I. – The Vessel
Travelling from Pisa to Florence I have noticed the expectation of a “Grand” City has been misplaced. This comes down to a more important observation than the expected size of the city, in both social importance and aesthetic appearance. Instead it boils down to the cultural output of a location and the external body of the viewer and how each intruded on the other to form an agency. Such a relation is based around the mediation of the spectator and his bodily interaction with, a much larger bodily form of, a location or area and how each either penetrate, juxtapose or parallel one another. In such a negotiation each body eventually informs the other to form a third.
To start, my intrusion into the rustic lives of rural Italy has in some way interrupted the union between the native and his land. The locals are put out by my arrival and for good reason I occupy their space without their language, tastes or appearance and because of that drive their habitual land into a reconfiguration. Suddenly the body and its traits become active in a process of revision, comparison and judgement. This process is fluid and therefore on going and only ever recedes when habitual monotony suffocates the activity (I.e. you are no longer a stranger and therefore become part of the configuration). But until this occurs both the culture perceived and the person entering it both have loaded boundaries that are unmistakably present but visually invisible. So the union of both foreigner and native is connected by the physical and it is visible; but the dynamic remains veiled.
In this case each traveller hopes to view the invisible through the visible. One way to observe this hope is through the collection of photographs a tourist may collect. Many implicitly involve a member of the travelling group, or even the traveller themselves, standing in front of an object of importance that is bound to the area travelling through. This is in some way is an obvious and fairly shallow example of attempts to bring forth the union between the two bodily forms. But one that holds the viewer with the apparatus of capturing and intern is the instigator or ignition of the formulation of that interaction.
Furthermore, you could highlight the production of souvenirs and their popularity as mementos as a further attempt to take on, or take in, the location they are interacting with. Memento defines itself as an object that is kept as a reminder or souvenir of a person or event. Both these examples operate on a physical transaction where no definite value is transmitted apart from at an economical level, but what they do present is an interesting ethological behaviour.
The Viewer, in his viewing attempts to connect with the location. The viewer does this by the mere fact they have to travel outward to arrive at this specific location. Such desire forces two separate actions to occur that lead on from one another. First, the validation of the arrival of the traveller to a location drives them to capture such an interaction. So the viewer themselves are the specific site of origin and with that are the ignition to activate the site into a negotiation. This ignition produces an expectation within the viewer. Such an expectation could be seen as the receptacle for agency. What needs to be understood is how such a space can be filled to produce a fierce and fruitful interaction where both become energised through their negotiations.
II. – The Agent
So far we have described the viewer being an ignition and therefore the central component to initiate, active correspondence between the spectacle and spectator. The viewer’s efforts physically to “view” intern formulate a receptacle that becomes the vessel between both the spectacle and spectator. This vessel is the third. This third space lends itself to the properties of an “agency”. It exists between two parties and therefore is versed in centralised negotiations. Furthermore, its dialectical ability frees it from the formal qualities within both the viewer and the viewed. This vessel distances itself from subjective anchoring; it is a form that is free of form, formless while remaining functional. It has a physical presence while abolishing the normalities of representation, leading to a vessel that continuously re-wires the physical negotiations of two bodily forms while instigating the transmission of a non-representative form.
So the ‘vessel’ is a form of non-representation that is the agent between two forms and therefore holds itself. Furthermore it holds no definitive structure or prerogative apart from the relation held by it. This creates a reflexive situation where the viewer through his instigation forms an interconnected third that is used to bridge the gap between his body and another’s. The viewer does this through his declaration of arriving; pronouncing he exists to his exterior. To announce ‘oneself’ is to form a new self. Through the new the viewer releases his bodily limits and operates beside himself linking the distance held between the two. This reflexivity becomes the agent to go beyond the physical limits of representation and opens a new dialogue above the physical dimensions.
III. – The Tool
So in a sense we have an agent that can connect two forms of representation through the un-represented and through this process reconfigure the substance of each. In some way this begins to describe the process of value production that occurs within our encounter with new forms. Furthermore, it may describe the process of crystallisation that occurs between the two forms until eventually it creates a solid structure and lineage where both become intertwined in their own manifestation.
Up to this point, an outline has been traced that forms a machine and its moving parts. Beginning with the viewer in his space and, passing him and his process, through an abstract manifestation we have highlighted the production of value. The more pressing question lies in; how to use such a production, in its parts or in its whole, within the visual arts to produce forms of value that go beyond the represented and begin to use such a system to refuse or deny satisfaction.
The success of utilising this process of value production is through focusing on the vessel as the site of transmission. Using the site the artist hopes to replicate this system and attempt to play a balancing act between the promise and the total denial of visual satisfaction. One does this by playing on the duality that is held within the visual. Both the physical and transmissible play it out within the process of value production where the physical is the basis of the encounter while the transmissible operates at a fluctuating rate. Such rigidness and malleability creates antagonisms that the producer can begin to play out.
