Katy Macleod

What ['consciousness'] does not see it does not see for reasons of principle, it is because it is consciousness that it does not see. What it does not see is what in it prepares the vision of the rest (as the retina is blind at the point where the fibres that will permit the vision spread out into it). What it does not see is what makes it see, is its tie to Being, is its corporeity, are the existentials by which the world becomes visible, is the flesh wherein the object is born.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Working Notes, May, 1960

 

Consciousness is both embodied and hidden. Through language we make sense of what it is to be conscious but it is the body/mind which registers consciousness. In this current work by Ineke van der Wal, it as if she has removed her mimetic rendering of the body as lived consciousness in pursuit of a more conceptual, more obviously linguistic approach. However, in this short text, I will assume that this is not quite the case; that her work is once again charged by what the body is as a perceiving organism, which is always and unalterably both conscious and unconscious of itself: it is, in fact, conscious of its ability to conceive but unconscious of how it perceives and how the sensory and neurological mechanisms determine the processes involved in apprehension, in their full complexity and ambiguity. For the conscious mind, the inner workings of the body are absent; they are what Drew Leder describes in The Absent Body (1990), as a 'nullpoint', that is a voided part of consciousness.

 

Notions of absence and displacement are powerfully resonant within the histories of art in many different ways. Contemporaneously, the idea of displacement adheres to a single, iconic gesture of removal by Marcel Duchamp, that is his infamous removal of the urinal from its place of manufacture to a place of gallery exhibition display, in 1915. Through this gesture of displacement, and with hindsight, Duchamp dismissed both the conventional understanding of a manufactured object and the object, termed art. It was a conceptually daring assertion of art as thought, not artistic mark, or style, or signature: all three were simultaneously re-placed by the mute obduracy of a manufactured object, anonymously reproduced on an assembly line, along with a false declaration of authorship. At one swoop, it now seems, the object became the concept of art.  And this idea is in play in van der Wal's current work, which I have not seen, but has been described to me. Perhaps it is this, the fact that I am here, in England, alone with my thoughts, which has determined that I will see this work as an elegant continuum of the work that I know. If that is the case, bear with me because I shall be brief.

 

In Ineke van der Wal's work, conceptual displacement relates to what it is to realise being fully present to the process of painting within the experience of being in and of the body. We could say that this is not at all unusual and that it is a process that could be said to characterise much of the painting of the last few decades. However, her work deals with both the extraordinary complexity of the body's surfaces, its skin and what we might call visual bodily appearance, and the hidden, but powerfully important, viscerality beneath. It is this viscerality, after all, which keeps the body functioning as a living organism; it is also this which means that awareness of what is being experienced is removed from consciousness because we do not know what is taking place in our cornea, let alone our veins and arteries: we do not, in fact, know our bodies. We could say, rather, it is they who know us. Whatever we eat, drink or, indeed, how we consume our lives, is known by our bodies rather than our conscious minds. Unless we are under medical supervision, we do not know our internal organs because they are never revealed to us. They are hidden to us, but they are us. In my view, this paradoxical is-ness is the conceptual core of van der Wal's oeuvre: the heavily marked surfaces of her canvases, (which you can now barely see beneath the plastic carrier bag), and the pulsations of paint which register the body, rely on an understanding that the skin never fully represents the body because it, as all animals in the wild reveal through their kills, is pumping and raw. Our supposedly advanced cultures do not wish to deal with the raw, we prefer the anesthetised, the cooked, the intellectually mastered. For us, the body as it is lived must be kept at bay, subdued by the logic of our shaping intellects, which fashion knowledge that keeps the visceral and chaotic in its place, hidden from view, and within a consciousness which has only grasped the logic of an event or visual display: this happened and thus it is, as I have grasped it intellectually. But the experience of the body is always present to understanding. That present is never fully available to consciousness and, one might be tempted to say, never available to language  but language, as Merleau-Ponty indicated, also responds to the body:

 

The wonderful thing about language is that it promotes its own oblivion: my eyes follow the lines on paper, and from the moment I am caught up in their meaning, I lose sight of them. The paper, the letters on it, my eyes and body are there only as the minimum setting of some invisible operation. Expression fades out before what is expressed, and this is why its mediating role may pass unnoticed, and why Descartes nowhere mentions it. Descartes and a fortiori, his reader, begin their mediation in what is already a universe of discourse. This certainty which we enjoy of reaching, beyond expression, a truth separable from it and of which expression is merely the garment and contingent manifestation, has been implanted in us precisely by language.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962

 

The pursuit of linguistic formulation within art practice is endemic in current practices, however, for van der Wal, as for Duchamp, the conceptual is represented through what we might call visual language. It is here that the paring down of conventional thinking was exercised by Duchamp and it is here, through the visual, that van der Wal provides her gestures of thought about the conceptual collision between the physical painting, its absent space and linguistic referent. Language and enculturation through the body can perhaps never be fully realised, never known or effectively understood, as Drew Leder points out in his marvellously provocative book, (1990), concerning the intertwining of body and mind and the phenomenological redress of Cartesian thought. The body is always beside its self, alien to consciousness, an abstracted phenomenological entity, on one important, intimate level. It is this level, which I maintain is still the central concern of Ineke van der Wal's art practice. I will put forward the idea that the status of this current work is dependent upon a reading which acknowledges the paradoxical consciousness of embodiment, of the relation between that which is apparent and that which is hidden from view. Her work has always provided a conceptual space for the body, beneath and beyond the painted surface, taking off from the canvas, burrowing into the recesses of viewers' minds given over to surface, to notions of identity and to conventional linguistic analysis. This work is not about conventional identity, it is about that nameless identity of the body, which is forever displaced from full understanding and without which, we are dust indeed.