A Simulist Manifesto - Binary to Simultaneity

My art does not reject the polemic. It politely yawns at it. It finds statement provisional; some are insightful, some banal, all promote thought; but often conceptualism is too singular. That does not mean there are not pieces I admire greatly. But that is not my voice. My art makes no statement beyond the statement that it is a question. Multiple questions. The first exists at the level of surface. What is the viewer engaging? Is it intended to be mimesis done awry, or abstract drawn too well? These are photographs; I, the viewer, know that. But not in the register I have hitherto encountered. I have seen saturation in Fra Angelico, in Turner, Matisse, Kusama, and many more. I have seen abstraction in El Greco, Turner, Sesshū, Pollock. I have seen the surreal in galleries, doubtless also available at the end of a pill (and I do not say this flippantly but with an acceptance that perception is fluid). I have seen such in the Blakean visions, the artistic sprezzatura layering down paint as God reaches from the Heavens to make Adam. They came to me as a John Martin: The portrayal of Milton’s “Satan with all the best lines,” given a makeover by the Madmen creative team. I have mistakenly trusted that photographs record some form of reality; a curated, partial, modernist reality, but a breath of veracity, nonetheless. My works are photographs. So surely some reality remains after this process of melting, mis-aligning and re-aligning pixels? Disoriented, I am posed a question: where is the verisimilitude that is supposed to be there; does any remain? And if I find it, have I found it, or has the artist just fed the viewer a more intriguing, less health-threatening pill?

What I see must mean something. I, the viewer, seek answers. I MUST HAVE ANSWERS. Ontology demands it. My pareidolic reflex is ungovernable, a basic urge as innate as the need for food, for sex. More innate than love, culture, language as that arises from that ontological desire too.

And at that point, where the objects question gives rise to a pre-linguistic answer, activated by the viewer’s engagement, and not before, that is where the work becomes art. Of course, it was an object before that, and because it is like a Pandora’s box of meaning, the inherent power to make art on its opening, it was an artwork prior to engagement. But it is the Schrodinger’s cat of artworks, its state arises from the act of observation. Before opening, we do not deny there is a cat in the box. We can pass the box from person to person, sell it, trade it, venerate it if we want, but only on the basis that it is to allude metaphorically to a “physical NFT”. Open the box, and the cat lives (or dies, if the viewer sees nothing). That is its surface resonance. A mash of colours, swirls, lines, sgraffito, gouges, and distortions that, nonetheless, looks as if they are something. We must see something, we are determined ‘nothing comes from nothing’. And so, we see something, but without resolution. An endless spiral of something and nothing ‘hung in the scales of beauty and atrocity’ as is the condition of our lives as we make meaning above the void.

But there is a meta-question. What does the method that was used to bring this process into being mean? It means nothing. Of course it means nothing, and yet it is so particular it must, surely mean something. Once again, ontology demands it. I take photographs. In so doing I try to capture not faithfully what my eye sees but what, through my experience of optics and electronics I believe can be rendered, in the form of a photonic working sketch, into a digital code. That code I then instruct a machine to read and from it something I recognise as an image of something is displayed in front of me. I interface with the machine, amending pixels until I have achieved not what I saw as I clicked the shutter, but what I would like to have seen. Or at least the best of what is available to me in the code of what I would like to have seen. I do this many times with many images. And then I break what I have made. But I do not leave it at that. This is process is alchemical.

I have arrived at a mass of transmuted pixels. I have been a deliberate as a potter carefully smashing a bowl so they may remake it: mitate mono through the art of kintsugi. I know it will not be remade. I do not have a means of remaking it beyond return to the original uncorrupted files and sticking with individual, fundamentally mimetic images. Whatever I do now, it will contain the wabi-sabi of imperfection; it will contain the ma of what it was and might have been: the ‘footfalls’ of Eliot’s memory, the Korean ‘Ham’. But it will be remade. When it is remade, it will be remade so the breaking and the object are remembered. But imagine if the potter stuck the pieces back together so systematically and carelessly (systematic in their carelessness) that one was no longer sure was the object was before, except it was an object. It would be impossible not to view and go ‘What the f…!’ So I take those pixels and in a digital process I have invented, I carelessly and systematically realign until I find what I consider the tipping point between remembered mimesis and abstraction to infinity, something, and nothing. I do not do this unaided; I compel software to gesture at the pareidolic. And so, he we have my making meaning through binary data; then a machine making of meaning out of my meaning; then my reinterpreting and editing to a gallery image; then a question made to the viewer - how can I make meaning out of that? Such a process poses a second question to the viewer: what has been revealed how I make meaning of every moment using my receptors, my neurons, my pattern recognition my ability to stamp some form of reason on my hallucinations, or persuade myself my hallucinations are real.

What does this entail for how my work is presented in a physical sense? Well to start with it is big. Pigment print on archival baryta paper the range from 60-200cm on the leading edge. Most are around 120-100cm. They are variously framed, to museum standard.

My work is filled with detail, crammed with it. The more detail, the more baroque, the more luminous, the more shimmering, the more opportunity for the viewer to attempt meaning.

The work has exclusivity. Editions range from 1+2AP, typically 7 or 8; for some smaller pieces, 20, seldom more. They are precious, as they are the opportunity to make art with the object on a direct basis. Not to see the artist’s statement; statements are inevitably re-printable. The world has built language and signs around the dissemination of statements. The reason my work must be seen in the original and at scale is that this allows the viewer to question and, with questions, context is everything.

The scale matters. They are the moment of connection, touching the relic and saying, ‘this was made… what does it mean?’ But the dissemination of the work in other forms is not exclusive. It must not be because that dissemination is part of the artwork itself.

The more people who see the work and, though of less impact, still get a gist of the question and make meaning from it, the more it is shared with others, the more powerful is the artwork. The power lies in the magical ability to make those questioned seek answers. So stream it on social media as much as you like. You are making it more powerful and culturally significant.

That does not mean in its grand form, in the monumental canvas on a gallery wall it can be reproduced willy-nilly. It cannot. The owner has a right to the art they made possible through their ownership and the artwork itself is infinitely more substantial in its original form. All other reproductions of the Omokage Chawan are copies. Just a bit of clay. Only the original allows one to stand before clay and form, held in perfect balance, art and object balanced perpetually at a point of question and say, ‘what is this’ and, ‘wow’. And that is because the maker made that, not copied it.

Does that answer what my art is about. Hopefully not. Hopefully, it has simply filled you with questions…