Metamorphoses from Causal Relations to Indexical Signs

Yağız Özgen

 

I would like to begin this text by clarifying my position in the exhibition. Even though I have fulfilled the tasks that would be expected of a curator to undertake, I am not the curator but an artist curating the exhibition. Even though I am not a curator, I think that any deliberate act could be a work of art. For instance, respiration, collecting pollinates while taking a promenade in nature, reading a book with undivided attention to thoroughly comprehend it, peeling a potato, or making small, medium, and large sized snowballs to sell them on a street booth. Thus in my opinion engaging with the tasks related to organizing an exhibition as a work of art makes no exception. In fact, there are numerous examples of “artist as a curator” works in art history since 1957.1 However, there is a critical distinction that needs further elaboration. Because in this case, an artist who contributes to the exhibition with a work acts as the curator to make decisions on the conceptual framework which brings the works together in this exhibition. I would like to touch on this divergence before I unpack the exhibition subject.

 

In the process of developing an artistic approach, any attempt to make art bears the potential to provide us with an idea about the nature of art. This principle applies regardless of the work’s subject matter. Even only through the means of mere presentation. On the other hand, the avant-garde artists of the last century sought more than developing an approach that revealed its artistic meaning during the presentation. These artists could be considered the pioneers of the paradigm in which they lived, and also formed a meta-language about the formal structure of their artistic approaches and the nature of art in general. This language constitutes an important source that could be employed to understand the conceptual development of art. Just as how we refer to a user manual while assembling a piece of furniture that tests our patience, we delve into this prefabricated meta-language on art when we have difficulty associating pioneering tendencies on art with an-integral-artistic-context that emerged during the conceptual development of art.

 

It would also be useful to note that throughout the history of thought, timely artistic tendencies drew parallels with contemporary philosophical approaches. For instance, the artistic approach developed by Conceptual Art is based on the widespread philosophical approach of the paradigm it originated. As a matter of fact, Conceptual Art occurred because of the Analytical Philosophy’s findings. This approach comprehends the external world that language represents by analyzing the structure of the designs it contains instead of establishing linguistic designs of the external world that surrounds us by representing the phenomena it contains. Considering that art itself is a language, the principle of Conceptual Art becomes self-evident because it inherently establishes a metalanguage that speaks about the nature of art while trying to comprehend the world it depicts by analyzing the language. This is precisely why Conceptual Art is art about art.

 

To have a better understanding of the world, it is of critical importance to analyze the structure of the language employed to construct the design of the external world that surrounds it. According to historian Hal Foster who refers to the ideas of Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin regarding how works of art should be constructed, art was never an activity for the good old days. It was always an activity for the new-bad-days. In the current paradigm of the new-bad-days2, contemporary artists do not establish a meta-language related to the formal structure of the art.

 

However, the fact that today’s artists remain silent about the nature of art and engage directly with practice does not imply that they relinquish their right to speak to art critics, art historians, curators, semiologists, or philosophers that develop concepts on art. I think we would have a stronger idea regarding the current state of the art if we interpret this in the sense that artists are no longer as inclined as they used to be to establish a metalanguage about art that looks at the world.

 

I can further note that I have extrapolated some of the reasons underlying art’s withdrawal from such a metalanguage. First of all, many artists today have already grasped that any attempt to make art inherently provides an idea about both the structure of their intellectual approach and the nature of art without establishing a meta-language. Unlike the avant-gardes of the last century, the fact that artists of our time prefer to remain silent about the nature of art might be hinting at something a lot more crucial about it: The moment we begin to speak about art through its own means, art ceases to be an-activity-towards-grasping-the-world-in-the-form-of-event. It rather transforms into an inert object that needs to be conserved.

 

As an artist who took on curatorial tasks in the organization of this exhibition, the main motivation for me to compare these two paradigms is that one cannot speak of a physical object that is actually a component of this world but that does not undergo metamorphosis over time. Moreover, as part of such a world that changes over time, it is not possible to think of a conceptual structure that would go through a radical change because it is dependent on human beings. I think the main problem ahead for someone engaging in artistic activity to grasp the outside world that surrounds it is indeed the one generated by the change. This is the subject that the exhibition delves into, namely, radical changes in objects, or in other words, metamorphoses. As a method to deal with this problem, the exhibition proposes to devise a language with a vocabulary constituted by signs of indexical character. More precisely, it seeks to unpack this method, which already has various examples in the history of art.

 

METAMORPHOSES FROM CAUSAL RELATIONS TO INDEXICAL SIGNS
The works on view are not designed as objects that maintain their permanence despite the changes in their environment but as sequences of events linked by causal relationships. By constructing a dynamic language with a vocabulary consisting of signs of indicative character, each artist focuses on specific phenomena according to their interests and examines the change in objects. These topics are the physical nature of television; an artist’s personal life, the emergence of human articulated language during the evolution of life, and the total amount of energy consumed per unit of time by the electronic devices used in an exhibition. Therefore, there is no similarity among these works in terms of subject matter, but they tackle different subjects with a similar approach and thus could be considered methodologically in parallel with each other.

