Air Pressure
by Jackie Dunn.

Catalogue essay from the exhibition, 1997.
 
"The whole flood of muck of worldwide melody..." (Francis Ponge, 'The Radio').

"We are like Gullivers in the world of technoscience: sometimes too big, sometimes too small, but never the right size." (Jean-Francois Lyotard)

Air pressure: that pressure of an atmosphere jacked up. Holding up the sky, holding up a heavenly sphere filled with all the muck of radiophonic garbage; holding up (holding back?) the buzz and blur of trivial electronic hum. This insistent weight on one's psyche, this drilling, penetrating crap, to be dealt with day in and day out...

Lyotard, among countless others, uttered the pessimistic, if no doubt insightful cry that "technoscientific development has become a means of deepening the malaise rather than allaying it. It is no longer possible to call development progress. It seems to proceed of its own accord, with a force, an autonomous motoricity that is independent of ourselves. It does not answer to demands issuing from man's needs. On the contrary, human entities - whether social or individual - always seem destabilised by the results and implications of development."

Destabilised indeed. If Sims agrees, he seems also to retain some faith in further words of Lyotard; perhaps in the latter's call not to ditch completely the terms of reference of the avant-garde, which though problematic, hold a sense of "the work, a long, obstinate and highly responsible work concerned with investigating the assumptions implicit in modernity." Sims, it would seem, sits with Lyotard not as a neo-conservative, but as one concerned with the responsibility not to repeat our "modern neurosis".

Amongst the props, a satellite dish mould sits. Not the satellite dish itself, but its positive, making possible the sheer repeatability of the hardware of endless information, noise, stuff... Repeated ad infinitum, ad nauseum. In some reversed sense, the dish's mould is no longer a positive here but a negative - that which is not used, like the space a sculpture displaces. The negative, the underside of production, of noise, of stuff, of the crappy, undifferentiated - as Sims would say - "seamless blur of transmission that permeates our lived spatiality."
In thinking through this piece, Sims worked with other satellite dishes that led other lives and had other uses. Broken down, denuded, second hand. Like their information, the function of such objects is not always what it seems, nor what it was. Indeed they are almost redundant, back to being stripped down shapes, media mediated. In the space with their echo, some identifiable noise is emitted which also shifts its function in the seamless blur and reiteration: it interferes. Aesthetically incongruous in this apparently congruous formal setup, it is irritating; it is violent.

In "Landscape and Memory", Simon Schama milks out the last drops of connective juice that connects the german forest and national identity. A dense, dark primeval place is seen to be the site at which a people at various times and with varying ramifications, comes to describe itself. The forest as a mythic cluster of signs of nationhood, a source of mysterious patrimony. I am reminded of that by this forest of signs, this bundle of supports which not only stave off collapse, or carry the burden (or pretend to), but are productive, as markers for our cultural identity. Sims, like Schama, reminds us that culture is both concrete - lodged in place and actuality - and carried forward in the memory.

A bundle of sticks, a forest of signs. Like the bundle of twigs containing an axe that is a 'fasces'; Latin root for fascism; symbol of unity, of many bound into strength. Virilio has pointed out the similarity of that bundle of wires, of rods, of nerves, to the television cable, and that this cable works in only one direction - fascistic in its uni-directional, uniform and insistent supply of information. Invading, infiltrating, and disenfranchising with a product once thought to be liberating.

Here is an attempt to resist this pressure, but not only to push against it and the systems which support it - Sims raises the alert: 'pressure' also carries with it a sense of urgency as well as a sense of coercion. The application of pressure - not only on us, but on language, and on the object and space of experience. Pressure as resisitance; language not as communicator - for we already share in an insatiable demand for all to be out in the open in a culture of equivalence - but as autonomous and material. Information as overflow, an excess of refuse in one direction. (Ah, said Baudrillard, "the transparency and obscenity of a universe of communication".)

Our modern neurosis then, for Sims, is to be marked out and opposed wherever possible - and if that place of resistance, if that impossible possibility still exists with the art space, then well and good. (That art space might begin to fall, to crack under pressure; and the walls come tumbling down...)

What he imposes is a certain 'muscular presence', not in order to be brute, but to elicit a physical experience from the viewer - who here is less viewer (with its sense of distance) and more beholder (with all its imperative force intact). Not a simple critique of technoscience or information technologies per se, this almost classically sculptural approach concerns itself with volume and mass. But here the volume is of data, and the mass is of the repeated information which Sims says "insinuates itself into our lives, where the virtual becomes the actual" in some strange full circle of transmission and reception. "As if communication was simply a matter of enough information..."