the mind and the world / imagination and reality.

I was really attracted to David Johnson's thoughts so I extracted pieces from his article Reality and Depth in the Independent Film and Video Magazine Vertigo.

Reality is something we experience in the gut rather than the intellect, though what exactly we experience will slowly be modified by what we believe. "Things merely are" as Stevens wrote. But perhaps it is within our relation to this "being" (and our eventual ceasing to be) that a difficult, open-eyed return to depth might be negotiated. Possibility of making an art that allowed depth, through the fact that reality is not transparent, that we experience what Wallace Stevens called a mundo: reality perceived, and thus formed and embellished, through a temperament, a mind. Our reality is full of histories, meanings, mechanisms, rhymes and rhythms, fears and hopes: all the attendants of time expanded outside the present of sensation. The recognition of reality as the product of an interplay between the world, in itself, and the mind which must imagine it, brought me back, through the frame of my work, to an idea of the spirit. It has been said that all that we have is surfaces, and on one level that is true. However it is equally true that all that we have is interiors - which are our own interior exteriorised. After all, we can only experience experiences. It is a kind of breathing, between the universe and the imagination, between things and their image in us - like the infinite recession between facing mirrors. A breathing also between now and not now - between being and not being: inspiration and expiration, light and darkness. The world in itself is unknowable - but at the core of the reality of experience we feel the heft and hardness of a world of things: and it is this which we seize with our hands and with metaphor (e=mc2 for example), and this from which we must fashion a real love. Without fictions we cannot conceive of the world. However, again like Stevens, I want an art (and a reality) that is not just a gratifying fantasy. A work of art deals with our experience of reality through another experience of reality. Art has always existed within more than one idea of reality: immediate and mediated. Words and matter impinge on reality in quite different ways. We can stand, in a sense, outside ourselves to think about ourselves. But we cannot stand outside our sense of reality. Light is such an old metaphor that we are hardly aware when it is one: enlightenment, awareness, life - and against that: darkness, the night of the soul, the nothingness behind appearance. We look out (and in) at the darkness when we dare, from the small circle lit by our own imagination and hope that the light is not ours only. That it exists without us. Light, inner light, which, in the words of Charles Taylor, "illuminates that space where I am present for myself." The world is ambiguous: why should I insist that my work be otherwise, so long as it contains a little of my truth and my longings. Though I hope that, ultimately, the work escapes everything I might say about it. Surfaces are not all we have - we have both more, and not even that. What we have, briefly, is a life. And within it, close up against it, so that its breath is our breath, we know that the world is real; really real.

Also why is the art world so reluctant to acknowledge the core role of metaphor, especially when the work is trying to escape all allusiveness? How often I read art criticism which tries to fill out something thin, something deliberately flat, rather than trying to find and render down, and say simply, something large and basic and felt. How seldom one hears the word profound. It embarrasses people. But I am not alone in wanting depth from art again. Ordinary, thoughtful people are grateful when they find it attempted seriously, and this should not be a reason to despise it. The deliberate blankness of Warhol and his successors needed to happen. But now we must find ways, without returning to the past or forgetting the reasons for our disillusionment, of making that difficult place where we can be truthful and yet make a place to stand and sometimes sing.