- Who’s there? *

- Who’s there? *

monologues on painting, indexicality and perception.

A thinking process.

* Shakespeare, Hamlet 1601, Act 1.1.1

Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design

Masters Programme of Fine Art Eva Spikbacka MFA Essay, Spring 2021

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Act I

The doubts and the uncertainty. Am I a painter? –About to no longer wait for the great mission.

How does one grasp a hold on the thoughts, how does one get a sight of oneself? How to find the way into work. How should I wake myself from this slumber, this uncertainty? Why do I swim in these sombre waters? Always I take refuge here. What am I avoiding, protecting, excusing here?

The white panel is looming in front of me. Empty and demanding. It flickers before my eyes. Outside is white. Snow light. I used to love white, go into it, disappear. Let myself dissolve and become nothing.

Now the emptiness thunders in my ears. A new kind of sound in my head. A pulsating humming yet monotonous tone. I thought for a long time that I heard the sound of the windmills over the silent woods of Ostrobothnia or the sound of the power plant at Alholmens Kraft propagate through under the ground. Sound pollutions. Or perhaps just the ambient great humming of the universe, of the planet rotating its way through the space. That my hearing had sharpened somehow and that I have started to hear sounds that only the birds and the animals hear. Tinnitus says the doctor, jaw tensions says the naprapathy. Restrained (emotional) expressions says the psychologist. They are all right in their respective fields of knowledge. Perhaps most the psychologist.

Not really wanting to, but knowing that you have to. The will to life – the will to non-life. And this doubtfulness to everything. To painting primarily. Have I misunderstood everything? Is there a voice?

I must not hesitate. The desert grows – woe to him who harbours deserts.¹

1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge University Press 2006) p. 248.

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Act II

The conscious feeling of the self.

In the book Felt Time: The Psyhology of How We Perceive Time, by Marc Wittmann, the author connects his reflections in chapter 6 to Thomas Metzingers analysis of the conscious self.

“But what then is the ego? After all, I experience myself as a thinking, feeling, and acting human being. I exist after all: there is something that is me. The conscious feeling of the self is fundamental, and draws on a sensation of physical presence as well as narrative elements – my personal history. In keeping with the view that it is more accurate to speak of subjectivity than the subject, one might employ the terminology of Thomas Metzinger, and say that the self is not a thing so much as a process. According to Metzinger, subjective experience – the self – arises from complex patterns of neural activation in the brain. That is, the ego is not a material entity; instead, it is the result of a number of processes. On this model, the brain creates a model of the ego. This is how I recognize myself.²

Presence, on a basic level, is temporally extended bodily awareness. On the phenomenal level, consciousness and furthermore self-consciousness is distinguished by spatial and temporal presence.

It is tied to corporeality and temporality. I experience myself as existing with a body over time.

Lambert Wiesing, German philosopher suggests something similar in The Philosophy of Perception:

Phenomenology and Image Theory as he is rethinking the current theories of perception and proposes a change of method of transcendental philosophizing. Instead of submitting to the Kantian tradition of asking about the conditions of the possibility of self-consciousness, Wiesing is reversing the question phenomenologically saying it is not the subject that constitutes the object of perception but rather it is perception that constitutes me thus making it possible to speak of a me in perception.

According to Wiesing, that perception condemns us to a physical and embodied existence,³ an existence as subjects that are present and self-identical through space and time.⁴

The reality of my perception lets me know that a Me, an ego, occurs in perception but it does so “not as a subject of substance, but as an ego-pole in a constellation.”

In a further reading of American Neuro scientist AD (Bud) Craigs concept ”global emotional moment ”, I learn of the Insular cortex, a rather small region of the cerebral cortex that is located in the lateral aspect of the forebrain, in the depths of the so called Sylvian fissure. The insula, also sometimes called “the hidden fifth lobe”, plays a very salient role in sensory processing in a large number of areas such as feelings, autonomous bodily perceptions and impulses, motoric control,

2 Marc Wittmann, Felt time: The Psychology of How We Perceive Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2016) p. 103.

