Joe Newton

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All is One - Left
410mm x 470mm x 110mm oil on linen 2008

Fragmentation

 

 

The point of view is at an inaccessable height. The viewer has to move and maybe strain a bit to reach the point needed to make the side perspectives become at one plane with the front. This involves the viewer in the system. The system of perspective which can be a metaphor for the illusion of perception. Which only has one viewpoint, the same as one person. Every persons viewpoint is a different part of the whole.

Wholeness could be said to be everything being one or at oneness. With each bit of the whole being the whole which would not be whole without any part missing! All is one.

 

 

The use of units within one artwork shows the systematic nature of my philosophy. The distortion of one causes a cascade of change around it. Like a web of signification in structuralism where each constantly refers to each other or one particle of a micro-state of an overlying macro-state referring to each other and the overlying macro-state itself their similarity and difference cause a system to be seen and understood by our perception. The space of our perception also being one of convention like our use of perspective or of an innate gestalt such as our reaction to certain patterns can be used within this system of units to build up a whole from the units. Each unit either being part of the whole in which the change of any of the units alters the perception of the others the so called implicate order of the micro-state altering the overall explicate order of the macro-state. Each unit could act upon our perspectival conventions to pull the viewer to one position at which point there significance would change from one of moving to one of meaning. The separate micro-states would meld to show the macro-state or explicate order.
If these units are represented on more than one plane or use more than one plane to represent one then we have an analogue with higher planes or the idea that our plane of existence is not the true reality but just a manifestation of a higher plane.

 

 

The idea that the world is fragmented or made of units is deeply ingrained upon human society. Different religions, political, economic and racial groups show it's
fragmentation while the art, science and human work in general is also divided into specialities considered to be separate in essence. The notion that all these fragments are separate is an illusion, one which can only lead to conflict and confusion. What had, in the earliest days of civilisation, been a way to make tasks and problems managable and allow an autonomy of thought had become more than a useful technique. Humankind began to see and experience oneself and the world as actually constituted of separately existent fragments or things. This lead to the fragmentation of the way that humankind saw and understood itself and it's surroundings. Because we began to think in this way we overlook that it is the act of thinking in this way that leads to fragmentations which now seem to have autonomous existence. The breaking up of experience by the way we think using language. The universal habit of taking the content of out thought (via language) as being in direct correspondence to objective reality. The relationship of thought to reality is informed by the the use of theories, ways of looking at the world, which could be seen as an insight or idea that fits with experience at not actual knowledge of how the world is.
Theories could be said to be abstractions from reality but are taken to be reality, replacing each other over time. To look at the world from just one point of view is to miss the whole picture and look using a fragment. A theory could be compared to a particular view of some object. With each view or theory only perceiving some aspect of the object. The whole object is not perceived in any one view but is understood implicitly as a whole when looked at from more than one viewpoint.

 

 
 
 
 
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