is an openness to the acknowledgement of the other for who or what it is and respond to its identity. An unwillingness to respond to the identity of an other is a rejection of its identity, that which makes it itself. The willingness is our natural desire for intimacy.
Looking in the mirror is an intimate act.
The bond of intimacy formed looking in the mirror is necessary for the disruption to occur.
Sometimes it scares Me to look in a mirror!
Looking in the mirror is a scary act.
All acts of intimacy are scary and take courage to perform. If I am unwilling to look into the mirror the work of art cannot perform its work. I cannot see either what is there or what could be there.
If the work of art is
a conduit in the relationship
between You and I,
isn’t it just a portrait?
Or a self portrait?
Would I claim that there is
little distinction between the two?
Yes, I would. I do not disregard the truth of self portraitures historical status as a sub-genre,a lesser category of portraiture performed only when the artist lacked a model as being a truth, but it is only one truth among many.
Here you go again with truth!
How can there be more than one truth?
In a multi-faceted world
how can there be
anything other
than a multitude of truths?
I listen to the smugness of My Self!
I think we need to move away from this topic before Me and My Self
In that case why don’t we just end it all now,
call every work of art a self portrait,
because somewhere deep within all works
the artist is present!
I don’t believe that every work of art is a self portrait. I believe for a work of art to fulfill its purpose, the artist, I, must find his or her presence and that of the spectator, You, somewhere deep within the work too.
I is seeking to avoid imprecision?
I would say so, My Self.
Is this a bit clearer for Me?
Maybe.
However I should return to the question of multiple truths.
Let’s move on to the truth
I understands for Me and My Self.
AN INCONCLUSIVE INTERNAL CONCLUSION
First I would like to examine the notion that no truth can be truthful because the space in which what we deem to be truth occurs is a never ending, open and expansive space, encompassing both all possibilities and all potentialities, including contradictions and multiplicities of meaning forming the identity we seek to define, establishes a state of inconclusiveness.
This space must be the opening in the mirror.
Inconclusiveness.
Again I uses a word with the root ‘clus’, meaning ‘shut’.
However the doubled prefix ‘in’ and ‘con’ create a contradiction to that root.
Inconclusiveness is defined as a quality of being vague or poorly defined.
Defined as poorly defined!
Best to ignore Me.
I know My Self, there is a wicked humor in Me.
Inconclusiveness is the antonym of conclusiveness defined as a quality of being final or certain, such as the finality of death.
Death could shut one out of life.
Shhh.
I do not contradict the validity of these definitions for statements of certainty issued within a finite space. Statements made outside a clearly defined space, a space such as the one in which I address the relationship between truth and identity, the artwork as mirror, cannot be held to the language of certainty because in infinite spaces the only certainty is uncertainty.
Mirrors never lie.
What can reflect Me?
Mirrors always lie.
I must be a mirror.
This banter calls for a bit more formality.
The language of formal logic is quite complex and by no means do I intend to dismiss this complexity through my use of it as an example to support the argument for inconclusiveness I am making here. My intention is to present it as the philosophical springboard from which I leap in my explorations of the relationship between identity and truth within an infinite space in the art I make.
Logical to Me.
Go on.
The language of formal logic and reason as developed by mathematicians and philosophers as a means of illuminating the certainties and uncertainties we encounter can be beneficial to understanding the context of the space within which I am navigating. Statements of formal logic are proven as certain (valid) or uncertain (invalid) by examining the statement through the following two questions: are all premises true and is the argument’s structure valid?
Something to please Me: truth.
Looking at the following statements:
All animals that ruminate eat grass. Cows ruminate, therefore cows eat grass.
The structure and premises in both these statements is certain (valid) when in the structure of this sentence the word ruminate takes the position of a verb stemming from the definition of the noun ruminant, defined online in thefreedictionary.com as:
1. Any of various hoofed, even-toed, usually horned mammals of
the suborder Ruminantia, such as cattle, sheep,deer, antelopes,
and giraffes, characteristically having a stomach divided into
four compartments and chewing a cud that consists of plant food
that is regurgitated when partially digested.
If ruminate applied as a verb in these statements does not originate with that primary definition of the noun ruminant, instead it refers to the definition of the adjective ruminate, as a meditative or contemplative act, neither statement can be proven certain (valid) because both premises and structure fail to answer the questions to prove validity.
Why don’t I break down the first statement?
Okay.
All animals that ruminate eat grass.
All humans are animals.
True.
I am human, therefore I am an animal.
True.
All humans engage in meditative or contemplative acts.
Not Me!
In the case of Me
best to say
Uncertain.
There remains both the potential and the possibility for a human to exist (be alive) and not engage in meditative or contemplative acts.
Even Me?
Go on.
I engage in meditative or contemplative acts.
True.
I eat grass.
A great dinner for Me is steamed asparagus!
Uncertain.
As a human I generally have the freedom to chose what I eat and I might not know the scientific classification of what I chose to eat, whether or not a substance is classified as a grass, which asparagus is. I may or may not eat the same types of grass as cows, nor in the same manner. Therefore not all animals that ruminate (engage in a meditative or contemplative act) eat grass.
The statement within this context is invalid because not all premises originating from within the statement are true.
Now the second statement.
Cows ruminate, therefore cows eat grass.
Cows eat grass.
True.
Cows ruminate.
Uncertain.
In this context the structure of this argument defines ruminate as engagement in a meditative or contemplative act. It remains uncertain to us if all or any cows engage in this form of rumination. While the premise that cows ruminate per the definition of “chewing a cud that consists of plant food that is regurgitated when partially digested” is true; the structure of the argument in this context proves the statement invalid for lack of certainty.
Here I contend that a structural shift, such as in the definition of ruminate, or space as finite or infinite can lead to a statement like the Epimenides paradox, where the truth is the lie.
Mirrors always lie. I never lie. I am a mirror.
Cretan!
That’s the one.
The notion that identity exists not in a finite but in an infinite space precludes the ability to speak of it in a language of logic grounded in conclusiveness.
The inability to speak of something inherently open
using language that is inherently closed
does seem logical; even to Me.
We might speak of death as a finite state, defining conclusiveness positively and inconclusiveness negatively, a wishy-washy infinite state of limbo, yet it is inconclusiveness which more clearly expresses the space in which truth and identity relate.
In the infinite mirror.
The truth is we do not exist in a finite space, therefore we should not seek to define our identity by conclusive language.
Ludwig Wittgenstein writes in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:
6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the
world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In
it there is no value --and if there were, it would be of no
value.
If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.
What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.
It must lie outside the world.
Beyond the conclusive boundaries of truth and identity
we know lies the inconclusive realm
which do not.
Again, Wittgenstein:
6.4311 Death is not an event of life. Death is not
lived through.
If by eternity is understood not endless
temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives
eternally who lives in the present.
Our life is endless in the way that our visual
field is without limit.
And:
6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who
understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has
climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the
world rightly.
7 Whereof one cannot speak, therefore one must be
silent.
The language of inconclusiveness allows me to push aside the ladder and look deep into the infinite space in which truth and identity co-mingle. Even if I cannot speak conclusively of all that is contained within that space I must not be silent, I can still speak of the endless potential and infinitely possible.
I reminded My Self of the words of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy:
Not everything that we know or feel can be verbalized by a language which uses logic
and reason as its main characteristics.
Silence is no option for Me.
Nor for My Self.
Have we finished then?