3 Lambert Wiesing: The Philosophy of Perception: Phenomenology and Image Theory (Bloomsbury 2014) p. 106.

4 Wiesing 2014, p. 125.

cognitive functions and interpersonal experience. However, much of its involvement in these fields remains unknown.

AD Craig developed a hypothesis that the insula is the foundation stone of our overall consciousness, as being a global working memory, a processor that incessantly sifts out and calibrates what is currently most interesting from a myriad of constant unconscious impressions and processes. It interprets and integrates the most prominent and important information of each moment, and the key features of our environment. Wittman summarizes as follows:

“It is the “I” felt in this particular moment, both bodily and mental presence. This all-encompassing emotional moment is created through processes of the brain. It is tied to the processes located in the anterior insular cortex in the brain. On the phenomenal level, subjectivity emerges: I perceive myself as a feeling subject in the environment. At every temporal instant, I, as the subject of perception, am tied into a series of moments that have already passed and moments that are anticipated. Self- consciousness results inasmuch as I mirror myself in the past and project myself as an agent to the future. Self-consciousness first emerges through these temporal relations”.⁵

Eo ipso:

A global emotional moment is an image of ourselves at one point in time that includes all of the information that is important.

Then what is painting in the context of this? In her essay The value of painting: Notes on Unspecificity, Indexicality, and Highly Valuable Quasi-Persons, Isabelle Graw discusses and proposes a more medium-unspecific and expanded notion of painting. In chapter IV Painting and Indexicality she proposes that we conceive of painting not as a medium, but as a production of signs that is experienced as highly personalized. By focusing on a painting’s specific indexicality, we will be able to grasp one of its main characteristics: it is able to suggest a strong bond between the product and the (absent) person of its maker.⁶

As self consciousness appears to be an inexplicable event, this indicates that what could be said remains specific about a painting is that it stores and suggests the embodied history and the labour of the painter, of that specific experience of the world. But it is a quasi-presence, as if we are dealing with the ghost of a presence. Someone has left their brush-strokes.

What we encounter in painting is not so much the authentically revealed self of the painter, but rather signs that insinuate that this absent self is somewhat present in it. ⁷

5 Marc Wittmann, Felt time: The Psychology of How We Perceive Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2016) p. 107.

6 Isabelle Graw, Thinking through Painting Reflexivity and Agency beyond the Canvas (Sternberg Press, 2012) p. 50.

7 Graw 2012, p. 51.

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Act III

The relations between the holy, the sublime and the ugly. And notes to self on awkwardness, beauty and the bodily presence in painting.

In the middle of September, the storm given the name Aila raged the Gulf of Bothnia. In the hours before, class 3 warnings from the Emergency Response Centre Finland reaches my cellphone. The damage expected is extensive. From the small pier on my island, I observe the dark clouds rise.

Highwater is coming, reduces the shoreline in front of my cabin. The pier is soon going to ease from its pillars and float under water. Suddenly everything became so strangely quiet, as if a sanctum descended over the lake. A lone heron flew over the surface of the water and I felt a feeling best described as eldritch, coming over me. A slight nausea rising from the center of my throat, and at the same time – exaltation. In the hours before.

As I later in January order seven white, industrial prepared panels and start to paint “The Cloud Panels” this somehow abstract and ambivalent cloud-experience on the pier requires a reflection of what characterizes the subjective experience of the sacred, or the holy, and what is then sublimity and even ugliness in relation to it? All this while applying thin layers of linseed oil paint, building up representations of cloud masses.

The holy

When the German theologist and historian of religion Rudolf Otto wrote his magnum opus Das Heilige 1917, he defines the experience of the holy as a numinous feeling, after the Latin word numen which can be translated with divinity or divine power. In ancient Rome numen could be associated with a certain God's providence, but not always, and was sometimes seen as a higher power without connection to any specific god. This feeling that grasps us where we are facing what is holy, is according to Otto, a contradictive duality of fear and fascination, tremendum et fascinans as we are confronted with the intangibility of the holy.

