Catharine Ahearn, when the evolution in art is an error in the copying-fidelity

 

Some time ago we bumped into Catharine Ahearn’s video posted on Raminken Crucible’s web site in occasion of her solo show at the gallery. We immediately thought that it were a clear case of an information based work, and our opinion was confirmed by the two quotations chosen to introduce that show. The first one by Kirk Varnedoe and the second by physics Steven Hawking, both thinkers to whom Conceptual Fine Arts is devoted. However it was not enough to inspire our writing. We were not ready yet. At that time we didn’t take into consideration the “Selfish Gene”.

 

Chapter 11 of the seminal book by Richard Dawkins is dedicated to what the English ethologist calls the “meme”, probably the most controversial and fragile element of his system of theories. According to Dawkins the meme is “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. […] examples of memes are tune, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches”. As the meme is derived from the gene, it has the fundamental characteristic of being a replicant: “imitation, in the broad sense, is how memes can replicate”.

 

But since the meme is based on a darwinian perspective, competition is part of the problem:

Where there is sexual reproduction, each gene is competing particularly with its own alleles-rivals for the same chromosomal slot. Memes seem to have nothing equivalent to chromosomes, and nothing equivalent to alleles. I suppose there is a trivial sense in which many ideas can be said to have ‘opposites’. But in general memes resemble the early replicating molecules, floating chaotically free in the primeval soup, rather than modern genes in their neatly paired, chromosomal regiments. In what sense then are memes competing with each other? Should we expect them to be selfish or ruthless, if they have no alleles? The answer is that we might, because there is a sense in which they must indulge in a kind of competition with each other.

 

If we blend this assumption with the basis on which the Ramachandran‘s “Primitive figurals” relay, it follows that in art the units are the ideas that we “like”, thus ideas we perceive that create sensations in some ways connected with a specific kind of pleasure. The new element is that memes tend to replicate, just like the phrases of an old symphony that a composer uses, consciously or unconsciously, in his new song. He employs them because they “work” properly.

 

How many replicas of primordial assemblage, or ready made, or objects made of unconventional materials did we see in the last fifty years of art history? Could the step forward just be not a generic error, as stated by Thomas Bernhard (Old masters, 1985), but an error in the copying-fidelity? And then, is this the concept that moves Ahearn’s art practice of “self made” lava lamps, or pretzel made fornitures? It might as well be, if we consider the errors she disseminates everywhere all around her works.

January 22, 2015