THE infinite loop
KEYNOTE ERIK MADIGAN HECK

SCRIPT & IMAGES

Erik hat uns freundlicherweise das Script und die Bilder für seine Keynote überlassen.

Hinweis: wenn du auf Mac bist, kannst du den untenstehenden Text auswählen und mit Option-Click (Sprachausgabe) vorlesen lassen.

Erik kindly let us have the script and images for his keynote.

Note: if you're on Mac, you can select the text below and option-click (speech output) to have it read aloud.

Download PDF with images…

Erik Madigan Heck | IPFO  International Photo Festival Olten - Switzerland | August 2021

On all levels, macro, and micro, we live inside a series of infinite loops through the theatre of our overarching visceral existence.

In our daily lives what we understand and create are defined by the fundamental laws of the natural world that we inhabit, which are in turn defined by circular parameters. 

We are born, and we die. 

It is common to see or feel in a photograph a similar face or place in time from another image, or memory— as everything ultimately resembles something else, even if we've never seen it before. And relational aesthetics are the most basic way we can begin to discuss Art with each other.

When we create a work of art we are thus assembling an amalgamation of all of our thoughts, memories, emotions, traumas, and loves until now, unknowingly, and translating them into something external — And when we relook at what we've made, we realize we are really relooking at ourselves through pure expression, with the understanding that we are merely a piece of a larger timeline that is constantly rotating, regenerating, and recycling itself.

In preparing for this talk I re-read the manuscript of Yves Klein's 1957 lecture "The Evolution of Art Towards the Immaterial," where he famously declared at the Sorbonne in Paris, "my paintings are only the ashes of my art." 

Klein was alluding to the non-physical space that we all occupy as humans- the indefinable feelings and emotions that actually define who we are as individuals, and makeup the larger indefinable space that we've only ever been able to attempt to define with religion, faith, and most importantly Art. 

As artists, we are very fortunate to be able to devote our lives to studying, understanding, and attempting to live inside ourselves, and dip our feet inside the immaterial world to report back what it feels like to those around us, like a call and response. 

Art allows us as humans to act on our ultimate desire as a species, which is to connect and share with each other, and be seen and heard from a safe distance. 

And since Art is an extension of what the maker believes to be true, it can thus be thought of as our most capable conversational tool in which we may make sense of the loop we all occupy— much more than religion, for it's medium is expression, not doctrine, or fiction. 

Art is not fiction, as our feelings will always be more true than any reality we see in front of us. Even if we're conditioned by our schooling, written media, museum programs, or art critics to now speak only about Art in analytical terms- our own feelings and sensibilities will always be more powerful than political statements, and cynical commentaries on modern society, especially in our post-Trumpian world, where facts themselves are no longer objective, or agreed upon. 

That is not to pretend that objective truths don't exist, on the contrary, we all still live under collective assumptions that we abide by—  we still stop at stop signs. 

But within the realm of creation, it is absolutely imperative that we re-shift our focus away from topical concerns of the day, such as identity politics— which ironically have the facade of being inward-looking, yet are merely narcissistic surfaces used to divide us, rather than guide us towards the sublime. 

The sublime by definition is the thing that transcends all, especially gender, race, and sexual preference. Art's role has never been to reinforce those divisions, but to unite us through realigning and reconditioning the way in which we interact with ourselves and ultimately the world. It allows us to add our own dialect to a language we all speak, and for others to paint on top of our words later on. 

For me, as an artist, not a photographer- and that distinction is important to make- it is my job to produce work that comes from a place of love. And like Klein, the primary method in which I articulate my sensibilities, is through color. 

The arranging of color, is, and will always be the most important element in all Art-making, for color actually engages us on a physiological level, as well as an existential one. It engages the child as well as the academic. 

Much like how a red stop sign derives its purpose from its color, not its words. We stop because the color red intrinsically alerts us to danger- in any culture, and has throughout history. 

In my own work, like the stop sign, the subject of the photograph is actually the color itself— not the fashion, or the landscape, or the person wearing the fashion in the landscape- the elements inside the composition merely exist as mannequins for me to drape color on top of. 

This has always been true throughout the history of art, even when the forms and compositions have been religious, or political in nature. 

To begin to create a literal loop between artists and art history, and color and time, I'd like to point to Eugene Delacroix. 

In 1849 the French painter created "The Good Samaritan," a canvas which depicts a man helping a woman down from a horse. 41 years later, Vincent Van Gogh painted another variation of Delacroix's canvas using his same title.

