ON VIEW
While Darkness Sleeps
The Latest Words & Work From Suzanne Anker
“There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those
who have perceived them without noticing." -Mary McCarthy
Perception, a mutable exchange between imaginary worlds and those occupying
cardinal space, is to varying degrees an acquired asset. Such that, it is a dividing line
between scales of awareness and raw instinct. For an artist, or poet, such fleeting moments of distinguishing the yet to be discovered in culture’s flotsam and jetsam joins
with its more rational other, the scientific researcher. Their mutual desires are to rewind and decipher the as yet unknown.
To what extent does the cultural imaginary bind to the scientific imaginary as a prelude to the “real?” With the cyber-real joining forces with medieval philosophical arguments about the proof of God—if we can imagine something, or name it, or picture
it, is it possible that it is, or will one day become, real? Can we view science fiction or
other cultural practices, such as visual art, as the vortex which explicates the manner in
which technoscience and its allied tools are capable of plotting our futures?
How is it that the imagination is so profoundly embedded in reality? When we speak
of fiction, do we mean so in a literal sense, the symbolic sense, or the literary sense?
Are fictive thoughts eruptions into consciousness revealing what lies beneath? The
question, is this an ongoing saga of how dreams and their displaced momentary fragments are assembled? In some sense the role of fiction or “pretend stories” point at
once to what has been lost, what noteworthy futures are in store, and all in all, epics
about the manipulation of resources and their subsequent revenge. Coming to our aid,
dreams of techno-fixes promise wonders and, in many cases, deliver them. Alternatively, such astonishments also summon alterations in the way societies organize themselves and govern their constituencies.
“While Darkness Sleeps,” my current exhibition at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary (The MAC) in Dallas, brings to the fore our relationships vis-à-vis the natural
world, mitigated by high technology. Nature is a mysterious time tester, pointing to
and enveloping what parameters are necessary for ethical consciousness. Encoded
in the DNA of all life is an expiration date, elastic enough to respond to chance and
change. What futures do the fictions of our current century seriously point to? How
earnestly are they considered?
Dystopian futures are hardly new to fiction or the visual arts for that matter. Apocalyptic reveries, end-of-the-world scenarios, and diabolical morality tales fill the storage
bins of our psyches, collective and personal. What interests me, however, are the current narratives of death, destruction and mayhem and their relationship to advances in
our own hyperreal rationality.
From surveillance to smart materials, from data networks to bio power to Monster
High dolls replacing Barbie, the grotesque and carnivalesque have taken new twists
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SciArt in America Februar y 2014