Necromania

The deepest essence of meaning (and meaning of essence) is hidden or concealed from humans for the purposes of Martin Heidegger’s challenging of technology, so too was the true meaning of Robert Hengeveld’s ‘Uprising’ hidden beneath the surface of the lake in Kitchener’s Victoria Park during Cafka and just as an essence could be gleaned by human thought through “paintstaking effort to think through still more primally what was primally thought…”, we must likewise go beneath the surface of those chilly waters to scry the technological nature of Uprising.

Heidegger’s methodology was largely concerned with poeisis, a key to his reasoning, that bespeaks a ‘bringing-forth’ of meaning from the challenging of concealment into unconcealment. For Heidegger, to accept the concealed was to never to attain truth. While a shopping cart (the focal artifact of Hengeveld’s piece) hardly represents the most complex construct in human technological achievement (it is after all, simply a wheeled cart) or even come close for that matter, it is still derived of techne, the ancient Greek word in which technology finds it’s root and for the Greeks, techne was inextricably linked with the notion of poesis. Techne didn’t just mean the skills and output of a craftsman but also the cerebral arts and fine arts, thus enabling the techne of modern times to provide a bringing-forth, a revealing in it’s own right.

Hengeveld’s ‘Uprising’ cart stands – stood – floated as a multi-faceted metaphor for Heidegger’s perception of technology in his essay, The Question Concerning Technology. In theory, the cart was to have been anchored to a weight at the bottom of the lake, on a tether that would allow it float freely about within a certain range of distance, bobbing along with a buoyancy afforded it by the air-filled tubes that comprise it’s framework. However, as one imagines might often be the case with interventionist, installation-based art that dares traverse the public boundaries, all did not apparently go completely according to plan as the facsimile of the shopping cart did not chart it’s random course around the radius allowed by it’s anchor but instead got stuck on the shallow lake floor and ran aground in the mire. Among the reasons that Hengeveld chose to construct his shopping cart simulacrum of light, artificial materials is so that it would do what a real shopping cart could not and bob about surreally across the surface of the lake, instead ‘Uprising’ appeared just as shipwrecked as a real shopping cart would in it’s situation and was perhaps more visually jarring, more striking because of that apparent failure.

In getting beached in the middle of Lake Victoria, the installation piece of ‘Uprising’ attains an inadvertant but brilliant feat by offering up an ideal posture from which to interpret Gestell or the ‘enframing,’ the fusing of the ‘setting upon, that sets upon man, (p. 20)’ – the form of the shopping cart is effectively put on ‘standing reserve’ against the backdrop of the urban lake setting in Kitchener and in doing so becomes more a more real shopping cart than a shopping cart itself.

Heidegger discusses technology in it’s usual setting as standing reserve as follows: “…an airliner that stands on the runway is surely an object. Certainly, we can respresent the machine so, but then it conceals itself as to what and how it is. Revealed, it stands on the taxi strip only as standing-reserve, inasmuch as it is ordered to ensure the possibility of transportation. For this it must be in its structure and in every one of its constituent parts, on call…(p.17, The Question Concerning Technology).” “…man has already been claimed by a way of revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an object for research until even the object disappears into the objectness of standing reserve (p.19)” When Henegeveld’s shopping cart simulacrum is up-ended against the backdrop of the urban water setting with it’s foam constructed wheels spinning helplessly, impotently in the air, only then – in its apparent uselessness – is it’s true nature as the tool it is finally revealed.

Only when a shopping cart is cloned from lighter materials and desposited in a lake in some terrible echo of the same way that early western europeans would hurl their ‘tools’ into a body of water do we really detect its essence – a fact hammered home by the fact that while we were videotaping the installation we encountered persons who either readily understood that the ‘Uprising’ project was, in fact, park of Cafka and not just another blight on the urban landscape. When abstracted from it’s ‘destined’ use we were truly brought face to face with the ‘thingness’ of this tool and our relation to our perception of it.