kiwa
Although meaning does not stem from nature, but from a certain level of cultural development, it transcends the grasp and identifications of the senses, falls back into pure existence, dissolves into the traceless and indistinguishable, behind the horizon of perception. If it is not possible to comprehend something without turning back to its manifestation, then how does the act of returning to the unmanifest look like?
There is a scale where life, time and being are identifiable and punctuated according to the rhythm of interruptions or new identifications. Does the scale that considers the absence of a permanent own-being overwrite the more common scale (in case a so-called common scale, a certain degree of fabrication, a strategic cultural code even exists)?
A scale that takes into account the absence of a permanent own-being is a more effective concept than the absence of such a scale. The fear of nonexistence, fear of silence, negative theology, impermanence as a value – predetermined perceptions, definitions, crypto codes, exhaustion of language and speech. Just like the painting’s auto-da-fé is an organic transition from *one* way of being/state – *to another*, a primordial mytho-text effervesces underneath and around us in the voids structuring space atoms.
Painting’s auto-da-fé does not mean a shift towards a phase/level/form/state/… of some kind of ontological afterlife, but a metamorphosis of sameness and re- (or rather a deep level) uniting with it: the fulfillment of freedom, wholeness, higher level awareness. At the same time, it is perceived as afterlife, as we cannot grasp nor colonize it. On one hand, it enters in an extra-objective, directly spatial, environmental, temporal relationship. On the other hand, by reversing the relationship between the viewer and the observed, the painting (and what becomes of it) evolves into the subject, an assembly of singular vibrations. It proves that the subject can exist without the object and all forms of substantiality dissolve within the process.
As a cognitonaut, I would like to have more inconceivable phenomena in my field of perception, where language has used itself to think outside of itself (whereas when the outside world as such changes, it recalculates itself and the meaning is formed outside intelligible sign relations). The language falls silent and offers a space for the manifestation of the truth of being. It is impossible to consider what will happen the day after tomorrow, on Thursday, next month or even a year from now at the same location. Meaning can also be formed outside intelligible sign relations, in the absence of a perceiving subject.
To activate perception and through it, simultaneously that which is slipping away from definitions, the meaningfulness of the return of matter to meaninglessness. At the same time, it includes alienation, distance, allowing for a more formal and thus more objective and more precise perspective, the illusion-breaking modality of the periphery of being, which seeks to nullify itself. Sequences, secret language, deep code, the skeleton of the universe to which everything else is attached. Returning to this source code is the poetry of reduction; giving up the fireworks of forms and colors, fantasy and originality, i.e. regarding them as the consequences, as the form of expression of the source code.
Auto-da-fé – the grandiose ceremony of public nullifying – is an idea of how we think of this act in the living present. It has an instrumental value as it is a means to an end. It is not a spectacle in a situationalist sense, it does not alienate us from life and being, on the contrary, it actualizes them. Inevitability and immediateness are not engraved in the tissues of the present, the painting’s auto-da-fé is not – the otherwise so popular theme nowadays – a literary dystopian scenario. It does not end up in depletion and the dominion of unknown forces, instead it transcends isolation, it enters into relationships, connections and intense presence.
It is not an end, but a beginning.
Although auto-da-fé, an act of religion, may sound dramatic – a self-sacrificial ritual, a voluntary disentanglement for the sake of the redemption of the species, i.e. of art (painting), giving life to others, while sacrificing one’s own, in order for them to contemplate in turn on their existence – I would rule out connections to purgatory, redemption, sacrifice, necrorealism, death wish, tyranny, genocide and apocalyptic fantasies which seem to be the soft spot of great cultures. The painting’s auto-da-fé as an event is not agitprop, it does not control meanings. The aim is to address actual processes and questions, because in addition to reversing the act of creation, the dematerialization of the work and the negation of the artist herself, on its background we inevitably find the semioblitz provoking desires and anxieties inherent to today’s information culture, the production of truth through deepfakes, the mass production of the culturally mediocre, iconoclasms, battles over monuments, the monolithic institutional power, etc. This list inevitably defines and structures the existent, although the center of importance of the work lies in the liminality between the existent and the non-existent.
Is it a conflict or a synthesis of logics? The purpose of suffering is redemption, but if we reverse the meaning, then the painting does not suffer, but instead it adventures, and in that case the redemption does not correspond to corvée, the twisting of a spiral around an elusive core (immanence), but the disentanglement of the act. This a magical pattern of thought only inherent to consciousness as the psyche and the material world work based on completely different codes.
Painting as a medium has become trivial, it has turned into a so-called convenience painting induced by inertia, whereas its visual ideology is based on its producer’s uncritical assumption that the colors added on the canvas mean/express something to the consumer, as well as the consumer's assumption that if the producer has created it, it must mean/express something. The producer has an endless choice of materials, yet the comfort zone is still hedged with canvas and paint, despite the fact that even for creating two-dimensional images there are a number of other possibilities in addition to the panel painting in continuity with Western art history. Immense overproduction amplified by market forces and narcissistic egos – and at the same time the constricting inability to relate to every artifact as to a living being, to enter in an exchange of time and energy with its sovereignty.
The monochrome painting itself is already a sign of the post-phase, liberation from the self-contained aesthetic image; the logical continuation of the process is to reject all kinds of materiality and step out of the mode of visibility. This does not mean the discontinuation of existence, the replacement of positivist neutrality and the experience of presence with millennial pessimism, simplicity-nostalgia or preservation-melancholy, but rather the activation of openness.
Yet, the imperative of Sirje Runge's painting’s auto-da-fé is love and that is something that is never «just like that». When allowed to function in the moment of its existence, it is eternal and real, like the separate reality of a dream or the total experience of music or life itself, the functional systems related to the nervous activities.
The artwork dissolves, but whether the love remains or not is up to us – it is a choice between restriction and greatness.