Reservoir

Remco de Fouw, in the tradition of the German artists Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer, reaches back to a ‘pre-scientific’, quasi-alchemical language to call into question the cult of science and rationally characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment and the corresponding modes of scientistic, instrumental thinking which still pervade our world. These modes replaced a previous sense of awe at the mysteries of nature with a hard-headed, rationalistic, ‘how-to’ spirit which has been a key feature of the West ever since – a spirit to which we owe so much that is destructive as well as much that is convenient.

The Enlightenment’s most prominent figures included Kant, Locke and Voltaire – it consolidated Newton’s theory of the universe, and the rational approach to the solution of human problems as well as the problem of reality. On the one hand it freed the West from superstition and royal absolutism which have become so familiar that they are invisible – bureaucracy, the assembly line, universal surveillance, an all-pervading cult of instrumental rationality. Indeed the Enlightenment is sometimes seen, in the views of theorists as diverse as Foucault and Adorno, as having substituted one form of absolutism for another. (The worst accusation against the Enlightenment is that it replaced the capricious cruelty of the absolute monarch with the organised terror of the death camp.)

The artist’s interrogation of the positivist, rationalist and reductivist spirit which is a heritage of the Enlightenment, is in the name of a different (higher) understanding of enlightenment as individuation/transcendence. In ‘Newton’s Deluge’ two spheres, an orange plastic sun and a copper moon, threaten to dislodge the apples (lead and cork respectively) in reference to the traditional story of Newton’s discovery of gravity. This would only happen, of course, should the room ever flood with water (measurable on the metal supports) and cause the spheres to rise. But what could cause such a deluge? Global warming perhaps, itself traceable to the over-use of fossil fuels as a result of the despoiling of the earth, to which the Enlightenment with its rational, utilitarian, de-sacralising tendencies made its own contribution. In this installation the destructive outcome of scientific/technological rationality ironically points the finger at its cause – a search for pure knowledge which historically gave way to pure exploitation.

The visual-verbal pun (the spheres are ballcocks) links the despoiling of nature to a masculine ideology of domination, itself related to the cult of man as instrumental, measuring subject versus nature as passive object of interrogation. In this view, fostered for example by Francis Bacon, nature was regarded as a (female) object of interrogation by torture, in terms reminiscent of the witch-trials. This ‘man/nature’ dichotomy has of course been superseded by the insights of today’s science – quantum physics tends to see the world as a seamless whole rather than in terms of measuring subject and measured object. The notion of observation as inseparable from participation parallels the eastern concept of interconnectedness with nature rather than separation from it. But the lead apple dislodged by the action of the (conscious, male) sun will sink, whereas its cork counterpart affected by the action of the (intuitive, female) moon will float. Plastic, as opposed to copper, is an artificial material, not found in nature, and therefore perhaps illustrative of the destructive tendencies of industrialism.

‘Portal I, II, III, IV and V’ consists of photographs, framed in copper cylinder ends, of light bulbs from different angles, a fortuitous visual effect on the bulbs, recalling the yin/yang philosophy of the East and echoing the negative/positive duality of electricity (of which copper is one of the best conductors). Electricity, that everyday yet mysterious entity, embodies a further sense of ‘enlightenment’ which contains its own dialectic – while electricity eases our lives through warmth and heat, at the same time it endangers the planet, threatening global warming through the pollution resulting from its generation.

‘Omniscience’ looks like a mine, but with some crucial differences. It is a kind of giant water bomb, with sprinkler phials from a fire-safety system which might be expected to burst and release the water when the red liquid within expands with the heat. This is a ‘safe’ bomb which promises perhaps to counteract global warming – by a pre-emptive burst of water (or some cleansing spiritual substance) analogous to the fire fighter’s ‘back burning’ which prevents the spread of a larger fire. The mine can thus be seen as an ‘enlightenment bomb’ which may counteract the excesses of the Enlightenment by a new (or old) form of enlightenment – in terms of the bursting-out of opposition to Western materialism.

‘Omniscience’ recalls a traditional theological concept, but also the threat of ‘omni-science’ – the domination of the planet by the scientific, technological world-view. The mine cites the despoliation and pollution consequent on ‘mining’ itself. In the pre-Enlightenment, vitalistic, organic world-view the earth was regarded with reverence as a living entity, with consequent restraints on mining and exploitation. But with the mechanistic, scientific outlook fostered by Francis Bacon, Descartes and Newton and culminating in the Enlightenment – an outlook which still prevails in Western consciousness today – the earth came to be viewed no longer as a ‘mother’ but merely as a source of raw material for exploitation (Carolyn Merchant outlines this development in her classic eco-feminist study The Death of Nature). The de-sacralisation of nature, the ‘disenchantment of the world’ with the dominance of the machine-metaphor, leads to the destruction of nature.

This ‘mine’ also refers, perhaps, to the ‘l/me/mine’ cult of possessiveness characteristic of the West. In this sense the work cites the fragility of the individual ego whose disintegration is a source of fear for the West and, in contrast, of liberation for the East (Buddhism, it should be remembered, posited the illusory nature of the self or ‘l’ long before the French psychoanalyst Lacan. Thus, the annihilation of the ego may be seen from a positive perspective as an expansive uniting with all phenomena.

‘Reservoir I, II, III, IV, V’ explores ‘Enlightenment issues of surveillance and ecological danger. The eye pieces in the inverted cylinders may represent the traditional scientific world view, isolated and abstracted from nature, which both focuses and distorts its objects. The cylinders may also be seen as periscopes through which, submerged, we anxiously survey the waters of some negative utopia – a future into whose hands science and technology threaten to deliver us. (The entire space might also be read as a metaphorical submarine suggesting the isolation of the male scientific consciousness – an observatory trying to make sense of, and impose order on, a cosmos which eludes merely rational analysis.)

But the instruments could also be regarded as microscopes through which we ourselves are observed; a symbol, perhaps, of Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’, the prison whose inmates were never out of sight of the jailer. The modern actualisation of the Panopticon – the bureaucratic State with its computer files, identify cards, security devices and universal surveillance – is itself the culmination of Enlightenment thinking. The paradox is that the ‘liberal’ Enlightenment has led to the society of unfreedom in which we live, where the surveillance camp have become universal and consequently invisible.

‘Expansion Chamber’ in contrast with ‘Omniscience’ – the mine which threatens to explode – implies confinement. But the breath (‘life breath’) suggested by the snorkel, combined with the ‘oriental’ clouds, recalls the relation posited by Oriental philosophy between breath and the expansive thinking of the meditative state. This piece appears to be about the perception of Eastern concepts of expansive consciousness and interconnectedness through a (fundamentally inadequate) Western mind-set of instrumentalised perception.

Remco de Fouw’s work is situated at the site of tension of a number of dualities: yin/yang, east/west, organic/mechanistic, spirit/matter, female/male, freedom/bondage, nature/artifice, being/instrumentality, intuition/reason. These dualities can be summed up in the conflict which his work posits between enlightenment as transcendence and Enlightenment as instrumentality, between ecological harmony and global destruction. The art/science polarisation of the installations continues, with incisiveness and some humour, a scepticism in regard to science, technology and the technical spirit which has persisted in one form or another since the Industrial Revolution, and which shows no sign of abating as we enter the post-industrial era.