MATERIAL EXPECTATIONS PART 1. CREATING REALITY, RAISING EXPECTATIONS Why are material objects always deceiving?

Why manmade reality often feels disappointing? As proclaimed in the 19th century, Realism was about representing everyday reality as accurately as possible, yet this very definition already presents two major problems. First, representation is a mediation of mediations in which the artist, by means of his own perception, cognition and labour respectively perceives reality, interprets it and translates it into another reality, that of the work of art. And even when realism calls for revolution by intendedly suppressing interpretation, it still thrives on the artists perceptive capacities and labouring skills. Second, and here lies the main problem of Realism, enclosing reality is no easy task. When someone calls themselves a realist artist today, what do they have in mind for everyday reality? And, materialistically speaking, what does this everyday reality consist of? Thanks to the marvels of modernity, our everyday life takes places chiefly in artificial environments, only partly in natural ones. To residents of modern cities, nature awakes inside ourselves an uncontrolled, raw feeling of close connection with the material. The wilder, the better. Exotic travel agencies, urban forests, adventure sports, they all respond to the same existential need: the quest for (going back to) authenticity, for the essential, the primal connection with materiality. It feels right because it feels essential. And nature has plenty of this essence to offer, a powerfully irresistible add-on to it: next to experiencing its mere materiality, we suspect a certain essence in natural entities. The bad news is that we carry out the major part of our modern lives inside (increasingly) artificial environments, composed of objects whose essence we suspect lost. The god of objects fled after modernity. Quoting Jan Verwoert quoting Jacques Rancire1, after modernity objects are presented to us both as talkative and silent; showing only their bare materiality and only their historical indexicality, both alone and at the same time. Next to the materialistic impulse of perceiving (owning) them, we can read objects as if they were pieces of social text. But very disappointingly, this text is not about essence. It speaks about use, about value, it represents, symbolizes, creates social relationships. However, it is a received text that the object possesses, not its immanent essence. Although it is modernism which is to blame for it, and not the material itself, here lies the first disappointment of the material. Lets pretend we create our own modernism. In this modernism, I will overcome the dialectic between materiality

and indexicality by programmatically opting for only one of them: the brutal materiality of the object. Lets create expectations, the expectations that materiality raises: at the very beginning we have perception, a rather problematic word, I am afraid. We know that our perception is flawed, that it is not the only possible perception. But despite being short-sighted or color blind, despite the lowresolution, wide-angle compound eyes of flies, despite the dangers of illusion, our perception is everything we have to hold onto when relating to materiality. We have a pair of limited eyes connected to a brain which is by no means a perfect engine. As Henri Poincar suggested2, our brain works by intuition, not by logical steps like an artificial computer chipset. In other words, we have a set of machines incorporated in our own materiality that fails to reach the truth of the material. We may not be able to apprehend it, but still we can sense it, learn it, possess it with desire, imbue it with meaning, uplift it to myth. And still we are disappointed. Or most precisely, that is why we are disappointed: we project expectations onto the material that materiality cannot suffice. In this modernism that I am formulating, I assume that perception and cognition may be completely independent processes. The theory that claims that our perception provides us with a direct awareness of the external world, that is, a true cognizance of truth, is called Nave Realism. According to Wikipedia, these are its five principles: 1. There exists a world of material objects. 2. Statements about these objects can be known to be true through sense-experience. 3. These objects exist not only when they are being perceived but also when they are not perceived. The objects of perception are largely perception-independent. 4. These objects are also able to retain properties of the types we perceive them as having, even when they are not being perceived. Their properties are perceptionindependent. 5. By means of our senses, we perceive the world directly. In the main, our claims to have knowledge of it are justified." Thus, reaching the truth of the material by means of our senses seems feasible. And to the extent that our senses permit, who would argue that what we perceive does not exist, that it is not true? After all, our very conception of the truth may not be truer than this feeling in the tip of our fingers. But of course, we already know that there is more than we can see, or touch. I know that I know nothing3. (It may be sad, but it is a start). Nevertheless, still assuming perception and cognition are independent, why does our perception feel hinged? I am

short sighted and often do not wear my eyeglasses, which makes me see all material edges rather blurry. However, when looking at a sharp knife, before cognition, in a sort of synaesthesia, I get an uneasy feeling. Does my nervous system already remember that I once cut my finger, before the electrical impulse reaches my brain? We know that cognition is mediated by desire and meaning, but is not perception mediated by experience? Since I am incapable of excruciating myself to those depths, I must admit I do not have an answer to that question. Thus, I have to admit that I am only playing, but not totally diving into Nave Realism. And since pretending, I must admit that I cannot surrender not only desire, meaning, myth and all those elements that crook cognition, but also indexicality. For I cannot stop my brain from working, not only cognition happens automatically, but also interpretation starts too suddenly. Therefore when I decide to stop my relation to the material at perception, am I stripping reality off several layers, or am I just veiling these layers with yet another (translucent) one?

