The Ontology of Total Art

The most radically political project is a project which does not act or articulate within the given political space as it exists, but rather which founds a new world. Such a project is thus poetic, and, it may be necessary to mention, is not in itself ‘good’. It is ambiguous. Regardless, what this points to is a kind of art project which has it’s own ontology, which appears as a self-contained microcosm - like a staging or a diorama of how the world could look, how we could look at it (and how it could look at us).

This kind of worldwork is a multi-storied building - a weltanschauung envelops life in such a way as to furnish practically every domain of life in it’s own particular way - so rather than providing an abstract formula the work is a Total Artwork which always repeats and re-articulates itself, using different words, material and schema, on differing planes.

Yet one domain certainly is thought - is philosophy. An ontology can be expressed through sculpture alone, but if one really want to get it across there’s a time and place for rational systematisation and critique. Granted - this aspect of the overall body of the Work should not be taken as an authoritative frame that decisively declares the meaning of the other parts - it is one compartment along with the others - and one may as well take a sculpture as hermeneutic key for a philosophical text than the reverse. (Not to mention that artists have a notorious tendency to be doing something they themselves don’t comprehend).

With that said: material seems to come to me speaking to a line of thinking that I articulated (although in a somewhat crude form) years ago. I’ve got a sense that I am circling around a position, and have been for a while, that is waiting to be drawn out. The key issue may well be time, but also freedom and it’s relation to the consensus -reality of ordinary causality. The bilateral activity of a person or community oriented towards an apocalyptic horizon, and a God who dwells in the infinite Future (in some sense), who’s wingflaps and fingerprints may be seen in the virtual field - or rather: felt intuitively in the inspired heights of the realm of ideas. In ways Eckhart and Schelling alludes to, where God is birthed in her actuality through us as vessels - where our activity in some sense causes or justifies God, while we of course are also in some sense caused by or grounded in God (reality would dissipate without God to sustain it, and the star I have followed to become who I am was a God’s guiding light etc.). There is also Walter Benjamins idea of a world as a web of signs, stretching out over history, all of which as fundamentally ambiguous: the sign constellations of the past defer their meaning onto the future, wagering on an age of reckoning to be justified and redeemed. Here we can see how Lacan may also come in handy: the Big Other as the guarantee of the consistency of the symbolic sphere coincides with the future reckoning, with God the redeemer.

There is at the same time in physics a kind of shift happening, and while it is a little to early to say where this is going, there are some interesting material there. Look at someone like Leonard Susskind who can now say with a straight face that the consensus reality we share is the result of a wave-function collapse consistent across each of our experiences because of our mutual entanglement. (It gets even more mind-boggling when he says that entanglement and worm holes are essentially the same phenomena). Or the Transactional Interpretation of quantum physics, where the collapse of the wave function is the result of the coming together of two waves, one moving forwards and one backwards in time - opening up the virtual (field of possibilities) to activity (rather than being merely shadow). Physicists gets nervous when we talk about their ideas in connection with religion, and we indeed have to be humble in our limited understanding here - but there is still something of a new movement happening in physics that aught to be engaged with and taken seriously.

With all that said, that which guides our ontology more than anything is artistic creation itself. How can the new arrive? Now that’s a question. It is more bilateral however: creation - both in process and in composition or concept or narrative enacts the ontology as well. Creation is sacred activity, and the structure of it’s activity is a seal of the Divine.