The following article sits tangentially to a more theoretical essay on what I have termed ‘Flux Art’. In considering two shows at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, the recently opened FREE THOUGHT FM by Garrett Phelan and Wild Relatives by Jumana Manna which preceded it, I hope to consider in practice a wider implication of flux art, specifically in its relation to and formation of community. Most significant,, the two shows can be said to address some of the most pressing matters facing us today, both at a local and global level.
In brief, Flux Art is a genre best understood by the philosophy of Heraclitus, who contended that all is not only constantly in state of flux or change, but that such change is fundamental to the very condition of entities we usually understand in static terms. Likewise, the recent philosopher and art theorist, Gilles Deleuze, likewise follows such a conceptual viewpoint and has influenced much contemporary approaches to understanding art. But while it is theoretically interesting to muse over the implications and possibilities of thinking of both artworks and interpretations in such terms as processes or multiplicities, I have chosen these two works precisely for their attempt to reflect and enact change in real life. All the while, these works do not fall into abstract philosophising, but instead are rooted in concrete conditions and most importantly, a real and impending future. A future we both seem to have arrived at and yet, for the sake of changing it, must posit it as before us, and something to be created. Crucially, the works show that we are our future, our decisions now are determining but also itself the future of some past moment.
Jumana Manna’s Wild Relatives, a documentary film, has been described as an exploration of “how one relates to the archive and the bodies that populate it – to the objects around and through which assemblages of power coalesce, with the object in the case of Wild Relatives being life itself.” The film follows the life of seeds.
The metaphor is apt – it is the life of future life not yet in bloom. Seeds are the promise of a future via the continuation of a present. In the midst of our current uncertainty of ecological stability, the metaphor beats with more urgency than ever. Yet the film frames this in two ways. Firstly, by choosing documentation and archive material, Manna makes self-conscious the fact that this is not only a means of representation – put an artifact that will, sooner or later, be situated in the past. Thus every question raised does suppose an eventual answer. But equally, looking at or back on this moment of uncertainty, it is clear that an alternative might be or have been.
But the life of a seed, as Manna at no point waivers in stressing, is not the life of a single plant, or species. It’s life grows around not only all the other seeds of the same and other plants; it is caught up in the life of farmers, lorry drivers, merchants, scientists, artists, whole communities. The film is focused on the tension between seed banks and agricultural standardisation under global economic transaction, a system which protects itself against the very environmental catastrophe it is creating, and the traditional rural communities whose identity as well as livelihood which is being phased out by the former economic forces. The film points that the existence, not of individual farms or plants are being threatened, but that the physical social networks and communities are what is most at risk. Notably these communities are understood in terms of both tradition and diversity. And while new economically motivated agricultural practices also establish communities, they are homogenous and socially alienated from those participating. Just as Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04, which meditates on “an object for or from a future where there was some other regime of value than the tyranny of price” the artwork’s plea to acknowledge the past can lead to a reification of the future, while the forgetting of these practices will be a break, a cutting off, of the future itself. Again and again it returns the present to the past so that “What normally felt like the only possible world became one among many”, and our future, much like our society and environment, need not be one of homogeneity or disaster.
Phelan’s in gallery live radio broadcast, titled FREE THOUGHT FM, shares a similarly overt socio-political concern. Crucially the exhibition is practically orientated towards addressing issues of access to education and other similar class based issues in Dublin. But this address to the youth in Ireland, in a bid to inform them about myriad unconventional options in accessing third level education, is not only a means of spreading information, itself a bid to empower and enable. Central this is the idea of giving space to the voices of those affected by these issues.
What might such an unconventional artwork achieve? While immediate results under the rubric of ‘spreading awareness’ might be clearly recognised, it is the uncertain, but infinitely more hopeful outcome that draws our attention. The very question is heavy with anticipation for a future. A different future. Perhaps this is exactly what ‘free thought’ is? Not the undetermined but the unmoored; the fluctuating thought. And so the inquiry of the exhibition is not solely concerned with access to education, but to this changing thought itself. Consequently, and especially considered in the shows context of the Trinity College institution, Phelan has invited a critique of what education itself may be. But while no answer is given, neither is the question raised in a purely theoretical manner – the very impetus of artwork is to encourage and invite answers, thoughts. But these thoughts are becoming. Active articulations of what it means to become a student – to enter the system of third level education. A processual role which needs to be both imitated and molded, accepted and rejected simultaneously. Third level education is not solely to be institutions we try to be ‘accepted into’, but instead are to be shaped by the community they are made up of. In this respect the student body is central to the conception of a university, rather than global standing or curriculum. The students themselves enact thought and shape the community they are a part of, defining it through its academic, cultural and political scope and nuances. In this way the shaping of independent thought is equal to the shaping of a university community. FREE THOUGHT FM does not portray the situation as it is now in all its bureaucratic and socio-economic complexity, or represent the kind of thought that third-level education promises, nor does it suggest any form of educational utopia to be actualised. It is simply an invitation, for the audience itself, to shape thought, and in doing so, to shape the wider university community.
What is central to understanding these two art works in terms of a flux art interpretation, is not the materially changing aspect of the works themselves, nor even their fundamentally temporal forms (as cinematic and audio formats), nor even the possibility for changing interpretations (though this too is possible an important). Instead, the underlying future orientated thematic and conceptual force of the both works is what deems them flux artworks. They function only under the understanding and embrace of the fact that the future is not only real in its uncertainty, but open to change, possibility, diversity. The outcome is not set, not in the Dublin housing crisis or educational system, or in the changing of our global climate. And though these situations can define who we are today, it is our role to define those very situations. As Henri Bergson put it so aptly, “Time is invention and nothing else.” What these works emphasis above all is that community is both tied to and a part of this future. We, today, play an active role in making the tomorrow which makes us who we are.
