Seers-in-Residence

Seers-in-Residence was an interactive research model for creative practices by Traci Kelly with: Emma Cocker, Dr Simon Cross, Ben Judd and Joanne Lee. Seers-in-Residence was an invitation issued by Traci Kelly to Nottingham Trent University researchers to spend time with the evolving monoprint installation, Feeling It For You (Perspective), which was exhibited in Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, January 2013. The project investigated the eclipses and slippages of a live art practice through a series of micro residencies.

The text, Seeing Shadows Requires a Certain Blindness to the Light, was written as my response to being involved in the project and has been published in Feeling it for You (Perspective)/Seers-in-Residence, (ed.) Traci Kelly, Bonington Gallery, 2013 >>

Seeing shadows requires certain blindness to the light

The opportunity to spend time working within the frame of another’s practice can create the conditions of temporary dislocation or even dépaysement — it is to be taken out of one’s element, out of one’s comfort zone. The invitation to enter into the practice of another might mean that something of one’s own practice must also be surrendered — suspended, abandoned or else given over. Approaching another’s practice through the prism of one’s own is a tentative and somewhat delicate operation. How much should the practice of another be absorbed, appropriated or grafted into one’s own? How much of one’s own practice should be foregrounded; how much should be withheld? Skilled collaborators are perhaps more practiced in this art, conceiving of the process less in terms of give and take, but rather as one of co-production, of producing together, of being produced reciprocally. Collaboration can be testing for it challenges the borders of the self, the sense of individual identity that we are often encouraged to protect, maintain intact. Through collaboration, the limits of an individual practice are rendered porous, vulnerable. The collaborator opens to the influence and affect of another; in turn, influencing and affecting she who opens back. Luce Irigaray writes that for ‘you’ to be a bridge for ‘me’, as ‘I’ for ‘you’, “A double passage must intervene in our exchanges”.[1]

Traci Kelly’s Seers-in-Residence project was not quite a collaborative proposition. I was invited to approach Kelly’s work — specifically her series of mono-prints, Feeling It For You (Perspective) — from the perspective of my own research practice, and in turn perhaps reconsider my practice from the perspective of this encounter  [2]. Operating under the working title Not Yet There my own research enquiry involves the exploration of models of (art) practice and subjectivity, which resist or refuse the pressure of a single or stable position by remaining willfully unresolved. Not Yet There is shaped by an interdisciplinary, hybridized approach, operating restlessly along the threshold of writing/art, where both language and subjectivity are considered as a working material — unstable; unfixed, malleable. Certainly, these interests chime with Kelly’s own engagement with ideas around inter-subjectivity and the porous body, signaling towards the potential for dialogue or collaboration around these shared set of concerns. Yet, unlike collaboration — which might involve the to and fro of dialogue and reciprocal exchange — the experience of being a Seer-in-Residence seemed willfully one-sided. Kelly was giving up her practice to the Seers’ scrutiny — for them to inhabit — whilst absenting herself from the scene, refusing to see back. Her body (of work) was effectively laid bare, whilst we were provided with various viewing devices and tools — goggles, glasses, loupes, lens — for peering nearer, seeing closer.

In conversations prior to the event itself, I had envisaged that the gallery would be a meeting point for coming together, where our practices and interests might collide. I thought that Kelly’s work might function as a foil or interlocutor, facilitating my own extant exploration of the relation between eclipses and ellipsis. Both ‘eclipse’ and ‘ellipsis’ indicate towards an obscuring, something hidden from view. Ékleipsis — an ancient Greek word referring to a state of abandonment or downfall, the ceasing of something to exist. Élleipsis — an omission. Falling short … the dot dot dot that marks the space of awkward silence or of momentary pausing, the removal of extraneous detail, the dissipation of unfinished thought. The words eclipse and ellipsis have a shared etymology in leíp — meaning ‘to leave’ or ‘to be absent’. Paralipomena — meaning things omitted, neglected or passed over, left behind. Leipoa — a species of bird with a habit of leaving its eggs once laid. There was something of leíp in the absent-presence of the artist. Prints like eggs laid and left on a table. Kelly’s image repeated over and over, she — elsewhere. Not here. Not seeing back. Eggs left unguarded. The Story of the Eye — eggs and eyes and suns and liquids spilling, leaking. Eggs and eyes cracked open, insides exposed. Yolky. Blinded. Erotic slippage as one thing becomes something else, once meaning is tilted, made unstable.

What had seemed like an act of generosity — the opening of a practice for others’ inhabitation — began to feel more like a provocation, an ethical test or challenge not to be entered into lightly. I had been invited along to ‘see’ something, perhaps even offer insight, but everywhere the artist was hiding, hidden. The viewing devices were taunts of sorts, daring the ‘seer’ to look harder, closer, with a more penetrating eye. The task felt violating, even a touch violent. A body had declared itself open; the seers were invited to probe its surface, get under its skin. My original intention had been to approach Kelly’s body (of work) through the practice of close reading. Close Reading is an ongoing series of investigations in which I apply close visual attention to language, looking at the materiality of words ‘close up’ through processes of visual magnification, microscopic observation. Under scrutiny, text can be pressured into its component parts (of ink and page), the sense or legibility of a word rendered nonsensical the closer it is attended to, as writing slips towards image, as meaning dissipates into pleats and folds. Here, the more language becomes scrutinized the less it becomes known. However, the body is already dense and impenetrable, unreadable, opaque. Close reading only amplifies the body’s opacity, bringing it closer into range. Seeing is not always performed through an increase in the pressure of observation, more intensive inquisition. Some things cannot be viewed directly; sometimes you have to look away. An eclipse cannot be viewed by the naked eye or through the prism of optics. Blind spots burn in the retina of too intent a gaze. A further foil must be used to refract the light. I needed something else to divert my attention, shield my eyes. [3]

