John Hyatt

Director of MIRIAD/Head of the Graduate School of the Faculty of Art and Design
Manchester Metropolitan University

The First Man in Space without Political Overtones

Gagarin says, in ecstasy,
he could have
gone on forever

he floated
at and sang
and when he emerged from that

one hundred eight minutes off
the surface of
the earth he was smiling.

Then he returned
to take his place
among the rest of us

from all that division and
subtraction a measure
to and heel

heel and toe he felt
as if he had
been dancing

– William Carlos Williams

Through the use of examples of my own diverse practice, I would like to present an overview of the persistence of aesthetic questions over a period of time of working as an artist. I would like to show how the questions of aesthetics are transferable from one medium to another by talking through key projects of the last twenty years that have been made through a diversity of materials. I will select from work that is either written, painted, designed, videoed, played (sound), woven, installed as large public sculpture or digitally made. Through an analysis of selected projects, I will foreground the aesthetic considerations where aesthetics has been an issue “within” and “without” a diachronic tale of national and world politics and technological contexts. The relationship, strong or weak, to contexts, immediate or remote will be addressed. The work references various notions: Brechtian distancing of the viewer, taste, balance and imbalance, the problem of edge, scale, squaring the circle.

Therefore, each piece will not be addressed in its full complexity but it will be used to investigate my current work investigating the significance of developments in cognitive science and our understanding of how the brain works to suggest the implications of a synthesis of new scientific knowledge with an understanding of an art practice. Therefore, in addition to the work of such as Brecht, Max Raphael on Guernica, T.J.Clark on Pisarro, I will be referencing the work in cognitive science of Lakoff and Johnson in the States:

‘Contrary to traditional views of meaning…our conceptual system is, for the most part, structured by systematic metaphorical mappings [so] we understand more abstract and less structured domains (such as our concepts of reason, knowledge, belief) via mappings from more concrete and highly structured domains of experience (such as our bodily experience of vision, movement, eating, or manipulating objects). Language, and the conceptual system that underlies it, does not give us a literal core of terms capable of mapping directly onto experience. Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 10. Also cf. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)): metaphors we live by are resultant from a differentiation process in spatial interactions of the contextualised body: differentiating other actors and their form in space relative to your own.

I will assert that practice is a giving form to. I will ask, can this process miss out language? Giving form to externalises and tests our conceptions through giving form to our perceptions. Perception is a process of evaluation involving metaphorical transference. The need in a primitive organism for differentiation in perception of other actors leads to sense organs embracing form – organs that developed to translate energy patterns and re-create those patterns inside the organism through these sense organs that actively translate and re-make (hairs in the ears, cone rods in the eye) external stimuli and phenomena. In this, I will particularly look at a) The notion of ‘the surface’ b) The notion of ‘on’ the surface c) the notion of ‘the container’ d) the frame as ‘container’ e) The notion of ‘in’ the container, f) The notion of ‘In front’ etc… The talk will, therefore, span not just personal work of twenty years but theories of the evolution of the human senses and the physical development of our bodies in relation to aesthetic concerns.

This is a talk that will raise more fruitful questions for future research rather than provide answers but the use of examples of past and current practice will ground the theoretical hot air in a set of actual completed practical experiments.