Chelsea College of Art & Design Cultural Studies Essay

Margarida Sardinha 1998

Projecting the Already Projected

Life’s Paradox

The paradox of life is the constant doubt of testing the conscience of the truth.

One’s mind is like a wardrobe where on which every coat hanger there is a
bag and it’s up to us to explore the inside of one of those numerous bags...

Once one opens one of the bags, a subject is discovered, a place, an area and
as in every place there is a road that one must take before ending up in the
same place *1.

Life will be a reflection, regardless of its size, of the bag that was chosen. It ‘s
the subject of one’s life and it will be for the contents of that bag that one will
be fighting for.

The bigger that bag is, the more connected it is with other bags exactly like a
main road has more connections than a secondary one...

Although the act of choosing a bag is almost unconscious, it is still dependent

on our natural instincts provided by genes as something that one is born with...

And, because intellectualism is mathematical and intelligence is symmetrical *2

and these are the means deciding how one goes knowing oneself through the
road of one’s life: by tube, walking or by bus...

If one decides to feel its own road, simply feel it, through experiences using the
sensorial organs as the world’s window... then one goes travelling by tube and
one reflects the darkness of shadows that one sees.

We don’t see the darkness that we live in and become like machines following
a routine... with the happiness of being unconscient turning the world of
darkness into a real world *3...

We become sleeping objects being transported along a dark tunnel because we

simply blend with the environment and one doesn’t explore one’s self in the
sense of knowing one’s life...
Our life’s aim will be to be as similar as possible to our surroundings without
criticising them... *4

We and earth become only one thing where things cannot be put...
Some people prefer to live reflecting the darkness because of nature’s brutal
strength of eternity... *5

It is completely different if we imagine ourselves walking along the road,

fighting at the same time with our body and soul... *6 In that situation one’s
body will be the one being limited, it will be the one being commanded by
symbols and rules that society created: signals, language, morals, space and
time... all these aspects make a culture. A culture that everyone must obey
and being conscious of one self is to be conscious of one’s materialistic
limitations *7.

Along with that consciousness only the body obeys to the shadows of the road
and the soul is abstract in a constant search for the truth... even if your legs
are tired of walking, the energy of an active mind undertakes them to walk
even faster. One doesn’t even realise the pressions of the culture, but one has
the pain of a soul under a body. One has the conscience of not being anything
else but a soul and mind trapped in a body *8.

The more fragmented one’s mind is, it depends on the length of one’s road
because a critical and rational mind will want to explore all the connections of
the main road... In this multiple evolution of life the only thing that is
persistent is one’s primordial unconscient choice and the idea of darkness from
where everything comes from *9.

Distinguished are those who travel along the road by bus, they see everything
from the top, they don’t even need to touch the world to understand it. They
don’t even waste their bodies because something is transporting them through
the road and all its connections. Those human beings become archetypes...

They are not completely during their lifetime because they still have a body,
even if its inside a soul...*10 That’s the reason why only after death they
become archetypes.

Their main doubt is their own body and their own road is their own life... The
amazing act of becoming an archetype is to be remembered for eternity in
world’s history. These people become ideals in the following generations
minds *11.
As a conclusion of these three ways of exploring life and it’s paradox I would
say that it doesn’t really matter which way one chooses... There is only one
end, the closer one feels it, the more one realises that will never reach it...
There is nothing worst than having the consciousness of their own
unconsciousness... It’s a long way to have the consciousness of the darkness
and disperse it. The one’s that have really realised it have lived very turbulent
lives and some have killed themselves because the other side is death... One
starts in one place and one ends up in the same place having learned that
everything has a symmetrical reflection *12...
... we came from conscient darkness to the darkness conscient...

Reflections on Interpretation

1 The idea of a place which is out of time, original and central in a metaphysical way.

2 In one sense this “place” is a space inside the mind, not the space of the ego, which
is evident, but the secret or hidden space of the unconscious, the abyss from where
potentially thoughts and feelings emerge unpredictably.

3 The event that occurs in the space of the unformed is often conceived as
hierosgamos, or sacred marriage. At a primal moment the one centre divides into two
modes of expression. By the interaction of their difference, the two initiate a process of
change which accelerates throughout history. The two modes have been formulated in
various ways.

4 The successful results of a surface criticism’s determination of identity become the

interpretanda of deep interpretations

5 For Pythagorus they were the finite and infinite, for Plato they were presence and
matter. In much of the world thought, including the sankhua philosophy and tantric
tradition of India, the distinction is imaged forth as male and female. The gender principles
are seen as complementary cosmic forces creating and sustaining the universe as their
intimate interactions. At the same time they are allegories of aspects of the spirit.

6 The spinning lingham suggests the auto-generative absolute (“the thought that thinks
itself”, as Aristotle called it ; spirit creating an image of itself for its own contemplation, as
Hegel put it). It also suggests the creative (phallic) artist spinning of products of imagination
and at the same time the art work itself as an auto regenerated entity. Because the art
work , in a metaphysical ideology, comes into being no ordinary or worldly desire, but from
an attraction toward the absolute, it follows that, in a sense, it comes into being from
beyond, another world, and from the artist’s own inner (orphic) imperative to contact that
other world.

7 Again it suggests the narcissistic aspect of the process of art making, in which the
artist gazes into himself or herself as into a beloved. In much the same way the concept of
“place” (whether Meru or Makom), the metaphysical centre, relates to the artist studio as
the site where narcissistic auto- generation occurs, and to the art gallery, which is purified
as a temple, to create a setting in which the walls and floor may seam to act like creative
membranes.

8 In Jungian terminology the uroboros is the unconscious, the abyss inner darkness
which is completely self contained and devours and feeds itself, like tail-bitting serpent. It is
the darkness in which one seeks to know oneself.

9 The ego approaches this void and feels his own boundaries becoming clear because
they are terrifyingly threatened with a dissolution which at the same time they long for. The
black smoke that comes off the void into one’s lungs one grasp both with the thrill of near
annihilation and with a new raw energy, that can perhaps, be redirected to the world of
form. From porting numerous forms rising dreamily from the unconscious, the work now
portrays the unconscious itself.

10 The concept of spirit in Art, articulated by both Hegel and Coomaraswamy, is the
mediating membrane which joins the diverse elements and smoothes out the contradictions
among them. Coomaraswmy’s aesthetic theory, which is rooted in indian metaphysics, is, as
he recognised, not so different from that of Benedeto Croce. Both emphasised the idea of
universal spirit where there’s a channel of communication with and through the art object
or the yoga making it. Underlying this dramatic image is the premise, understood in both
ancient and modern contexts, that the soul has fallen from high and its incarnation as an
artist is one of its better chances of finding the way back.

11 Is really a state within. It has a lot to do with fear, in Oedipa terms, but more so,
with darkness. There is nothing so black as the black within. No darkness is as dark as that.
I am aware of the phenomenological presence of the void works but I am also aware that
phenomenological experience on its own is insufficient. I find myself coming back to the
idea of narrative without storytelling, to that which allows one bring in psychology, fear,
death and love in as direct a way as possible. This void is not something which is no
utterance. It is a potential space, not a non-space.