When the American author Paul Auster much later reflects upon his father’s death in the memoir The Invention of Solitude, and in one episode in the book describes a scene from Carlo Collodi’s novel The Adventures of Pinocchio, where the wooden puppet Pinocchio tries to save his father and creator Mister Gepetto and suddenly finds himself inside the belly of the seamonster, Auster somehow approaches the essence of the holy. Swallowed in the enclosing darkness that stinks of decay and bodily fluids, we follow Pinocchio who falls into the grips of total despair, horror and trepidation. One can easily here draw parallels with the old Testament’s Jonah in the belly of the whale. Immersed in this darkness there are no guarantees of any resurrection or salvation. This is where we find Jesu’s last cry on the cross Eli, Eli Lama Sabachthani. The cry to the absent father when

hope and salvation all seems lost and the integument of the body collapses. But to return to Pinocchio, it is in this darkness that the essential act of creation in Collodis story takes place, explains Paul Auster. This is where the marionette finally manages to save his father and at that point, he begins his transformation into a real boy. And it is somewhere here, that the interaction between the loneliness, the fear, the holiness, and the creation can be glimpsed.

In this reference, the holy is not to be confused with the qualities of the spiritual and the experience of beauty, and must be separated from this. The ideas of beauty share those of the spiritual, as something divine and eternal. A transcendent universal completeness based on rational geometry that liberates us and fills us with positive feelings of meaningfulness, unity, acceptance and harmony.

Consonantia et claritas. In the face of beauty, we stand with calm confidence. The existentially challenging encounter with holiness on the other side, is the manifestation of the unpredictable Abrahamitic God who both creates and destroys, before whom man falls to the ground in fear and trembles.

Above all, the encounter with the holy must be described and distinguished as the encounter with the chthonian, with that which belongs to the earth. To the underworld and the maelstroms of what is secret and hidden. To the repressed and to that which Freud refers to as the uncanny. An encounter with that which draws us to the point in us where language collapses and the self meets with its own possible annihilation. To confront the chaos that intimidates to deconstruct the self. A convocation which both attracts and consumes. We can not know what will meet us there, if it is the God who devours his children as in Francisco Goya’s painting Saturn devouring his son from the Black paintings of 1819-1823, if it is insanity or a possible rebirth.

The sublime

Rudolf Otto separates the holy from the sublime experience even if these show conspicuous similarities and connections between themselves. Sublimity, after the Latin word sublimis refers to uplifted, high, elevated, of higher order. It refers to a transcendent and elevated quality in an experience which the mind can not compare and thus lies beyond the human world of conceptions.

Being the foremost ideal of art for so long, especially in the pictorial worlds of classicism and romanticism, the idea of sublimity has been investigated by many – amongst others - Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. Burke is generally considered to be the first to approach the sublime systematically, while Immanuel Kant is considered the most influential when it comes to how the concept has been implemented as something that can be connected to how human consciousness is constituted, rather than to qualities associated with that which is sublimated, be it the wild nature, the universe and its infinity, the fine arts, pure objects or that for the eye tremendous. With Burke, an absolute dividing line is drawn between the beautiful and the sublime. Of which, if the beautiful can be addressed to deal with quality, restrictions and form, then the sublime originates from a

phenomenon in which human measures cease to apply, and is connected to terms such as quantity, limitlessness and shapelessness.

Due to the comparative aspect of this reflection, I will return to Rudolf Otto as he writes; Between the numinous (the holy) and the sublime there is a hidden kinship that is more than just similarity.

Both Otto and Kant emphasize an ambivalence in the encounter with the sublime. Like the tremendum et fascinans as Otto describes in the encounter with the holy, Edmund Burke also emphasizes the attractive and at the same frightening aspects of the sublime as it strikes us with full force and overwhelms us in its unlimited greatness. He associates the experience of the sublime with amazement and fear, and connects the concept to the impulsion of self-preservation.

