World-less Inanimate objects – simply do not perceive the world, are not aware of existence or non-existence

World-poor Animals – strictly bound to experience the world as it already exists

World-building Humans – have the ability to create our own enduring structures, environments and meaning

According to Heidegger these divisions do not contain value judgements, but rather, each being is complete in their own world.

These classifications are interesting in relation to Hengeveld’s “Uprising” and “Independent Rider On The Lam” projects. Both projects include shopping carts which seem to roam by their own agency. As discussed earlier, the cart in “Uprising” roams the lake within the bounds of a tethered anchor. “Independent Rider On The Lam”, similarly, roams by seemingly its own volition. This piece uses an electric motor to allow the cart to move without being pushed by a human.

In terms of Heidegger’s thought, the shopping carts are ‘world-less’ beings. However, Hengeveld’s contextualization of these objects seems to challenge these boundaries. As the carts exist and act in different contexts, we are challenged to reconsider our own relationship to these objects. As ‘world-building’ creatures, do our creations have the ability to act in value systems other than our own? Furthermore, can or will humanity be able to create other world-building entities and what does this mean for us?

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.

Firstly, Hengeveld’s discovery of human debris or garbage in remote areas speaks to the ubiquity of our reach as humans. However, Hengeveld’s discussion highlights the eerie side of this discovery – that no matter how far we travel, our trash is already there to meet us. In this sense, our trash, seems to have a life of its own. In his book “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter”, German media theorist Frederick Kittler asserts that our technology has created a ‘situation’ or environment for our own existence. While this claim was, in fact, made years earlier by the famous Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, it is Kittler’s description of the functioning of this environment that differs. Kittler claimed that as information technology progressed, the need for human interaction diminished. One only needs to think of war drones, or cars that park themselves to see this process in action today. For Kittler, the ‘situation’ has forgotten us. Data streams no longer need to be (or even can be) processed by humans and therefore some sense of agency is lost.

While Hengeveld speaks to this sort of repositioning, he also positions ourselves, and our trash, in relation to nature. As Hengeveld described in the interview, the currents of nature operate without our input. Trash is carried down river, buried and decomposed along the shore or in the case of Chernobyl, the situation of nature quickly responds to the vacuum of human action.

Both of these sentiments bear great weight in today’s schizophrenic society. We fear technology but also worship its narrative of progress. We revere nature as a mystical source of power, but often forget the terror of the wilderness. Hengeveld’s pieces help us to recognize some of these disparate positions so that we can examine the validity of our often contradictory perceptions.

The following is the first of a two part video of our conversation with Mr. Hengeveld

Hengeveld’s work is also pertinent to the examination of the idea of death. ‘The shopping cart’, as it has come to be known by locals, examines how cultural artifacts die. In our everyday reality, shopping carts are used mainly to transport food – life giving material. But what happens to the shopping cart when it is removed from its intended context? Does the cart cease to have value and therefore become waste? Or does it attain a sort of life after death, wherein it becomes valuable in different contexts and purposes?

These questions can also be posed of ourselves in our own interaction with the things which we create to sustain our lives and lifestyles and the ways in which we interact with our own ideas of our own mortality and the meanings of our lives.

Robert Hengeveld positions the shopping cart in his ‘Uprising’ project as a familiar enough sight, different only in that it fails to sink to the bottom. and there is where the emotional touchstone exists in terms of Necromedia theory and how we encounter this installation project cum artifact of human invention.’

If the Beckerian theory of hero-systems promises a kind of life after death – or the delusion of such – for a mortal being, helplessly terrified of their own mortality, then the shopping cart, emblematic of undeniable biological stresses on the human animal, when turned upside down and plunged into a watery abyss represents a starkly uncomfortable reminder of who we are and what animal truths we are inescapably subordinate to.

