I went out into the garden this morning. Of course I had noticed it before now, but I hadn’t acknowledged it. The path has gone, the grass has regrown and the trace of his physical existence is no longer there. It left me feeling sad. He would run from one end of the trees to the other barking at the cyclists who would greet him as they passed. The path embodied his physical presence.
Video – A Line Made By Running
The line in Richard Long’s A Line Made By Walking (1967), embodied his physical presence in the act of walking and questioned which part is the art, the walking, the line, the photograph documenting it?
I then started thinking about how dogs see the world and about colour, about whether colour only exists because we perceive it and what the world would ‘look’ like if we didn’t. It took me to the classic question of whether a falling tree makes a sound if no-one is there to hear it. From a scientific perspective it does because it still creates the sound waves. But what about a banana in a dark room? It still exists even though we can’t perceive it, but is it still yellow? My initial thought was no, because there are no light waves to be reflected or absorbed.
I think that I prefer the scientific view to Berkeley’s idea that ‘to exist is to be perceived‘ in which neither the tree nor the banana exist until we perceive them. But that led me to thinking about whether my work is art when only I perceive it or whether it needs to be perceived by others as being art. I think Merleau-Ponty would say that it is enough that I experience it as art because our perception is embodied in our experience of being in the world. It is art because I declare it to be, the perception of others enhances it and adds to its meaning.
Rightly or wrongly, some rambling thoughts when I’m supposed to be getting on with something else.
Kate McCalmont-Woods 