File Note 155: Richard Wright

‘Consciousness flickers; and even at its brightest, there is a small focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbral region of experience which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension. The simplicity of clear consciousness is no measure of the complexity of complete experience’.1

In 2017 Richard Wright opened an exhibition in the Aird’s Lane Bricks Space at The Modern Institute in Glasgow. Anyone familiar with the artist’s work knows that for the last thirty or so years he has made wall drawings, of varying scale and complexity, in very direct and sensitive response to the space in which they are produced. In this show though, there were no wall drawings. At least not in the sense that one usually thinks of them.

The first work you encountered was installed on the outside of the building—a long, low, light-industrial-looking unit that might once have been a workshop or factory. Pasted directly onto the exterior walls —as well as partially covering windows, sills, ledges and mouldings —were hundreds of paper posters of the kind that usually advertise nightclubs, gigs, magazines or album releases. The posters were uniform in size and shape, and each was divided diagonally to create a simple design in one of four variations: white/black; black/white; white/red; and red/white.

From these basic elements (basic in terms of both design and materiality), Wright created a complex geometric composition across the building’s façade. It was remarkable for the degree of variation and novelty achievable from such an apparently limited set of forms, the intricacies of the pattern produced by a simple process of adding, rotating and layering the sheets one on top of the other. It called to mind the modernist languages of Futurist painting but operated more like the camouflage livery on a dazzle ship, breaking up and disrupting the surface to reveal a more complex, kinetic architecture behind or beneath.

As you entered the building, the everyday fabric of the space reasserted itself. A number of small works on paper were arranged around the walls, hung directly onto the crumbling brick and plaster. One depicted a mountain, set against an empty sky, a semi-naturalistic scene painted in watercolour; another appeared more schematic, a simple conduit and cell form, like a blueprint or plan; a third described a cryptic architectural elevation, the planes of the structure rendered in brick pattern, folding and bending through brick-patterned space.

‘The relationship of each moment in the whole to all the others is implied by its total content: the way in which it ‘holds’ all the others enfolded within it.’2

For the physicist and theorist David Bohm, the universe isn’t composed of discrete chunks of stuff—of matter that can be broken down into unchanging and ever smaller fragments—it is composed of ‘moments’. Everything that we can see and sense and measure and touch is caught in a process of constant change, and what we encounter at our scale of ‘reality’, Bohm understood as an abstraction or projection of a deeper, more fundamental plane or dimension.

Ever since the fifth century BC, when Democritus first proposed the atom as the elementary building block for everything in the universe, scientists have attempted to break matter down into smaller and smaller parts. First came the atom, until that was subsequently divided into electrons, protons and neutrons, which in turn were found to consist of hundreds of different, smaller particles including quarks and gluons. And while we still tend to think of all matter as being composed of these tiny, indivisible ‘building blocks’, scientists now know that particles are much less like discrete, stable bodies of ‘stuff’ and much more like excitable bundles of energy.

At this scale of reality, the laws of classical physics no longer apply. Quantum mechanics has demonstrated how particles can behave like bits of matter, but can also manifest as waves or fields. What is more, what we think of as empty space is in fact full of energy —energy that we know is there, but which still cannot properly be accounted for. Roughly 68 percent of the universe is made up of this ‘dark energy’, with ‘dark matter’ making up a further 27 percent. The rest—everything on earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter—adds up to less than 5 percent of the universe.

