Reflections on the Possibility of Subjectivity: The 24 Hour Paintings of Alessia Armeni
by Mike Watson
“Once Upon a Time ...
A balcony at night
A man stands by a window, sharpening a razor. He looks to the sky and sees a cloud moving toward the full moon.
As the cloud passes across the face of the moon, a razor blade slices through the eye of a
young woman.”
Un Chien Andalou, Dali, Bunuel
I-ball
The slow diligent work of Alessia Armeni, which painstakingly reproduces the effect of light on the human retina, and the processing of that light by the human brain, gives us an opportunity to ask how - and indeed if - art intervenes so as to give ‘meaning’ to a life which is otherwise objectified. That is to say, that in a society where the individual human is both objectified by science (as we are reduced to the material we are made of - cells atoms, etc) and by the finance system (as we are reduced to a monetary value), how can art be perceived as offering a transcendent experience? The act of looking, and of transcribing what is seen onto canvas ultimately remains the act of one chemically construed human subject manipulating material matter. A simple interaction between the eye, brain, hands and paint, where the eye, rather than being the glistening humane eye of the lover, remains a dead ‘eyeball’, responsive to light which leaves its impressions on the blank surface of the mind. At what point, as Alessia Armeni - a conglomeration of cells - applies paint to canvas to recreate the impression made upon her mind as light waves enter her brain, does the product she makes become elevated to the status of ‘artwork’? Further, at what point does that artwork become elevated out of the realm of mere cells and objects, so as to confer meaning on the producer, and the viewer?
Armeni’s work is ideal for such a reflection. Continuing the tradition of painting - heavily influenced by her having grown up in Rome - it draws upon the history of transcendent artistic experience, embodied in the work of the renaissance and baroque masters. Painting, seen in a certain way, has the ability to transport the viewer to another reality. One can suspend disbelief, and accede to the notion that one is looking at a landscape or beautiful nude, such that the true conditions of existence can be momentarily forgotten. In this moment, our connectedness with the wider world is made. We no longer experience ourselves as blocked off from the world, compartmentalised in our individual ‘boxes’, but rather ‘swim’ in a giant cosmos, as scepticism gives way to wonder. And yet it is in the break away from that moment, the point at which something ‘snaps’ and the art viewer is returned to an awareness of their surroundings, and of their place in a world populated by gallery attendants, tourists, furniture, doors, elevators, that the art viewer realises their fundamental difference from those surroundings and from the artwork which momentarily transported them away from themselves. In this sense the painting, at the moment in which it ceases to represent an alternative and appealing reality, and becomes mere paint and canvas - thus throwing the viewer back upon him or herself - creates a moment of subjectivity. And yet, for the neuroscientist, who would argue that human thought is purely a material process, that moment of subjectivity remains merely an objective process. How to resolve this contradiction, and elevate artistic experience such that it can overcome the objectifying nature of rationality and capital is of vital importance to the the study of contemporary philosophy and art.
Armeni, in painting her 24 hour paintings from the series ‘24 hour painting’, in which she divides a canvas placed in the landscape position into 24 equally proportioned stripes, and paints the colour she sees on a blank space of wall in a studio in a given location - for example, Rome, London, New York or mexico City - effectively reproduces this very argument. The simple process of dividing the canvas into hours - which reflects a rationalistic division of time and space - and then of copying on the canvas what is presented in front to the eye, reflects upon the divide between the artist and the object they study (here ‘ligh’t). We are invited from that point to inquire as to whether the creation of the artwork intervenes firstly during t’s creation and, secondly, when it is viewed, so as to make the subject-viewer and subject-artist a real existing being, as separate from the objects they are surrounded by.
Put simply, when we look at Armeni’s shifting colour fields, and become lost in the seemingly moving subtle tonal shifts which evoke the sky, just as Armeni - who paints these paintings for 24 hours continuously without sleep - becomes lost whilst painting, at what point would it be possible to say that a genuine subjectivity has come into existence? At what point does the act of looking become an act performed by the benevolent gaze of the human eye, rather than by a mere glutinous ‘eye ball’? At what point does the painter’s hand become a graceful human hand, knowingly moving paint, rather than a mass of bone and flesh, quivering at the end of a brush to which it responds?
