Thoughts on Hippos/The stare

I've been reading Mandelstam's The Age, Badiou's interpretation of it in Century, W.J.T Mitchell's What do Pictures Want, and thinking about them in relation to our own practice. To take a W.J.T Mitchell idea, it seems as though these strands of thinking/making are being 'plaited'* together to create a platform for the work for this show.

What seems to resonate with our practice is the ideas of animism and vitalism at work in Mandelstam's poem. The age (the 19th century) is seen as a beast - it's a living, organic being which, by the end of the poem is broken - looking back at the traces of it's own steps. It seems like Badiou chose the poem because, amongst other reasons, it is about the century looking at itself. This self-reflexivity seems relevant to our own practice, which is concerned with its own conditions of production. Furthermore the ideas of the 'face to face' ("Who will be able to stare into your pupils"), and of the beast looking back at itself, seem to map onto the issues in our own work about the stare, the facial, and the confrontation of the viewer with an (opaque) plea/command/non plea/non command.

The 'aliveness' of Mandelstam's age-as-beast connects to Badiou's methodology of examining how the (20th) century sees itself' and to Mitchell's idea about images that 'want' something. For Mitchell, there is a 'double consciousness' involved in how we see images - on the one hand we behave as if images/works of art have a life of their own, but on the other we demonstrate that obviously we don't really believe this to be the case. (This was the case for us when comparing Runge's interpretation of self-grown chemical images, with our own conception of Jackson Webb as a 'living practice' - we don't really believe that a third force is created between us, but we talk as if we do!) Mitchell states that 'The usual way of sorting out this double consciousness is to attribute one side of it to someone else, and to claim the hardheaded, critical, and skeptical position as one's own. There are many candidates for the "someone else" who believes that images are alive and want things: primitives, children, the masses, the illiterate, the uncritical, the illogical, the "Other."'

In our own work, it has been the hippo which stands in for this 'Other' - the image of the hippo, and it's placement in proximity to objects denoting logic/order/rationality is an acknowledgment of this double consciousness. The hippo stares back at the viewer, denoting the consciousness of the practice, but its ridiculousness, and mute quality denote the skepticism about its own status and position.




* At the Research Into Practice conference held at Royal Society of Arts, London Oct 31, Mitchell talked about the idea of plaiting as important in his own work

Mitchell, W.J.T, p7 What Images Want, Univesity of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 2005

Ideas of looking and being looked at are key here - we see a