Jeff Perrott

1.

A useful area of research for random walks has been in decision-making theory.[i]  It seems random walks beautifully model the brain’s process of randomly gathering data from its environment prior to decision-making. The randomness of this ‘primal thinking’ process (gathering data with a trajectory similar to the way animals forage for food) tells perhaps why decisions often seem surprisingly ‘mistaken’ or ‘good’ or ‘bad.’  Reasonable decisions and possible outcomes, after all, are only as comprehensive or as accurate as the contingent available data plus the random gathering process.  Garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes.

So is conscious experience largely, or wholly, randomly determined?  At the very least, conscious thinking seems limited by random environmental pressures.  From this perspective, life seems wrought in a cauldron of determined contingency, from the vastly small chance of birth to the uncertain moment of death.  Can I in fact trace my life as a sequence of decisions forged out of that cauldron?  As the Talking Heads song Once in a Lifetime goes, ‘Well…how did I get here?’[ii]

When I add to the random movement of my perceptual apparatus within the immediate physical environment the available subconscious data – memories, wishes, fantasies, latent and present (all the things Freud noted as real in my experience but just out of view), and all presented to me seemingly from beyond my own choosing, as a force of nature, as another level of determinism – things begin to seem claustrophobically deterministic.

2.

Writing this, here, I scan the things available to me (Coco sitting at a nearby table drawing, asking me to look; a question in my mind of to have or not have coffee; the pressure I feel that I want to finish this and post it before my sitter comes at 12:30, etc.), including the set of things unavailable to immediate consciousness, and then I decide to put the next words down.  It’s astonishing to think about the vast number of shapes this moment could take, on the one hand, and the fact that it only takes one shape as it unfolds, on the other.  Everything could have been or could be different, and it seems as if there’s an infinite set of possibilities there.  Or, maybe not ‘infinite’ – because the contingencies are still determined by what is here and available to consciousness – consciously and unconsciously.  Some new agers and quantum entanglement theorists might claim that everything is available to consciousness, but for my belief in its availability; but this is not my experience.  In fact, I’m not sure what the word everything means in this context: isn’t my sense of possibility itself bounded by something, some real sense of what is possible? 

So why this moment, this thing happening, and not all the rest? There is, after all, the data I do pick up, and the decisions I do make.  Like the RW paintings, there are a vast number of possible outcomes at the start, and yet there is one outcome at the end, that carries with it a kind of inevitability.  But that inevitability is not inevitable — it’s a thought I have, related to my sense that everything happens for a willed, intentional reason, and that it has nothing to do with contingency, randomness, and loss. 

So the difference isn’t in the outcome itself, but in how I experience the outcome.  Is it something that seems to naturally fulfill the willed, reasoned, intended purpose of my work – as something meaningful -- or it is experienced as one possibility among many, that simply happens to be here.  That last thought seems to open up a gulf: my will and intention seem dissolved in a pool of vast possibility, so I experience a loss of self, value, significance, power.  The context for ‘meaning’ seems gone, or at least diluted. Without that direct line between intention and result, how can meaning function? And how do I respond to that? With contraction or expansion?  Fear or ecstasy? Hardening or softening? Anxiety or relaxation? With cynicism and separateness, or irony and solidarity?   Or do I simply ignore it and re-establish for myself the common sense status quo?

3. 

Perhaps the experience of this vastness and radical contingency doesn’t require choosing or advocating for one response or another, any more than the random process of consciousness decides for itself.  I say I advocate for the latter, in all the choices above (which looks like the ‘ignorance and re-establishment of the status quo’ option) I’m for irony, etc.  But my experience, in truth, is all of the above, in turns.  Because most of the time in fact I am not choosing or advocating for anything, but just being; and that being encounters fear, ecstasy, hardness, softness, anxiety, relaxation, cynicism, separateness, irony and solidarity — in spite of whatever I advocate.  Thwarted again by the contingencies working under the surface of my conscious intention. 

