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Catalogue essay published on the occasion of - Benign neglect 2007. Bernhard Knaus Fine Art, Germany
Text by: Richard Clements
Absence, Entropy, and the Self.To see a landscape as it is when I am not there. . . .
When I am in any place, I disturb the silence of heaven and earth by my breathing and the beating of my heart.
Simone Weil [1]The work of Adam Thompson is entrenched in melancholia: the realization of the futility of human endeavour. The melancholic disposition is the perceiving or creating subject’s conscious realization of the fracture between materia and eidos/form [2] ; physically objective reality pitted against subjective abstract thought, and the fallibility of attempted negotiations for reconciliation (materially instantiated or conceptual/philosophical). For Thompson, this cleavage is at it most potent and most evident in the relationship between man and landscape (natural environment). The sense of dislocation or misplacement is philosophically existentialist, and ultimately leads to a dissolution of the self, not in an ascetic or mystical manner, but through a conscious skepticism of the potential of objective truth in the construction of the self, and the reliability of perceptual ability. This destabilization of self becomes symbolically mirrored in the entropic cycle or breakdown of the natural world; in Thompson’s work, nature becomes mournfully reciprocal and utterly devastated.
Contemporary thought tends towards fragmentation; we are hyper self-reflexive of how we subjectively construct ideas. Our created objects, our physically manifested ideological constructs, are now viewed as mere detritus strewn across the atomized landscape, flotsam floating between shores merging over deep time. In Thompson’s work Untitled (Globe) [2006] we see an object that illustrates the limitations of cartographical objects and their inability to represent the complexities of the world; the created idea and object are now embodied as debris. But one does not see the destroyed globe as merely a failed or corrupted human creation; it symbolically mirrors a world unable to keep pace with our desperate production.
The concept arouses feelings of mourning and bleakness due to mankind’s unavoidable progressivism; to create we must destroy, and the effects are irreversible. Giles Tiberghie states “ For the Greeks, it was necessary to ‘follow nature’, since nature holds absolute privilege, in the moral as well as the physical sense. It is the same for art, whose sole justification is to imitate nature: not for its products – a crude version of mimesis as copy – but rather its production. Imitating nature is not reproducing its exterior, rather it is remaining a part of it to realize it completely. To use Pierre Aubenques’s expression, art is an ‘active tautology’ of nature.[3]” However, the act of creation, whether artistic or cultural, cannot be separated from the created thing; while the act of replication may suggest an involvement or union with an evolving world, the created object itself is a perversity; this is particularly the case in an age where the sheer volume of the material we appropriate can harm the very object (the natural world) it attempts to inhabit through emulation. Such concepts are expressed in Thompson’s work 29/10/04 [2007], where the ‘reality’ of the wall is forced into a dialogue with a photograph. The creation of the photograph is dependent on the natural world, and is juxtaposed against the physical presence of the crumbling wall. We have no confidence in the present existence of the photograph’s subject; it only exists through record; much like the internal eye’s ability to accurately recollect or replicate original experiences. The potential harmony of the photograph is undermined by the physical presence of the decayed wall; the wall’s suggestion of creation as destruction throws into question any faith we may have in the integrity or benefits of human production.
Through a nihilistic materialist reading, the perceived inconsequentiality of our individual existence in the chronology of the universe reduces everything (mental/physical) to its microcosmic parts: to dust. When we attempt to personify this continuing entropic force we view it as an amoral juggernaut, but its true ominous presence is revealed in its inability to be humanized, its lack of central consciousness, the absence of presence.
It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness
Jacob Boehme [4]What is this void? How can nullity hold such emotive force over us? For French Philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, this void was evidence of the existence of the divine. God, for her, because of His all-encompassing presence, needed to retract himself in order for exterior life to exist. The void, therefore, is symbolic of divinity, and the process of eradication of separateness provides cosmological alignment, and differentiation between Nature, God and the self is destroyed. We find everything in nothing, and, although its presence is no comfort, it displays a profound spiritual absoluteness. But void only occurs through complete annihilation; the debris of a mere shattering or scattering can be gathered up, and the reconstituted whole is a nauseating prospect, an object without essence; as Rudolf Steiner writes:
First you kill the whole world by differentiating it; then you fit its differentials together again in integrals, but you no longer have a world, only a copy, an illusion. . . this does not bring them back to life; they remain no more than dead replicas ” [5]
Void is nothingness, and its indivisibility aligns it with monism. Debris is the true opposite of void; it is a conglomeration of irreconcilable parts that suggests infinite difference. Thompson’s work explores both poles: nihilistic despair as well as the potential for grace through blackness. Is there potential for transcendence in God’s benign neglect?
If void, can be seen as the ultimate assimilator because of it’s infinite inclusion, then perhaps we can think of entropic breakdown in similar terms. Is there a possibility for unity in the concluding atomization of entropy? Does a deep time awareness of nature’s infinite mutability and flux create a sense of singularity or oneness? If everything is reduced to ash and unified in darkness, how can our consciousness distinguish differences? Perhaps this can be viewed as the reconciliation of the micro and macrocosmic and of materia, form and eidos.
“the continuous is what is infinitely divisible. . .” Aristotle [6]
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1. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. p. 37
2. Latin Terms: Materia relates to physical material, Forma to Being, and Eidos to pure thought.
3. Tiberghie, Giles. Qtd. in Tomato. Process; a Tomato Project. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1996.
4. Boehme, Jacob. Qtd. in Cormac Mccarthy. Blood Meridian. (fronticepiece). New York: Vintage International, 1992.
5. Steiner, Rudolf. The Origins of Natural Science. London: Anthroposophic Press, 1985. p. 55
6. Aristotle. Qtd. in Tomato. Process; a Tomato Project. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1996.
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Richard Clements is an Artist currently working in London - www.richard-clements.com