There is no documentation
09/05/15
Ian Wilson
The Pure Awareness of the Absolute / A Discussion
6 pm (by reservation only)
There is no documentation because the
artist Ian Wilson requests that there be none. We are sitting in a
circular configuration in the Jan Mot Gallery, gathering, talking
quietly and waiting. Ian Wilson, dressed in traditional gentleman's
casual clothing, soft off-white shirt, cords, tweed-like jacket and
brown shoes comes in slowly and sits with us. He asks us to get
closer together and we all shuffle up. I find myself sitting opposite
at the inner front line, up close, almost uncomfortably close in eye
contact. He has a strong head and the gentle stoop that age is
bringing along. There is a radiant thoughtfulness and reflection in
his manner but I also imagine he could become quite stern, get a
little fed up with fools, which is all of us from time to time.
This is what the New York based Dia Art
Foundation says about the piece,
He opens up the discussion with a brief
introduction, a starting point, and we slowly engage in the
discussion, some more than others, verbally, although to be sure,
everyone is engaged and the atmosphere is acutely concentrated,
perhaps too much so, that we are focusing and feeling initially
unsure about becoming expansive or lateral. There is an implied
direction as the artist continues to review each stage and then to
add a continuity, but the group does branch out to sensation, feeling
and to philosophical and experiential tones. There is empathic
agreement and cogent disagreement.
The moment of absoluteness that we may
feel when confronted by a work of art, he indicates, is likely to
be in an art gallery, even though for sensation, we chart some of the territories of
Nature. When was this moment bringing us to that recognised state,
almost a disembodiment or when time stops? In general, it seems, this is not
supposed to happen too frequently. Wilson reluctantly describes a
moment for himself. A black Ad Reinhardt painting that makes me think
of the early, small, Malevich works of the suprematist black square,
recently at Tate Modern. He adds that this example doesn't mean
anything exactly but I thought how much it did. The Reinhardt could
have contained an abstracted zen like presence, simultaneously empty and
full, and I imagined a specific cultural context and historic moment
for Wilson to have had this pure awareness of the absolute, at
such a time with such a work.
So we all stayed with the process and
the discussion for about an hour, where to speak was not exactly
comfortable and there seemed much essential difficulty to go too far
into a moment of this absolute. Why? I can speculate because the
absolute has maybe recently been tainted and transcended anything reassuring when our daily
lives have also become exposed to such violence and demonic acts
around behaviours that trade with the sacred and profane. The triple
contagiousness of purity, awareness and the absolute could have lead
us into a spiritual and/or intellectual interstellar ride but in fact
we all remained somewhat grounded, a little shy of the mark, even if
most of us seemed to acknowledge an essential truth in the
statement.
I wasn't sure if he wanted to convince
us or just let us loose into the arena. We did manage to engage and
to follow, at times lost, but then found, and the artist was clearly
generous and working in deep recall and knowledge to bring us towards
his findings in this long passage of discussion. It was touching to
be understanding of his own limitations, his ability to hear the
softly spoken, asking people to speak up or move closer, his
forgetting and losing the moment. The sense of being unrehearsed,
when we say that there is no rehearsal for life.
Afterwards, if you were there, you may
have reflected as to whether every moment of our lives is actually
rooted in the title of the work.
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