C96 Article

The Event Space

Grace Weir, along with Siobhán Hapaska, is representing Ireland at the Venice Biennale this year. Here Gemma Tipton reflects on Weir's fascination with time and space.

What You See

In forgetting (the vanishing point), a sequence of film shows a white cloud slowly dissolving to nothing but blue. In The Clearing, the eye of the camera travels on a perfectly circular journey through the air, down and below the horizon line into the sea and on beneath the watery green - then it breaks up into the sky once more. We think the world is made of straight lines because we are trained to think in straight lines, not in curves and arcs. But rules of perspective and notions of the vanishing point don't explain these sensations of movement and distance, of elements meeting and parting. In the turn of the camera through water and sky there is only one straight line: the horizon, which disappears as it is passed through, leaving only a vision of space. Our scientific senses of narrative time and physical distance are not equipped to map the viewer's experience of the unfolding of these events, or to describe what we are seeing on screen. And it is in the realisation that what we are seeing is not explainable by the rules, that there is an elating escape, a flash of realisation (as Hamlet had it) that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy...¹

 

Grace Weir: forgetting (the vanishing point), 2000, stills from digital video;courtesy the artist	Grace Weir: Clearing, 1999, stills from digital video; courtesy the artist

 

Grace Weir:working drawing forThe Clearing

 

Events unfold, occupying space and time until they seem to achieve a kind of completion, then they move on. A cloud exists, progresses through subtle movements and dissolutions until there remains only blue sky. Its event is concluded although more clouds even then begin invisibly to form. As viewers, we are as conditioned by linear narrative experiences of time as we are by fifteenth century delineations of perspective. Grace Weir's work is involved with seeking alternative ways to chart and experience events, exploring the realities of time and space bent on escaping the enclosures of ill-fitting rules.

 

Grace Weir: Distance AB, 2000, still from digital video; courtesy the artist

Explorations that have taken the artist through the work of Brunelleschi, Euclid and Einstein, to the writings of Henry Miller, Deleuze and Guattari, probe at the movements of natural reality, questioning the authenticity of accepted ways of seeing. They offer openings to a world where all is movement, all flux, all on the point of becoming, within which the viewer is at liberty to recreate a perspective, to discover an alternative event space. Weir is an artist investigating significant philosophical ideas and engaged in finding a way of expressing them visually rather than through the written word.

Whether through painting, the printed page, or on film, the medium engaged with the delivery of an event applies its own rules to the shaping of the viewer's experience of that event. But how does it work, how do these rules hold reality in their check? Or to put it another way, why is an hour an hour? Why do words mean what they do? These are not trick questions but still more thoughts to bear in mind when exploring our understanding of events, the mediation of experience and some of the ideas surrounding Grace Weir.

 

About Time

An hour is a handy segment to the day, once around your watch multiplied by twenty four and then it's tomorrow. But think how this portion of time, which we take so much for granted, maps the progress of our lives, how our body clocks have been set to the march of an arbitrary span. One hour for lunch, eight hours sleep, an hour for lectures, an hour for meetings. It is as if we have swallowed our clocks and they tick away inside us.

So what a perverse anarchic relief is to be found in rush hour as it ignores the rules and extravagantly sprawls across the false boundary of sixty minutes, to eat into the time from four o'clock till beyond seven. And how consoling to realise that even now we are still wrong in our calculations. Leap years are the reminders that hours don't quite work as we planned, and little by little, time slips beyond our understanding's grip.

 

And Words

"Words themselves are doors," says Seamus Heaney.² But words as tools for expression have been limited by dictionaries, the rules of practical exactitude closing down the potential of their meanings, excluding the extra and leaving only the specific, the rational. Even before that, St Paul was expressing an idea of the limitations of language. "Not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life."³ Naming and explaining are issues which have concerned artists and writers throughout history. Speaking of a writer's processes, Heaney warns "to name them too definitively may have the effect of confining them to what is named." The more we understand, the less we are able to know. Ascribing meaning to something, giving it an explanation, closes off the multiplicity of possibilities of what that something could be, could mean if it were looked at in a different light. Again, Heaney puts it succinctly, "what we are engaged upon here is a way of seeing that turns the lightning into 'the visible discharge of electricity between cloud and cloud or between cloud and ground' rather than its own puzzling brilliant self."⁴ The point is that somewhere in that puzzling brilliance may lie additional scientific truths, further elements of understanding which are presently being missed.

Shrödinger too had something to say about this. About the infinite potential of possibility which is lost when we observe and describe. Shrödinger's cat was in a box with poison. Until you looked into the box, the cat could be dead, alive, disappeared even. But once the box was opened there was only one possible truth, one single alternative.

