The under-determination in Polyxene Kasda’s work
by Mariana Zikou, art historian, Stoa tou Vivliou 2/6/2016 Athens
I will try to develop some thoughts on the
writings of Poly Kasda in relation to one of her first books 'The Conscious
Eye' and her latest one 'When that word swallowed me'. The two will be linked
with an epistemological concept, the 'under-determination' and an allegory, the
Kafkaesque Burrow.
Dr. Yannis Almyrantis presented an intriguing
approach with his essay “The over-determination in Poly Kasda’s work”. The
present essay reflects on its antithetical term, the 'under-determination' in
Kasda’s work.
Within the frame of this presentation
‘under-determination’ is used with a double interpretation, employing the
prefix under- (in greek hypo-):
On one hand, under-determination is an
epistemological concept which challenges the univocal approach of experience.
In this sense, it is considered impossible for an experience to be fully
interpreted through a single axiom. This thinking is reflected in Gödel's
incompleteness theorem and can be extended to Derrida's philosophical term of
‘deconstruction’, which refers to the infinite experience of language, but also
to the impasse of its meaning.
Under-determination is transcribed in the work of
Poly Kasda as scattered traces of language, objects, performances, gatherings,
as well as other manifestations like TV shows, buildings and new media, which
may reveal or conceal the true meaning, the core of her objectives. A core
attracting into its orbit scientific theories of computational and cognitive
science along with the philosophical and applied concepts of experience.
'The Conscious Eye', one of the first books of
Poly Kasda, is associated with the epistemological interpretation of
under-determination. Poly Kasda initiates a genuine and systematic exploration
of the human experience and the cognitive processes that transpire the works of
artists and the artistic movements of the 20th century. The human eye is used
as an interface, the eye becomes a quasi-mechanical component tool which
creates a tube between the inner and outer reality topology.
The book starts with two questions 'So what
happened to many artists and they stopped painting? What lies behind this
silence that took so many strange forms?' To these questions Poly Kasda creates
insightful conceptions, linking scientific theories and technologies with
artistic methods and the philosophical discourse.
However, in the preamble of the book she already
shows her awareness of under-determination: 'This essay on the essence of
contemporary art and visual perception is just the tip of the iceberg'. In the
last pages of the book, she outlines the collapse of certainty, the decay of
conventional structures and with it, the withdrawal of words.
These comments lead the way to the second
interpretation of the term under-determination, into the creative-experiential
extension of the term, which can be connected to Poly Kasda’s new book 'When
that word swallowed me'.
The book is ushering us in a wild exploration
into what is under, below the territory of the visible and of the reassuring
semiology, into the aniconic fields of artistic experience and ambiguity, of
the collapse of the subject and ultimately the collapse of the text into
sub-texts, in word-symbols that burst further into glyphs, into the smallest
cracking units of language, to become objects and anti-texts, no-texts,
precipitated in a submersive trip into the substrates of language, the
hypothalamus of experience and into the sub-liminal of perception.
The deep dive begins; a persistent recollection
towards the core of the experience described in 'When that word swallowed me',
in which she notes: 'After the completion of The Conscious Eye, I was left
again with this Something Essential Missing, this SEM sensation'.
The course of the next 25 years would open up the
topoi for the emergence of the iceberg, an intense immersion to the core of
cognition and experience. A striking, persistent and productive exploration
which often anticipates the developments in technology and cognitive science,
such as through her artistic project Myth/Network, where Kasda composes an
ideography of the web before its spreading.
At the same time, these explorations in the other
side of reasoning, in the twilight of experience and of deconstructed meaning,
had their impact. In 'When that word swallowed me', Kasda reveals that her
essay 'Pyrisporos' which followed 'The Conscious Eye', disturbed and chased
away the audience she had gained with the latter.
As she continues her research into the
philosophical discourse of computational and cognitive science, her visionary
leaves her at times without applied scientific and theoretic tools. She then
resorts to alleged scientific axioms and data, some of which evolve later as
validated concepts, while others swing for now and maybe forever between the
exo-logical, the alchemy and the myth. Kasda will not renounce them as useful
tools, stating: 'But is there any other way? Those fantastic things that are
directly seen by the soul are formulated by the intellect as an absence; a
dense omission from which words return baffled'.
From then on, although her creative and
exploratory course continue intensively, she will start consciously and
methodically concealing their true essence. In 'When that word swallowed me’,
she confesses the creation of a 'self-sustaining shelter' which takes the form
of a woolen cocoon: '...I started knitting around me a borderless blanket. It
was gradually growing from inside itself, mounting on the walls, towering above
me like a wave swallowing me in its cocoon-like embrace'.
This hermetic structure can find its counterpart
in an allegorical architecture, the Burrow of Kafka, one of his last texts that
remained unfinished. The Kafkaesque edifice can be interpreted as the agitated
strive of an individual to safeguard her safety and integrity, when disclosing
the erebus of one's own personal experience.
As if in a discoursive relationship with the
Kafkaesque creature residing in its underground dark maze construction, Poly
Kasda writes: 'On the ordinary level I was protecting my delicate experiment
from the unexamined eyes, shielding it behind palatable, easy to digest
descriptions. I knew that if it were contaminated by doubt, the whole structure
would crumble…'.
This fragile and intimate revelation, along with
her uncompromising determination to continue sinking in the profound substrates
of the inner self, destined to be the cornerstones for the creation of her
allegorical biomatic narrative 'When that word swallowed me' and ultimately,
the symbolic collapse of her Kafkaesque shelter.
Kasda's short autofiction marks an epitome
of the research in the profound and unfathomed realms of human experience and
imaginary through artistic practice; a possible invitation also for us, to
challenge the emergence of our own minds' uncharted topoi. The 'Conscious Eye'
continues its quest into the most elusive, controversial and intra-real
dimensions of its existence.
Athens 19.7.2016
