reality of projection

Plato in The Republic addresses art as imitation or as mimesis. He critiques representation as a pretense to actually experiencing the real. The artist differs to the craftsman as he seeks to copy the Form (with a capital F), that is he copies the copy rather than creating something which is real. Hence art represents the appearance of appearances; a way tomake things appear rather that make them as they truly are. His philosophy suggests thatart appears different without being so; the image is removed from the truth and hence is inferior.

I am interested in emphasising art as being an enactment of the real,a re-presentation, yet I consider this presentation to be considered as something new in itself. Rather than critiquing image as merely an illusion, a projection of a higher reality, I feel it is more beneficial to call attention to the very nature of mediation;a reflection on mediation itself. This couldbe aligned with the simulacra and Baudrillard’s notion of the hyperreal yet I feel my interest lies more in theprocess of appearing itself as opposed to naming and categorising the outcome. The means and mediation of 'difference' itself I suppose, if I want to bring Deleuze into it.

Still on the other hand I do feel that I am not trying to prove or overlay the projected image as reality, rather I see it as an attempt to imbue the work strongly within its own situation, (working in the studio, documenting and presenting work etc) so that it becomes difficult to distinguish work from requirement, representation from the real.

Emphasising the experience of the moment itself by presenting it as representation but then allowing it to fall out again.

I’m not sure it fits in but I am also intrigued by Schopenhauer’s philosophy of aesthetics in The World as Will and Representation particularly ‘das delo’ or the systematic ordering of how things present themselves in an illusional way. That is the world as we encounter it does not exist rather it occurs as the way we order and systematise it in relation to sufficient reason. This harps back to my thinking at the beginning of the project- of making a viewer come to understand the pre-established way in which they approach representation. Schopenhauer suggests it is through the infinite that we can enter domains outside of space and time and experience reality as it truly is. He cynically suggests it is through total absorption into the world of representation that prevents suffering as it diverts the spectators attention form to grave everyday world and lifts it to a world that consists of the folly of a mere play of images.