However, the sublime never awakes feelings of pure fear. It is instead a highly complex experience where the feeling of danger and threat is connected to an aesthetic context. The experience of fear is held back and can therefore give the viewer a feeling of delight. The sublime is something one looks at from a safe vantage point, enchanted but in certainty of ones own safety. It is something that scares us, but at a certain distance. It both attracts and marks distance. It is death that is absent.

What distinguishes the sublime experience from the holy experience, by reason of this, seems to be distance.

The ugly

A focus on beauty through most of the history of aesthetics can for the most part be blamed for the fact that works which methodically examine the ugly are relatively few. Here too can be mentioned Edward Burkes A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Immanuel Kants publications, as well as the German philosopher Karl Rosenkrantz, Aesthetics of Ugliness as examples of thinkers who have conducted more extensive research on the subject. A more contemporary compilation has been published by Umberto Eco with “On Ugliness” 2008.

To speak about the ugly, one must first become acquainted with what has traditionally been establishing the beautiful. It seems that it is with which the beautiful is defined that the ugly always calls to be compared to. The ugly becomes, so to speak, the negation of the beautiful, its absolute opposite and vice versa, and in this way the concept can be made somewhat visible. According to a

“a first preliminary definition, beauty must be identified as a kind of geometric rationality and harmonious expediency with specifically divine qualities”.⁸ A definition that leans heavily on the Greek Classical Antiquity beauty ideal in which the beauty of the universe is a harmonious order that can be expressed in pure, abstract and rationally arranged number ratios. Since the Classical Antiquity epoch, beauty has been considered to possess a privileged relationship with truth. And to

8 Tom Sanqvist, Det fula: från antikens skönhet till Paul McCarthy (Raster förlag, Stockholm, 1998) p. 16. (own translation)

that extent the representation of an ugly object becomes a denial of not just the beauty but also of

“that which is true”.

The beautiful object corresponds to its purpose, while the structure of the ugly object can be described as chaotic and disintegrated, and it conflicts with the need to find harmony and order in the world. “If the beautiful object is passive, resting in its own essence, the ugly object is active and even aggressive.” ⁹

In front of the ugly, the self is once again in danger. The ugliness forces itself on all true aesthetic experience. Obnoxious, disturbing and disgusting, it upsets and does not allow itself to be subordinated in the laboriously arranged equilibrium.

Embracing ugliness

Kant’s explanation of the sublime finally raises the question of; since both the sublime and the ugly is disordered and impossible to arrange for our cognitive ability and thus evokes a feeling of discomfort which in the sublime case ultimately still results in a positive aesthetic response and elevated exaltation, while in the case of the so-called ugly, the final result is a feeling of displeasure only. Who in nature has failed, what has gone wrong when ugliness reveals itself? Why does it offend us and what is it an insult to?

I would here like to propose that what Amy Sillman refers to as awkwardness in her essay Shit Happens - Notes on Awkwardness, finds its parallel or kinship in the concept of ugliness as described above. Sillman delineates the ambivalent state of embarrassment that so often occurs in the art making process, and I would like to suggest, especially in the process of painting.

“Awkwardness is that thing which is fleshy, funny, downward facing, uncontrollable; it is an emotional or even philosophical state of being, against the great and noble, and also against the cynical. It is both positive and negative, with its own dialect and dialectic”. ¹⁰

The experience of the beautiful may call us upwards, but ugliness as well as awkwardness grounds us in the uneasiness of here and now. Ugliness is not merely the absent privation of beauty – it has its own unsettling presence. Both ugliness and awkwardness have – so to say- their own agenda.