Childhood Obsessions Die Hard
The act of looking at a blank white wall as its colours shif due to natural changes in the quality of light is familiar to us all from childhood. Such a simple visual device - the same area of wall, seen over a period of time, or over subsequent days and years - can play host to a myriad of scenes, stories and shifting moods. This is all due to the simple interaction between light and the human sensory apparatus, in this case the eye, or, specifically, the retina. The meeting of light waves with the human eyeball, interpreted by the brain, the meeting, effectively, of various loosely connected objects in a certain configuration, relative in their positions to the Sun, to cloud, or clear sky and to passing or stationary objects, all affect the shifting colour we see when we look at a blank white wall.
This childhood habit of gazing for prolonged periods at blank spaces - part of the general natural inquisitiveness that is lost over time - is the start of a wider critical reflection which never really leaves us and which finds its later expression in scientific pursuit, philosophical study, spiritual practice and mathematical reasoning. The trance like state that one enters easily in childhood and which can be described as a kind of bewilderment at the mechanisms of the world of which we are part, represents an interesting phenomenon for recent rationalist theories of being. Indeed, one of the most significant further developments of childhood is reflective of the break which is characteristic of rationalism - or indeed any form of dialectical or dualistic thinking which divides inside from outside, human from nature, spirit from body. For in a later stage of a person's individual development there generally comes a moment when it is not enough to gaze at walls or objects. There comes a point when the intention becomes to grasp the object, to try to shape it. not with the hands, which is something that comes at a much earlier stage, but somehow with the mind. In this moment there is an non-acceptance of the natural boundaries between the human and the outside world.
I recall as a child - and this is I am sure the experience of many children - sitting and trying to move objects using the power of my mind alone. I would try for hours (or what seemed like hours) and I used to become incredibly frustrated, as it really seemed like I should have been able to. Througout our lives and somehow ingrained in society and history there is this basic unwillingness to accept the limits of human experience. The artist, scientist, philosopher, priest and mathematician are all involved in challenging the boundaries of perception: The boundaries which exist between the human sensory apparatus and the world outside it.
The paintings of Alessia Armeni reflect on this human tendency to want to go beyond the base mechanisms of perception. In taking the simple interaction between the retina, a blank white wall, and the brain, and reproducing - with oil, canvas and pigment - the effect as it appears to human eye, the artist recreates and displaces this objective process. It is an entirely objective process, but becomes refracted via the recreation of the interaction between subject and object on a new surface. In this way the artist both crosses the gap between the outside object (in this case 'light', and the wall) and herself (as sensory apparatus). And yet, if we were to be reductive we could still claim that, as the artist paints her 24 hour paintings, painstakingly mixing the colours she sees using just paint, brushes and canvas, all that occurs is the interaction diverse objects, amongst which the artist is just one. The act of artistic creation itself cannot elevate the artist out of the scientific reduction of people to mere objects. Making art is much like the childhood obsession with controlling objects with the mind. It is an attempt to shape the world of which the artist is just one tiny part. And whilst small traces can be left in the manner of object-paintings, the artist remains, as a human, a material construct, made of cells, which interact with and record the world. And yet, in the tendency of art to create illusion, to present a canvas as a landscape, or - indeed - as colours appearing on a white wall, there is a childlike refusal to accept the conditions of being. Armeni’s 24 hour paintings both examine the simple mechanism of perception, by which light gives form to everything we see, and, by representing it, offer simultaneously an account of artistic perception as material process, and as transcendent. Here resides an interesting response to the question posed over the validity of subjective existence by rationality: perhaps art is an entirely objective process, which in its refusal to accept reality, admits of the possibility of subjecivity. It is for this reason that painting remains important, alongside other artforms, as a research into the possibility of being itself.
by Mike Watson
“Once Upon a Time ...
