Dissociation.

"Constantly, it seemed, the experts were on the brink of deciphering the ever-growing mass of information ... the scientists [were convinced] that they were confronted with a monstrous entity endowed with reason, a protoplasmic ocean-brain enveloping the entire planet."

--Solaris, Stanislaw Lem (1961)

In the novel Solariz, by the Polish science-fiction novelist Stanislaw Lem, who died this year, scientists have spent years studying the eponymous planet. Working on a space station that hovers just above Solaris, they have elaborated an intricate system of nomenclature about the planet (when the novel starts, the official bibliography of Solaris studies runs to some 1,500 pages) but they have never have been able to achieve consensus about what it means.

In a lecture he gave recently about the genre of science fiction at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin, the Romanian critic and curator Cosmin Costinas noted that "the need to envision the future is an effect of modernity." In contrast to this, I would argue that far from being prognosticators of the future, our task is now to envision the present. We are like the scientists in Solaris; we can observe the complex phenomenon of today but, in the end, we do not understand what we are looking at.

The concept of dissociation as an aesthetic category does not really exist. It does, regardless, have many precedents. Some form of productive estrangement has been the goal of art since the early 20th century, if not before. The Russian Formalists called this distanciation; Brecht called it the alienation effect; in modernism it is a technique called Cubism. In each case, the intention is to fracture our perception of reality so that we might grasp it more firmly. Underlying this impetus is the assumption that appearances are deceiving--due to the mystifications of class politics or the simple belief that the forms of 19th-century art practice are inadequate to the job of describing the changes wrought by the era's rapid pace of technological development--but not to the extent that they can't be subjected to the artwork's unique ability to embody an analysis of the present.

If there is a prevailing idea behind the concept of dissociation as we are using it in this issue of C, it is that as a culture we are caught in patterns of behaviour and habits of thought that are no longer of much use to us. In this context, the psychological dimension of the concept is most meaningful. In the interview "Ornament as Content," the Berlin-based Canadian artist Shannon Bool speaks about dissociation as "the idea of splitting off from yourself ... of you losing contact with the present world and going somewhere else, but in a non-hallucinatory way." Bool sees this process as integral to making art. It's how other worlds created by the artist become possible.

Writing about the late German artist Martin Kippenberger, Montreal-based theatre director Jacob Wren notes that, "it is ... possible that many artists working today ... aren't aware of the degree to which the core values of their practice are derived from, a) how fully the romantic ideal of art and of the artist continues to hold sway over our imagination, and b) how powerful the modernist ideal of a break with tradition continues to be." Wren sees this unacknowledged tradition of breaking with tradition in contemporary art practice as essentially aimless, if only for the reason that it creates a framework in which, as everyone knows, anything is possible; today, provided you work within the parameters of its conventions, virtually anything can be art. Wren observes that this is an essential weakness of the practice and, he writes, it works as a "metaphor for how aimless and powerless we often feel living in the contemporary world."

It is a coincidence that Wren's sometime collaborator Nadia Ross also appears in this issue of C. Addressing the topic of dissociation more directly, she not surprisingly comes to similar conclusions as Wren. She writes, "Modernism and postmodernism are characterized by an ever-recurring transgression of the norms set up by earlier periods. I argue that these transgressions cannot be resolved; there is no end to them." Somewhat ominously, she concludes, "There is no meaning because transgression is an end in itself." However, Ross sees a way out of this impasse. If we live in what is often described as a continuous present, it may be because contemporary culture functions as little more than one long dissociative moment. In Ross's view, theatre can provide the context for a more authentic type of experience, what she calls "natural emptiness;" she writes, "Theatre is not meditation, but it is a communal space with bodily attendance where, at some point in the time/space event, what is shared amongst all of us can be revealed: the subject and the object of contemplation are, for a moment, the same."

In an interview with Michele Faguet and Cristobal Lehyt, Venezuelan artist Javier Tellez reveals an interesting parallel to Ross' thinking. He states, "It is very important for me to work with non-professional actors--or 'models' as Bresson called them--because their lack of skills make the evidence of the real more present." The real is out there, these artists believe, and it is within our power to find it; all that is left is the need to agree that we don't know what it is already, and that we need to find this out.