| kevin chin |
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| aaa | > press archive Dr Elizabeth Presa, Linden Catalogue essay, Nov 09 Kevin Chin Hearth Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts 14 Nov – 13 Dec 2009 Catalogue essay by Dr Elizabeth Presa Hearth Making Kevin Chin’s installation ‘Hearth’ invites us to reflect on what it means to be at home. He uses what is already in the gallery – the wooden floor, the window and the fireplace – and adds illumination, fired clay tiles moulded from the planks of a decomposing wooden bridge, a pile of cinders, and a large canvas containing painted images of wooden logs placed against the window to screen the light. A persistent questioning of origins has led this artist to thoughts of the ground, ash and cinders. Why does this artist desire to maintain such a close relationship to the hearth through his work? Perhaps he knows that the Latin word for ‘hearth’ derives from focalia, meaning ‘focus’, and sees that in English ‘hearth’ contains within it four more words ‘hear’, ‘heart‚ ‘earth’‚ and ‘art’‚ that bring him even closer to the centre of his being. With each new dislocation and movement from culture to culture, language to language, do we not try to carry with us the embers of an originary home? That home which is the site of our first memories, where we first learned the shape and texture of things, the meaning of love and belonging, and the taste and sound of words from our mother tongue. As artists do we not carry something of our home with us precisely in order to reconfigure it, each time with a new resonance and new intensity? Hestia, goddess of the Hearth, was one of the most ancient of Greek divinities. She guarded and kept burning the flames that warmed and gave light to the home and its traditions. Her flame was carried to distant colonies, marking out for the ancient Greeks new homes, far from their originary homeland, to which they or their children would someday return. The Lithuanian born French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, however questions this Greek notion of the home as the place to which we, or our children are destined to return. He proposes an alternative view taking his idea of home from ancient Judaic texts. This view is expressed in his essay "La Trace de L'Autre" (Levinas 1986, 348): To the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca, we wish to oppose the story of Abraham who leaves his fatherland forever for a yet unknown land, and forbids his servant to even bring back his son to the point of departure. Metaphysics for Levinas is a movement from “at home” (chez soi) toward “an alien outside-of-oneself (hors-de-soi), toward a yonder." We are called upon to leave our egocentrism to attend to the other person. This other is desired not as "a nostalgia, a longing for return" but as a voice calling us "to a land not of our birth" (Levinas Totality and Infinity, 33-4). In contrast to the myth of Ulysses, in which the hero leaves home and gathers wisdom, but returns to the same home, Levinas proposes a different journey, we leave home not knowing our destination, knowing only that we can never return to the home we have left. Levinas does not deny the centrality of home and indeed for him the home offers the very condition for what is required to be human. But the home, as building with a fixed geographical location is not, for Levinas, an end in itself. Rather it makes possible the commencement of human activity. Dwelling, for Levinas, opens up the space in which we can be at home with ourselves and into which we can retire. “Interiority concretely accomplished by the home…opens up new possibilities” for being with the outside world and with others. (Totality and Infinity, 154) By allowing a space for recollection and intimacy, the home facilitates and sustains our “inner-life”. The gentleness and the intimacy that the home affords allows us to be most ourselves and it is only in being at home with ourselves that we can extend affection towards others. Being at home with ourselves has an important ethical dimension because it is precisely our “inner life” that allows us to resist the harshness and brutality of unexamined, agenda ridden thinking of those (politicians, the state, institutions or organizations) who seek power and control over us. Dwelling provides the solitude and the space that allows us to welcome and unfold ideas unencumbered by habitual and dogmatic regimes of thought. For Levinas this interiority is equated with the Feminine and in this sense we might think of Hestia attending to a hearth and fire not of the polis or the state, but rather to one that welcomes both the unfamiliar and the stranger with infinite hospitality. But if this being at home is the condition of welcoming, then what does this mean for artists? Here Kevin Chin reminds us that being at home means being at home with oneself. And as an artist he is no more at home with himself than in his studio, in his own practice, wherever that practice may take him, across the borders of cultures, traditions and languages. If we hold onto Levinas’ image of a being at home that involves the deepest solitude, receptivity and welcoming then we are thinking of something close to sort of transcendent imagination that making art demands. For art always moves beyond familiar categories and ways of knowing. Indeed, we might think of an art practice as the hearth par excellence that welcomes the strange, the difficult and the unexpected. Making art becomes the focus, the heart of a metaphysical and ethical reality where we touch, attend to and hear the world. Dr Elizabeth Presa, 2009. |
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