Digital Mitate Mon∞

Ghosts in the Machine (2012)

by John Rux-Burton

Another show took place, in the same year, on the other side of the world. I was part of a mixed exhibition at the Apple Store Gallery in Hereford, a particularly fine and adventurous regional space.

Today, the irony does not escape me, given its influence on my work, that Melbourne and Herefordshire are two places so important in Sidney Nolan’s practice. He is an artist who confronts a harsh physical reality in the Australian landscape and rises to the mythic in his response. In Herefordshire, he makes cosmic landscapes that do not afford answers but do exhibit the Simulist reflex to ask why, again and again.

Around the time of my visit to Australia, maybe on the same trip, I visited China. That is an ancient land too, but one emerging, if not already emerged, into modernity at a rate faster than a maglev train. I was struck by many things, too many to record here.

I do not undertake a consciously structured process in what I choose to shoot as fine art — or at least not a conscious, linguistic one. When I visit or shoot somewhere new, I don’t pick up a camera for two or three days. I am deliberate in not trying to see anything. First must come a visceral induction into the space — an aesthetic empathy arising from experiencing the space, not interrogating it.

Merleau-Ponty talked of letting the world look back. But Bashō nailed that long before, and Sesshū Tōyō before him, in his notion that to paint bamboo, become bamboo. The Japanese call this chokkan (直観): intuitive perception. If we had the records, we’d doubtlessly find such perceptive thoughts have struck humankind since the awakening of sentience. They are at the heart of the Simulist urge: that ontological desire fulfilled through obtaining the spirit of a thing — or mono, as the Japanese so perfectly express it, where thing is not simply thing, but everything contained in that thing.

Is it a linguistic coincidence that mono is singular in English? Perhaps. Or maybe it is onomatopoeic: mon — such a long, neutral sound, and then the O like a question, like the surprise within Oh. Just a thing, then something more.

This process of painting, or in my case photographing, the object by letting it lead me, brought me to the kaleidoscope of signs, colours, materials, and speed of the travel networks of Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Suzhou.

Perhaps, on reflection, it is telling that these seemingly mundane transport networks demanded my attention, especially in Suzhou — a place of truly extraordinary, to a Westerner medieval, gardens. I took nice pictures of those, of course. But it was not there I found intrigue. I now realise it was the pictures I took of transport spaces that were themselves the journey — another tobi-ishi (飛石) on my path to Simulism. And the distortions I observed, pushing the processing power of my Nikon in ways it was not designed (or at least the way cameras were originally designed to be used) produced slippage in mimesis. Not the slippage I achieve today, but it was a start.

The images that arose are filled with reflections, disruptions, and long exposures that blur movement and fracture any attempt at a single reality.

I find it intriguing that through a culture fifty thousand years old and technology at the cutting edge of human achievement, I found two stepping stones to Simulism. Such is the tobi-ishi (飛石) of thought — and of life.

I offer them to you here: my own marks in digital ochre on the cave wall. They act as maps to something else — to a place where the game may, with sufficient skill and effort, be found.