 

Now Words and Pictures

But just as Shrödinger observed that observing something changes its state, so defining things alters our relationship to the world we are defining. The histories of science and art include the histories of discoveries designed to help us understand, codify, represent. But as ways to look at the world, these are misleading when they are used to exclude all alternatives. The invention of linear perspective in the fifteenth century was heralded as the discovery of the way to achieve a true two-dimensional representation of our three-dimensional world. Linear perspective places the viewer in a particular standpoint in relation to what is being viewed. It creates a way to see the world and excludes all other representations as false. But it is still only one standpoint, one subject position and even Brunelleschi, in his imaging of the baptistry in Florence, balked at trying to apply the principles of perspective to clouds.

And then there was the printing press. Printing opened up the world of literacy and books to the public, and with that began the death of the oral tradition. But books are closed narratives. Their stories imply a beginning, a middle and an end. Imagine a murder mystery novel, one inch thick: the suavely heroic detective solves the crime and apprehends his suspect but you have only read thirty pages. Feeling the weight of the unread paper in your fingers, you know that the detective is wrong. Not from the evidence of the text, but of the pages heavy in your hand. Things become predictable. But writing can still be exciting when it works through the gaps, art too. New perspectives can be applied, new ways to see pages, squares -

 

And Circles

There is an edge of irony to the fact that while explorers were at last proving beyond all doubt that the world was round, Mercator was busily mapping the globe onto the flat planes of the two dimensional map. But Mercator's cylindrical orthomorphic projections exaggerate the size and position of Europe, placing the exploring and colonising nations firmly at the centre of the newly understood world.

And there is a disappointment still in the exposition of each new scientific discovery. I feel as if each time another of the chinks that let in a little light of wonder has been snapped closed, something else has been hidden or lost. The first photographs from space showed finally and forever what everyone had known for hundreds of years. That the world we knew was the world we had, there were no more countries to discover, no reason to set off in a boat with biscuits for the body and wild notions of savages with eyes in their navels for the soul. Now even small children could no longer dream. Yet discovery is in our genes and so we explore further, under the seas, into space and into the genes themselves, mapping, defining.

Fortunately things are still escaping. How comfortingly exciting to remember in one of those trapped-by-time moments, crawling through rush hour traffic that makes your home, an hour from town, now two hours away, driving over the gently curving surface of the turning earth, that mathematicians and computers are ever busy in constant hum, trying to calculate to the end of Pi. The decimal figure that will map a circle, a sphere. They've been calculating for years, and still the numbers go on.

 

Subversive Structures

Better still is the thought that it is the inventions of exact science that have created the structures that now elude the exactitude of scientific understanding. Take the sprawling infinite internet which has no beginning middle or end. Take satellite technology that removes distance from our comprehension of time.

Weir explores these ideas through film. Cinematic narratives present an almost complete notion of reality through moving pictures and sound. Tarkovsky called it the printing on celluloid of the actuality of time. The specific nature of film (or video) as a medium allows for the mapping of one time onto another, experienced by the viewer as an authentic expression of the episode. Yet cinematic expressions of circumstances are still governed by how we perceive events should unfold. And that perception has been altered by the way they have historically been mediated to us. Weir re-explores reality through film. Instead of looking for the narrative in what occurs, it is the actuality of the medium which occupies her. The real-time experience of film, the event space is not driven by the constructs of story telling, but by a desire to show things as they are, as they appear. These are the things that the mind, trained by long-learned artistic and scientific rules of space, story and time has often forgotten to look at.

Digital video allows Grace Weir to show a stone falling upwards through water to the sky, or a simultaneous view from the inside and outside of a cloud, or again that perfect circular fall of a camera moving through air to horizon to sea and underwater, then up to the clouds once more.

So it is fortunate that the histories of art and science also include the histories of creative thinkers, artists like Weir trying to create space for us to understand around the edges of understanding, as the world still wriggles away. Capitalists talk of the failure of the internet because a few dot com companies collapse. Perhaps it is true that a certain vision of the internet has folded, but every little tendril and tentacle of information moving through cyberspace proves them wrong. Its failure is its success; it can't be controlled, can't be codified. Like time, like Pi, like trying to map a cloud, like trying to express the idea of a sphere on a page or screen, these are indefinable, infinite and very very exciting things. "Strictly speaking," said Erwin Panofsky, it is "an impossible task, for a sphere obviously cannot be unrolled upon a surface." Why not? asks The Clearing. Art and science creep around the edges of each other with something to muse on, something to think about, a way beyond words.

^1<Shakespeare, Hamlet, I:v:174-5, Arden Edition, London 1982

²Seamus Heaney, Feeling into Words, p. 52, Faber and Faber, London 1984

³St Paul, Letter to the Corinthians III, 6

⁴Seamus Heaney, op. cit., p. 52.

Gemma Tipton is a writer based in Dublin; her exhibition The Foot Series is at the Basement Gallery, Dundalk, in June.