How are you, Hotel Waterloo
2008, Ink and watercolour on paper, 2-channel sound
This is an extract from the essay Mediating Pothos 2008
At the Hotel Waterloo in Wellington my grandmother hurries to room 507 to write a letter to her husband. From her window she can see the port where he is preparing to board a ship bound for Egypt.
As I am unable to see you to give you one more last goodbye hug I have rushed back here to write you my goodbyes.
Dearest remember always no matter where you are and in what circumstances I am with you – closer than breathing – spirit with your spirit. I am so at one with you.
She is separated from him. Himeros: she desires his embrace. Yet she cannot. Instead she writes to him: Pothos. He is absent and she shapes the space between them with language. In this space she connects to her beloved. Only here in the mediated or virtual realm, created through language, can she be closer than breathing, can she connect.
Vilém Flusser writes that communication is an artificial construct . The words ‘I love you’ that as a sixteen year old I first whispered into a girl’s ear are no more natural than the electric images glowing from a box in a lounge room. Communication and the various systems of language constructed by man exist for the purpose of rendering the abstract tangible. Allowing the unknown to exist in our daily discourses. Language can, through abstraction, create space for the imagining of meaning.
John Hanhardt writes that Gary Hill’s work is ironic in that it concerns itself with the threat of the erasure of language by the very technologies he uses in his art . There is however no chasm between language and communication technologies such as video. Language is not limited to the written or spoken word. Language is by definition a system of communication and the written and spoken word is so often supplanted with the term ‘language’ because it is a system that can be easily measured.
The English alphabet has a set of 26 symbols and these symbols are combined and collected into compilations called dictionaries that list how the symbols should be defined. The written and spoken word therefore is very typical of a system, if a system were to be defined as set of principles and guidelines similar to the rules of a game. If we were however to define a system as a set of things that are interconnected together into a network, then new communication technologies such as the internet or television, which are focused primarily on creating connections, are as valid as the written and spoken word as language. This definition of a system as an interconnecting network is more suitable as it is the very nature of communication to create connections.
As an artist I create connections, or rather I mediate. By presenting the art object in space I use language to shape a void where connections can take place. In this regard an artist is not dissimilar to a lover writing a letter to their beloved. Both the artist and the lover utilise language, an image repertoire, an interconnecting system, to shape the imaginary void where we can be closer than breathing.