Desire

‘I leaned over the edge of my boat and looked down at the peak of the underwater volcano. The clarity of the ocean water all around the boat gave me an unsettled feeling, as if a hollow had opened somewhere behind my solar plexus – a hermetically sealed cavern that had neither entrance nor exit.’

Thus runs a description of spiritual hunger in Haruki Murakami’s short story ‘The Second Bakery Attack’, in which the protagonist, stricken by a craving for bread in the dead of night, goes out to attack a bakery, together with his wife. His hallucinatory vision of a boat and the underwater volcano stems from his extreme hunger. The bread functions to stuff and assuage the feeling of a bodily lack that comes from transparency and hollowness, and the sensation of a real absence. Finally, when this objective is attained, the underwater volcano is no longer visible; instead, the protagonist gives himself over to the boat as it flows along with the tide.

It is not clear if this is a question of appetite, a desire to ‘attack’” mediated by bread, or a desire to escape from mundane everyday life through an irrational act or behaviour. The ‘“peak of the underwater volcano’,” as a metaphor for the form that desire takes, expresses the ambiguity of the protagonist’s own desires.
Art has a profound relationship to desire. From the early 20th century up until the present, the nature of desire has changed dramatically as a result of two factors. The first is a shift that has occurred in terms of the subject, and individuality, while the second pertains to how capitalism and information capitalism have evolved. Capitalism gave desire a clear vector, based on a desire for new things, for a certain disparity different from what came before. Pro-jects and pro-ducts are indices that seek to propel themselves endlessly forward. Since the advent of the twentieth century, these entities have replaced our conceptions of desire.

Art has a profound relationship to desire. From the early 20th century up until the present, the nature of desire has changed dramatically as a result of two factors. The first is a shift that has occurred in terms of the subject, and individuality, while the second pertains to how capitalism and information capitalism have evolved. Capitalism gave desire a clear vector, based on a desire for new things, for a certain disparity different from what came before. Pro-jects and pro-ducts are indices that seek to propel themselves endlessly forward. Since the advent of the twentieth century, these entities have replaced our conceptions of desire.
From the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, we have witnessed major shifts in how we collectively conceive of desire, owing both to changes in how we perceive subject/object and individuality, as well as mechanisms of modern information capitalism that continue to dislocate desire from the realm of the internal to that of external forces. The ‘pro’ mindsets of product, promotion and productivity belie the sense of acceleration and external projection of our contemporary reality. Within this loss of desire’s inner agency, the artists in this exhibition help us re-manifest the internal imaginary realms and landscapes of desire.

Thanks to the rise of the cognitive capital of the Big Four (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple), information capitalism is attempting to eradicate the boundaries between inside and outside. The internet has penetrated our insides, controlling our tastes and emotions. Amazon anticipates with astonishing accuracy what you are likely to want to buy next. Algorithms tailored expressly to yourself are created, and it becomes increasingly vague whether your desires come from the outside, or whether you actually desire these things from the inside. The evaluation of values becomes dictated by digitised information, while judgment is withheld on internal assessments and one’s human values, or abandoned altogether.

Young people today have an attenuated desire for a strong ego or self-realisation; instead, they empathise with a sense of collectivity, with certain desires that exist within the drive to share specific tastes or inclinations. The act of being constantly connected to the world through the internet does not consist of concentrated moments of high tension with things that exist before your eyes; rather, it places us in a ceaseless state of slackened strain. To put it another way, this is a condition of short-circuited energy.

Jane Bennett has pointed out that we have shifted from the subject/object and individual to a network of agents and assemblies. The premise of the human as the subject of desire is also in flux. This exhibition seeks to explore the increasingly ambiguous nature of desire through the imagination that still resides within us, as well as works of contemporary art that pursue and activate this desire within the internal spaces of our cognition. It is my hope that a panoramic view of these landscapes of desire, shaped by art from the beginning of the 20th century up until the present, will fill and energise the transparent ‘sealed caverns’ inside our minds.

"Cycles of Desire" Yuko Hasegwa (Excerpts from catalog text)