The 'Real' as a Process

Before this symposium, I hadn't really thought about realism or "the real" as something in ascendance in art, or even something that was a common topic. The panel two weeks ago didn't exactly change this, but it did identify for me what where a discussion of "the real" can be an important and relevant activity. This is because the identification of the real has important implications for how we define the human, and art's role in that process.

I'd like to offer a brief polemic about subjecthood - about how we understand the limits of our knowledge and experience.

I've always been agitated by the Enlightenment ideal of the Good, the True and the Beautiful - that belief that as art achieves verisimilitude with the perceived real, art approaches truth, and therefore beauty, and therefore moral goodness. It's in the name of truth and justice that I find this concept destructive and despicable. I blame it for as much injustice as I do bad art.

I want to explain why I feel this way today. We need to proliferate some newer models, so that we can move on to the pressing task of determining art's role in fixing what we broke in the Enlightenment.

In aesthetics, the real is often defined in opposition to the artist, the observing, creative subject.

The painter from observation stands by the representation in progress, looking away to the distant real.

Inside art institutions like this one, students and faculty alike point out to the "real world," and increasingly make work that desires to connect with it, instead of with ideas or works by other artists, which are perceived as insular.

Perception itself often poses the real against the observer. The real is "out there," available for our senses to grasp only in part.

This ever-present approach to reality treats subjectivity as an obstacle, a poor substitute for the kind of intimate knowledge of the real afforded to the eyes of heaven or big brother.

As a model, it pushes us into either the pursuit of unmediated experience of the real on one hand, or avoidance of dangerous encounters with the real on the other. As an artist, I can't see how either of these strategies would result in good art, or good ethics, or good anything. Yet we seem to be in a trap of vascillating between the two, wishing our mediums would go away and let us see the honest truth, or wrapping mediation around us to shield us from the ugly violent truth.

Think for a minute about that - first, who in this world seems to be convinced that they are accessing the direct, unmediated truth of things? Second, who in this world seems to be avoiding contact with anything that would bump them from outside their defined realm of being? Now I suspect that we're all thinking of the same person, or group of people. But my point is that these two strategies, of avoidance of the real and of unmediated access to a real, are often coincident. This is the choice we have inherited from a model that posits the real in opposition to our own being.

We desperately need another model, one which acknowledges the limits of individual experience without denigrating subjectivity.

Though art's not gonna save the world, there do seem to be some ways in which art makes the task of "re-defining the real" immediate and physical, something we understand more readily. Artmaking involves constant confrontation with that which is outside of us - artists sit there and pound on some THING that lies outside their control until it does what they want it to.

That boundary between the artist and the THING is coincident with the problematic boundary between our being and the so-called REAL that lies beyond.

I'd like to read a passage from a writer who I think sees this coincidence as a powerful place to start. She's writing about our relationship to THINGS, those physical chunks in the world that we can either scrape or that scrape us, but I think she's writing about much more, about how we might re-imagine subjectivity.

Her argument, as I understand it, is an application of Darwinism toward a Feminist epistemology. In Darwinism, the THINGS outside the limits of being, where artists might normally locate the REAL, are a source of life BECAUSE we as beings react to them, respond to them. Life isn't on one side, the inanimate on the other - life is what is produced in the push between the two sides, literally in the case of Darwin. As human beings, we shape and interact with that stuff and then it shapes us back. It's a push-pull process that makes being possible BECAUSE of limits, not despite those limits.

Quoting Grosz's essay Things (reprinted in her recent book Time Travels):

"The thing in itself is not, as Kant suggested, noumenal, that which lies behind appearances and which can never appear as such, that which we cannot know or perceive. Rather, if we follow Darwin, the thing is the real which we both find and make." The thing has a history: it is ot simply a passive inertia against which we measure our own activity. It has a 'life' of its own, characteristics of its own, which we must incorporate into our activities in order to be effective, rather than simply understanding, regulating and neutralizing it from the outside. We need to accomodate things more than they accomodate us. Life is the growing accomodation of matter, the adaptation of the needs of life to the exigencies of matter. It is matter, the thing, that produces life; sustains and provides life with its biological organization and orientation: and requires life to overcome itself, to evolve, to become more. We find the thing in the world as our resource for making things, and in the process we leave our trace on things, we fabricate things out of what we find. The thing is the resource, in other words, for both subjects and technology."

For Grosz, relying some on a mystic named Bergson, the real is not a thing or a place, it's a process, a flux. The real is always becoming, and aesthetics, or at least art, functions as both a literal and symbolic demonstration of that process.