Position Statement
By Khammachat Suwan
My practice during the epidemic focused on new possibilities for creating art. I am interested in the relationship between different reality levels. My practice seeks to reduce and widen the gap between these relationships by changing the status of materials, signs that are commonly used in everyday life and demonstrated in different contexts. The essence of everyday necessities is resurrected to a new form or new state of being.
We live in the world involving two dimensions and three dimensions. In other words, digital world and the world of objects. Virtual reality such as social media and object dimensions (real particle world) are inseparably linked. The relationship between these two expands the possibilities of human life, including art. The definition of art is fluid and constantly changing. From a historical perspective, our world is divided into three eras, Primitive, Christian and Modern. One of the important factors that changed the definition of art is the context that relates to time. In the Athens period, Plato was mainly negatively interested in art, since he was attempting to design and ideal society-a Republic!-and was eager to get rid of the artists on the grounds that art was of minimal practical use. The art of Marcel Duchamp, 'Fountain' in 1917 was a turning point in the interpretation of art. He challenged the definition of traditional art by installing a typical urinal at the Grand Central Palace in New York. Ordinary objects become art because of intelligent context management. In 1970, Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson and Perimeter / Pavilions / Decoys, 1978 by Mary Miss combines the boundaries of sculpture, architecture and landscape. The definition of art is inevitably linked to other area. Mary Kelly said, “There’s no single theoretical discourse which is going to offer an explanation for all forms of social relations or for every mode of political practice.”
“We perceive the world with language and explain it through language. All knowledge is based on language. But the language is not a truly medium that can help us access or communicate in detail as if putting the truth ahead. The discourse is used to guide the knowledge of the world in one direction with the power acting on it. But every language has changed all the time. The "reading" by the audience is another interpretation of that discourse. All knowledge is therefore bound to the interpretation of the language. ”
The world of objects is linked to language and interpretation. A logical picture of facts is a thought. In society language is something we use for a purpose. The meaning of words is constituted by the function they perform within any language-game. The meaning of an object can deliver messages in different contextual content and be interpreted in both consistent and conflicting. The object world is named and remembered. The interpretation relies on the personal experience and background knowledge of the interpreter. Because of these two things, ambiguity and contradiction are inevitable. Although the meaning of an object seems to be held firmly but it is still based on the flow of language. In other words, The identity of objects and their recognitions are unstable.
Images is the object, object is textile , language is abstract. We can interpret objects and sign in a variety of ways. It is not identical with their properties, but have a tense relationship with those properties, and this very tension is responsible for all of the change that occurs in the world. We can see the complexity in the simplicity of the objects and sign around us. We can see the complexity in the simplicity of the objects and sign around us. By organizing and using in different ways than general norms, we can communicate in different languages. The context is the creation of concepts and inventions by science and language. It is an institution. For example, things in museums are divided by genre, style, and age. These norms are what separate art from design, or ordinary objects, etc. The purpose of my practice is to understand the relationship of this intertextuality.
As Democritus put it ‘Nothing do we know from having seen it; for the truth is hidden in the deep.’ In our time, the findings of science are usually recognized as the gold standard for knowledge and truth. No one is actually in possession of knowledge or truth. From Lippmann theory, he tried to explain how the pictures that arise spontaneously in people’s minds come to be—a simplification of his theory is that we live in second-hand worlds. Because we are aware of much more than we have personally experienced our own experience is mainly indirect. So, never something we encounter directly in the flesh, we must approach it indirectly. Reality is something ‘constructed’ by language, power or human cultural practices. We understand the world through visual perception, all of the objects we experience are merely fictions. Wittgenstein was fond of making remarks to show that philosophy puzzles about things that ordinarily we are unconcerned with. Such as the nature of time: “if it is five o'clock in Cambridge, is it also five o'clock on the sun?” This produces a picture in our minds, but does the picture tell us what we have to look for, or have to do, to determine whether what is pictured is the case. So images are important as the center of human life.
