Thy summer’s play
My thoughtless hand
Has brush’d away.
Am not I
A Fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
William Blake, from ‘The Fly’, Songs of Experience
‘Philosophers have always tried to show that we are not like the other animals, sniffing their way uncertainly through the world. Yet after all the work of Plato and Spinoza, Descartes and Russell we have no more reason than [the] other animals do for believing the sun will rise tomorrow.’
John Gray, Straw Dogs
In the cosmology of most ancient belief systems there is
a general acceptance that ‘all is one’, a notion that all
matter is from one source, that all things have been, and
will become, part of everything else one day.
It interests me that the conclusions drawn from Quantum
Physics and Evolutionary Theory all point towards the same
reality: an Existential oneness where all things are
related.
Western culture has suffered under an illusion of its own
making for a long time now; that we are at the centre of
things, somehow separated from the rest of Nature by our
divine and exclusive sentience.
For me, there is no threshold of consciousness, more of a
sliding scale that extends right through to the very
bacteria that co-exist in our bodies. To believe anything
else would mean the existence of something fanciful … like
god or alien ancestry.
Paul Chaney’s work
thematises and disrupts the framing of ‘Nature’ in several
ways, some subtle, some more confrontational. His work is
above all concerned with an effort to coexist with other
living beings; but the seriousness with which he takes this
problem is matched by a keen awareness that it is never
solved, but only deepens as it is pursued.
To become close to nature, for Chaney, is at the very least
to repudiate the notion that the natural world is something
unreservedly worthy of our admiration, something from which
we can draw some comforting meaning.
Chaney is a professed monist – for him, the strong
hypothesis that ‘all matter is from one source’ implies a
rescinding of any special privilege granted to the human.
But his monism inherits an ironic edge from his interest in
‘cognitive dissonance’ – our ability to maintain, against
all the evidence, our conceit that humans are the unmoving
centre of the universe.
Chaney’s work admits there is no acceptable ‘solution’ to
the problems he poses. His irony, however, is not the
cynical resignation of the city-dweller. For at the cutting
edge of his practice, he battles with unaestheticised
nature as few of us do. His central, ongoing work
f i
e l d c l u b (2004-present)
consists in his own attempt to live ‘off-grid’ in a remote
field in the southwest of the UK. He grows his own food,
disconnected from public utilities and drawing as little on
outside resources as possible. Much of his recent work
continues to document incidents in the day-to-day course of
this experiment in living, small occurrences which never
fail to blacken the name of Eden.
Admitting
that the logos
of
‘ecology’ is always already recoded, messed up, and
unnatural, Chaney enhances it with a dark ecology of
uncomfortable co-existence and intervention. A bracing
antidote to all that is sentimental, deluded and terminally
bourgeois in discourses of the rural and ‘environmental’,
Chaney proposes more profound and twisted philosophical
roots for them, plunging the viewer into strange
situations, emotions and perceptions that expose the
urgency and complexity, not to mention the humour and the
irony, of the problem at hand.
Robin Mackay,
Falmouth, 2008