It was during the long lockdown of 2020, that I first noticed my eyes ‘playing tricks’ on me, as if they too were bored by the great global shrinking...

The Optometrist #1

The optometrist chose her words kindly.

The ‘flaw’ wasn’t mine. We humans simply hadn’t evolved to live in endless confinement or do so much near-vision work. We’re hunter gatherers, she said, never designed to code all day, Netflix all night.

Of course, she couldn’t prescribe a solution to the problem of modern livelihoods or summon an end to our coronatimes. She could however create a tool that would help me better embrace resulting bad habits, and prolong my ability to interface with the machine (ie. do my job, get money).

Having reached a middleish age (all things going well), she also pointed out that in the far, far past, for which I was designed, I would by now be in the twilight of my life, looking at little but toward the heavens for salvation.

It wasn’t altogether unreasonable then, that I was here, seeking her help. And if I was to live a long life, and to spend much of it subject to ever-encroaching screens, then yes, I would need to aid and augment my eyes with a clarifying, magnifying lens.

The Optometrist #2

I’d last seen an optometrist in 1986, when in year three, the popular kid got glasses. Surely I’d need a pair too I thought, ever impressionable. I must have invented some pathology, but in front of the eye chart, as the optometrist pointed to each line of diminishing letters with a pointed cane, I read with ease.

I loved tests; I didn’t need glasses.

The Diagnosis

Thirty-five years later, I eagerly awaited another examination. Led into a dark room, I was placed in the intimate embrace of a robot; eye-to-eyepiece, foreheads pressed together. In just a minute or two we were done, but I felt strangely haunted by the experience—as if through that eyepiece I’ d exposed my soul.

I was led into another room, where I sat, transfixed. Here before me, in high definition, I saw a hyper-real photo-image of our nearest celestial neighbour, the red planet, Mars.

This, I was quickly corrected, isn’t Mars.
This is the back of your eyeball.
My physical reaction was like rising bile. My cerebral reaction was: cool.

Hark! This marble on which I meditate is the back of my eyeball? That lava flow the optic nerve through which all visual information drains into my brain?

What I am looking at, the optometrist tells me, is my blind spot. Actual irony, I think. I’ve found it!
Irony, absurdity.
And it is beautiful.

The Pathology

We might live in strange times, but we also live in a time when the things we can see—now more than ever—astound. That ‘I can see my blind spot’ seems to reflect this. But ‘I can see my blind spot’ is also a ridiculously post-modern (wanky), anthropocentric (deluded), and let’s face it, arrogant (post-truth) claim.

Here on Earth, whether we look around us, within, or up into the Sky, there are infinite questions. In 2021, so much exists outside our visual field of perception, that we still require divining guides—yes, a plurality—for answers.

Questions—and the elusive pursuit of answers—allow us to live with wonder. Although ‘why’ can sometimes be challenging, it’s a condition that makes life worth living; compelling ongoing exploration and excavation, both scientific and artistic.

Along the way we’ve done what we can to offset existential dread and discomfort, confronting the unknown and advancing knowledge. We’ve deployed talismans, tinctures and repetitive tics; we’ve employed trial and error, field research and academic practice; we’ve created microscopes, telescopes and endoscopes to see more than was once imaginable; developed blueprints, instructions, and maps to guide us through once uncharted territory.

Yet we continue to live with undiscovered atomic elements, unidentified microplastic pollutants, and deep-seated traumas we can’t untangle.

The Human Condition

Our artist, Rohan Schwartz, lives with chronic pain. It remains unexplained and unseen; health professionals can’t seem to fix it. It’s certainly not for want of trying, nor due to a lack of curiosity in our subject.

Rohan has been reading, collecting ephemera, and painstakingly creating topographic propositions in his artwork as a way of mapping out a new landscape. Like many drawn to mindfulness, he has been meditating on the Cartesian bind of the mind-body divide in an attempt to find a more sympathetic, holistic position. From here he hopes to understand pain as an embodied, lived experience—to reflect on its irresolute and indeterminate form...

That which can be felt, and sensed, but not seen.

This is his, human condition.

The Cosmos

When situating the self, it’s common to look to the cosmos for inspiration; only to find that here too we often find a similar split in effect. Western thought (and our way of life, particularly in cities) has done its usual ‘othering’ in distancing our planet from the universe of which it’s a part. We divide the two into discrete entities to be assessed, when they are really one and the same. Integral.

When things we can’t see and/or control have us spooked, we name, and we name according to a (potentially simplistic) ‘mental understanding of black’—as in the case of dark matter, darkness, black holes, cats, et cetera. But confronted with the dark and/or the state of being ‘in the dark’, humanity has also demonstrated a fortitude and willingness for experimentation that cements our experience as intelligent, sentient beings; from scrying glass, tarot and alchemy, to probes, satellites, and space stations.

The Stain

Every seeker has their tools. Like the earliest pre-Islamic astrolabes that were said to aid understanding of astronomy, astrology, seasonal change and tides, Rohan employs a tool that is in part, folkloric. His talisman is a remnant—a stain really, an imprint from an earlier work—a scrap of a map that held some future significance, saved, framed and locked away, but never forgotten.

On my first visit to his studio, Rohan showed me the stain, and I started to see the way in which it was informing his work. It stayed with me too, as if it were in my peripheral vision. So to understand the stain’s application to, and relationship with the work, and as an antidote to ‘I think therefore I am’, I turned to French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s short essay, L’Œil et l’Esprit:

“I would be hard pressed to say where the painting is I am looking at. For I do not look at it as one looks at a thing, fixing it in its place. My gaze wanders within it as in the halos of Being. Rather than seeing it, I see according to, or with it.”

It is according to his astrolabe, this talisman—the stain—that Rohan is mapping his own course, and in ‘The emergency of being alive’, it is in them, or with them, we might find our own guide. “Make your own damn art” says Bob and Roberta Smith. “Make your own damn meaning” these works seem to say.

*Astrolabe from the collection at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich*

The Seer

In Anne Carson’s Variations on the Right to Remain Silent, the Canadian writer says of painter Francis Bacon (himself an oracle):

“[He] claims that a real seer who looked at the world would notice it to be fairly violent—not violent as narrative surface but somehow violently composed underneath the surface, having violence as its essence.”

In communion with an artwork, it’s certainly possible to experience clarity and silence, but held there in confrontation with the self—with our bodies about which we have no idea, the deep universe, deep time, and those deep ocean channels that amass our human waste—violence is equally likely.

If our seer, in their seeking, continually finds mad and maddening material, what more valid response than the production of madness?

I admit to wondering if that’s what I’m looking at. But our artist rightly asks: “You see black?”

And you would at once be correct to question your perception.

For what is the artist’s black if not all the colours, absorbing all the light—and therefore an abundance—a presence of absolutely everything so beyond we just can’t see it yet?

*The emergency of being alive, Rohan Schwartz, 2020-21; Sand, glues, wood filler, enamel and oil on board, 92 x 81cm*

The Eye

The eye is a great manipulator, that we already know. It is also flawed.
That’s ok.
The ‘flaw’ is mine.

Catalogue text by Amy Rudder for The emergency of being alive, a solo show from Melbourne artist, Rohan Schwartz, at TCB Art Inc., 7–25 April, 2021.

*Harding, D. E. (1986). On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious. London: Arkana. p12.*

The flaw