Plants exist, people exist. They live like two peas in a pod. Tony climbed into his pod to snuggle his magnolias.
Pataphysical traditions tend to focus on processes of their creation and elements of chance or arbitrary choices creating imaginary solutions to imaginary problems that recreate and mimic themselves through process of doing so. Baudrillard says in his 1992 essay Pataphysics of Year 2000, ‘nothing behind us exists anymore, only the present.’ I relate this quote (and essay in its entirety) to the continuing theme within my practice of moving existing visual culture from a point of nostalgia to a new contemporary role in today’s society. History no longer exists, but it has left a lot of things behind. These things become tools in my work and I piece them together to create new stories, an imaginary world that only exists in the present. People who come across GBC in the future, even a second after it is made, will attach their own fantasies, their own stories to the work just as I have done with the existing imagery in the first place. GBC becomes a pataphor for an original idea, seeking to describe a new and separate world where that original idea has taken a life of its own.
In The Imaginary Solution, Douglas-Dworkin (2007) describes pataphysics as being two degrees of separation from reality. The plants that exist in GBC were once photographed for inclusion in a book. Being photographed is meant to replicate reality, but this does not always transcend in new meaning or new context in which the photograph is placed. The photograph then becomes one degree separated from reality. That photograph/book then moves forward in time 40 years and is picked up and that photograph cut out to be appropriated next to an image taken from a American Apparel advert where the model has also lost his head in place of a green leafy plant. The second degree of separation takes place, and no longer is the plant serving a pictorial reference for a pruning article, but is now taking a role in an entirely imagined world exploring their relationships with people, thus removing it entirely from its original context.
My practice has always been concerned with the idea of digital technologies having the capability to remove the physical photograph and attached processes from today’s culture. Digital technologies can be used to create fantasy worlds through online gaming, websites and photo manipulation software, store digital archives and be used in any facet of life whether it be through computers, smart phones or tablets. It is this distinct acceleration of digital technology and media that Baudrillard blames for the ‘losing tempo of liberation’ and means we are only now loosely attached to the real. We can no longer pin down reality or meaning because of the digital absorption that we are contained within. I wrote about a similar issue when addressing my first year MA work, in the post named ‘RIP Pat Butcher’ examining the worlds people believe in beyond reality, in places such as Eastenders; sending cards to a fictional character when she had died onscreen. When applying this to the idea of GBC, it comes down to the breakdown of foundational knowledge on which I base stereotypes and presumptions of a certain era. I was born in 1988, and remember nothing before roughly 1992-1993. Things I know about history have been taught, researched or presumed. It is this foundational knowledge on which I make presumptions about a book I find in a charity shop from 1976. It is a certain colour, it smells a certain way and the people within the pages are wearing certain clothes. These beliefs I then attach to an object that has travelled through time could be entirely untrue to begin with. Things I think have happened, that actually may not have happened at all mean I immediately breakdown the knowledge into a pataphysical idea and expand that idea further through collage and photography. The narrative that originally existed has gone through so many state changes; we know nothing true about anything except for the now. Thinking that all history no longer exists can force an obsession of the now, spurred on by its exemption from linear time. We seek immediate satisfaction but fear the forgetting, so no longer trust the meaning of events in current time. When we arrive at the event, we then arm ourselves with tools of artificial memory in order to preserve the event without experiencing it in the now, in order to recall it later in time.
Linking with ideas of the absurd, pataphysics creates meaningless worlds where if context is applied the general laws of pataphysics become weakened. Garden Book Club is an entirely pataphysical world, where proportion is ignored and facts of botanical science turned upside down. It explores a world of plant obsessives (which do in fact exist in metaphysics) but extends the idea further by changing facts and placing fully grown men in glass plant containers, among other things. The imaginary problem that GBC attempts to solve is that the imagined people who are embodied through collage have nowhere to go to talk to people of similar ilk or with the same interests. Providing a ‘club’ to which they can share stories and peculiar images of one another becomes the solution. All the content contained in GBC is made up of elements entirely removed from context, placing them in a pataphysical myth where people will attempt to apply existing foundational knowledge to when viewing. On failing to do so, people tend to become defensive or panic that their knowledge does not stretch to this new visual culture, and thoughts race whilst trying to apply something, anything relevant they can. I find that most people tend to try and understand the plant element before the role of the people, which seems a much easier process for most. I have rarely been questioned past the ‘relationships between plants and people’ answer I give to ‘what is it about?’ and I think this links directly back to seeing a world we do not recognize or have not learned through school or the internet.
This may be because plants are seemingly ‘emotionless’ physical things, although they share a few of the same qualities as humans. This lack of emotion means they are immediately easy to interpret than the more complex human aspect. They are treated as objects, and objects that do not offer opinion or any argument to the way they are treated meaning humans can abuse, or obsess about plants.
Baudrillard, J. (1992). Pataphysics of Year 2000. Galilee: Paris. Available:http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/pataphysics.html
Douglas-Dworkin, C. (2007) The Imaginary Solution. Journal of Contemporary Literature. 48:1, pp. 49-60
Meg Wellington 