The Circumflex

In one of the last South Bank Show programmes on ITV,  David Hockney, in discussing his work, highlighted the importance of scrutiny in the creation of an art work.  He expressed the belief that human beings have an eye for scrutiny…they see it and relate to it.  This, he said, was why you can look at a Rembrandt self-portrait for hours but a photograph, typically, for no more than a few seconds.  That ‘enormous correlation of particulars’ noted by Pound in 1962 is there in every photograph…a skilled photographer (or photo-shopper) can manipulate the image – shift focus, change exposure, blur, burn or filter – but the camera does not choose what to see/say…it sees and says everything in its purview.

In our examination of the scrutiny of others we see their humanity – like us or not – likeable or not – this is what they see/say about the world.  We connect with the creator and, if we are lucky, we see something we hadn’t noticed, didn’t know and was worthy of our scrutiny.

Something emerges from this…that that which we cannot see must be passed over in silence…cannot, to build on Wittgenstein’s formula, be spoken of.  There is no point repainting a photograph taken from the Hubble telescope or an electron microscope…that seeing which can only be mediated through machines is not seen, it is processed, it is data…all we see is the machine – the feed.  Imagine stars and microbes…inform yourself of their ‘configuration’ – understand anatomy, astrophysics, crystallography, plate tectonics, hydrology – but this knowing only informs scrutiny.  You can’t see what you know any more than you can know what you see.

Our scrutiny expresses desire, compassion, disgust in its emphasis on the telling detail, in its distortion of a limb, the twisting of a tale, the detailing of an eye.

Truism or not, the core discipline of art is looking not making.  Making – craft – is absolutely essential to the realisation of art – to say what you see skilfully and authentically – true to the intent – but making is meaningless without looking.  Looking – not imagining – or if imagining, only in so far as that is looking beyond the conventionally apparent into some unnoticed relation or aspect – the stuff of dreams or kinaesthesia or paranoia. 

So then, isn’t ‘art’ experience focussed through a human lens – the phenomenon of scrutiny.  The analogy to the camera seems paradoxical.  Lens, focus, art creates a mechanistic grammar for a far more numinous process of acquisition, incorporation, transformation, temporisation, narrativisation and production.  What happens is not the instantaneous bending of light but the transmutation of experience – splat! onto the paper, into the throbbing air, onto the screen, into the clay or fabric, stone or steel.

Does it matter?  It is not matter it is code.  There is that old debate, isn’t there?  Truth and beauty – their correlation?  Can crafty cynicism produce a thing of beauty?  Isn’t there always a truth in there…sometimes an ugly truth which radiates?

In the pursuit of likeness then, we must invest scrutiny in the world and in the work – and the more knowingly  we scrutinise, the harder we work it, the more we transmute and essentialise the objects of our scrutiny, the greater will be the expressive value of the result.  It has to be raw, unmediated – no collaborations, no reproduction (that’s another matter entirely).  The thing itself is raw.  Raw scrutiny.  The image of one of Goya’s black paintings – Saturn eating his own children – comes to me now.  The image haunted my childhood – a colour plate in Classical Myth and Legend.  I was not terrified for the dismembered child but for Saturn…and of course it should have been for Franscisco Goya.  Raw scrutiny.  That which we ingest to shit gold.  Sorry.  No way around that statement. 

Odd – to find my way from David Hockney, who seems such a nice, well-scrubbed, sorted sort of a man, to Goya and Saturn.  But somehow the trajectory takes us through Rembrandt’s eyes…consider for example his self-portrait of c.1665…yes, I know it is a reproduction!  But look at his eyes and see what he saw.  Be told!