The Elimination of Distance
JAMES BALMFORTH, BOBBY DOWLER, CHRISTOPHER GREEN, OLIVER GRIFFIN
Before there were scientific instruments, there was art. Whether representing a distant land or a distant mind, art makes perceptible what is too far, too close, or too fluid for our immediate sensorium to register.
Artwork does not so much imagine new worlds, as reveal those worlds propagating beneath the slide of convention, beyond the horizon of probability.
To say that art is the elimination of distance is not simply to say that art makes the far near, the foreign familiar, or the estranged re-united. It may do all of these things or, as often, their opposites. But first and foremost, art rejects the category of distance as a necessary marker of difference.
Art introduces a new relation between objects, events, and consciousnesses that cannot be interrupted by the conventions of custom or science. For the forgotten heaven, lover, nightmare, hope, intimation, it says: 'I am'.
