Transitions between Truth and Lies

Recently, in The Monthly magazine, Mark McKenna described Manning Clarks epiphanies in relation to art, music and literature and his realization that history must always run second to art as a form of human expression. Manning Clarke played with fact and fiction and in doing so revealed something more about the human condition, as McKenna states ‘the moral of the parable always mattered more than the facts’ In this paper I intend to explore the work of artists, who like Manning Clark are less concerned with developing grand hierarchical ‘truths’ but more concerned with the development of interpretive artworks which provide a metaphorical conduit to new experience. Art provides a zone for Winnicots ‘transitional object’, for chance encounters which cause a domino effect of response, or as with Manning Clark, an epiphany. Transitional works provide a starting point for journeys of association, they are not so much about formal aesthetics but are concerned with evoking the viewer’s affective response to both private and cultural remembered objects and the associations. Gregor Schneider, Mike Nelson and Mark Dion all work in this transitional zone. Gordon Matta Clark, in describing the work of Mark Dion says that the artist takes ‘a normal situation and retranslates it into overlapping and multiple readings of conditions past and present’. Indices and traces of actions and existences in Dions work pull the spectator into other times and spaces. Concepts of linearity and hierarchy implicit in categorizations are radically destroyed. The work of Dion and Manning Clark both elucidate the rich potential which may occur when artists are prepared to work both inside and outside the confines of an ordered ‘truth’. Their work is complex with many layers of meaning, full of the unexpected conjunctions and revelations which may occur as a result of the encounter between fact and fiction.