In his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Bohm used his lifelong work on quantum physics to set out his vision of the implicate and explicate order: a theory of reality in which what we experience (the explicate order) is a kind of dynamic and temporal unfolding of a deeper dimension (the implicate order)—an energetic, holistic force or field that connects everything, everywhere, across space and time. For Bohm, ‘objects’ in our universe—all matter, all particles, everything from photons to kettles to footballs to cats—are best thought of not as ‘things’ but as ‘processes’ emerging out of this field, characterised not by their autonomy, permanence and immutability, but by a state of immanent, ceaseless ‘becoming’:

‘What is implied by this proposal is that what we call empty space contains an immense background of energy, and that matter as we know it is a small, ‘quantized’, wavelike excitation on top of this background,rather like a tiny ripple on a vast sea.’3

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A hologram works by capturing a three-dimensional image of an object using interference patterns, created when light waves bounce off it and intersect. Unlike a traditional photographic process, these patterns are not a visual representation of the object but a complex and enigmatic abstraction. To the naked eye they look like a set of intersecting, concentric circles—like ripples on a pool of water—but when a light is shone through them, a three-dimensional image is produced from the information encoded in the waveforms and fixed on the film.

What is remarkable about the hologram is that if you cut the film in half and shine a light separately through each piece, you don’t get two halves of the picture, you get two intact images of the object. And if you cut the film up again, into smaller and smaller fragments, each fragment still produces a complete image (albeit a little hazier). In a hologram, knowledge, memory and information of the whole are distributed and contained within each and every part.

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‘Each instance of concrescence is itself the novel individual ‘thing’ in question. There are not ‘the concrescence’ and ‘the novel thing’: when we analyse the novel thing we find nothing but the concrescence.‘Actuality’ means nothing else than this ultimate entry into the concrete.’5

In 1920 the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead published his seminal work, Process and Reality. In it, he put forward his theory of ‘process relational thought’, in which he described the basic nature of the world as made up of events and the process of their creation and extinction, as well as the idea that all objects are only real for themselves or each other through their relations. I am quoting here from Wikipedia—another vast and distributed field of information (and another exemplary process-object)—because I cannot say it better than this:

‘Whitehead describes any entity as in some sense nothing more and nothing less than the sum of its relations to other entities—its synthesis of and reaction to the world around it. A real thing is just that which forces the rest of the universe to in some way conform to it; that is to say, if theoretically a thing made strictly no difference to any other entity, it could not be said to really exist. Relations are not secondary to what a thing is, they are what the thing is.’6

‘All things flow’,7 and for Whitehead, matter is nothing more than an abstraction or ‘concrescence’ from these relational events or ‘occasions’, which are the final, real things that make up the world. But if matter is in one sense a relation or interaction, it is also a kind of experience, and this experience goes all the way down.

Both Whitehead and Bohm understood particles not just as quanta or energy, but as interconnected bundles of experience or ‘awareness’, elementary vectors of atavistic intuition. In this way, mind and matter become aspects of the same totality, the same fundamental stuff out of which everything unfolds. Otherwise, where does it come from? From where do sensation and experience and emotion and knowing emerge into the world? And as these primitive particles of spatio-temporal sensation arrange themselves into successively more complex forms—into molecules, enzymes, cells, plants, rocks, nervous systems, brains and planets—so the complexity of ‘feeling’ correspondingly increases, until a kind of threshold is crossed into what we understand or experience as consciousness.

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What, then, is the meaning of the appearance of the apparently independent and self-existent ‘manifest world’ …? The answer to this question is indicated by the root of the word ‘manifest’, which comes from the Latin ‘manus’, meaning ‘hand’. Essentially, what is manifest is what can be held with the hand—something solid, tangible and visibly stable.8

Shapes and lines and thoughts and materials are organised and assembled, fluorescing briefly into novel forms and patterns before disappearing again, collapsing back into a pot of paint or a stack of posters. Works cluster into new constellations and relation. Edges agitate. The hand holds within it a kind of knowledge or intellect, quite as much as the ‘mind’ or the head. ‘Consciousness flickers’ and I’m back in that space on Aird’s Lane, the delicate leaded skylight opening out of the building’s interior like an opaque and fractured aperture to an impossibly rich and inaccessible ‘outside’, another plane or dimension. In here we only experience a mediated, simplified, but still beautiful projection. It hardens then dissipates—intangible, diaphanous, but somehow solid, real—appearing and fading with the invisible passage of clouds and sun; imminent for us now as nothing more nor less than a dazzling matrix of light, moving gently across the walls of the room.