Rainer Maria Rilke

Micky Donnelly  Proposition #12  2008/2010  Oil on Fabric on Canvas

                                                

                                   “And we, spectators always, everywhere,

                                    looking at, never out of, everything!

                                    It fills us. We arrange it. It collapses. 

                                    We re-arrange it, and collapse ourselves.”

                                 Rainer Maria Rilke   from The Eighth Duino Elegy

Jouissance

Micky Donnelly  Proposition #42  2008/2010  Oil on Fabric on Canvas

Recently, while writing a statement about my work, I hesitated for some time before using the phrase “the jouissance of seeing” to describe some of the motivation behind my paintings and photographs. “Jouissance” is a word teetering on the brink of pretension, a word rarely used and probably only then by people who might claim to have read Jacques Lacan. There is a certain risk by association in using it, but the alternative possibilities for what I wanted to say didn’t quite measure up….

“The joy of seeing” is too weak, and too laced with intimations of popular psychology; similarly “the joy of looking” is too cosy and too domestic; “the joy of vision” or “the richness of vision” aren’t specific enough and seem to suggest some kind of mystical leanings; “the erotics of seeing” is a bit misleading, though it might have a certain agreeable overlap of correspondence; and so on….

“The jouissance of seeing” suggests more than just joy – it suggests play, joyousness, and delight through an active engagement, rather than something passively received. It implies the pleasures of actively looking at things in the world, things that become unique through the looking, not just awe-inspiring images of nature, for example, but modest everyday things seen consistently from new angles or in a new light.

The phrase might even suggest a kind of in-the-moment awareness of constantly 'seeing the world anew', the kind of awareness that can only be cultivated over a long period of time. And it would seem natural that years of looking at paintings, and making paintings, would help cultivate such an awareness.

John Cage

                                                 

Micky Donnelly  from  Mapping The Days  2008/2010

“Not immediately, but a few years later, I was to move from structure to process, from music as an object having parts, to music without beginning, middle, or end, music as weather."

                                                                                 John Cage  from An Autobiographical Statement

Keith Jarrett

                                    Micky Donnelly  Untitled  2010  Oil on Fabric on Canvas


"Keith Jarrett has commented that his best performances were during the times where he had the least amount of preconception of what he was going to play at the next moment. An apocryphal account of one such performance had Jarrett staring at the piano for several minutes without playing. As the audience grew increasingly uncomfortable, one member shouted to Jarrett, 'D sharp!', to which the pianist responded, 'Thank you!', and launched into an improvisation at speed."
                                                  adapted from an anonymous internet text

Gianni Vattimo

                                  Micky Donnelly  Cluster  2009  Oil on Fabric on Canvas


The Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo claims that a lot of the generally accepted certainties that have sustained our culture are not certainties at all. He says that, in order to see them differently, we need to find a type of ‘weak thought’ whereby our strongest and most basic intellectual assumptions are dissolved from within and replaced with a more flexible set of possibilities, which we should avoid moulding into yet another fixed and authoritative foundation for thought.

Postmodernism has generated various experiments along these lines, with some success, but is still commonly seen as an adjunct to late modernism, whose prescribed tenets continue to rule as our major cultural models. Specialisation and cultural reductionism, along with a narrow conflation of progress with new technologies, would still seem to be the order of the day. ‘Weak thought’ stands for something else - oblique means of discovery rather than analysis, and an emphasis on interpretations over facts. It advocates a ‘turning to new purposes’ rather than an aggressive overcoming of tradition, and it recommends open, organic forms of research with more than one vocabulary. Innovation and secularisation are welcomed because they gradually undermine conditioning, creating a ‘play of interpretations’ that facilitates a shift towards a more open, charitable society less fixated on the old truths.

Although Vattimo’s discussion stays very much within the realms of philosophy, the interesting thing, for some people, is that the general description of ‘weak thought’ fits closely with what contemporary art, in all its diverse and anarchic forms, should be, or ideally could be, were it not for the twin contagions of pretension and money (this might sound naïve, but just think about how art is actually used by most people). ‘Weak thought’ could therefore be easily contrived as a very useful model for the aspirations of artists today. Or, alternatively, what artists have been doing for the last few hundred years could be contrived as a model for ‘weak thought’.

Orchids

                   
                             Micky Donnelly  Placement  2009  Oil on Fabric on Canvas

                                 
                                 A cosmic ray scrambles the atoms in a DNA molecule.
                         A few billion evolutionary steps later, orchids appear.
                         Are the orchids any less novel or marvellous for the
                         contingency of their coming into being?

Michel De Certeau

                         

                                       Micky Donnelly  Transition #1   2007   Mixed Media on Canvas


  “Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.”

                                                       Michel de Certeau from The Practice of Everyday Life

                                                                                                                                                                                                        

                               see more information at http://www.mickydonnelly.com/