Awkwardness is the “moment of tension between the ideal and the real, where what is supposed to happen goes awry”.¹¹ It is the ambition that turns out to fall beyond expectation and it is looking at that which actually has been accomplished, that certainly have fallen beyond expectation. It is the

9 Sandqvist 1998, p. 63.

10 Amy Sillman, Shit Happens-Notes on Awkwardness (Frieze Magazine Nov. 2015) https://www.frieze.com/article/shit-happens (downloaded 2021.02.04)

11 Sillman 2015

painting that has to be turned facing the wall to dry, because one can not bear to look at it in its miserable being.

In the same way as ugliness introduces a kind of tension into our comfortable experience of the aesthetic, there is a kind of push and pull with our emotions and affections when awkwardness enters the working process of painting. Sillman declares that this state is precisely the state of mind for making a painting.

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Act IV

Painting as will and resistance.

At the construction site outside my studio at the university, a cadmium orange excavator works persistently in a pit. A single laser sight flickers among the earth fills. Men with yellow jackets and blueprints work towards a given purpose and realization, they move in a grid of accurate lines spread by the red laser eye.

I go inside, to the process of not knowing, to painting. After all, the only way to paint, - is to paint.

Ann Hamilton writes in Learning mind: Experience into Art “Not knowing is not ignorance. Not knowing is a permission and rigorous willingness to trust, leaving knowing in suspension, trusting in possibility without result, regarding as possible all manners of response”.¹²

The noise from that excavator is almost unbearable. I try to exercise tolerance towards myself, in various degrees of success. Painting is after all bodily, it is materia. It is submitted to the laws of physics as it is only possible to apply paint on panel with a certain speed, i.e., no faster than the pace of physics allows. Meanwhile I practice tolerance in looking at what is embarrassing, uncertain, non- addressed. Restlessly improvising, trusting in a kind of indefinite empirical intuition. Laborating with high glossy car paint and egg oil tempera, I work in the borderlands between the illusionary room and pure surface.

Long processes are based on fidelity to the idea. To persist despite the awareness of the possibility of failure. To persevere despite the anguish until a kind of determination emerges. It is about to submit and obey to that particular image or that particular idea. To bear the contradiction in on one side allowing the permission of having an aim versus the absolute requirement of at some point let go of the model, the aim. And thus, submit to painting.

Perhaps it is all about time, a certain amount of time in the constant murmuring stream of consciousness and the unconscious. A shape cut out of the amorphous. A recording of time spent in

12 Ann Hamilton Learning Mind; Experience into Art (University of California Press; First edition 2010) p. 68, 69.

uncertainty, not knowing what is going to present itself. I, the ego-pole that reflects on this, is unaware of the origin of my experience. But I can articulate certain and necessary expressions of what it is like to have this experience of the world. Perceiving involves participating. In the glitch between distance and sensibility an utterance, a pronouncement takes place.

Who or what is actually present in that moment?

Who is there?

Stand, and unfold yourself! ¹³

13 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1601 Act 1.1.2

List of literature:

Geimer,Peter. Birnbaum, Daniel. Graw Isabelle. Rottman André. Hirsch, Nikolaus (Eds.)

Thinking through Painting: Reflexivity and Agency beyond the Canvas, Institut fur Kunstktitikk Frankfurt am Main, Sternberg Press 2012ISBN 978-3-943365-10-8

Hamilton, Ann,Learning Mind; Experience into Art ,University of California Press; First edition January 18, 2010 ISBN:9780520260764

Sandqvist, Tom: Det fula: från antikens skönhet till Paul McCarthy, Stockholm: Raster Förlag 1998, ISBN: 9789187214851

Sillman, Amy, Shit happens Notes on Awkwardness, Frieze November 2015 available at https://www.frieze.com/article/shit-happens

Wiesing, Lambert, The Philosophy of Perception: Phenomenology and Image Theory, Bloomsbury, 2014,ISBN: 9781780937595

Wittmann, Marc, Felt time: The Psychology of How We Perceive Time, Cambridge MA: MIT Press 2016, ISBN: 9780262034029

Front page painting: Eva Spikbacka untitled , 2021, oil on wooden panel, Ø 62 cm