Linden - Centre for Contemporary Arts: Persuasion Equation 8 August

Persuasion Equation - The Ethics of Hypnosis

The Ethics of Hypnosis is a project predicated on failure. Failure is both its point of departure and its point of arrival. Failure is its programmatic goal, its hedging of its own bets; it can only succeed in failing, or fail to fail, so that any success despite itself will be a double failure. It is its own tautological proposition, and in this sense it need not even take place, not even perform. Such resignation, however, would be to shackle failure to the logic of success, to ignore the potentialities that failure presents, to gloss over it to the point of erasure, to negate its role within the mechanisms of artistic practice. As with the five practices it platforms, whose unity it struggles to come to grips with, The Ethics of Hypnosis embraces failure at the levels of methodology and content alike, as a provision, both inevitable and precautionary, for the emergence of possibility and chance from the gaps created by its numerous slippages.

An expanded conception of exhibition making might posit the exhibition as more than just a collection of objects put on public display. This expansion might include contextual elements, those factors, controllable and uncontrollable, that would frame its reading, but also the complex of interpersonal transactions that go into its creation and presentation. The exhibition, considered as process, is a conversation of sorts, and the experience of the viewer on encountering its objects, those registers selected for exposure to a public, is one of walking into a conversation that is already underway. The curator, or whoever is charged with configuring the controllable elements of the project's discursive framework, has the ultimate choice as to how much of the preceding conversation is conveyed to the viewer. In this way conversation can be opened up or closed down, but in this closure, it can be opened up to misconstruction.

In the spirit of failure, then, The Ethics of Hypnosis will reveal nothing of what transpired in its preparation apart from what might be discernable in its works. For what is more interesting in disrupting the logics of success is what the exhibition produces, leaving it open to interpretation and misinterpretation. As with arcs of dialogue overheard from strangers on a train, a diary left open and then snapped shut, or a clipped phrase booming out of a television before the channel is quickly changed, meaning is left for the viewer to perform in their engagement with the work. Not that failure itself is concealed so much in the work the project presents-it is here in many forms, articulated or reflected in blunt and apologetic refusals, deployed as a method of corralling chance, hyperbolised for laughs, motivating explorations of the limits of representation, broken down into units and then reassembled between walls, across hallways and around corners in an unlikely attempt to provide a semblance of wholeness to elements neither completely arbitrary nor fully determined. Nor is it the case that the process of construction is absent from the work-at certain points it is referenced quite clearly. But this will be left to the work, to the work that the work does, to what, in its final configuration, the work produces. For what The Ethics of Hypnosis ultimately presents is itself, its own presence, and for all its bathos and absurdity, the viewer can make of it what they will.

Reuben Keehan

photos: Dean McCartney

Akira Akira