Tony Maas

For Samual Beckett at the core of existence lay a helplessness beyond redemption, an impotence of enquiry which lies behind the question 'What are we here for?' The artist is not one concerned with the interpretation of reality, a dubious premise to my mind, but one concerned with its very falsehood the idea that there is a reality to start with. The intention is to peer between the cracks of truth and memory and establish a dialogue where puzzlement replaces certainty and the strange pulls at the familiar.

The artist’s role is that of storyteller, devising rituals and games which aim to address art's uneasy balance between what the philosophy of Claude Levi Strauss refers to as the '...mythical view and the science of inquiry...', a distinction between magic and science. It is a game pitched at the neurosis of intellectual certainty and the unrestricted playground of what the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud referred to as the pleasure-principle, the desire for pleasure whilst avoiding pain, the boundary between which lies that of the child memory and adult certitude.

We tame nature by our intellect yet do not conquer it, the sciences of the mind will not repel the chaotic forces of nature. At the core of Man lies internal forces at war between that of rationality and tumult; a front between fictional, poetic play and analytic discourse, pulling at the reigns of social order and challenging status. It is a documentary of narrative, seeking a value of truth behind language, though aware any truth is itself a construct of falsity, a layering of disbelief.

It is the impossible quest for understanding of that which is not knowable; who we are. Ultimately, the dialogue is with language itself and how it steers us toward certain codes of action and behaviour which affect our knowledge of self, examining the underlying mechanisms of how we arrive at our identity utilising playful challenges and the disruptive use of space to question the perception of what it is to be human. The artist seeks a disordering of language and its influence and imply a note of caution to our conception of the imprint of beliefs it creates. For myself this inevitably draws me toward the engines of social order and the values of class stitched throughout.

At its core there remains an inner absence of everything to itself which can never be directly experienced, a shadow of presence that can only be reached through a non verbal cognitive resonance.

'Words fly away; the written letter remains. Sound is absence, beguiling; out of sight, out of reach. What made the sound? Who is there? Sound is void, fear and wonder. Listening, as if to the dead, like a medium who deals only in history and what is lost, the ear attunes itself to distant signals, eavesdropping on ghosts and their chatter. Unable to write a solid history, the listener accedes to the slippage of time.'

Toop, David - Sinister Resonance. New York: Conrinuum Books Inc., 2010