Seeing Secrecy: Object Orientated Ontologies

My friend told me a story about going to Tiananmen Square with a group of students he was with. He had a banner that read out ‘Class of 2008! Beijing Study Trip’ in Chinese that he wanted the students to hold for a nice snapshot, a fond memory of their time together. He’d just taken his bag off his shoulder, hadn’t even pulled the rolled-up sign fully out of it, when a firm hand gripped his shoulder and a voice said ‘No you don’t. Move it along right away.’

Clearly, any notion of anything remotely resembling demonstration is off limits here. What I couldn’t work out during my visit there last month was how many people knew, how many didn’t know and how many would never know about the history of Tiananmen Square.

Exploring the notion of censorship with students is interesting – how much information is too much information? How much information is too much, for them, and for me, how much information about their own lives in China is too much to either know, or want to know, and what consequences does ‘having more information’ in a country like China actually have? It’s frankly bizarre to have very illuminating discussions with well-travelled, well-educated people, open to the world and its different ideas who then churn out some absurd party line on a current events topic. It’s like suddenly hitting a very big blank wall.

Concepts of secrecy and privacy as being both what is hidden, what is protected and also what is concealed, willingly or unwillingly, is winding its way into my art these days.

Living in an area of China not used to seeing many Westerners in the flesh (as opposed to seeing many Westerners everywhere in adverts, which would annoy me if I were Chinese) means getting used to being stared at. The open STARE of men definitely differs to the looks and glances of women though. It’s clear that men are not used to being STARED BACK at, but are obviously used to being the ones actively looking. Surely a peculiarly worthwhile experience to feel the Otherness from the gaze of those around you, when you are used to being the norm back home. I think of foreigners who come to remote parts of the UK, who may look and dress differently, and hope they don’t suffer similar interminable stares at the supermarket, on the bus, on a walk to the corner shop, sitting in a café, catching a quick meal on the way home from work. If you need a constant reminder that you are an alien, having people point, whisper and giggle at you on a daily basis will do that just fine… And what of those who will always feel Otherness wherever they go?

Does the gaze embody the real differences between myself and those around me, or is it just a reflection of the illusion that we are all different?

I see a connection between the openness of a stare and the closedness, the resulting disconnectedness, that I then feel between myself and others around me. The open gaze towards the Other, and the desire to have a part of that Otherness by taking a photo, soon becomes a wall of difference, which then becomes a desire to protect, to conceal, to hide my Otherness. It’s sometimes easy to feel a sense of my privacy and peace becoming gradually eroded over time.

 What talisman protects

from the evil eye?

The seeing ‘I’,

Witnessing;

A symbol of wisdom.

A closed eye is blind.

An unwillingness to see,

Incapacitated in seeing

the mechanism by which people

Connect / Accept

Disconnect / Don’t accept

Their Truth

 and

Your Reality

“Dig into your displacement and live there” 

says American artist Zoe Leonard, she who made the wonderful poem ‘I want a President’

 Seeing Double, edited photographs of a print in Chongqing Art Museum

56 Minorities Whitewashed, edited photograph of a print in Chongqing Art Museum

Coming across a collection of prints from the 20^th and 21^st Century in the Chongqing Art Gallery, I was both amazed and yet unsurprised that such painfully overt propaganda was clearly still in production. One print shows the 56 minority Chinese groups, laughing, playing, relaxing with one another with ease and joy, another shows a group of happy farmers overjoyed by a visitation from Chairman Mao... Steven Mulhall, in his essay ‘How complex is a lemon?’ in the London Review of Books (Vol. 40, No. 18) speaks of the philosophical quandaries around naming things as they are. In the fairly abstract realm of ontology, the complications around perceiving, relating and determining subjects and objects correlate well with discussions on truth, art and propaganda. He says:

“Nietzsche claims that truth is a mobile army of metaphors: 

because our representations of the world 

are the result of multiple mediation, 

assuming their veracity involves imputing an identity between 

a series of phenomena that are patently not identical. 

Hence they cannot but falsify 

the reality they purport to represent.”

Edited photographs of prints in Chongqing Art Museum

Such a collection of art on display in a National Museum, with hundreds of visitors trooping in and out photographing the works, perhaps talking to one another about the imagery and meaning in these prints, again makes me question how many people are really seeing these images. And yet in many great works of art I often feel that part of the work always remains hidden from us; some quiet, enigmatic part of the work is kept just out of our reach, an idea I explore further in the post ‘In Practicing Our Art, We Touch Our Greatest Fears.’ Mulhall continues:

“Heidegger always emphasised that something about the real Being of things necessarily withdraws from us.”

What distance between that which is kept from us and which adds mystery and beauty to our lives, and that which deliberately veils our eyes from seeing things as they really are.