SARAH WALKER

THE WORD THE LIGHT OBSCURES

Catalogue essay to accompany Ravi Avasti’s exhibition ‘Summa’ at correspondences, Brunswick, 2024.

Generally, when presented with both image and text, humans notice images first. Our eyes are hungry for the visual; we devour information in picture form, dissecting and digesting it in milliseconds, before we turn to the chewier issues of the written word.

In the gallery, though, this hierarchy is upended. It’s partly a function of public estrangement from contemporary art (‘it’s weird’, ‘I don’t get it’, ‘it makes me feel dumb’). It’s partly the fault of art schooling, where art must be complex; it must investigate; it must be difficult. The modern art viewer, entering a gallery, generally addresses the wall didactic first. They frown through the buzzwords and artspeak, and then, maybe, sneak a few glances at the work itself, to see whether they can unearth the content promised in those densely packed paragraphs. More frowning ensues, before they shuffle off to the next informative panel.

It feels almost revolutionary, then, to bypass description entirely, to come for an encounter with the work itself, on pure terms. To become a body meeting an object, ready for some sort of exchange or revelation, understanding or misunderstanding. And so I am sitting on the floor at correspondences, cross-legged, head cocked at an arrangement of four black-framed LED panels, also on the floor. A blind date, if you will. I don’t know its name. I don’t know its meaning. I am here to see what I can find.

The LEDs face away from the window, oriented towards the side of the gallery. This means that to approach them feels like sneaking up on them. The sense of the panels as both screen and observer is immediate and unexpected. There is the weirdest quality of being looked at, of entering a line of sight.

Impressions arrive in a scattered order. Several of the panels are illuminated, to differing degrees. They are otherwise static. What moves is sound: Tibetan singing bowls, struck tones, throbbing deep bass which echoes against he hard walls in the gallery. My associations with this genre of sound are yoga classes, meditation. The type of late-capitalist wellness-optimisation earnestness that signals: take time. Be present. Mindfulness will make you a better person. It could be cringeworthy. It should be cringeworthy.

And yet, there’s something that’s off, tonally. Something a little skew-whiff. Maybe it’s the sideways install. Maybe it’s the lack of space to sit facing the work directly. There’s something a little absurd about it, tongue-in-cheek. Winking.

Wink. A light winks out. Another seems to illuminate so slowly I’m not sure whether I’m imagining it.  Associations bubble up. On an island off Japan, I once sat for fifteen minutes in a perfectly black, cavernous room created by Tadao Ando to house James Turrell’s Backside of the Moon. Panels of light faded up with agonising slowness, rectangular, like film screens. Time seemed to tunnel down to breath and vision. Eventually, a staff member came and told us, in a low voice, that the lights had been there the whole time; it was the duration that had allowed our eyes to adjust enough to see them. The other people in the room murmured softly, politely. I called out, involuntarily, ‘Holy fuck!’ The point being: light and time. The point beyond: something occurring that I do not understand.

From this angle, the sound seems to emanate from the cubes themselves. This gives them a kind of alien personhood. Arrival meets Walter De Maria. A little of 2001: the static, patient, endless attention of the machine. I could swear that they are watching me, observing me as I observe them. There is none of the cheek and pathos of Avanti’s bent chairs, two of which hug the ceiling beams — these LED objects possess a radiant nothingness. They are closed-off, dispassionate.

The music throbs. A group of young people walk past, giggling, their eyes skating off the miniatures in the window. Trams rumble. Outside suddenly seems too vibrant, too sunlit for this slow unfolding in front of me.

I squint. Behind the frosted surface of each panel, the light mechanism sits vertically, creating a hotspot in the centre and vignettes of shadow on the sides, except when the LED is approximately 50% illuminated, at which point the light spill is more even and somehow harder to look at. I’m reminded of Turrell again, Event Horizon at MONA, designed to replicate the experience of snow-blindness. Then, as now, my eyes danced with visual snow and idle floaters, as I tried to focus and failed. I think of the cyclorama in photography, designed to replicate a white void.