Transparent flag, an object meant to bear utter symbolization, reduced to pure materiality. Image from http://eeeedarun.tumblr.com

Materiality is always disappointing because our perception of it involves aspects that are not material. Likewise, materiality has the capacity of raising big expectations by itself. I am afraid that to overcome the creation of these expectation we must lie: the strategy consists of pretending we are removing when in fact we are adding, pretending we are exposing when once again we are veiling. The works of Nina Beier and Marie Lund are examples of this strategy. For instance, in Shelving for Unlocked Matter and Open Problems, Nina Beier has cut off to the same height several sculptures to support a set of shelves. These objects have been stripped of their meaning and symbolical power to become again pure matter. But this gesture has also conferred them a new (materialistic) value, repurposing them. Marie Lunds work Doubles and Halves also shows how Nave Realism veils reality. Hidden sculptures in plaster blocks, reversing the process of creating the material: a sculpture returns back to its original shape. Apart from the overwhelming answer it provides, Doubles and Halves also questions openly Nave Realism from the side of the creator: When creating the material (producing reality), are we using only the material as a source? In other words, when transforming matter, does the transformation take place solely within matter? We know this kind of transformation is not art otherwise I could now put some water in the freezer and claim that ice-cubes constitute a masterpiece! Therefore, I have to acknowledge that even Nave Realist Art needs some immaterial layer in which to function. This argument (which just by itself should suffice to invalidate it) will be used instead to define Nave Realist Art. We are not going to pretend we can delimitate the immaterial. Because the effects

of an artwork onto immateriality are unforeseeable and openended. Since pretending our work stays within the material, the Nave Realist Artwork will have to concentrate on the sheer transformation of it, avoiding undesirable immaterial side-effects of meaning or indexicality. Obliterating the generation of (further) undesired expectations. I have the intuition that a reality as self-contained as materiality is far from being self-immanent. Yet the objects, in all its muteness, will never fill my expectations. Nave Realism is a conscious game, and as such, will not amuse me. But the leap into the larger field of real Realism, of acknowledging the realness of immateriality, scares me. That is probably the vertigo of the real. But likewise, REALISM MAKES ME SAD AND LONELY. Everyone has similar existential worries about reality; these are memes that spread across generations, byproducts of affective transference. But if my existential angst is a cultural byproduct, if it does not come from within, why does it feel so real? Funny that while I feel time is accelerating, my senses become less accurate and the lack of novelty makes my experiences less interesting, my perception of reality seems to become more and more intense. So intense that to stay safely inside it without looking further, I have had to invent a game called Nave Realism. But I cannot pretend any longer that this game is reality. To go further, I will have to quit playing and accept Realism in its broader sense, embracing its immaterial consequences. NOTES: 1. In Jan Verwoerts essay Crooked modernisms Oh, crooked indeed! (included in Tell me what you want, what you really, really want, p. 218) he quotes repeatedly the first 32 pages of Jaques Rancires The Future of the Image, which as of today I have not read. 2. Anthony Hubermans For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isnt there remarks (p.15) this suggestion of Henri Poincar, who laid the foundation for chaos theory: The life of mathematics exists in intuition, not logic 3. Ibid. p.IV-V: *I KNOW THAT I KNOW NOTHING. Clearly, confusion has always been at the heart of wisdom. TO SUM UP: This text wants to reach immateriality by talking about materiality. Because pretending that only the material is real is not only stupid but impossible. To actualize realism we must consider what does 'everyday reality' consist of nowadays. After modernism we have, on one side, natural entities which we consider essential,

and on the other, man-made objects whose essence we find lost. These objects show at the same their materiality and historical indexicality, which is not their essence. What problems do we find when we focus only on their materiality? First, our perception is not absolute. But we can pretend it is, as in Naive Realism. Second and most important, we can only pretend to deny the immaterial aspects of reality, because they arise too quickly. Some works of art are good examples at pretending to deny immateriality, but only confirming its presence instead. Thus, the naive desire of not having to deal with immateriality only responds to cowardice. ---