FLUX
AETERNA
Gerald O'Connell
http://www.gacoc.demon.co.uk/
The Flux Aeterna project commenced in August 1990 with
the development of a single imperfect curve. I was, at the
time, only faintly aware of the thought processes that had
attracted me to the idea, but, as the drawings proceeded,
I found much of the activity to be mechanical. I was,
therefore, able to reflect at some length upon the genesis
of the work, and also upon many aspects of its aesthetic
and psychological significance.
I have attempted here to set out some of these reflections
and to impose some sort of order and coherence upon them. I
should make it clear, however, that I can promise nothing
that would amount to a rationale, explanation or
justification. Instead, I offer a modest record of some of
the thoughts that have formed and accompanied the making of
a series of acrylic ink drawings. The series is incomplete,
and, I suspect, must necessarily remain so. Much the same
can be said for the thoughts...
In July 1990 I afforded myself the luxury of a day spent
in various public and commercial art galleries in London.
I saw paintings and drawings of every type and from every
era. I ended the day, before returning home, by passing
a bookshop specialising in exotic travel. In the window
was an enormous relief map of part of the Himalayas.
Deeply and suddenly fascinated by the flowing density of
its contours, I was surprised to find that I drew more
pleasure from the map than anything else I had seen that
day.
In a popular discussion of cosmological themes I came
across the engaging speculation that the entirety of
existence is owed to a single random disturbance in the
primordial waveform. 'Being', it would seem' is nothing
more than the relentless and often chaotic development of
this irregularity.
All we have, our only means of understanding, is the
picture. The totality of our discourse, internal and
external, is by way of analogy - by means of various kinds
of pictures. We tend to think of maps as a special, very
powerful but limited, type of picture. But perhaps we should
regard every picture as really just a type of map - an
attempt to make a diagram of an area of thought.
Flux Aeterna could be regarded, perhaps mischievously, as
a philosophical enquiry into the nature of change and
movement, conducted within (carto)graphic parameters - because
some truths cannot be explained, they can only be drawn. The
pen is mightier than the word...
There are certain mathematical patterns that are of great
fundamental simplicity - basic expressions of quantity and
extension. They can seem to act together as a kind of motor
for being, always in flux, shifting, ticking away beneath
the veil of the physical. They are independent of categories
like mass or time. Any graphical representation of them
must be totally ambiguous as to scale, appearing at once as
both cosmic and microscopic. In such maps there can be no
objects or things, only the shadows of action or the
trajectories of potential. In an age of religious
superstition the cartogropher who sought to record these
pathways might have been described as exploring God's
fingerprint. In our age of scientific superstition the same
activity will, perhaps, be described in terms of chaos
theory.
...not things moving, but movement itself - so persistent
and inevitable that it creates coagulant clouds and
apparitions out of itself; and we mistake these blurred
ghosts for the ultimate components, the particles and forces
from which, we persuade ourselves, existence itself must be
constructed..
I have, from time to time, been forced to describe these
drawings as 'abstract'. But the abstract represents forms of
conceptual reality, while the representation is merely an
abstraction from the real. We cannot stand apart from
reality. An idea is a thing. Every attempt to bring reason
to bear on this activity seems to end in paradox, and it is
not clear whether the problem lies with the activity or with
reason itself. Perhaps paradox is all there is...
I am aware that I am making another world for myself, a
garden of forking paths where every step taken invites yet
more. I walk to feed a sense of astonishment upon which I
have come to depend. Thus, what commences as an activity
becomes a condition.
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