I visited Cumming’s exhibition on
Wednesday 22 August and and then attended his presentation of the work the same
evening. The work comprises an installation with a 27-minute video and a
collection of works (including large colour photographs) attributed to Adam
Linklater that also, largely appear in the film. Adam Linklater, Cummings tells
us, is an ‘avatar’ of himself, the artist but also a kind of ‘double’, whose
paranoia and psychosis Cummings admits he can get dangerously near to. On his
website Cumming says:
“My work deals
with many different themes from the origins of creativity with the
understanding of inherent and embedded knowledge, to the study of human
behaviour and the social sciences. I am also interested on the effect that the
internet is having on our learning. Having unlimited access to knowledge on every
possible subject is an amazing thing but it also opens us up to false and or
conflicting information, adding to an ever increasing mistrust of our
governments and the education we are taught at school. I find interest in many
things but I also enjoy the process of allowing the chance mark inspire the
form/idea. I tend to start my work with no particular theme but through the
process of play and random markmaking a theme starts to come to fruition. I
very much allow my tacit knowledge to take over whilst I make art.”
Andy Cumming
2017
Cumming’s insistence that ‘tacit
knowledge’ constitutes an alternative identity that like the traditional
doppleganger can ‘take over’ a more conscious self, goes a long way to
explaining the origins of Adam (the first man) Linklater (a man of belated
networks). His theory here sounds a lot like that of the Dadaists’ practice of
automatic writing or creation – such practices try to go underneath the layers
of convention that we call our conscious selves to something we call either ‘primitive’,
‘tacit’ or unconscious. At one point in video, the artist’s search for clues to Linklater’s quest for
knowledge, and the control he believes inheres in that knowledge, is labelled
firs I.D. (at one level identity) and later ‘id’ (the ‘It’ which is the name Freud
actually gave to the unconscious).
The search Linklater, and
Cummings – sometime with his girlfriend – after him, undergo, involves a
descent to an underworld – such as we find in archetypes like Orpheus, Odysseus
in Homer, Aeneas in Virgil, Satan in Milton. But underground caves also recall
that fearful palace of art made by Daedalus, the Labyrinth. One section of the video is named ‘labyrinth’
and shows Andy and girlfriend penetrating a cellar and finding within evidence
of earlier occupation by Linklater.
Strangely, when I asked Cumming,
at his presentation, why he did not talk about labyrinths, he prevaricated but
later said that the labyrinth was a kind of emotional-cognitive space (my term)
in which he experienced feelings of self-loss, and which prompted him to ‘disappear’
his Linklater avatar. Artists have to move on. That labyrinths are a symbol of
the artist is clear in the Daedalus story. That master of art (techne in Greek)
made marvellous monuments but they became prey to the uses to made of them by tyrants
like Minos and dangerous for neophytes, like his son Icarus who died in the
attempt to escape the labyrinth by getting too near a more pure Apollonian
knowledge.
But Cummings work is an excellent
translation of the labyrinth trope to the nature of what we naturally call ‘the
web’ (a classic analogy to the labyrinth). It associates with Cumming’s use of
maps and links later made upon them (as in Rosicrucian thinking), and to the
ubiquitousness of mind-mapping as a means of charting mental operations in
modern education. Hence many of the works are mind-maps, charts of the mind
that allow for labyrinthine following of links and connections, some of which
fall into a dead-end. Of these Cumming makes for rather interesting art.
Ultimately these networks are also neural networks, which too can be
labyrinthine and sometimes dangerous link hungry. For Cumming some of this
relates to the aetiology of what he calls paranoia and which I’d prefer to call
more widely psychosis – in which patterns and meanings get over-perceived,
although not necessarily therefore becoming delusions (at least not always).
At the book festival I saw some
similar connections made by very good contemporary poets in poems about descent
to undergrounds. Those were Sean Borodale (clearly a very great poet in the making)
and Ruth Padel.
Labyrinthine Artistry: Andy Cumming Adam Linklater: Mythopaedia Maritime Lane Collective, Leith; Edinburgh Art Festival 2018.