In truth most of the time – like now, in writing within the rules of language (kind of), even writing the content of this subject — I am not consciously considering contingency, randomness, and determinism at all.  Instead I have the sense of being moved along by the conscious, willed urgency of some goal (completing the blog entry), which is underwritten by a convicted sense of its meaning (the dissemination of these ideas gives my world a kind of context, solidity, and integration that feels personally nice and seems to connect me with others through a shared experience), which in turn seems to almost necessitate a kind of blocking of the contingent experience, a privileging of meaning, a kind of narrowing down of possibility, a focus.  So is my conscious consideration of these ideas another return to ignorance, again, or is that common sense knowingness inevitable?

4

Perhaps it’s my experience of vastness and contingency, the realization of my radical fragility, that itself keeps me moving in meaning: writing this down, in an attempt to grasp something, a kind of hunger for nourishment that never quite satisfies.  That seems odd, paradoxical, and even contradictory — but true.  For without the experience, there is nothing to blog about.  Or, it may be a personal thing, a morbid attraction.  But is it any different than any other attraction?

After all, does the consideration of these ideas mean anything?  And if it doesn’t, what’s the point, as in: what’s the point of life? Is anyone reading?  Does anyone care?  Does it matter? 

Well, no, not essentially.  Socrates may have said that the unexamined life is not worth living,[iii] but he never said it wasn’t possible to live that life.  Is it a worthless life?  That seems to bring up a new question, about value. 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

A little while back I sent some images of the random walk paintings to a friend, who is curator, buyer, artworld guy, etc. and he replied, something to the effect of ‘they are perfectly fine as paintings, but what has abstraction to say now?’  The implication is that abstraction has nothing to say in the present situation, and my response to him was a knee-jerk, “that’s right, Nothing.  Abstraction can discuss – no be – the nothing we’re all trying to avoid.”

But reflecting more on his remark, and my reaction, I thought that abstraction actually does say something important now.  Part of it may be an ability to show ‘nothingness,’ but I am not convinced that abstraction deals with nothingness per se any more effectively than representation.  

Let’s get this out of the way first – the polemics about abstraction v. representation are useless to me and I think useless to the discourse of art now. The RW paintings, as all abstractions, represent something – an experience, sensations are there which are something, something I want to name and talk about.  So I reject the ineffability stance in abstraction – that it is ‘unknowable’, beyond talk, or – worse – that talk limits it.  

What limits the experience of all paintings is the stance that one or a set of privileged interpretations is the undoubtable meaning of the work.  Lots of reviews, wall texts, essays, and gallery press releases are written from this stance (a stance I think is underwritten largely by the sense that the need to know, once and for all, what the work means, to feel redeemed and identified wholly with the work, is key to the intellectual, experiential, and monetary value of the work – but this is a subject for another post).  So I don’t fault artists who are restrained in interpreting their own work or take a more allowing stance to interpretations; and this is very different than claiming the work has no meaning and is beyond talk.   

In fact the experience of all painting, ‘abstract’ and ‘representational,’ and the desire to interpret, at its most basic level - thoughts, feelings, associations, intuitions, reactions, etc - seems clearly the same.  But there is still a recognizable difference, which my friend noted.  And I think his question is a good one.  To be clear, the difference, to me, is one of degree and not kind.   And to me abstraction is good at considering inner processes, from two points of view.  First, from the view of making or looking at painting, it can present the (as mentioned above) thoughts, feelings, associations, intuitions, reactions, etc., in their most basic form, the building blocks of interpretation.  And second, related, it can represent the inner processes of life, the stuff beyond view – which to me includes the stuff of consciousness.  

To coarsely oversimplify, abstraction can work the way representations of quantum mechanics or string theory, and the equations that support them, help me inhabit (and not just have an idea about) an understanding of the basic material stuff and processes in my everyday experience – the basic stuff beyond the apparent reality of my experience.  

So the random walk paintings model a certain type of consciousness – a basic response to the contingency, unpredictability, and uncertainty of the random conditions of the process. That response seems alternately comical, haunting, vulnerable, desperate, free, doubtful, giddy, ecstatic, sullen, heavy, light, etc.. – adding up, in my experience of them, ultimately to a sense of irony, optimism, and possibility as a response to the absurdity and pointlessness of the random process.  