A balcony at night
A man stands by a window, sharpening a razor. He looks to the sky and sees a cloud moving toward the full moon.
As the cloud passes across the face of the moon, a razor blade slices through the eye of a
young woman.”
Un Chien Andalou, Dali, Bunuel
I-ball
The slow diligent work of Alessia Armeni, which painstakingly reproduces the effect of light on the human retina, and the processing of that light by the human brain, gives us an opportunity to ask how - and indeed if - art intervenes so as to give ‘meaning’ to a life which is otherwise objectified. That is to say, that in a society where the individual human is both objectified by science (as we are reduced to the material we are made of - cells atoms, etc) and by the finance system (as we are reduced to a monetary value), how can art be perceived as offering a transcendent experience? The act of looking, and of transcribing what is seen onto canvas ultimately remains the act of one chemically construed human subject manipulating material matter. A simple interaction between the eye, brain, hands and paint, where the eye, rather than being the glistening humane eye of the lover, remains a dead ‘eyeball’, responsive to light which leaves its impressions on the blank surface of the mind. At what point, as Alessia Armeni - a conglomeration of cells - applies paint to canvas to recreate the impression made upon her mind as light waves enter her brain, does the product she makes become elevated to the status of ‘artwork’? Further, at what point does that artwork become elevated out of the realm of mere cells and objects, so as to confer meaning on the producer, and the viewer?
Armeni’s work is ideal for such a reflection. Continuing the tradition of painting - heavily influenced by her having grown up in Rome - it draws upon the history of transcendent artistic experience, embodied in the work of the renaissance and baroque masters. Painting, seen in a certain way, has the ability to transport the viewer to another reality. One can suspend disbelief, and accede to the notion that one is looking at a landscape or beautiful nude, such that the true conditions of existence can be momentarily forgotten. In this moment, our connectedness with the wider world is made. We no longer experience ourselves as blocked off from the world, compartmentalised in our individual ‘boxes’, but rather ‘swim’ in a giant cosmos, as scepticism gives way to wonder. And yet it is in the break away from that moment, the point at which something ‘snaps’ and the art viewer is returned to an awareness of their surroundings, and of their place in a world populated by gallery attendants, tourists, furniture, doors, elevators, that the art viewer realises their fundamental difference from those surroundings and from the artwork which momentarily transported them away from themselves. In this sense the painting, at the moment in which it ceases to represent an alternative and appealing reality, and becomes mere paint and canvas - thus throwing the viewer back upon him or herself - creates a moment of subjectivity. And yet, for the neuroscientist, who would argue that human thought is purely a material process, that moment of subjectivity remains merely an objective process. How to resolve this contradiction, and elevate artistic experience such that it can overcome the objectifying nature of rationality and capital is of vital importance to the the study of contemporary philosophy and art.
Armeni, in painting her 24 hour paintings from the series ‘24 hour painting’, in which she divides a canvas placed in the landscape position into 24 equally proportioned stripes, and paints the colour she sees on a blank space of wall in a studio in a given location - for example, Rome, London, New York or mexico City - effectively reproduces this very argument. The simple process of dividing the canvas into hours - which reflects a rationalistic division of time and space - and then of copying on the canvas what is presented in front to the eye, reflects upon the divide between the artist and the object they study (here ‘ligh’t). We are invited from that point to inquire as to whether the creation of the artwork intervenes firstly during t’s creation and, secondly, when it is viewed, so as to make the subject-viewer and subject-artist a real existing being, as separate from the objects they are surrounded by.
Put simply, when we look at Armeni’s shifting colour fields, and become lost in the seemingly moving subtle tonal shifts which evoke the sky, just as Armeni - who paints these paintings for 24 hours continuously without sleep - becomes lost whilst painting, at what point would it be possible to say that a genuine subjectivity has come into existence? At what point does the act of looking become an act performed by the benevolent gaze of the human eye, rather than by a mere glutinous ‘eye ball’? At what point does the painter’s hand become a graceful human hand, knowingly moving paint, rather than a mass of bone and flesh, quivering at the end of a brush to which it responds?
