Man has always attempted to double himself as a means of attaining self-knowledge.
The recognition of one’s own image in a pool of water - like recognizing oneself in a mirror - was perhaps one of the first real hallucinations that man experienced.
Part of man’s mind has always remained attached to that reproduction of himself.
With the passage of time, this doubling, this process of duplication, came to be used in ways that were ever more systematic and convincing.
The mind created representation on the basis of the reflection of the self; and art has become one form of this representation.
Man began to use reflection as a strategic point for measuring of the universe.
Man began to measure the universe in terms of his own direct experience of life and death, then went on to the great task of creating good and evil.
In the light of the day he said “white” and in the darkness of the night he said “black”. And always remaining at the center of things he created perspective.
The world was seen in terms of vanishing points and points of view with respect to the position of man’s eye at about five feet above ground level, and from that point he created high and low.
Past and future, near and distant, profound and superficial, true and false, single and multiple, subjective and objective, static and dynamic.
These are a few examples of the complex of antinomies that has grown up around the human being as the fruit of his mind.
In constant expansion, the process began with the first man who walked the earth, and it has continued until today.
The world that we daily inhabit both physically and mentally is made up of the conflict between the two extreme halves of every proposition and every judgment.
Looking at works of art, I felt the force with which I was compelled to oscillate between one dimension of experience that was abstract and mental and another dimension of experience that was concrete and physical.
And it was in the fact of representation that I discovered the poles that were in simultaneous attraction and repulsion - my literal presence as proposed by the mirror, and my intellectual presence as proposed by my painting.
Predetermined directions are contrary to man’s liberty.
To predetermine something means to make a commitment for tomorrow;
it means that tomorrow I will no longer be free.
To adhere to a predetermined idea means to reflect oneself in the past and to deprive oneself of free will.
Unity of language must be predetermined and it demands that we adhere to it.
To believe in one’s own language means to play one’s own role.
Languages are posited as fictions between us and the others
in the midst of a mass of individuals who play-act themselves
and who are always ready to be manipulated by the directors.
There are certain people of extraordinary intelligence who are frustrated by some kind
of a personal complex or another, and they have turned themselves
into theatrical characters on the basis of it, they believe in the character
so thoroughly that they presume to make even the others play it.
These are society’s directors - the ones who send the actors to kill and be killed by the evil that they, they directors, have perceived in themselves.
And all of this happens when it would have been sufficient to take a little step to one side, proceed on one’s own way and abandon the complexes without instrumentalizing them.
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| nick knight photography |
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