Non-Mediation
(The Impossible Ideal, with Strategies for Cheating)
An implicit question in Nihil is how direct can my experience of the world be? How much mediation between myself and the world can be removed? Does the question make any sense at all? Isn’t meditation itself what makes possible my experience of the world?
Removed from the realm of possible visual information for use in Nihil is the internet, social media, books and print publications, movies and television, memes, fashion, intellectual information, topical issues, intentions concerning history and politics (pragmatically speaking), and any other cultural production that the arts typically exist within. Inevitably, however, this is not all there is to mediated experience. Mediation is too subtle a problem. It cannot be whittled down to nothing.
I can draw a juniper without thinking “juniper” only if I draw through the landscape continuously, and then what I’ve drawn most certainly isn’t a juniper. Whatever idea of tree arises, arises out of memory of tree. It’s this memory, among other factors, that constitutes mediation. After all, isn’t mediation, ontologically speaking, to be found in the very accrual of life itself?
The attempt to remove mediation speaks to an ideal of merging, I suppose, between the self and the world beneath the world of ideas. Here the usefulness of language dead-ends because whatever world I mean to infer would not be that world if it could be described. Nihil wants to whittle everything down to nothing, to discover and embrace emptiness fully.
Knowing my ideal to be an impossibility, cheating becomes not only possible, but necessary, because it makes all the subtlest forms of mediation visible to me. What I want, ultimately, is not so much to end up with “nothing,” (nothing is nothing) but to isolate and rely only on the forms of mediation closest to my unconscious desires and motivations. In this way, the unconscious might be made conscious, it might actualize itself in the work to its fullest potential.
An example of good cheating in Nihil is to make drawings of imagery found on garbage and objects in abandoned spaces. Because it doesn’t violate the dogma to draw what I see along the Nihil route, then, if I see an image printed on torn-out pages of magazines, for example, I have only drawn what I found. Most images I find are out of time, not current to events going on in the world now. They are themselves memory. I am drawing, to the fullest degree possible, unmediated mediations.
Here we find the mystery and paradox at the center of every aspect of Nihil. On one hand, I am giving preference to what I discover over what I already think about the world. And yet, what I discover seems, again and again, to reflect how I’ve always seen things. Even as my views and opinions change, over time, there is something essential to who I am which has not changed since I was a child. I don’t know why I can’t escape my own subjectivity, but what’s even more mysterious is why there should be any subjectivity at all to the world. Even from the position of a single life’s repeated experiences of synchronicity there seems to be a non-coincidental subjectivity at work in the world itself. The individual life is reflected in the world in equal measure to the world’s reflection in the individual life. The images I find, for example, just happen to be the sorts of images I’ve been dealing with for as long as I can remember. The kind of solitude found in sparsely populated places matches the kind of solitude that leaves its trace in my earliest memories. I follow an arbitrary tree-shaped route, but the route only follows my yearning to return my soul to the earth. To give the work’s destiny over to arbitrariness is another way of clearing the path for the unconscious to actualize its own unveiling.
In Nihil, I encounter my own ghost wherever I am. Somewhere I am already dead. Somewhere I haven’t yet been born. And everywhere I find my ghost, I find the ghost of the world, already gone, always becoming.