My work for the 1988 Society of Scottish Artists Annual Exhibition consisted of two tricycles…
I was a member of the Society of Scottish Artists (SSA) between 1986 and 1992. The SSA was established many years ago to cater for ‘the more adventurous spirits in Scottish art’. As an adventurous environmental artist, I tried to do more than merely exhibit my artworks ‘with the SSA’, but rather, if possible make works that resonated with the SSA as my art context, with the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) building as the context of the SSA’s annual art exhibition and with Princes Street in Edinburgh which is the physical context of the RSA building.
This work called ‘Two Gates’, was both a statement and an invitation. The statement was about the nature of worlds. Worlds do not exist in isolation from each other, but rather overlap and bleed into each other at every opportunity… I think it’s called life! The invitation was this – that people inside the art world use the small child’s trike (which was situated halfway up the main staircase of the RSA) to explore the spaces of the world outside the building, in all innocence as a child might – and seeing things anew, be creative in open space. And likewise, the invitation was extended to all people in the open spaces outside the art world, to use their ‘gate’ (the large child’s trike situated on the covered platform that forms part of the architecture) to explore as a child might the creative space that all animals possess as part of our psychology. My desire was that artists and others might meet in the space between the two gates.
writing
I want to talk here about the space between the two tricycle gates. At the time of the work in 1988, I thought of the space not only in physical terms but also as a social distance – a separation of understandings that I wanted to close. But it has not been until relatively recently (in the 2000’s) that I have considered spacetime to be merely the real condition of the actual state of the singularity of under-standing.
I want to talk now about the actual state of ‘the universe’ after the disclosures associated with quantum entanglement and about how the two gates artwork might have related to all of that without me realizing it at the time.
The problematic is massive: if, as the quasi-phenomenon of quantum entanglement suggests, our actual state is singularity – notwithstanding the infinity of differences that constitute the spacetime reality of which we are a part – then how does this state of singularity comprehend the plurality of ‘things in space and time’? In other words, how do we things come into existence?
My best shot at solving this problem is as follows: given that we are actually the singularity, then what we call understanding must be what the singularity also calls understanding. And there we are already presented with the obvious fact that understanding cannot merely be a human attribute, nor can it belong only to living things; for understanding to be the basis of a singularity – the singularity of understanding – then it must perforce be universal. Understanding as the way that singularity is real.
Understanding is not a mode of differentiating, but rather it is the other way around – difference is merely a deficient mode of understanding, and the reason we say this is simply because a singularity of difference would not be capable of being understood as the universe. Every thing would be different from every other thing and that would be it. There would be no possibility of a future of things developing and growing into other things. No possibility of life.
This is not how understanding comports itself in its ownmost alterity. Understanding differentiates itself one from one, other from other, by being the one and other – quite literally through each standing under the other as the other.
The least arrangement of such a condition of existence is three-fold, which is called a tri-verse, and which we can illustrate diagrammatically…
Such a diagram cannot be taken literally of course, because it tries to present the means of its own presentation! This is simply intended to give an impression of how the singularity might comport itself as differential understanding or under-standing. The central point I’m trying to make, in this case in the form of a basic tri-versal under-standing, is that each constituent of any thing is constituted wholly and absolutely as the other constituents. The above image shows a green-cyan-red thing of differential understanding: not only does each differentiate between the other two, but inasmuch as this is the singularity, each is actually constituted by the other two through understanding with them. Red and cyan constitute green, red and green constitute cyan, green and cyan constitute red – a description of the basic constitutional comportment of our singular reality.
So how does this hypothesis effect my 2020 view of the Two Gates artwork of 1988? I mean, I had not gone through any of the thinking that led to the above disclosure of singular under-standing. It seemed to me simply and intuitively right that I make a sculpture of two tricycles. But with the benefit of 2020 hindsight, we can perhaps sense the symbolism of the tri-cycle. And we can comprehend that two trikes is the very invitation to any passer-by to compete this tri-verse of under-standing.