Field Study's Man in E11 contemplates a pseudopian twist in the Utopian visual field



I arrived at 'pseudopia' by applying some Venn and artless psycho-maintenance to our days in the field. We would like this field study to be a Utopian project however it soon became clear that our vision is misinformed (and disinformed) by a trinity and triumvirate of hallucination, illusion and delusion. It is unlikely there will be any genuine radical and social transformation in our project unless we attempt a deconstruction of those three phenomena, which are vaguely employed and all too often confounded. The prospect of a deconstruction of distraction found me out of my depth and floundering in the mediocrity of my critical faculties. Field Study's Man in E11 complained I have made a wholesale (and retail) liberal capitulation to capitalism. I retorted he had made a serious omission in not prefixing liberal with neo-. 'You are such a pseudo', he replied. I tried to negotiate the fading transition from psycho- to pseudo and gave up, all most. FSMiE11, detecting my cluelessness, shifted from complaint to advice, stating I could make a radical and revolutionary break with what is by 'modelling the tension between an immanent critique of the present and a future condition implied by that critique' (Richard Noble*). I replied that these words in my mouth, or rather at the tips of my fingers, amount to waffle. 'I don't think I'd know what a critique is, even if it hit me in the face', I added despairingly, at which point a vision of a fist mysteriously caused my nose to start bleeding. 'Which one of the trinity was that vision supposed to be?' I cried to the field student, who appeared before me, hanging (or is it hung?) in a tree, just off Stratford High Street. He did not answer in a frequency range audible to my ordinary hearing faculties but I am certain that finding myself standing before another tree later in the twisted time of the field day was as a consequence of that encounter - and that in that place I had liberated my mediocre self from the triumvirate of hallucination, illusion and delusion. I think this might be a Utopian visual quest in progress.




















* Utopias//Edited by Richard Noble. Documents of Contemporary Art. Whitechapel Gallery.


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