Obsessed, bewildered
~
By the shipwreck
Of the singular
~
We have chosen the meaning
Of being numerous
~
(George Oppen, Of Being Numerous, 1968)
‘being numerous’ is one of a series of recent works that reflects my shift in thinking about the relationship of the individual to community. being signifies the individual, the singular, whereas ‘numerous’ suggests the community, the many. The work also, almost involuntarily questions our relation to the environment with special reference to degradation of primary elements of agricultural survival.
At times when we talk of community we tend to think in terms of a desire for unity or shared purpose. Some may seek a Rousseauian notion of community, an intimacy or immanence that binds individuals into a common substance. My work is not this, nor is it a communion of political nationalism, homogenized and simplistic (that paradoxically echoes the oppressive faceless community of totalitarianism or absolutism). Rather I am dealing with a community constructed of inherent differences, splintered and fractured, whereby experience and meaning occur within these fractures - the spaces in-between. It is in this between space that the connections, the sharing, the being-with of experience and meaning is derived.
My idea for the cast salt work was inspired by the writings of Radical Empiricist William James. Unable to describe successfully how the objects of experience can come together in any coherent fashion he used the mosaic as a metaphor for the edges of experience. James argued that the pluralistic rather than atomistic (or singular) nature of experience supposes a continuous flux of both difference and unity wherein the transformations of experience depended upon conjunctive as well as disjunctive relations. The un-bedded edges of the mosaic were where these conjunctive and disjunctive relations met. However, it was Jean-Luc Nancy (The Inoperative Community 1991) who said to think the individual, the singular, first, before that of community is to think ones existence in terms of absolutes, theoretical philosophical extremes, as atomized beings. Ultimately he believed there is no meaning if meaning is not shared. The importance of Nancy’s (and James) thinking does not diminish the relevance of the individual; rather the shift of focus is from thinking the individual first, to a different point of departure, the being-with of community. Salt fits well for expressing these theoretical underpinnings. Salt is not a single mass, such as wood or steel or plastic. Rather it is an essential element, made up of individual crystals that only gain any meaning once they are assembled collectively. A single crystal or grain of salt is meaningless without its collective; it is a single point only.
It is an impossibility to think of ourselves as a single being and yet, we think first from the position of the individual. This is the illusion of the individual.
Megan Sprague
Artist Statement February 2009
