A partial transcript from the Keynote Lecture delivered by Erik Madigan Heck at The International Photography Festival in Olten, Switzerland, August 2021
On all levels , macro and micro , we live inside a series of infinite loops within the theatre of our visceral existence. In our daily lives, what we understand and create is defined by the fundamental laws of the natural world we inhabit, which are in turn defined by circular parameters. We are born, and we die.
It’s common to see or feel in a photograph a similar face, or place in time from another image or memory — for everything ultimately resembles something else, even if we’ve never seen it before. Relational aesthetics are the most basic way we can begin to relate to each other.
When we create a work of art we are thus assembling an amalgamation of all our thoughts, memories, emotions, traumas and loves — until now, unknowingly, by translating them into something external. When we re-look at what we’ve made, we realize we are really re-looking 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.
Recently I re-read the manuscript of Yves Klein’s 1957 lecture from the Sorbonne, in Paris, ‘The Evolution of Art Towards the Immaterial’, where he famously declared —
‘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 define who we are as individuals, and make up the larger indefinable space that we’ve only ever been able to attempt to describe historically through religious doctrine, and art.
As artists we are 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 what it feels like to those around us — as a call and response.
Art allows us to act on our ultimate desire to connect and share with each other, and be seen and heard from a safe distance. And since art is an extension of what its maker believes to be true, it can be thought of as our most capable conversational tool, in which we may make sense of this loop we all occupy — much more than religion, for its medium is expression, not doctrine, or fiction.
When it’s authentic, art may be considered non-fiction, for our feelings will always be truer than any reality we see in front of us. Even if we’re conditioned by our schooling, media, academic programmes, and critics to speak about art in analytical terms, our own feelings and sensibilities will always reign more powerfully than the political statements and cynical commentaries of modern society, especially in our post-Trumpian world, where facts themselves are no longer 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 imperative that we shift our focus away from topical concerns of the day, which have the facade of being inward-looking while existing as narcissistic surfaces used to divide us, rather than guide us together towards the sublime — the indescribable thing that transcends all human qualities.
Art’s purpose is 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.
As an artist, not a photographer — a distinction I find important — my job is to produce work that comes from a place of love. And, like Klein, the primary method by which I articulate my sensibilities is through colour.
The arranging of colour is and always will be the most important element in art-making; for colour engages us on a physiological level as well as an existential one.
It engages the child as well as the academic. A red stop sign [for instance] derives its purpose from its colour, not its letters. We stop because the colour red intrinsically alerts us to danger, as it has in most cultures throughout history.
The subject matter of my work is colour itself— not the fashion, the landscape, or the person wearing fashion inside of a landscape. These elements merely exist as mannequins to drape colour on top of.
To weave a loop between art history, colour, and time, I would like to begin by discussing Eugène Delacroix. In 1849 the French painter finished ‘The Good Samaritan’, a canvas depicting a man helping a woman down from her horse. Forty-one years later, Vincent van Gogh painted a variation of Delacroix’s canvas using the same title.
Historically, Delacroix is considered the first painter to combine colours in a dynamic, primary manner, which achieved a higher, more universal symbiosis of geometrical patterns and forms. He used colour to elicit transcendental responses from his viewers, preceding Yves Klein by a century.
Obviously artists have repainted others’ compositions for centuries, which in itself isn’t necessarily significant. The importance lies in how the application of colour supersedes a composition by allowing artists to engage in a dialogue across time, where the same composition is reinvented through it, birthing two languages from the same form.
Yves Klein frequently wrote about Delacroix’s work in his private journals. In studying both of their writings, a particular quotation of Delacroix’s that Klein fixated on also remains in my mind frequently:
‘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 colours and to the lines.’
The substance or composition of the thing in front of us becomes irrelevant almost, as colour’s infinite combinations placed upon the thing itself bring us past that which we know, and into the realm of the immaterial.
To quote another passage from one of Klein’s journals, this time one he wrote himself: ‘What I’m doing at this moment is analysing myself, analysing 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 believe his words to be authentic, and are the basis behind why I believe my photography acts in the same way that Klein considered his canvases: as a means to help us explain the unknown, in place of evidence of what we think we see.
In 1973, the BBC ran a documentary series called ‘The Ascent of Man’, a science-based miniseries where the host, Dr Jacob 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 twentieth 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 a picture of the material world. However, thanks to physics, photography was freed from the burden of pretending to do that, for it has never been merely a document of something real.
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.