A shopping cart.. a vessel of commerce and a conduit for the transference of basic animal nourishment, a unifying and underlying symbol of humanity and family, it is a universal symbol. Everyone knows what a shopping cart is, even if they don’t have cause to use them in their own daily existence and everyone is familiar with the wide variety of them to some degree or another – with other artists, such as Julian Montague even accrediting them with a hyperreal degree of complexity and importance that they might otherwise be scrutinized with.

The functioning of the shopping cart is similar to a crucifix in the sense that when it is upright, as intended and rolling through creation on it’s own sticky rubber wheels it is a symbol of such essential human commonality so as to almost embody a palpable sense of the sacrosanct, but conversely, just like the Judeo-christian cruciform, one only has to invert it in order to not only subvert it’s purpose but also to invoke a pall of dread and wrongness around the image and the object.

Indeed, when admiring Hengeveld’s installation piece we are provoked by a sense of wrongness in it’s casually upended reversal of purpose that claws at not only our demand of the usual from reality but also at one of the principal hero-systems of hunter/gatherer/provider – built around the mentality that states: ‘I have only to provide nourishment for my family and they will continue to live and so will I’.

Part of what makes ‘Uprising’ so effective is that the drowning shopping cart refuses to sink. Robert Hengeveld constructed it of artificial composites so that it would remain afloat on the surface of an urban lake and it bestrides the watery horizon like a specter and so the viewer has no recourse but to break away and ‘reaffirm the use of this device’, but in true Heideggerian fashion, deny it the right to dominate us and lay waste to our being,”

Relating these ideas back to Becker, the situation of Maynard’s piece recalls our own situation in regards to our conceptions of our own mortality. The tension between public and private space, which is built into the installation, is analogous to our own approaches to moments where we experience the sublime or transcendent. While we can recognize both our creaturlieness and our symbolic existences, we have difficulty reconciling the two. Becker claims that much of what we do in culture then, serves to repress the animality and finitude of our existence. In order to truly understand our existence, Becker encourages us to follow Kierkegaard’s logic which leads up to a leap of faith. Becker tells us that this process is filled with dread as we recognize that our ‘hero systems’ or our ‘armour of character’ are merely balms which disguise the fundamental truths of our existence.

Becker then beckons us to examine our own finitude and creaturlieness. We are asked to examine our most important values and therefore transgress or undermine their very existence. It is this transgression which we then wanted to apply to Maynard’s installation. We hope to have engaged with the piece in a critical and subversive way, by violating its public and private values.

It is the tension between two spaces – in this case psychological and physical- which calls for mediation. The term ‘necromedia’ points towards the mediation which takes place between our understanding of the inevitability of death, and the strategies we employ in order to assign meaning to our actions.

Ernest Becker’s 1973 book “The Denial of Death” posits that the denial of death is not only pervasive in our culture, but the reason for culture itself. Firstly, Becker asks us to acknowledge the fear of death as a universal trait in humans. Unlike other animals, according to Becker, the human stands alone as a being which recognizes its impending death. However, Becker also asserts that humans have the ability to look beyond the limits of their lives. As a result, the human is an animal which is “half animal and half symbolic” (Becker 26). The realm of symbols is then where we attempt to validate our creaturely existence. Becker calls these validations ‘hero systems’. Our ‘hero systems’ the ways in which we create cultural meaning in order to affirm our existence and assign our existence a greater value.

Welcome to Necromania! This VLOG will follow a selection artists from this year’s incarnation of CAFKA. The focus of our commentary will be on how these pieces confront our conceptions of our own mortality.

This year’s theme is Veracity. The Oxford English dictionary defines Veracity in a number of ways, but for our purposes, we will define veracity as:

“The quality or character in persons of speaking or stating the truth; habitual observance of the truth; truthfulness, veraciousness.”

The aspect of Veracity which we will examine in our selected pieces is that of the inevitability of our own death. Whether at the personal, societal or universal level, all reflections of truth must incorporate the truth of our finitude.

The following are a few preliminary photos from around town. Enjoy!