All there is to thinking, is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren t noticing which makes you see something that isn t even visible. -Norman Maclean
I need to think that I am the one doing the looking and sifting one version of an object from the next. But what if I were changing along with the Objects? What if the sentence were The Observers - the multiple moments of myself- look among the objects? I am divided, and at times my modes of seeing are so distinct from one another that they could belong to different people. At other moments they coalesce, but I am normally aware that differing view-points collide in the ways I see. Within limits, I do not want to see things from a single point of view: I hope to be flexible, to think in a liquid a way as I can, and even to risk incoherence. And above all, I want to continue to change- I do not wish to remain the same jaded eye that I was a moment ago. Art is among the experiences I rely on to alter what I am. When it comes to seeing, objects and observers alter one another, and meaning goes in both directions....they are the conditions of seeing itself. A picture is the ways and places it is viewed, and I am the result of those various encounters. -James Elkins
"The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important. -Viktor Shklovsky, Art as Technique, 1925
The Salt Pit The Salt Pit is an abstract composition that incorporates freehand drawing and layered markmaking to depict a world in ceaseless flux. It evokes the vastness of the universe and our efforts to rationalize, fictionalize, or understand the matter that exists beyond the limits of our perception. Ritchie typically favors a kind of gestamtkunstwerk (total work of art) in which multiple paintings installed together often extend beyond the canvas onto the gallery wall to form an immersive installation. He regards painting not so much as a construction of space as a continuous flow of slowed-down information multiple threads that seemingly interrupt and/or threaten to cancel each other out. Gestural lines mimic both the flow and upheavals of the universe and the map of neurons racing through the human brain -not to mention the stops, starts, and false starts that twist through the process of painting. -ICA Wall Text, Expanding the Field of Painting
Matthew Ritchie, The Salt Pit, 2008
Matthew Ritchie, The Ghost Operator, White Cube Gallery, London 2008
Trevor Paglan, The Salt Pit, Northeast of Kabul, Afghanistan, 2006
Claude Monet, Water Lilies and the Japanese Bridge, 1899
The Sublime The Picturesque Thomas Prichard Rossiter, Niagara Falls, 1858 The Beautiful Joseph William Casilear, Niagara Falls, 1872 Thomas Hill, Niagara Falls, 1860 -Intense emotions; prompt feeling of awe or terror -Emotional response to vast, infinite, dynamic, and fearsome quality of nature -Astonishment -Conceptual framework with which to view an actual landscape -Variety of elements: curious details, interesting textures, palette of dark to light -When fashionable, tourists traveled to untamed areas in pursuit of their own visually ideal. (Claude Glass) -Projects beauty onto natural objects -Creates universal feeling of satisfaction and delight -No underlying concept or purpose -Eventually lead to Romanticism
Matthew Ritchie, The Salt Pit, 2008
2. Building a map. -Collaborating on building a strange new shared world. -Collect all these thoughts together, pin them up. Make sure you can easily move everything around! -Collaborate on a map/network of possible connections between each idea. There are no bad ideas but some ideas may be too hard to fit in, some may be too easy or familiar. If an idea has too many connections, or too few, it may not be useful here. (See Network Theory). See if this rule helps you order the space: the closer the distance between two ideas, the more normal the story will feel. The greater the distance, the greater the feeling of strangeness. Consider the Following: -What is the most intriguing grouping of ideas? You may have to design a voting system or elect a team of editors to imitate how the human brain decides on the final list.
Actor-Network Theory -Treats objects as part of social network. -Maps relations that are simultaneously material (between things) and semiotic (between concepts). It assumes that many relations are both material and semiotic. -Although it is called a theory, ANT does not usually explain why or "how" a network takes the form that it does. Rather, ANT is a way of thoroughly exploring the relational ties within a network (which can be a multitude of different things). As Latour notes, "explanation does not follow from description; it is description taken that much further." It is not, in other words, a theory "of" anything, but rather a method, or a "how-to book" as Latour puts it. -What more do we see? Consider how the following relates to: - Visual art and the creative process? - Matthew Ritchie s, The Salt Pit? - OUR project?
Matthew Ritchie, The Salt Pit, 2008
3. Elements of narrative. -By placing the elements together you might begin to imagine a 'story' that links them. Hold that thought. -Lets see how long we can hold off from either 'realistic' solutions - or 'invented' ones. -Maybe the real world is already strange enough that we don't need to undermine the narrative of the future with either facts - or impossible fantasies - But we can actually imagine more, go further and get stranger by letting the viewer's imagination guess what might be possible. -This project plays with a famous trick used by mystery writers - start with three apparently unconnected facts and then let the reader deduce how they are linked through clues. -Though, we will start with unconnected facts and allow the viewer the space to develop their own nonlinear narrative - a famous trick used by artists...)