Childhood Obsessions Die Hard
The act of looking at a blank white wall as its colours shif due to natural changes in the quality of light is familiar to us all from childhood. Such a simple visual device - the same area of wall, seen over a period of time, or over subsequent days and years - can play host to a myriad of scenes, stories and shifting moods. This is all due to the simple interaction between light and the human sensory apparatus, in this case the eye, or, specifically, the retina. The meeting of light waves with the human eyeball, interpreted by the brain, the meeting, effectively, of various loosely connected objects in a certain configuration, relative in their positions to the Sun, to cloud, or clear sky and to passing or stationary objects, all affect the shifting colour we see when we look at a blank white wall.
This childhood habit of gazing for prolonged periods at blank spaces - part of the general natural inquisitiveness that is lost over time - is the start of a wider critical reflection which never really leaves us and which finds its later expression in scientific pursuit, philosophical study, spiritual practice and mathematical reasoning. The trance like state that one enters easily in childhood and which can be described as a kind of bewilderment at the mechanisms of the world of which we are part, represents an interesting phenomenon for recent rationalist theories of being. Indeed, one of the most significant further developments of childhood is reflective of the break which is characteristic of rationalism - or indeed any form of dialectical or dualistic thinking which divides inside from outside, human from nature, spirit from body. For in a later stage of a person's individual development there generally comes a moment when it is not enough to gaze at walls or objects. There comes a point when the intention becomes to grasp the object, to try to shape it. not with the hands, which is something that comes at a much earlier stage, but somehow with the mind. In this moment there is an non-acceptance of the natural boundaries between the human and the outside world.
I recall as a child - and this is I am sure the experience of many children - sitting and trying to move objects using the power of my mind alone. I would try for hours (or what seemed like hours) and I used to become incredibly frustrated, as it really seemed like I should have been able to. Througout our lives and somehow ingrained in society and history there is this basic unwillingness to accept the limits of human experience. The artist, scientist, philosopher, priest and mathematician are all involved in challenging the boundaries of perception: The boundaries which exist between the human sensory apparatus and the world outside it.
The paintings of Alessia Armeni reflect on this human tendency to want to go beyond the base mechanisms of perception. In taking the simple interaction between the retina, a blank white wall, and the brain, and reproducing - with oil, canvas and pigment - the effect as it appears to human eye, the artist recreates and displaces this objective process. It is an entirely objective process, but becomes refracted via the recreation of the interaction between subject and object on a new surface. In this way the artist both crosses the gap between the outside object (in this case 'light', and the wall) and herself (as sensory apparatus). And yet, if we were to be reductive we could still claim that, as the artist paints her 24 hour paintings, painstakingly mixing the colours she sees using just paint, brushes and canvas, all that occurs is the interaction diverse objects, amongst which the artist is just one. The act of artistic creation itself cannot elevate the artist out of the scientific reduction of people to mere objects. Making art is much like the childhood obsession with controlling objects with the mind. It is an attempt to shape the world of which the artist is just one tiny part. And whilst small traces can be left in the manner of object-paintings, the artist remains, as a human, a material construct, made of cells, which interact with and record the world. And yet, in the tendency of art to create illusion, to present a canvas as a landscape, or - indeed - as colours appearing on a white wall, there is a childlike refusal to accept the conditions of being. Armeni’s 24 hour paintings both examine the simple mechanism of perception, by which light gives form to everything we see, and, by representing it, offer simultaneously an account of artistic perception as material process, and as transcendent. Here resides an interesting response to the question posed over the validity of subjective existence by rationality: perhaps art is an entirely objective process, which in its refusal to accept reality, admits of the possibility of subjecivity. It is for this reason that painting remains important, alongside other artforms, as a research into the possibility of being itself.