The Physiology Of Hope - Dr Ric Spencer

Ultimately any pursuit of happiness is motivated by hope. Happiness may be fleeting - hope is enduring...

Hope springs eternal in the human breast

Alexander Pope

Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength and your greatest weakness.

The Architect in Matrix Reloaded

Hope is what makes us get up in the morning. Hope is what makes our minds look forward with ambition – and to look back in defiance of regret. The world is full of hope; it builds dreams, creates fantastic visions, confounds facts, allows for miracles and envelops us with a certain acceptance that we

are - all of us - capable of great and wondrous things. It is, along with passion, discipline and energy a defining denominator of art. Hope compels us to go further and further into uncharted lands, it is the key to searching, hope waves a vision of utopia seductively in front of our eyes. Of course these visions also have a habit of blinding us - hope also drives people mad, it offers too much.

Hope was, along with all the other evils of the world, in Pandora’s box; held captive while greed, vanity, slander, envy and pining were released. Hope, in this sense, becomes an internalised response to the in/comprehension of our place in the world. Hope, in this association with all the other evils in Pandora’s box, illustrates a very selfish response

to our connectivity to things, a dislocation central to an existentialist view.

Roderick Sprigg, the searcher in his exhibition GOLD, mythologizes an heroic existentialist view, in doing so producing anxiety; an isolationist energy that afflicts many of us who find ourselves as singularities in a sea of humanity. Hope, as it derives from anxiety is I think at the cornerstone of Sprigg’s work. Happiness, as a particular endgame to restless searching only idealises hope.

The potential derived from being unhappy and our desire for its antithesis (happiness) is fundamental to all that we do today. This is across the board, the essentialness in our character to feel we should be happy is so overpowering today that we will forcibly do what it takes to acquire happiness. We live in eternal hope for happiness - eudamonia - hope for a better life, acquired - no, bought

- by any means. The anxiety we feel if we’re not happy, or at least not obtaining some formulated picture of happiness, drives the fiscal, cultural, and physical well being of our world. It’s big business and as Sprigg knows, it needs focused critique. Particularly I must say the aesthetic

of happiness - in other words, what does it look like and therefore how do we recognize it in others and therefore replicate that look on ourselves? Over the past few months Sprigg has literally gone looking for happiness, he has dared to hope for it because he knows that hope is inherently part of our genetic makeup - hope and the search for happiness has become part of our physiology.

The physiology of hope is, it seems to me, a genuine response to finding ourselves once again alive and in a state of possibility, encompassed by a rebirth of adventure into the unknown. Today the hope of a better life has filtered out far beyond the romantic colonial notion of new geological boundaries. Today’s hope is awash across medical breakthroughs, technological parameters being smashed and our looking, literally at the beginnings of the universe. Sprigg has set off with a metal detector into the desert, but as such he is only retelling an old myth as metaphor.

He dresses well, he has a 3G phone, his story is encountered on a blog, he has a wheelbarrow and he finds gold but the image clashes; he is not the gold digger of old. Hope has sent many of us off on fantastical journeys with often obscure aims, travelling to places ill considered with packs often ill equipped. The history of the world is scattered with tales of adventurers, lost explorers, endless wanderers in search of the Philosopher’s Stone and the Holy Grail but Sprigg is only faintly related to these explorers. Sprigg is a new explorer, a post-technology, post-punk, post-cynical artist re-acquainting himself with the fresh new notion that life happens, that it’s ok to be unhappy, it is good to be happy, and that the spirit is above all resilient, if we would just listen to it ... and feed it.

It is interesting to me that Sprigg has consciously intertwined a number of different facets of action, object and aesthetics in his hopeful search for happiness. The performative and, in this case, symbolic act of walking away from civilization with no aim except of being conscious of his surroundings to the point of finding value, is important as a starting point. A single step starts any journey but as philosophers from Aristotle to Nietzsche to Thich Nhat Hanh have reminded us it is the ability to be within and deliberately aware of this step and of its repetition and not the journey or its outcome that brings fulfillment. This act of being aware of the step is highlighted in this case by Sprigg’s metal detecting. Here the artist may find gold but it’s his intense focus on the ground and the act of conscious listening that drives this aesthetic act. Walking necessarily places the constituent within a semantic dialogue. What

is possible within a conscious reading of the ground is the co-forming of a conversational dialogue between place and self that turns the walker away from mere dialogue to a more involved “vialogue”, a transaction of impetus co-formed between walker and surrounds. This engrossing of peripheral phenomena into the potentiality for story is a rupturing of spatial text, rewriting history as the walker becomes the sequencer of time, material and ultimately narrative. Sprigg takes on this role of vialogue, a conduit for new narrative, overlaying his movement, his reason, onto the motives of the past and the possible gains of the future. Hope springs eternal from repetition; a gold statue of Sisyphus - we need icons that continually play out history.

