Our conception and then expression of reality is based on a series of meaning-making processes that are valid just as conventionally accepted in the society, and within specific groups. However, those are just one of the many options we have to read and express the reality around us.

Similarly, a work of art, being primarily a symbolic representation of reality, can also be read on different levels often depending on the cultural background of the viewer. 

So, I’m interested in how you yourself ‘read’ these works. Can you step outside for a moment and let me know what you see?

My overall project exists within five worlds: 

1 subjective 

2 Sign

3 world framed

4 world unframed 

5 elemental 

Each world describes reality and its base within different contexts ! Each has a different feeling. Each has a different reality!

In my work, the center is the subjective or subject. It is the basis for what we see and how we see it! I am not a formalist, my work is not about the object first! I’m more interested in the meaning of the subject and how that feels. When we see anything that is represented it becomes mental, its primary structure exists in our minds, in a way all pictures are mental! On the other end of my five worlds are the elements, the material, the form! You could say that this is the basis for our reality. Of course minimalism from the ‘60s tells us that that is all there is; silent without feeling or judgment. Paint and canvas is all that’s there. So I went the other way and said that stick figures live and that we live within pictures. This was 1972-73 so I say that it is not the object but the subject! 

That’s how I got to the cosmology of heaven, god, death, hell, demons, and angels. The imaginary universe!

The three exhibited works are part of the “Charts” series; they describe the splitting of a thing from the objective material reality to its purely subjective idea. 

As other symbols in use, they are intended to abstract and condense everyday things and circumstances within single signifying signs. On the other hand, some of your works are actually closer to the surrealist “automatic writing”, as created during performances where you act under hypnosis. 

What was the specific referent in the works presented here — or how did the specific signs included in those “charts” arrived to you in relation to the nature of the thought, material, location (either physical, psychological or situational) you were positioned in at the time of making them?

Reality and the world are represented in the charts. The five worlds! From subject to object, a kind of encyclopedia! But the world changes and these borders change as well! I am attracted to the notion that everything is represented (a fiction) in these charts. They are constructed and they represent our need to put everything in its place. I do not want the viewer of my work to believe that there is only one way! Some of my shows seem to work easier than others. As a professor I never told the students that I had the answers! I only asked questions. Art is not science, it does not progress. It is not more advanced today than it was 1000 years ago. Art changes. Different problems are solved in different ages. I believe that my work addresses modernism and its problems. I’m trying to define the nature of reality and its image and of course that can be thought of as political!

Your research elaborates on the relationship between perception and reality, between the ability to see something and the ability to represent it. This research may appear purely self-referential, but turns out to have some deep socio-political implications: as history tells us,  the use of symbols can be instrumentally and strategically used also as a system of power, to manipulate the reality of things. (i.e. totalitarianisms) – Would you say that your practice also implies some political stand? I mean, is your work political?

In a way the represented world can always be deconstructed as political. Even if I represent my subjective cosmology, its representation illustrates our personal feelings and lives. And that we all have value.

Humankind has elaborated different linguistic systems and systems of knowledge through time, and your personal signs cosmology taps and mixes fluidly various elements coming from different cultures and contexts. Your pictograms somehow preceded emojis, and all the tools of today predominant visual communication. 

Do you feel that there is any system better than others in expressing the complexity of reality? What’s your idea about our communication “evolution” (or involution) through time?

I do not really like the contest of which art is best. Who gets the gold medal or star!

So many choices are intuitive. We as artists respond to a zeitgeist without fully understanding its context! My work from the mid ‘70s looks like the iPhone of today; this was done way before we had personal computers, internet or virtual reality but it must have been in the zeitgeist some 50 years ago! Of course we had TV, cartoons and board games. In 1973 I did a performance where I entered a picture in front of an audience and described what I saw. I described the atmosphere in the picture, the time, the place, my age, the feeling of standing on that ground! But mostly I was describing my feelings within that place. 18 years later, in 1991, I was walking inside a virtual city that I designed and I was describing what I saw and how I felt. Things change!

go to the next interview

Enam Gbewonyo