My approach to research often involves the triangulation of my own ideas, a live encounter with the practice of others and the act of reading. Here, reading is not undertaken in pursuit of theoretical prop or support, but rather as an attempt to find a foil for refracting back those ideas provoked through the encounter with practice. Within my current work, reading is undertaken both as a physical, material act (through the process of close reading) and as a conceptual exercise, practiced as a gesture of looking away (momentarily) from a practice so as to reconsider it, in order to see its shadows as much as its light. If Kelly’s body was visibly present in the work, the subject herself remained somehow occulted, hidden from view [4] In blissful states, the subject finds a way of momentarily escaping the gravity of flesh. Ecstasy is experienced as a brief departure, whilst the body remains in place. An egg left behind and then returned to. Eyes rolled white, turned inwards. Sight folded back upon itself, blinded to the visible world. In the swoon of syncope, the sharpness of the visible world is rendered faint and distant. Catherine Clément conceives of syncope as a momentary disappearance or ‘cerebral eclipse’, a brief leaving behind of the world and its realities to access another, perhaps more enchanted or luminescent, realm. For her, “this eclipse that fractures consciousness is the very prerequisite for the creative act” [5] There are forms of seeing which do not belong to the ocular realm, visions produced through rather more experimental means.

For Hélène Cixous, the diurnal is a realm of too much light, too bright an intensity — “Solar daylight blinds me to the visionary day”.[6] In order to write (to see the not-yet-visible), Cixous states that she “must escape from the broad daylight which takes me by the eyes, which takes my eyes and fills them with broad raw visions”.[7] She asserts, “I do not want to see what is shown. I want to see what is secret. What is hidden amongst the visible. I want to see the skin of the light”.[8] Cixous argues for a form of seeing encountered by closing the eyes, by distracting the gaze, through the near-sight of myopia. Here, thinking is performed through the withdrawal from the visible world. For Hannah Arendt too, this retreat from ‘reality’ is a precondition of certain forms of thinking. In her introduction to See it Again, Say it Again: The Artist as Researcher, Janneke Wesseling notes how Arendt differentiates between Vernunft (reason) and Verstand (intellect), a distinction which is conceived as corresponding to the distinction between meaning and knowledge.[9] Following Arendt, Wesseling states that whilst Verstand (intellect) “wants to understand perceptible reality” by applying the criteria of “certainty and proof”, Vernunft (reason) “has its origins in our need to ponder questions to which we know that there is no answer and for which no verifiable knowledge is possible”.[10] The thinking associated with Vernunft requires periodic withdrawal from the world, since as Wesseling notes “sensory experience distracts us when we try to concentrate and think, which is why we say that someone who is thinking concentratedly is ‘absent’.”[11] Perhaps then, there is something of leíp (to leave, to be absent) in Vernunft’s withdrawal from ‘reality’, in the turn away from the brightness of the exterior world, towards the dark light of the reflexive interior. Perhaps this is why thinking can sometimes feel like a kind of faint or swoon, why it might at times feel blissful.

On occasion, new methods of practice and research can only be ‘discovered’ blindly, absent-mindedly, or by accident when thought is otherwise engaged. Live Writing is a new working process conceived (as such) within the context of my Seer-in-Residence experience. Developed somewhat by chance, in the casual flick and skim of notes written on a computer screen, Live Writing has since evolved/is evolving as a working method for continuing my exploration of skimming, scanning and the visual encounter with words ‘close up’. Within the process of Live Writing, words themselves are not always distinguishable as discrete signifying units but instead appear liquid, their sense blurred. I am interested in the moments of eclipse and ellipsis within the event of witnessing or encountering another’s practice, and in ways of rendering this experience as the not-yet of a language punctured through with gaps and holes. Both the ‘close readings’ and ‘live writings’ also intimate towards their potential for being read, given voice. Here, blindness becomes breathless; the not-being-able-to-fully-grasp of a written language articulated through syncopated speech-acts, assemblages of plosive phonemes and vowel sounds, hyperventilation and gasps. Perhaps the processes of Live Writing and Close Reading intimate towards a way of using language to reflect on the not-quite-seen or captured, for remaining faithful to the experience of something glimpsed. For me, the skim of language, the restless movement of letters ever approaching and falling out of sense, feels closer to the process of reading, of writing and of the thinking-through-writing that is central to my own research practice. Here, meaning is not always produced first through thought, but rather through the material process of endlessly assembling and disassembling sentences on the page, by moving letters around until they begin to fit.[12]

It is hard to reflect on the experience of being a Seer-in-Residence — it still feels too close or near, too soon. Though invited into Kelly’s practice as a ‘seer’, in order to ‘see’, I found myself thinking more about the notion of blindness, the condition of myopia and the practice of withdrawing the gaze, of looking away. The term ‘seer’ refers both to the witness who observes what is present and to the visionary who sees beyond the visible, attending to what is unseen or un-seeable, for whom vision is performed in the subjunctive key of what might be rather than what is. Indeed, the modality of artistic research often seems one of alternation, the perpetual shifting of a position or oscillation between positions rather than electing for any one: somewhere between sight and blindness; between witnessing and looking past; between regarding what is and imagining what might be; between practical action (making) and theoretical reflection (thinking); between knowledge and ignorance, somewhere between the shadow and the light.

Emma Cocker, 2013