The Bit Inbetween

Today literally is 'the bit in between' as it is our last day in Melbourne, and we catch a flight in the late afternoon to Sydney to stay at a budget hotel near the airport and fly the next day to New Zealand.

We use our limited time to visit the Museum Of Contemporary Art. The pieces are all by different artists and all need the explanation we are provided with by the guide, bring not obviously interpretable on their own. Which sounds like an indictment. But actually I think we could have made some interpretation of our own - we just might not have got quite so much out of it.

Of course all art is a matter of interpretation and so even with the guides explanation, certain pieces chime with me and begin a thought process of my own, so that now as I describe them to you I am no longer able to distinguish my own spin from the original - which is what good art, especially modern art, is all about.

Whilst not deliberately put together as such (as far as I know), there is, I think a theme to a few of the pieces, and that is, as the title suggest, 'the bit in between'.

Some artists had deliberately played on this theme, being interested in the gap between what is real and what is not, especially where a real object is present, but something not solid is represented.

In one piece, a set of neon strip lights depict a set of horizontal lines of diminishing size, set above each other in parrellel, and above them, a neon circle. The lights are real. The 'stairs' you see are not. The circle is just a circle, and it leads into the same room you stand in now. But it suggests something more.

In another, a camera, filming the room opposite, projects onto the wall behind the piece, the image of museum goers as they move around there. However, as we move through into the room to look closer, the image of us disappears. We occupy, in that moment, the space between what us obviously real, and what is not. We exist, but we are no longer portrayed as such.   I wonder, in that space, whether perhaps we have more scope, whether our conceptualisation of ourselves might become less restricted when our image is not tied down, strictly, to that which can be seen by the camera. In that space we might transform, become something bigger, more beautiful in our mind's eye. And might that, eventually be perceived by others? Might the widening of our own mental agility, our imagination if ourselves, become reality to the extent that we, personally, could prove t that to others, to the contrary of what their eyes might tell them?

It's a bit of a leap, I admit, but I have always believed in the limiting effect of our received understanding of ourselves through limited media caricatures, and indeed through the pigeon holing of  society and even our friends and family. 

"Jennifer is the arty one"

"Lisa is so fiery"

"The thing about Robert is he's just a little bit socially inept."

Are these people these things naturally and everlastingly?Or did they display some characteristics that signalled those things once or twice, and the reported image of themselves did the rest, tying them forever in their own minds and others to becoming that thing.

I have always loved the theory put forward by the poet Wallace Stevens, that reality and the imagination are so tightly interrelated that one cannot exist without the other. My favourite if his poems, The Man With The Blue Guitar, begins:

"A man played on a blue guitar,

A shearsman of sorts.

The day was green.

They said 'you have a blue guitar,

You do not play things as they are.'

The man replied, 'Things as they are,

Are changed upon the blue guitar.'"

We view everything through the filter of how we imagine them to be. If we imagine them differently, they will morph and change under that filter. What we believe we are seeing changes our behaviour, and our behaviour changes what we see. Or vice versa. M once told me a story from Chinese philosophy about a woman whose Mother In Law had come to live with her, and who loathed and hated her Mother In Law, because she criticised and moaned and sniped at her all day long. Eventually she visited a herbal doctor and asked for some poison to kill the Mother In Law with.

"Very well," said the doctor. "I can see your problem us very great. Here are some herbs which will surely kill her, however, they have a cumulative effect. You need to use them in tiny doses every day and, very gradually, they will poison her. But, in order to avoid suspicion, you must be very very kind and good to your Mother In Law, so that when she is finally dead, no one would think you would do such a thing."

As light hearted as I imagine you can be having just resolved to poison someone, the woman returned home and, sure enough hid a little of the poison in each meal. She went out of her way to be kind and friendly to her Mother In Law, the husband was greatly relieved and the household, once so stricken with enmity, became peaceful.

Weeks and months passed, and the woman and her Mother In Law became good friends, so much so that the woman ran back to the doctor in panic,

"Doctor!" She cried, "I need to reverse the poison! My Mother In Law has changed so much! She is good hearted and kind and she is a great friend to me! Please tell me it is not too late!"

And of course the doctor replies,

"My dear Lady, there was never any poison in those herbs. I only wanted you to see your Mother In Law when she was not defending herself in enmity against you."

Everything changes depending on how we perceive it, and how we perceive it changes everything.