I might say it presents these conditions and possibilities of response as part and parcel of a viewing experience, as the process of looking, following the line, considering the quality of the line, noting differences and similarities, etc.  And I might say it represents the inner process of consciousness both in general – as the random quality of basic experience, that gathers data as sensory input before that data in sense – and specifically, as the unique situation, set of outcomes and sense of each painting.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

‘Chance’ is what I use, usually, to describe the other act – the act out of control. 

The word seems to point to the forces at work when, say, I drop a one-meter string from a height of one meter, and allow it to twist as it pleases until – via gravity, wind, and aim – until it comes to rest at an absolute spot.  The word seems to point to the absence of power; but it gets this signification (power) by pointing back at the power it claims is absent: the power I embrace when, say, I effort to place a tiny daub of titanium white to faithfully depict a highlight on a crown on the head of a royal. 

I could drop the string a thousand times to get the shape I want; I could swipe at the canvas blindly and leave the daub/highlight exactly as it wants to be.

 
AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD. 2010. OIL ON PANEL. 32” X 44”. ON VIEW AT MORGAN LEHMAN GALLERY, NEW YORK.

Intention?  Intention seems to have the power too: the power of inevitability, of simultaneously being willed from ‘me’ and being sourced in the unconditioned.  It’s nice to be in control.  But where does it originate—the thought, intention, idea to drop a string or paint a daub?

So I have an idea to write.  It takes shape, form, in my head; words start to enter, and I am now typing, watching words manifest.  How did they get here? 

It seems to come from me, I am the source. I matched a word with a thought, and the thought came from a kind of synthesis of other thoughts or fragments of thoughts.  But is that it?  Where did the initial thought come from?  Generated spontaneously within me?  From what raw material?  Raw material from where? Outside me? 

From the conditioned, environmental pressures stretching back ad infinitum: arbitrary signifiers, language, history, the consequences of powerful choices and dominations over centuries; natural selection driven by genetic mechanics, honed by competition for scarce resources?

Or from nowhere in particular, some kind of deeper raw-thought material, some vast vat of potential, to-be-formed stuff?

What’s the difference?  For who can account for all of the factors? Who can count the forces of gravity, wind, and aim at any moment, given evolutionary vastness.

Words are as conditioned and arbitrary, as formed by evolutionary pressures, as mechanically selected, as anything ‘natural’ – why should it be different here and now, with this idea?  What is it that makes me think this is special?  Why do certain words stand out at this moment, stand out enough to get typed here?  There are other, better words perhaps – according to what?  Should I double back and make it ‘right’, or hesitate, or let if flow.  What is flow? 

Is one more ‘natural’ than the other? 

No.  All is nature.  What else can anything be derived from?  The shapes of dust swirling on the surface of Saturn are the same as the random walking sugar crystals in my coffee.  No hole opens up in my consciousness, opening onto a truly ‘other’ experience; the Law of Conservation seems to hold in consciousness. 

So what?  Now I spin a spinner, now I make a mark, now I spin a spinner, now I make a mark, just moving stuff around – now a glop from a tube, now what we call a ‘mark.’  Things move in the direction aimed for or they don’t.  Every one is conditioned by chance, the unfolding of evolutionary creativity in all directions, in all dimensions, simultaneously.

This is what we call ‘chance.’  Chance is useful, in that it challenges control, our sense that we are what we do, and that we do what we want.  But chance is more determined than chance would suggest, and intention is more beyond control than intention suggests.  At best, degree not kind. 

It’s true that I want, and direct energy to an end, but where does the energy emerge, where does the end and wanting come from?  I can’t locate the origin or cause: I don’t know what there was before the bang.  Did my parents decide which sperm?  Did they choose their parents?  How far back do we need to go?  It took me winning a 50 billion chance lottery, 50 billion times in a row, just to get here.

I telescope into oblivion.  Still, here I am.  I am spinning a spinner, making a mark, choosing this and that; and I am an amoeba in the mud, crystal friction along a clay riverbed.  Beautiful, and nothing.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »