We Are Only Partly Real, 2025
VR Installation Shot, Zone 3 Day Cycle
In the text Ahead of ‘Yes’ and ‘No’: Heidegger on Knowing Unknowingness, from On Not Knowing: How Artists Think (2013), Gary Peters refers to Martin Heidegger’s the The Origin of the Work of Art (1950) and Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature (1955) to reflect upon the nature of truth-seeking within works of art.[1]
Opposing the idea of art making or artworks as processes or things where problems can be solved, Peters text favours artworks that encapsulate an ‘affirmative’ experience which dissolves the dichotomies of binary thinking and closed questioning by offering an alternative to ‘pregiven’ choices, in which, the artist faces an opportunity to turn uncertainties into possibilities.[2]
Reflecting on the spark that ignites art making as being driven by curiosity rather than a need to know, Peters refers to the notion of ‘knowing unknowing’, wherein, the artwork works independently of knowledge, possessing an enigma and provocation which drives the viewer to think.[3]
Referring to Heidegger’s metaphor the ‘leap into the unknown’ as having an ‘allure’ in which we are ‘…drawn into thinking by that which is thought provoking’, Peters compares the experience of being allured, as witnessing ‘in-difference’ or something that is ‘coexistent’ and too elusive to tie down. He defines the ‘revelation of this work…that draws the thinker in, not as a way of approaching the truth but, rather, as a way of tracking and tracing (and taking pleasure in) its withdrawal. Being drawn to what withdraws is the essence of fascination’.[4]
Peters then refers to Blanchot who identifies art which ‘renders visible truth’s invisibility’, as working to ‘enact’ the truth and capture ‘the unconcealement of concealment’, which he describes as a form of ‘shelter’, where ‘truth is protected and preserved but also concealed’ as it ‘incessantly reveals and re-veils’.[5]
[1] Gary Peters. ‘Ahead of ‘Yes’ and ‘No’: Heidegger on Knowing Unknowingness’, in Elizabeth Fisher & Rebecca Fortnum ‘On Not Knowing: How Artists Think’. London: Black Dog Publishing. 2013. p110-119
[2] IBID.
[3] IBID.
[4] IBID.
[5] IBID.