Published by Alternating Current Artspace [2019]



In Georges Bataille's much ignored essay on prehistory, titled The Cradle of Humanity, he characterises consciousness as an awareness of death: a moment in which the intellect is placed in the terrifying presence of its own radical negation. For Bataille, human consciousness is born not out of a cognizance of objects and actions but out of designating the limit of human power and experience. In this view, consciousness barricades human experience, paradoxically acting as both our cage and shield from the tentacular horrors of alterity. .


The weird fiction of horror writer H.P Lovecraft continually dramatizes this notion, where the limited scope of human consciousness is theatrically confronted with the limitless abysses of a cosmic unconscious. "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it is not meant that we should voyage far." As described with ghoulish melodrama in the former passage, Lovecraft's fiction always gestures to an occulted and impersonal psyche which incidentally shapes and frames all subjectivity; a psyche that is inhuman and utterly alien to all our comforting notions of reason and order (embodied in the Lovecraftian mythos as a pantheon of imperceptible cosmic deities called The Old Ones). In Lovecraft's opinion, to travel down into this subterranean chasm of the impossible is to risk being consumed by it. For at the base of humanity there is nothing but a hungry void . . .


Squirming at the centre of Arthur Schopenhauer's notion of will is the same void which typifies Lovecraft's particular mannerism of horror. In Schopenhauer's hands the will [wille] is re-cast as an impersonal, noumenal impulse that is irreducible to phenomena as 'willing' isn't subject to time and space. Will is therefore a pre-organic entity as it can only ever be understood as a concept, due to the fact that the deeper spirit or agency of 'willing' is located beyond empirical and phenomenological understanding. In this post-Kantian light, reason and order then becomes a secondary process to this pre- representational drive of 'willing' which, for Schopenhauer at least, is the noumena intrinsic in all phenomena. Schopenhauer's provocative theory forces one to recognise that within all understanding is a yawning black hole: a chthonic zone of shadows where the virtual 'volcanic core' of being is concealed from and supressed by our own subjectivity. Therefore, our perception of reality is only ever partial and illusionary as we are forever denied access to the primordial depths of experience.


This ominous void of non-knowledge which consciousness anxiously flutters above (described in the philosophical musings of Schopenhauer and detailed in Lovecraftian horror) is the main source of drama in the paintings of Georgiy Margvelashvili. In his current work, ancient Greek statues are eerily isolated and hauntingly suspended in front of dark veils and brooding abstractions, their forms visibly damaged, crumbling and broken as if from an overexposure to the elements. Yet these tortured bodies are figures of enlightenment, in the literal sense that they are the only objects spotlit and detailed in the paintings. They are our only point of recognition and identification in this otherworldly terrain. However, it would be a mistake to assume that the source of their illumination is conjured from within.


As described in Hegel's Aesthetics, ancient Greek sculpture is typified by an absence of "self-aware subjectivity in the knowing and willing of itself" as indicated by the rendering of the eyes as pupil-less surfaces: they appear vacant, flat, and sightless. They are without gaze and, as such, their "inner being does not look out of them as self-knowing inwardness in this spiritual concentration which the eyes disclose." Devoid of such depth of consciousness and spirit, the figures in Margvelashvili's paintings are, in a sense, dead – their glazed gaze reminiscent of the funerary coins placed over the eyes of fresh cadavers in the Victorian Era. Therefore, as these figures are lifeless, the luminance which bathes them does not radiate out from within but, instead, is generated externally by the gaze of the viewer. It is the subjectivity of the spectator that ignites these corpses with their incandescence, causing them to emerge out from the murky abstractions of the noumenon and into the sensual, material realm of consciousness. However, the revelatory horror which surfaces out of this 'mirroring' is recognizing how little is illuminated by consciousness, evoking the unsettling realization that our subjectivity only grants us a fragmented texture of our true surroundings . . . like the brightness of a lone star which twinkles dimly in the vast darkness of the universe.


To be granted consciousness is to be cursed to exist "on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity" . . .to be blind to the true complexity of our own reality. For humanity exists in a void of primordial darkness.