College of Fine Arts Masters of Fine Arts Research documentation 2011 Depart Without Return Shoufay Derz For my Father Peter Derz 15.02.1940-27.12.2009 When a candle is extinguished, the light from surrounding candles remains. For the light and the dark, in the presence and the absence, I wish you well. 3 Contents Abstract 1. Abstract 5 2. Acknowledgements 6 3. Introduction 7 3. Depart Without Return: project description 9 3. Absence and unknowing 18 4. The fugitive moment, arising and disappearing 41 5. The boat as body, death and the sea 59 6. Erasure: Influence of text and poetry 69 7. Conclusion Illustrations Appendix 1. List of works 100 2. Professional achievement during MFA 102 3. Poems 106 Bibliography 110 Disk 1. Depart Without Return DVD Disk 2. Depart Without Return DVD Disk 3. Transportation Love Song (QuickTime movie) Images from of Depart Without Return (PDF file) 4 Abstract The visual artist uses the known to depict the unknown just as the writer uses words to express the ineffable. From this paradox the premise of my research arises: an exploration of how we conceive of absence through marks or masks of presence. In attempting to apprehend the unknown, I consider the notion of negative thought. This acknowledges the futility of describing the unknown, and approaches it by speaking of it by what it is not. The paper presents several ideas concerning the themes of emptiness, impermanence and unknowing. The unknown is principally beyond knowledge; yet its significance and meaning is apparent across cultures as evidenced through diverse artistic and literary investigations. My art practice is experimental and process driven, culminating in the thematically interconnected installation Depart Without Return. Through the varied mediums of photography, video and sculpture, I have explored death, the desert, the ephemeral, written language and erasure. Death is one unknown that I believe most worthy of creative reflection; it is the only certainty and holds the ultimate potential to make us aware of the sublime wonder of life. I conclude that absence and presence are not as separate as they may appear; similarly the concepts of death and life are an inseparable continuum of each other. To explore absence one must do so through presence, similarly nothing and something are inextricable linked. By visually representing absence as presence, I aspire to draw attention to this essential paradox. Through its presence, Depart Without Return is a personal reflection on death and the meaning of emptiness. It is both a lament on the transience of life and a celebration of its mystery. 5 Acknowledgements My deepest gratitude to all who ‘got’ the premise of this research and recognized the value of its creative exploration. I wish to thank all my friends who encouraged, contributed, listened and supported me through the many unknowns that led to the realization of this long-term work. I’m grateful for all the obstacles and challenges I met alone the way. We become who we are as we wrestle with others and ourselves. From the earliest steps on the stony Ladakh desert, to the sublime edge of Ambrym volcano, I did not accomplish this project alone. 6 Introduction There are many things We could have said, But words never wanted To name them; And perhaps a world That is quietly sensed Across the air In another’s heart Becomes the inner companion To one’s own unknown.1 This work is about my observations and experiences towards the unknown, influenced by philosophical treatises on the ineffable, the infinite, and absence. The work explores two central ideas; first, I link the unknown to the infinite as endless and beyond comprehension. I concede that the ‘unknown’ is inconceivable and beyond articulation, for any attempt to describe it reifies and binds what is boundless and formless. Consequently, I offer no fixed definition nor clear questions. The artworks are simply lures or signposts towards the unknown, and reflect my attempt to penetrate the possibilities of what the signs stand in for. Secondly, I then contradict this by asserting the unknown and the known are not independent notions, but contingent upon each other. I believe that the ‘unknown’ is not simply a remote concept existing externally to the self, but also a deeply personal position within oneself in relationship to the ‘other’. This tension between the unknown and the known is where I place Depart without Return. In this paper I interweave discussion of my earlier works dreamboat and Transportation 1 John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 91. 7 Love Song: Inseperable as they offer some insight into how subsequent interests have developed. I use the words unknown, absence, nothing and mystery interchangeably in referring to the terra incognita of this paper. I begin with a general description of the installation Depart without Return, which represents the synthesis of my research and studio practice over the period of the MFA. I then follow this with a deeper examination the themes on absence, the ephemeral, boats, poetry, language and memory. Throughout the paper I discuss philosophy, cultural history, literature and my personal experiences that directly influenced the making of this work, and later, my evaluation of the work as a spectator. I also examine the work of specific artists that I believe contribute significantly to the field exploring the unknown and the expression of the ineffable. Lastly, I appraise the resulting body of research in relation to my personal insight the connections between death, emptiness, absence and presence. 8 Depart Without Return: project description - Lay with me - Field of diamonds - Field of stone Depart without Return begins with three images of a desert landscape. Importantly the work is grounded within experience of an actual place, denoting that the unknown is within this world rather than a realm beyond. The images Lay with me and Field of diamonds were photographed in the remote desert area near Leh on the border of northern India and western China. These images speak of the sense of wonder and awe inspired from direct engagement with vast open landscape. The landscape can be envisioned as both a physical thing and a mental image, thus it can be considered both real and imaginary, present and absent. This ambiguity is explored in the desert imagery representing a space absent of anything but the self. At the time and from that position I had wondered what was beyond the mountainous ranges, and consequently discovered on the other side is the desert from which this project garners it name. The title is a translation of the Taklamakan desert, which in Turkic literally means place from which no living thing returns.’ The Chinese refer to the desert as the ‘Death Sea’, which symbolises within the cultural imagination a formidable obstacle that one cannot traverse. Although an inhospitable wasteland it is the ideal habitat for the dead — and also for creative imagining into the unknown. While my research into the theme of death begun as an academic pursuit it later became a deeply personal experience when my father unexpectedly passed away. - Umbra Blumen Umbra Blumen (shadow flower) is the sculpture piece at the center of the installation; a casket shaped box made from recycled hardwood timber, with two blue glass panels 9 along each length. Text has been etched into the inside face of each glass panel and is only revealed when the light is powered. Umbra Blumen links the sea, sky, death and boats. The casket-shaped sculpture is, of all the pieces, the most literal allusion to the unknown. Like a death boat it is a vessel for carrying the body into absence and beyond sight. I envision the vessel as a small boat, as a metonym for the individual out at sea, which guides us to the view of the line that demarcates the visually known world from beyond. Throughout Depart without Return the colour blue alludes to this separation between the known and unknown and symbolises the infinite void. The text ‘negative’ takes inspiration from a book of poetry by Charles Wright called “Negative blue”. In the poem NEGATIVES II he writes, ‘One erases only in order to write again,’ an idea explored in this piece. Negotiating the paradox of creating through erasing, the text ‘negative’ fades in and out and is punctuated on either side by the color blue. Wright’s themes interconnecting landscape, language, mortality and God in the context of the everyday were a great inspiration at the time of grieving the loss of my father. Through its presence the sculpture is a positive representation of an absent body, and as such refers to what is not there. It is also a symbol of the enduring aspects of the dead - just as the past informs the present the language written today originates from bygone words. The text inscription has multifaceted meanings; referencing cultural memory but originating as a personal homage to my father whose handwriting has been recreated post-mortem. Discovering old hand written love letters dating back to 1973 that my father had addressed to my mother, I scoured through his words under detailed magnification in order to trace and visually translate individual letters into the new words Depart without Return that now appear etched in blue glass. This forged text invokes his presence, which emphasises that words have great potential to weave meaning. Yet when translated and reconceptualised such meaning can be entirely lost or transfigured. As a death vessel this artwork poetically links the process of translating—in latin translatus originally meaning ‘carried across’—with the passage after death from this place or condition to another.