Gorge: An un-mountain, 2016
Dimensions: 190cm x 110cm x 110cm and 35cm x 235cm x 85cm
Materials: Baking tins, copper coated steel rings
Like a garment no longer worn
but slumped on the floor
wearing itself as only it could.
In 2016, I was beginning to feel bent out of shape after striving to build a monumental mountain. The tipping point was finding myself consumed by an un-mountain that collapsed and concertinaed me . It was not until I began to loosen my grip and get to grips with the constraints that I had set myself, when I started to imagine how comical and a desperate this impossible performance must have looked.
I reached a turning point, when reading The Split and the Structure, by Rudolf Arnheim, published in 1996. Formed from a collection of 28 essays written, Arnheim shares his views and perspective on the study of visual perception and the arts, which he approaches using the principles of Gestalt psychology.[1]
Across this series of essays Arnheim makes more than one analogy between the workings of nature and works of art. Whether drawing upon knowledge, experience, intuition or the imagination, Arnheim considers the creative act of an artist as an act of personification, wherein, the artist attributes human characteristics onto something non-human, to ’embody’ the ‘dynamic’ nature of indeterminate events, which he defines as a symbol of mental strength, in which, the viewer can confront life’s ‘mysteries and problems…challenges, threats’.
Illustrating the artist’s world as ‘a forest of symbols’, Arnheim states:
“Since forces are felt but are as abstract as electricity or gravitation, it is the artists’ task to make the strivings of the mind perceivable by seeing them symbolised in the behaviour of the environment.“
In the essay The Echo of the Mountain, Arnheim reflects on the ‘impediments of the body’ in relation to ‘the ease of the mind’s mobility’ and compares the ‘peaks and valleys’ of a sublime landscape alongside ‘abstract feelings’ that are not easy to define, due to emotional patterns of behaviour having a tendency to fluctuate.
Referring to the psychological drive that is required to climb mountains, Arnheim draws the readers attention to the precarious ‘edges of a precipice’ and uses the oxymoronic phrase ‘aspirations weakness’, to consider multiple points of view that reflects not only a determined climber, but a cautious climber, an overly anxious climber…[2]
Gorge: An un-mountain (detail), 2016
Baking tins, copper coated steel rings
190cm x 110cm x 110cm and 35cm x 235cm x 85cm
[1] Britannica. (n.d.) Gestalt psychology. Retrieved from: https://www.britannica.com/science/Gestalt-psychology. Source cited: 20th January, 2017
Gestalt theory emphasizes that the whole of anything is greater than its parts. That is, the attributes of the whole are not deducible from analysis of the parts in isolation. The word Gestalt is used in modern German to mean the way a thing has been “placed,” or “put together.” There is no exact equivalent in English. “Form” and “shape” are the usual translations; in psychology the word is often interpreted as “pattern” or “configuration.”
Gestalt theory originated in Austria and Germany as a reaction against the associationist and structural schools’ atomistic orientation (an approach which fragmented experience into distinct and unrelated elements). Gestalt studies made use instead of phenomenology. This method, with a tradition going back to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, involves nothing more than the description of direct psychological experience, with no restrictions on what is permissible in the description. Gestalt psychology was in part an attempt to add a humanistic dimension to what was considered a sterile approach to the scientific study of mental life. Gestalt psychology further sought to encompass the qualities of form, meaning, and value that prevailing psychologists had either ignored or presumed to fall outside the boundaries of science.
[2] Rudolph Arnheim. ‘The Split and the Structure’. University of California Press. 1996. p92-96