Andy Harper | Robin Mackay
YKCOWREBBAJ
sevot yhtils eht dna,gillirb sawT’
ebaw eht ni elbmig dna eryg diD
,sevogorob eht erew ysmim llA
.ebargtuo shtar emom eht dnA – Lewis Carroll
Does not a hinge always imply closure? Presiding over a twofold and its mirrored relation, it sides
with neither facet, but is their vanishing point. It belongs to another order and asserts its presence
only indirectly – usually at the moment when both sides disappear from sight, as when facing pages
are pressed shut into mute latency. But it can also declare itself in a moment of transfer, as the ‘identical neutrality of the gulf’1 across which – by means of which – an impossible leap is made. In
another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the looking-glass room.
Such a secret, enabling fold is the subject of philosopher Immanuel Kant’s 1768 dissertation
‘Concerning the ultimate foundation of the differentiation of directions in space’ (Kant [1768] 1992).
Although inaccessible from either side of the mirror, this point of articulation seems to be all that
holds back disorientation and madness.
According to Kant, specifying the relations between parts of an object is not sufficient to completely
determine them. For two objects can also distinguished by a pivotal ‘inner difference’ which is not a
matter of shape, relation, or magnitude, but which is crucial to our ability to orient ourselves among
them. It is best discerned as that minimal difference that allows us to distinguish between ‘incongruous counterparts’ – objects which, otherwise identical, are possessed of handedness.
Kant’s prime example (via many others, including the growth of beans around a pole, the spiral
of hair on the crown of the head, snails’ shells, the thread of a screw) will be human hands themselves. A left hand is identical to a right hand in all of its internal relations, and yet no set of rotations will make them coincide; a left hand will never fit inside a right-handed glove. But, of course,
for the philosopher, books come first: Were a right-hand page to be inverted into a left-hand page,
although the relations between all of its letters would remain constant, everything would turn to
nonsense. Just where does this difference lie, though?
Just consider, Kant exhorts us, in a bravura reductio ad absurdum that drives the point home – just
consider a hand without handedness, a hand which therefore ‘would fit equally well on either side of
the human body’ – pure abstract horror (perhaps looking-glass milk isn’t good to drink …). No, Kant
reassures us, even if a single hand were the only object in the universe, it would still have to be
either a left or a right hand. Direction or orientation is a necessary property, one that can only be
maintained through reference to ‘universal space as a unity’: although absolute space is something
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1.
In Mallarmé’s Coup
de dés, this ‘gulf’ is
the void, the absent
transcendence which
‘blights’ the modern
poet’s enterprise.
Materially, it is
figured by the
central fold as an
internal difference
around which the
whole poem ‘rhymes’
(Meillassoux
2012: 58, 78–79).
A two-hander
we can never intuit, every thing is sewn into its orienting spine, as an unmoving background – and
all hands will rest on one or the other side of the book of nature.
And yet … consider the lowly typesetter, who, responsible for hundreds of lines of metal sorts,
becomes fluent at composing metal looking-glass books. He knows very well how the even surface
of the forme will coincide with the surface of the page; and that a metallic outline of a right hand will
print a perfect left hand, so long as the press has space to work in. This whole story will end in disorientation for both Kant and Euclid: rotation through four-dimensional space would indeed make a
left into a right hand, turning it inside out like a glove. The ‘inner difference’ is no absolute, but a
contingent feature of the space we happen to be embedded within and the limitations it places upon
the organization of the objects it contains.
But let’s turn to the strange moment of closure brought about when an image bounces off this
limit, passes through the mirror. The work underway on one surface – the slow, wet, incomplete process of painting – is given the stamp of authority, or becomes that stamp; it is ratified by passing through
the point of articulation that organizes the two into an oriented twofold. Freed from its laboured
surface through this doubling, the painting is fixed – a stereo-type, a forme whole and undivided.
And yet the double is never identical: the ‘secondary’ image even reacts back on the ‘original’,
the moment of transfer constituting another intervention and a continuation of the process at the
same moment at which it is arrested. The spine detains pages in their serial order; a backbone strong
enough to support the transfer of narrative from page to page, it is an orienting fold that withdraws
from the scene of sense while organizing it.
Hermann Rorschach, explaining the use of symmetry in his famous inkblots, notes that such
symmetry ‘facilitates interpretation for certain blocked subjects’ (1942: 15). And it is indeed as if, at
this moment when it crosses the neutral gulf, the splaying of the image across its minimal inner
difference has ‘unblocked’ it. The painter’s complex of perception, tactility, and visual recognition
are closed-up tight against another kind of image-making which is automatic, indifferent, stereotypical; which doubles without interpretation, requiring only a hinge’s elementary mediation.
Admittedly, to a painter, all of these convolutions on the page may be about as interesting as
watching paint dry. As the oils oxidize, the pigment is fixed and the surface of the image closes itself
off. But what if one could fold closure into the process of painting itself? So that, facing each other
within the space of images, we would have, on the one hand, vital sedimentation; on the other, spiritless impression. As Alice asked: Which Dreamed It?
References
Carroll, L. ([1872] 2003), ‘Through the looking glass and what Alice found there’, Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, London: Penguin Classics.
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Andy Harper | Robin Mackay
Kant, I. ([1768] 1992), ‘Concerning the ultimate foundation of the differentiation of directions
in space’, in P. Guyr and A. W. Wood (eds), Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 361–71.
Meillassoux, Q. (2012), The Number and the Siren: A Decipherment of Mallarmé’s Coup de dés, Falmouth
and New York: Urbanomic and Sequence Press.
Rorschach, H. (1942), Psychodiagnostics; A Diagnostic Test Based on Perception, New York: Grune &
Stratton.
Suggested citation
Harper, A. and Mackay, R. (2015), ‘A Two Hander’, Journal of Contemporary Painting 1: 2, pp. 321–330,
doi: 10.1386/jcp.1.2.321_1
Contributor details
Andy Harper is an artist and lecturer. His most recent project is for a group show ‘The First Humans’
which is touring the United Kingdom this year and next. Harper is represented by Danese-Corey in
New York and The Page Gallery in Seoul. He has taught part-time in various institutions over the
last twenty years and is currently a senior lecturer on the MFA programme at Goldsmiths, London.
E-mail: andyhcape@me.com
Robin Mackay is a philosopher and director of UK arts organization Urbanomic, which promotes
research activities addressing crucial issues in philosophy and science and their relation to contemporary art practice, and aims to engender interdisciplinary thinking and production.
E-mail: robin@urbanomic.com
Andy Harper and Robin Mackay have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.
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