“Now in this century into virtual reality, where everybody reads images through the virtual. … the virtual denies tactility. It denies your physical presence in relationship to something other than a lighted screen. The nature of art has given way to photographs and images - we receive information through images - that we don’t receive art through our total senses in terms of walking, looking, experiencing, touching and feeling. And that’s kind of been lost.”
The virus that first appeared in a market in Wuhan proves that globalism is dependent even on micro-locations and micro-events. My practice began with research and questioned the definition and context in the art by understanding the relationship between various dimensions. The connection between them creates an indivisible bond in today's society, including the art world. The scope and meaning of art is interpreted in various forms in the 21st century, when the world is linked by a complex network. Therefore, art is not just about the expression of the individual. It also reflects issues and / or questions about related things. The scope of my work is the application of virtual-dimensional and three-dimensional objects found in everyday life to ask questions to objects or symbol (itself) and the context. Changing the context of objects, sign and symbols is a strategy I have chosen for my practice. My concept was changing the context and original meaning of contemporary images. In our era people create a new form of storytelling using emojis, meme and so on which is images. Human emotions are condensed into signs and images. Distance is no longer a limit for communication. We communicate through images, via Instagram… upload photo, like and comment. While we use emoji and memes to immediately express our emotions we are temporarily disconnected from the perception of the material world. In other word, we live in the imaginative world.
My art is trying to ask questions about the gap between two-dimensional(or virtual) and three-dimensional reality. By creating emoji sculptures and sending them by posting, instead of using them in their original state(for chatting), the receiver's awareness will be stimulated in an unusual way. The message I want to convey is a chain that creates relationships between reality that are more than just presenting the artist's intelligence and making objects like Rosalind Krauss idea that art may serve more than the “discourse of originality,” and that it might indeed accomodate “much wider interests… fueled by more diverse institutions—than the restricted circle of professional art-making.” Of course, the development of my work in this final stage was based on previous work. The issue of covid outbreaks forced everything to adapt, and when unable to access studios and workshops Both methods of thinking and media must therefore be adjusted. My old work created installation depending on the area. But when the situation of the Covid epidemic struck me, I thought of the context of the word space in a new dimension. The main problem is limited medium. The limited media and what is the message lead to a McLuhan's theory, the medium is the message. McLuhan uses the term 'message' to convey content and characters. The content of the medium is easily understood and the characters of the media are another message that can be easily overlooked. McLuhan says "Indeed, it is only too typical that the 'content' of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium." For McLuhan, it was the medium itself that shaped and controlled "the scale and form of human association and action." Taking the movie as an example, he argued that the way this medium played with conceptions of speed and time transformed "the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure." Therefore, the message of the movie medium is this transition from "lineal connections" to "configurations." Extending the argument for understanding the medium as the message itself, he proposed that the "content of any medium is always another medium" – thus, speech is the content of writing, writing is the content of print, and print itself is the content of the telegraph. It means that the nature of a medium (the channel through which a message is transmitted) is more important than the meaning or content of the message. In this process, I created a small emoji sculptures by paper clay and sent it to a friend by mail, instead email or messaging program. The media is completely different from the original. The recipients have to wait and delay when they acknowledge the action. New perspectives on messages and media are upside down. The purpose of the immediate response, original media, is challenged by new media that has to wait for many days. My art is creating new perceptions of time and reality. Being familiar with certain things is not a confirmation of the fact that there is only one dimension. Our world is accelerating with the internet. We can communicate with a person on the other side of the world immediately. Of course, the messages sent to each other are just virtual reality. But what is influenced is human behavior in the material world. My art does not want to take viewers back to the old world. Just want to show it as a language that leads viewers to other unfamiliar interpretations of life. Sometime knowing something does not mean involve thinking about it. Art is like language. The meaning of words is constituded of functions that are used in any dimention and grammar does not tell us how language must be constructed in order to fulfill its purpose.
Art is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about. In art it is hard to say anything as good as saying nothing.