From near to actual death
Will Schrimshaw article on No Such Thing As Gravity gives a interesting insight into The GHost Formula.
No Such Thing as Gravity (11/2/16–5/2/17, FACT Liverpool) is positioned within the cracks of uncertainty and doubt that may exist or be perceived to exist in the ever expanding scientific image of the world. The exhibition focuses in particular on the room for speculation that uncertainty leaves, taking the form of alternative theories, conspiracies and an ever shrinking space for spirituality. In this collection of works we find art engaging with science yet free from its instrumentalization as a means of communicating scientific knowledge or publicizing its research. Instead art is a site that registers the shocks of the real that scientific research occasionally unleashes upon wider culture, belief systems and the composition of what Wilfrid Sellars called the manifest image: the conceptual framework supporting our everyday perception and understanding of the world around us.
At the more grandiose end of its ambitions the exhibition sets out to explore the nature of scientific truth, yet the focus of the show is largely upon the absence of, uncertainty or resistance to such a truth. We find speculation upon the futures that science might open up, how truths unearthed by rogue science disruptive to global capitalism may have been covered up, but also on a resistance to the idea of scientific truth through a continued belief in the transcendence of the spirit. The exhibition posits that in zones of uncertainty science and fiction begin to overlap. The science-fiction that emerges from this overlapping is often less concerned with futurity and utopia than with a more pernicious fictionalizing of science that is carried out in order to preserve the transcendence of souls and the autonomy of the self.
The exhibition’s title suggests a tendency to render the imperceptible entities populating the scientific image (electrons, muons, quarks, etc.) as merely calculational devices that lack the concrete, full-blooded existence of everyday objects and events that have an intuitive consistency. In this image it is concrete, everyday experience that is the ultimate paradigm of reality, and positing of diverse quanta is framed as yet another creative yet circuitous detour in accounting for the reality of appearances in ever greater detail.
Free from the “awe inspiring” visualisations that sometimes mark sci-art, there is an occasional submission to the reductivism of linear determinism that sometimes accompanies scientism. While one of the strengths of the exhibition is the way in which concepts emerging from a range of scientific paradigms are shown to intersect and have impact within a range of cultural paradigms, Yin-Ju Chen’s Action at a Distance (2015) presents a model of linear determinism in the form of a causal chain between subatomic events and political upheaval. While fundamental physics may describe a plane of reality immanent to all that exists, this immanence need not entail homogeneity wherein cultural, political and social activities should be understood to reflect or respond simplistically to events at increasingly microscopic levels of the real.
Most striking about this exhibition is the way death runs through it. Sarah Sparkes ^(http://www.theghostportal.co.uk/mirror/goto/http://www.sarahsparkes.com/blog/)’ The GHost Formula (2016) documents efforts to capture and synthesise paranormal events, and so becomes oriented around questions regarding the afterlife. Through the perception of a slither of uncertainty in scientific conclusions regarding the existence of the soul some would seek to insert the question of an afterlife and the transcendence of spirit.
Gina Czarnecki’s Heirloom (2016) explores the possibility that synthetic biology presents for an eternal youth, a renewal of perished flesh and a second material life after a brief stop over in death. Interestingly it is the artist’s daughters that are the subjects for these procedures, individuals who are already carrying the artist’s perishable matter, tissues, DNA, etc. into new lives beyond her own.
Through the role of death in the work of both Sparkes and Pynor the exhibition begins to oscillate between poles of immanence and transcendence: on the one hand we have life as immanent within the material world, on the other life as that which originates and ultimately ends up elsewhere, on another plane. Where The Ghost Formula takes up the question of the supernatural it takes up the theme of the transcendence of the spirit. In this context to render science a fiction presents the hope of preserving the supernatural transcendence of the spirit. Sparkes’ work presents machines for documenting and stimulating supernatural events (no God helmet though), the former collection of devices assumes such events to be fact and the latter a fiction.
Where the question of transcendence is present in Sparkes’ work, it is an immanence that runs through the collection of works presented in Pynor’s The End is a Distant Memory (2016). Projected on the floor we see the choreography of a near death experience: a body is manipulated, spun, bent and twisted atop an operating table of sorts, mirroring the movements of a near death experience. Viewing these movements from above we find ourselves in the position of someone undergoing an out of body experience. Death is here presented as something that has already happened, which we might look back upon. Projected onto a wall is a bed sheet falling slowly back down to a mattress, a return to the living from the edge of death.
The adjacent room shows a “free range” chicken farm, the supermarket freezers the animals are destined for and a series of chicken carcasses positioned in human poses.
The dead body being manipulated in the room next door becomes equivalent to that of the chicken carcasses put in human poses. Both dead bodies are meat. This equivalence could be seen to degrade and devalue the human, but also to elevate the animal; both are meat, both are matter, death here is a leveller.
A wet, gloopy, visceral sound draws you into the corner of the room where a small projection displays the microscopic growth and movements of bacteria. An accompanying text reveals this bacteria to have been extracted from one of the chicken carcasses destined for the supermarket. The vitality of the bacteria is accentuated through the wet, sinewy and dynamic textures evoked by the sound. Here we see a depiction of life in death, which contrasts with the experience of death in life depicted in the adjacent room, this juxtaposition prompts a rethinking of their relationship, positing a reciprocal envelopment of life and death within a single material plane. Where the presence of life enclosed in dead matter might suggest a ghost in the machine, that the life here is bacterial brings it back down to earth.
The images of meat and flesh presents a single plane of immanence within which all bodies are located. Death is the leveller, the ultimate assertion of our immanence within nature and the unbinding of any image that would correlate our own existence with that of the world or seek out the transcendence of human souls.
Ultimately the No Such Thing as Gravity shows how accepting many of the truths of science entails accepting the truth of death, thereby partly explaining resistance to the same truths.
Will Schrimshaw, medium.com, 29th January 2017
Posted in Blog, Press