Historically, Delacroix is considered to be the first painter to combine colors in a dynamic and primary manner that achieved a higher, more universal rendition of geometrical patterns and forms, truly using color to elicit transcendental responses from his viewers, preceding Yves Klein by a century. 

Obviously artists have repainted other's compositions for over centuries, which actually isn't why I mention it. The importance lies in how the application of color can supersede a composition, and allow two artists to have a dialogue across time, where the same composition becomes reinvented, re-experienced, and understood differently- where two languages are birthed from the same form, or at least loosely.

To make a literal loop between centuries, Yves Klein frequently wrote about Delacroix's work in his private journals. In reading Klein's journals there remains a particular quote of Delacroix's that has stuck with me to this day:

"Woe to the picture which shows to a man gifted with imagination nothing more than finish. The merit of a picture is the indefinable: it is just the thing which goes beyond precision. What then is it? It is what the soul has added to the colors and to the lines."

The substance, or composition of the thing in front of us becomes irrelevant, almost, as color and its infinite combinations placed upon the thing itself, bring us past the thing we know, and into the realm of the immaterial. 

I'd like to quote another passage from Klein's journals, this time one Klein wrote himself—  

"What I'm doing at this moment is analyzing myself, analyzing my way of thinking, stripping myself bare, which I do know is indecent. I shouldn't do it. It's romantic. It's psychological. So why do I do it? Because I tell myself, beyond that awakened and effective reverie, that overall this reverie is vital to humans. It is universal and indeed if I strip myself bare, like the people who will live naked in the architecture of air, perhaps another form of intimacy will emerge from further off. And what is strange is to think that beyond that, there still exists more, even greater and more immense, and so on." 

I find his words to be both true, and utterly fascinating, and is the primary thought behind why I think about my photography in the same way Klein thought of his canvases— as a means to help us better explain the unknown, in place of evidence of what we think we see.

To begin to speak about photography more specifically lets jump forward to 1973. The BBC ran a documentary series called The Ascent of Man, a science based mini-series, where the host, Dr. Bronowski, began the show by saying:  "One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an actual picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the 20th century has been to show that such an aim is unattainable." 

Photography may be considered a physical science, or a subset of the physical sciences. And historically, as a medium, its primary concern has been to literally provide an actual picture of the material world. 

Thanks to physics, photography was freed of the burden of pretending to actually do that. And when I say pretend, I mean pretend. Photography has never been merely, or remotely, a document of something real. The absurdity of thinking it has been, or should be, is for the disillusioned. We should never have to answer a question like, "did you photoshop that?" Or, "Do you think that picture was staged?" Or, "Are those colors real?"

Photography is so much more than a physical science. And it has never truly documented that moment in time, as we never are truly seeing what's actually in front of us. It's a technical opinion, not a truth, when used under the guise of being a document.

Recently I stumbled upon Robert Macfarlane's essay "Silt", in which he writes—"The American writer William Fox spent his career exploring "cognitive dissonance in isotropic spaces", or more simply "how we get easily lost in spaces that appear much the same in all directions." 

He's referring to spaces such as deserts, the Antarctic, and volcanic tundras that literally become monotone. As he writes about his own journeys in relation to Fox, he says "The Serenity of the space through which we were moving calmed me to the point of invulnerability. A Mile out, the white mist still hovered, and in the haze, I started to perceive impossible forms and shapes." 

We all exist in the mist of our imaginations, and sometimes, we, like Macfarlane and Fox, exist in the physical mists of a landscape— but the works that we create should always convey the impossible forms that Macfarlane speaks of, because they are the only truths we can utter. 

I don't care about a perfectly timed photo of something that might have been. I crave the poetry of what wasn't there, the eccentricity that is invented on top of reality. 

Although photography is the central core of this festival, and the primary topic I was brought to speak about, it is not my primary focus as an artist, nor is it my first love- even though its the medium I've chosen to work with for half of my life.

As an artist, I actually detest when I am described as a "fashion photographer", because it's not accurate— I also paint; write, curate, edit, and publish an annual art book called Nomenus; make short films, perfumes, and even recently put out a collaborative musical score that includes my own poetry narrated by the actress Tilda Swinton on top of a 27 minute journey of Classical, Choral, and Techno music, called Safe Passage. The record was made as an homage to my mother who passed away last year from Breast Cancer and Covid-19, and acted as a counterpart to my most recent book, The Garden.

I hope to always strive to try my hand at new mediums that I feel will further help form a more wholesome vision of myself to the world, and personally help me make sense of my place in it. 

Thank you.