Startled
‘Startled’ is a possible affect generated by the artwork and as such is an intensity or a discharge of sorts. It appears as a quality between the image and space. To experience the sensation of a startling image-space is to be interrupted in the act of perceiving it, when you are seized by it, rather than being in possession of a feeling of control. There is with this a sense of reversal that inaugurates such a sensation. It might even be the sensation of the image trembling, thus resisting definite location and in turn designation and naming.
There are many forms of space: smooth, striated, interrupted, continuous, dense, eruptive, floating, contemplative, fractured, expansive, but for aesthetic configuration to occur, there needs to be such a defined space for an event to take place. To talk of a body also implies a space, the body is always a body in space, and in more general terms, an image is the opening out of a distinct space to lend it dimensionality. Art can be said to be the conjunction of the mixing together of space, matter, image, and time in ways that might occasion surprise. This group exhibition presents different ways of examining a startling relation of space and image through various combinations of narrative. To startle is to arrest, or to create a surprise, which implies an intuitive collision of space, image and time.
Montage in cinema for example, is the art of arrest or collision which introduces the possibility of a new image or sensation to emerge. This can be close to an energetic charge, as much as a novel redistribution of images, but anyway, to startle is to break with habit whether it be optical or psychological. In the pursuit of redistribution, difference becomes possible, so to startle is to introduce the energetic component to it. This gives rise to figurations, arrangements of bodies, the look invested in seeing into something, hands reaching out, the charge discovered in fetishism, awkward bodily stances, all vying for attention. Art is a way of giving attention to how attention takes place, the nuances that provide fragments of attention, each event that might become exhibited as such, and that which startles in this process, serving as an arrest with this process of ciphering difference.
As spectators there is a pleasure in switching attention from one image to the next, noticing riddles, balancing offerings with withdrawals, discovering free play, lingering within interruptions, wondering and wandering amongst dense signage, retaining and losing sense. All such things might indicate minor events of difference, but they should never be set aside as being too minor. As an art historical aside, it is worth remembering how Dutch genre painting of the Baroque period drew attention to the smallest gestures within the everyday but did so in ways that enabled the dimension of the exquisite to reside within details of perception. Rather than the exquisite, we have. here instead fragments of excess, and with this, the desire to enter curious realms afforded within the second glance. If one was tempted to name the investment of this exhibition it relates to an affective encounter with this notion of exposure to an act of a second glance which creates a rippled striation across the works. What startles as an outcome of this, is to be found between the spatial settings of the image and gesture contained within the subjective impulse of the work. It is a configuration that suspends the process of a habitual way of being with each confluence. Thus, what is before is transformed by what is immediately after, this being an attribute an art of the fractured interval. A small shock, a bursting open of space, an arrest, a secretly contained recession, each of which at times is only just legible or visible. This is a quality that is invariably a feature within the process of figuring the figure, for it is this that allows for, and then attends to, the awakening of a space for the aesthetic image. It is this that chart there being nothing, to there being a something. To startle is to open the drama and play of these contraries.
Text by Jonathan Miles
Presented by Lychee One and WARMBATH.ART
12 Dec 2024 - 18 Jan 2025
Unit 1, 39 Gransden Avenue, London E8 3QA