I have still not read the wall text. I am trying to determine: is this a clock? The four panels suggest so. It can’t be a calendar: the lights shift too regularly. I can’t determine a pattern though. I check my watch. Minutes pass without a change, and then several seem to come in quick succession. There is clearly some system occurring, but it is beyond me. An intelligence I cannot access.

The sound doesn’t feel funny any more. It feels threatening. I try to imagine the gallery silent. Possibly I would feel calm, watching these lights bloom and fade. Possibly I would be thinking about impermanence, about the cycles of moon and sun, life to death to compost. Somehow, though, as the bass pulses, almost but not quite like a heartbeat, I feel a kind of uneasy dissociation. The kind you’d find in a Ballard novel.

I look back up at the chairs, traces of previous iterations of Avanti’s residency period. It is impossible not to anthropomorphise them. The one above the door has its little legs curled around the ceiling beam; what looks from this angle like a tossed head arcs down to observe passers-by. A monkey in a tree. Cheeky, yet somehow vulnerable. I half-expect to hear a grizzle, the sniffs of a child asking to be rescued. The chair opposite seems proud, defiant, a lord overlooking his domain, resting on the wooden scaffolding as though on the arms of a throne. It seems to look down, at the light boxes. They look nowhere and everywhere.

I am sitting on the brink of something, a word I cannot recall. I get up, stretch, let the pull of the wall text take me. Now I have a name. Now, we are introduced.

Ah, of course. The seven-digit illuminated lines of a digital clock, reduced to a quantitative output. The arrival of understanding. I have been looking for linearity, expecting light levels to shift from 0 to 100, but now that I have the key, I can resume our encounter.

I sit. The panels have changed again. Now that I understand the work’s mechanisms, it feels friendly. Time, after all, is a human concept, not an alien one. Suddenly, space opens in the room for play. I try to count out a minute by feel. I am at 54 seconds when the lights change. I notice that my watch is thirty seconds fast.

This work conjures Christian Marclay’s The Clock without the hysteria. If The Clock told us about how we conceive of what generally happens at various times of the day, The Current Time as the Value of Light From a Seven Segment Display is slower, softer. It makes us aware of the intersections of light: the sun bouncing off the road, coming in sideways. The LED boxes reflecting onto the grey floor, creating mirrors of themselves.

A month or so ago, I took my watch off for a day, pulled the clock off the wall, turned off all my devices. I expected to feel freed, somehow, by feeling called to wake, to eat, to sleep according to my body, not a handful of numbers. I caught a bus to the beach, and found myself sitting on the sand, unsure how long I’d been reading, feeling a strange hum of dissatisfaction. Once night fell, I replaced the clock on the wall, and with the return of time came my sense of order and situatedness in space. By feeling my when, I could better feel my where.

My mind wanders. I realise that I think of now as a section, a slice of time, and this is both impossible and unhelpful. To be constantly saying, ‘no this is now. No, this’ is to think like a clock, to divide time into segments. The true now is eternal, river-like, flowing. It meanders, and to remain within it means to surrender. It moves. The now in my mind is static, a photograph, which becomes past as soon as it occurs, ready to be pinned on the wall with all the rest of them. But if the now is process and change, then there are no photographs, merely a current in which we flow, leaving the banks alongside.

It is 13:33. Three boxes glow with the same light levels. A moment of near-harmony. It only lasts a minute.

I leave.

When Douglas Gordon made 24 Hour Psycho, slowing the film down so that its movement became glacial, he imagined his ideal viewer as someone who would encounter the film in the gallery, and then who, many hours later, as they drank with friends, or settled into bed, would suddenly wonder what was happening on-screen at that very moment. The viewer, in this way, carries the stretched out film within them, as a kind of internal clock. Even at this very moment, they might think, the shower scene might be happening.

It is like that with The Current Time. I find myself running at night, thinking about the darkened gallery; how beautiful the LED panels must be, flickering in the gloom. When I squint to see my phone screen in harsh sunlight, I think of the miniature form of the work in the windows; how the illumination must be almost invisible in the glare. Those panels become a strange anchor in the psychogeography of my mind.

The word comes days later, so obvious it had been obfuscated. I just needed a little time to find it: enlightenment.