Half out of the corner of my mind I heard emerge from the noise matrix of
a video installation the phrase ’So many people living without me’.
Was it a girl’s voice? I paid little attention and continued my way
through the art gallery – being oddly impressed by the soft pendulous glooping
of the skin-like membranes turgid with powdered turmeric, coffee and other
aromatics of Ernesto Neto’s sculpture ‘Just like the drops in
time, nothing’.
I imagined it somehow as freeze-drying the space/time distortion; perhaps
a family cluster yo-yoing into an Einstein representation.
But I found myself also writing down, ’So many people existing without
me’, and resolved to find out who had both spoken and written it. I
returned to the upstairs gallery but the constraints of my very limited time
and the inflexibility of a series of video works on rotation meant that I
never found out the artist’s name, despite delving through the web to
the detriment of the good night’s sleep that insomniacs dream oft.
She, I’m sure it was a she, was right. The world exists without us,
oblivious to our individuality. Take yourself out of the frame, airbrush yourself
out of the picture, and nothing fundamentally changes to the world. The only
dependency on your existence is your children.
I’m sure that I didn’t always feel this was so; I know that I
spent a significant part of my early existence trying not to be recorded,
studiously avoiding any group or individual photograph – and not just because
I looked like Bobby Vinton on steroids. So many school photographs had a gap
in the line where I had suddenly dropped down out of sight at the sound of
the word ‘cheese’. Or the class photograph displayed the cryptic
message “Absent -Richard Rudd” as I threw another sicky. This
may be the narcissism of youth – ‘I exist, therefore you are’
– but in a small town in a small country denial of one’s presence
appeared meaningful for some reason. The existentialism of ‘The Outsider’
taken alienation to invisibility.
This was my choice and preferable to those who where literally airbrushed
out of history: the successive photographs of the Politburo with an increasing
number of blurred grey bits representing those who had been removed as tantalising
as the airbrushed nudes of Lilliput magazine that I discovered in my grandparents
house in the 1960s. Preferable to disappearance through the casual obliteration
of history. The thousands of humble citizens who were casually tilling the
fields when the Mongol hordes appeared like death on the horizon; the villagers
learning of the Black Death as it arrived at their clustered huts killing
them whilst they slept, or the mass extinctions as the random paths of an
asteroid took its predestined plunge into the earth’s crust a few hundred
million years.
So, the immaterial unimportance of one’s existence is apt to fall into
one’s consciousness rather an uninvited guest at a wedding who turns
out to have slept with the groom, best man and the bride’s father and
has pictures and a disease to prove it. ‘This is not good’, you
think whilst clutching the back of one’s trousers. How can I not feel
humbled and insignificant ?
But insignificance is also liberating as it gives the poised-on-the-edge sense
that one is creating one’s own destiny, like being alone in a foreign
city where you don’t speak the language and have no map. Which is pretty
much our journey through life really.
There is a point when you grow up you realise that you are one amongst a multitude
– there are so many people, that Rick’s lines in Casablanca “……but
it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t
amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,“ are true. You don’t
amount to a hill of beans and, no matter what, you never will. There are only
a few Mozarts, Richard Feynmans or Albert Einsteins scattered amongst history.
You are probably not one of them, your purpose in life may only be to serve
as an example to other people.
Yet you are the only you alive at this moment of time, you have a few brief
moments in the life of the universe to realise what a splendid thing it is.
Some of it may be rotten but there are moments which we can take with us,
moments that you could never explain to anyone else where words will fail.
Where art can provide a correspondence not an equivalent.
The universe may only be a thing that just happens every once in while, but
we get to see a small fraction of it, even if it only with the rudimentary
understanding of a species that will probably wipe itself out in the near
future.
Recollect the last lines of the replicant Roy Batty in ‘Bladerunner’.
”I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire
off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the
Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain”
‘Just like the drops in time, nothing’