Sprigg does what anyone can do, we can all grab a metal detector and go looking for gold - but in this case the symbolic act of conscious walking takes precedence. Sprigg’s timely reminder rewrites the swaggie, the digger, the bloke down on his luck and willing to play his hand - this is the quintessential Australian myth but it’s not the gold, it’s not the prospect of wealth - it’s the pursuit of happiness and indeed the questioning of what that is along with a narrative of searching movement that builds a critique well beyond materialism.

This is reiterated in Mineshaft, a contemplative structure (perhaps a grotto) and for me Byzantine in its internal appearance. Sprigg’s gold embellished chasm brings to mind the Hagia Sophia or Basilica of San Vitale; it also highlights for me a significant shift in human consciousness and perhaps a misunderstanding of history. Byzantium art was often undervalued as a source of realism and talked about as an art of the extra-ordinary when I was at art school. Giotto’s blue had changed the world and the place we saw ourselves in it. Giotto, heavily influenced by St Francis’ views, brought about an age of humanism that I think is important to consider when approaching Sprigg’s work. The blue sky of Giotto sees a material world of actuality take significance over the radiated possibility of God’s omnipotence, but we should be careful of applying such schisms to the world. Giotto’s world understands the reality of colour, but so too in this way does the Byzantium gold. What is being offered in Byzantium gold is hope, a utopian vision and the strength of connection (gold is an excellent conductor of electricity, just shy of silver and copper).

The gold domes of Constantinople offered a significant vision, valuing the possibility of energetic transfer and the power of idealistic and ethereal relationships, an important political statement for an empire being run from the periphery. Interestingly too Rudolph Steiner picks up on this view of gold as a metal of conductivity, particularly so as a metal of heat. For Steiner gold affiliates with the sun, it is a gift from the sun, a material that arrives from an ethereal plane. Gold, as Wilhelm Pelikan too goes onto suggest, is linked in cosmology, numerology and on our calendar with the sun.

This holds currency in Australia’s association with gold; the antipodean country - the Great Southern Land – heralded into mythology as the sunburnt country. The harsh land, its dry sky and gold somehow conflated into the bronzed Aussie and gold became a part of vernacular slang; “good as gold”, “that’s gold”, “go the green and gold”. People have rushed here from everywhere to find gold and it weighs heavily in our sense of worth...it also weighs heavily on our social conscious. Gold mining produces boom after boom, it is the crucible of our culture and it proves, at least in its association with the arts, a constant ethical threat - yet for all of that, gold’s allure as a malleable metal and economic currency traverses the history of aesthetic knowledge ... we know its worth and we highlight it at every turn.

The artworld too is littered with gold references. Gold frames adorn masterpieces in the Louvre. While more and more gold bars get locked up under the pentagon for future securityWolfgangTillmansphotographedthemandmade them look like thick rectangles of yellow. Digital transactions mean less and less cash in the world so Tom Mùller made credit cards out of gold. Gold along with blue and rose made up Yves Klein’s triumvirate palette of colours; “All exist in one and the same state,” he said. Klein’s expansive gold voids hark back to Byzantium architecture-Wolfgang Laibuses the gold of pollen to similar effect. The jeweller Karl Fritsch searched for gold everywhere he went, and found it too - in popular culture, in advertising, branding, text based media and in a subversive use of the material itself. Roni Horn’s use of a minimalist poetic vision, also traced from an isolated landscape, in this case the sublime landscape of Iceland, utilises gold sheeting in her homage to Félix González-Torres and his partner Ross. Horn’s mirroring use of gold brings the gaze back on the viewer, making us reassess our fascination with external phenomena - turning the gaze inside.

For Roderick Sprigg the essential spiritual and elemental nature of gold operates initially as a metaphor for questioning value but ultimately ends up questioning the value of happiness ... also turning the gaze inside. It tells us much about hope, that its close accomplices are desire and luck but I wonder if happiness is worth all that hope ... hope takes a lot of energy. I also wonder if fearing failure doesn’t burn us out, like molten gold falling languidly out of a tilted forge.

Ric Spencer (PHD) is an artist, writer and former Curator of Fremantle Arts Centre