 

As already underlined the main problem for a person engaged with artistic activity to comprehend the external world surrounding itself is the problem caused by change. The external world that surrounds us is one that finds rest in change as Heraclitus described it about 2500 years ago.3 And the signs that we have created through established conventions between people do not seem to have the power (or capacity) to depict such a dynamic world. As a matter of fact, the objects we are trying to speak about are changing radically before we agree on the meanings of signs. Since the meanings of the signs we established are mostly determined through interpersonal conventions, they are arbitrary signs and thus cannot represent the movement naturally and in accordance with its flow.

 

The indexical sign concept introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce, who is considered the founder of pragmatism, could serve as a guide for an artist to represent change without surrendering to aesthetic taste and historical habits. According to Peirce, the accuracy of a sign in terms of what it represents or its attainment in representing is based on the fact that an object/event is interpreted as a sign of another object/event by the perceiving mind. Hence, every object or event could be interpreted as a sign of another object or event.

 

On the other hand, if any event that will be interpreted as a sign by the perceiving mind shows (or describes) an event caused by it or one that caused it to occur, then it would be possible to consider this sign as an indexical sign of that event. Just as a sulky face could be read as a sign of boredom, or a rise in the mercury level in the thermometer indicates an increase in the temperature of the environment. Such signs inherently indicate change because their material is change itself. These are two separate occurrences that are causally linked. But since there is a causal relationship between them, the occurrence of one depends on the other thus one emerges as an indexical sign of the other.

 

If we follow Teo Grünberg’s thoughts on signs, we can generally say that the correlation of a sign with what it indicates is neither causal nor logical.4 Usually, a sign’s relation to what it indicates is established by conventions. We could unpack this phenomenon by pointing out that the word “blue” means “one of the cold colors”. However, it should be noted that the meaning of the word “one of the cold colors” depends on the conventions between speakers of the English language in which the word originated, and therefore is up to these speakers’ free will. This is not to suggest that the only valid way to establish the relationship between signs and what they indicate is through interpersonal accordance. As mentioned above, smoke hints at a fire; an increase in the level of mercury in a thermometer is caused by the increase in the ambient temperature; the facial expression of a person reveals the emotional state in a causal way. Here, the relationship of the sign with what it represents is natural. No matter what people or groups are inclined to think about the relations between such natural occurrences, it is obvious that the free will of conscious beings is not an important factor in changes occurring in the temperature of the environment caused by a rise in mercury level in the thermometer. So it is possible to deduce that the correlation of these indicators with what they show is not based on interpersonal consensus.

 

The phenomenon of interpersonal accordance is of the utmost importance for art. Because many aesthetic criteria and historical habits that art tries to debunk throughout its conceptual development are based on conventions. When artists are uncertain about how the elements in their work shall find form, they are often inclined to distance themselves from aesthetic taste and historical habits. Although this is quite a difficult task, as Marcel Duchamp, Bernard Venet, and many other artists have pointed out. As a matter of fact, the analysis of any given work that we would randomly choose from the history of art could easily reveal how substantial are the impacts of aesthetic taste and habits on decisions taken during the artistic development processes.

 

However, changing our worldview by breaking the aesthetic criteria and historical habits that we believe to be universal has always been one of the most fundamental issues of art. But in a philosophical sense, it should also be noted that there are not many alternatives to the methods that are already employed when we want to make decisions that are not based on aesthetic criteria and habits. These methods are limited to relying on causal relationships between events that are components of the external world that surrounds us and/or logical relationships between linguistic expressions. What people think does not play an important role in these. It makes sense to underline yet again that both are non-consensual relations between persons.

 

Making a work based on a causal relationship not only serves an artist to bypass arbitrary decisions based on aesthetic criteria but also makes representing the change in a natural way possible. In short, the capacity (potency) of a language whose vocabulary consists of indexical signs would be much more instrumental to represent the external world in motion than a language whose vocabulary consists of signs based on interpersonal conventions, and the conceptual framework of this exhibition modestly makes a proposition to render this method visible.

 

1 Organized by Richard Hamilton, Victor Pasmore and Lawrence Alloway in 1957, “an Exhibit” is considered as the first case in history that an artist as curator has undertaken putting the exhibition together.
2 Published by Verso in 20015, Hal Foster elaborates on this topic in the book titled “Bad New Days”.

3 Heraclitus was one of the pre-Socratic natural philosophers. He posited change as a universal principle on the work titled, “On Nature”. He followed the teachings of other philosophers of nature inhabiting lands known today as Miletus but Heraclitus of Ephesus differed by asserting that change is a universal principle. His teachings that focused on changes in perception had been the foundation of the potentiality/actuality teaching of Aristotle, which has influenced the history of thought for nearly twenty centuries.

4 Published by Gündoğan Yayınları in 1999, “Anlama, Belirsizlik ve Çok-Anlamlılık” (Comprehension, Ambiguity and Polysemantics) collected Teo Grünberg’s writings.