Redundant Perception: An Artist's Enquiry
(2017)
author(s): Christopher Hollins
published in: Research Catalogue
Living things often display redundant and unused appendages of physical characteristics that once served to give them an advantage in the struggle for life. Examples would be the flightless wings of penguins and ostriches, and the vestige of a tail in we humans; which is made of three small loosely fused bones called the coccyx. This is known as the ‘tail-bone’ because it is considered the remains of the full tail that our ape-like ancestors once possessed. It is also probable that our brains generate the remaining impulses from an older redundant power of perception that once gave our distant ancestors an ‘animal’ awareness of objects and events. This experience of mind now lies buried behind our modern day thought processes, and for any artist aware of this the implications are that the way we create art through intelligent learned ideas hides an experience of deeper natural form. A state of mind therefore exists that once allowed us to conceive of the world in a natural way, but artists have always created intelligently structured artificial images rather than the spontaneous intuitive results need to glimpse the instinctive insight. Art has always worked to suppress rather than reveal an original way of sensing sight, shape, sound, and movement, and it is this realisation that I believe was the motivation for challenging the established principles of art upheld by the founding pioneers of modernism.
PRIMALISM UPDATED
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Christopher Hollins
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Primalism would be a way of looking at any object or event to remove the established ideas we use to recognise what we see. The aim of the Primalist Artist would be to reveal that art objects can be used to generate recall of what remains of an inherent 'animal' sensation that is suppressed in our minds by the learned ideas we use to categorize and classify what we see To achieve this view, art objects would have to be made to direct our responses to an inherent way of sensing that stems from our old powers of instinct. This is a directly opposed view to the educated definition of art – that looks to the production of works of higher learning. Primalist Art would hold no intellectual meaning or content, and it would have to be defined by an ability to disrupt our learned view of the world. Primalism is the result of a direct biological response from our minds to how we conceive of objects and events when deprived of all learned ideas, and the Primalist view is that our higher thought processes have evolved to stop a natural way of sensing in our day-to-day powers of observation.