ART IS NOT EPISTEMOLOGY BY IAN HOUSTON SHADWELL
2011
Description
Essay for the exhibition catalogue of The Last Visible Dog. Grantpirrie, 2009 by Ian Houston Shadwell.
Fields
Writing, Visual Arts, Video Arts
  • 2009

    Catalogue Essay for The Last Visible Dog at Grantpirrie Gallery
  • Art is not epistemology.  Yet, just as epistemology contemplates what knowledge is, art acts as an antithetical complement to this project, not seeking philosophical certainty, but instead, a state of flux within which the mystery of the experience produces its meaning.  With apologies to Clausewitz, perhaps we could say that "art is a continuation of epistemology by other means". This is why, if you were to ask an artist what their work means, they would be as likely to deflect your question with comments such as, "what do you think it means?", or perhaps, more frustratingly, that, "it means nothing", or that, "it is simply an arrangement of pigments on a piece of wood".  It is not in the artist's interest to make claims for what a work means, since that would rob it of its greatest power, which is ineffability.  Or as Wittgenstein would have it, "Of that which one cannot speak, one should remain silent." Art will always be fascinated with the ineffable, the idea of "neither nor", the pivotal, the transitory and the transformative, in its engagement with knowledge.  
     
     
    Clare Milledge's practice is an ambitious entanglement with these amorphous understandings.  A heteroglossic clutter of competing positions concerned less with the certainties of a unified expression or the tension of opposition, but rather, the nuance that lies in the "between zones" of syntactical relationships.  This is a position from which she says she can conduct "research".  It is art as metaphysical experimentation.  A laboratory of the Will within which form is scrutinized and found wanting, leaving us with the ineffable, leading us, somehow, we hope, to the impossible.  
     
     
    Such a project is heroic, inevitably Romantic and consequently doomed.  The work is filled with defences  that have crumbled, masks made from the detritus of the past and primal energies that are invoked in a return to base motivations. If there is the tang of Nietzschean ambition, there is also, inevitably, the pessimism of Schopenhauer.  A valiant joke conducted in the shadows of desire.  The Platonic cave remodeled as defeated castle.  Here, the eye becomes infinite, a tunnel through which we fall, a gaze transformed into the void, a black hole, a pit.  From scene to scene, the body/form is passed over as unimportant.  Instead it is the caesura that is anticipated, the gap between meanings.   Structure is rendered in the retreat from the possibility of identification.  Form is found by recoiling from form.  
     
    Though intellectual games abound, there is the strong, heady scent of nostalgia, of loss.  Art's end game makes life dangerous for those who wish to swim in its torrid water. Who wouldn't strike out for the shore if they thought it was close enough? Yet Clare's instincts are sound and her technique undoubted.  Such ablutions are necessary for the tempering of steel.  The trick is to keep moving.
     
    Clare's work is vigorous, explorative and ambitious, as it should be. She brings the viewer into a world that is mediated by a sophisticated understanding of contemporary theory as well as a background in the tradition of fine arts.  Challenging and absorbing it warrants your closest attention.