''Gresham’s ghost: prolegomena'' Exhibition
Jack Hanley
This event has ended.
According to a standard understanding of perception, one is able to comprehend the world only as
one sees it, within the restraints or limits of a particularly human sense and reason. When we imagine what
it’s like to be a bat, it is still a human attempting to think the world of a bat, not actually becoming the bat.
Nevertheless we are wrong to assume that our subjectivity is totally our own to begin with. We are constantly
dependent upon many other living beings to reach any of our aspirations, but we rarely acknowledge their
assistance or the possibility that our living is translated in part through theirs, and perhaps vice-versa. There
is a whole contagion of life forms that survive within us. Some help with digestion, others with
joint-movement, and so many others with basic upkeep. Our lives are heavily dependent on the lives of
others.
Our intentions and motives are constantly both siphoned through and indebted to many other
material beings or objects, and larger social organisms. If we are willing to acknowledge that social, political,
and capitalistic forces all make a claim on us, and that we’re able to understand those forces to some extent,
then we should also be ready to say that non-human beings influence our ways of being, that the trees exhale
our air and thus create a different atmosphere, that mosquitos orient our behavior towards minute movements
very differently. These interactions, where the human and the non-human overlap, folding into one another’s
worlds, makes explicit the fact that all beings are translating one another, sentient and non-sentient, and that
we are not trapped in thinking the world just as we see it, but are able to see partially through the eyes of
various creatures.
The response will be that this is simple anthropomorphism, but just as knowing another’s mind is
an impossible task to achieve fully, we still assume that we can empathize, understand, and comprehend the
pain, pleasure, boredom, success, and consternation of another. Likewise, as the rest of the world actively
affects us in both large and small ways, it is when we highlight these moments that we realize that who we
are in the world is not just contingent upon humanity, but upon all the world’s wealth.
We’ve made quite a big mess for ourselves, but we must attempt to widen our scope of how to tend
to the world, how we intend it and likewise how it’s been tending to us, intending us - sculpting our
sensibilities outside our knowledge. We will never exhaust such relations of care and caution, whether they
be human to human or otherwise.
Media
Schedule
from April 07, 2012 to April 28, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-04-07 from 18:00 to 20:00