Labyrinths III: Andy Cumming Adam Linklater: Mythopaedia Maritime Lane Collective, Leith; Edinburgh Art Festival 2018. Labyrinthine Artistry
For internet site visit: http://www.andycummingsite.com/about/
For excerpts of video see: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-2Ml1qbSdWp-JwuCuR50sw
For selected images see: https://www.pintaram.com/u/adamlinklateroccultartist
Images from the installation:
I visited Cumming’s exhibition on Wednesday 22 August and and then attended his presentation of the work the same evening. The work comprises an installation with a 27-minute video and a collection of works (including large colour photographs) attributed to Adam Linklater that also, largely appear in the film. Adam Linklater, Cummings tells us, is an ‘avatar’ of himself, the artist but also a kind of ‘double’, whose paranoia and psychosis Cummings admits he can get dangerously near to. On his website Cumming says:
“My work deals with many different themes from the origins of creativity with the understanding of inherent and embedded knowledge, to the study of human behaviour and the social sciences. I am also interested on the effect that the internet is having on our learning. Having unlimited access to knowledge on every possible subject is an amazing thing but it also opens us up to false and or conflicting information, adding to an ever increasing mistrust of our governments and the education we are taught at school. I find interest in many things but I also enjoy the process of allowing the chance mark inspire the form/idea. I tend to start my work with no particular theme but through the process of play and random markmaking a theme starts to come to fruition. I very much allow my tacit knowledge to take over whilst I make art.”
Andy Cumming 2017
Cumming’s insistence that ‘tacit knowledge’ constitutes an alternative identity that like the traditional doppleganger can ‘take over’ a more conscious self, goes a long way to explaining the origins of Adam (the first man) Linklater (a man of belated networks). His theory here sounds a lot like that of the Dadaists’ practice of automatic writing or creation – such practices try to go underneath the layers of convention that we call our conscious selves to something we call either ‘primitive’, ‘tacit’ or unconscious. At one point in video, the artist’s search for clues to Linklater’s quest for knowledge, and the control he believes inheres in that knowledge, is labelled firs I.D. (at one level identity) and later ‘id’ (the ‘It’ which is the name Freud actually gave to the unconscious).
The search Linklater, and Cummings – sometime with his girlfriend – after him, undergo, involves a descent to an underworld – such as we find in archetypes like Orpheus, Odysseus in Homer, Aeneas in Virgil, Satan in Milton. But underground caves also recall that fearful palace of art made by Daedalus, the Labyrinth. One section of the video is named ‘labyrinth’ and shows Andy and girlfriend penetrating a cellar and finding within evidence of earlier occupation by Linklater.
Strangely, when I asked Cumming, at his presentation, why he did not talk about labyrinths, he prevaricated but later said that the labyrinth was a kind of emotional-cognitive space (my term) in which he experienced feelings of self-loss, and which prompted him to ‘disappear’ his Linklater avatar. Artists have to move on. That labyrinths are a symbol of the artist is clear in the Daedalus story. That master of art (techne in Greek) made marvellous monuments but they became prey to the uses to made of them by tyrants like Minos and dangerous for neophytes, like his son Icarus who died in the attempt to escape the labyrinth by getting too near a more pure Apollonian knowledge.
But Cummings work is an excellent translation of the labyrinth trope to the nature of what we naturally call ‘the web’ (a classic analogy to the labyrinth). It associates with Cumming’s use of maps and links later made upon them (as in Rosicrucian thinking), and to the ubiquitousness of mind-mapping as a means of charting mental operations in modern education. Hence many of the works are mind-maps, charts of the mind that allow for labyrinthine following of links and connections, some of which fall into a dead-end. Of these Cumming makes for rather interesting art. Ultimately these networks are also neural networks, which too can be labyrinthine and sometimes dangerous link hungry. For Cumming some of this relates to the aetiology of what he calls paranoia and which I’d prefer to call more widely psychosis – in which patterns and meanings get over-perceived, although not necessarily therefore becoming delusions (at least not always).
At the book festival I saw some similar connections made by very good contemporary poets in poems about descent to undergrounds. Those were Sean Borodale (clearly a very great poet in the making) and Ruth Padel.
Linked to this review are:
1. The exhibition The Green Man in and of the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh University collated and curated by Lucy Skaer and others.
2. An art installation on Maritime Lane, Leith Adam Linklater: Mythopoeia by Andy Cummings (this).
3. An introduction through Charlotte Higgins’s new book.
4. An addendum: the way in to Anselm Kiefer - a labyrinth with no end has, of course, no way out.
5. A second addendum - Paul Broks: the labyrinth in the Neuropsycholgist's Odyssey.
All the best
Steve