Tony Maas

For Samual Beckett, at the core of existence lay a helplessness beyond redemption, an impotence of enquiry which lies behind the question 'What are we here for?' I would ask 'What is the point? for mine is not a practice concerned with the interpretation of reality, a dubious premise in my mind, but one concerned with its very falsehood, the idea that there is a reality to start with. My desire is to peer between the cracks of truth and memory and establish a dialogue where puzzlement replaces certainty and the strange pulls at the familiar.

I see my role as that of storyteller, devising rituals and games which aim to address art's uneasy balance between what Levi-Strauss refers to as the '...mythical view and the science of inquiry...', a distinction between magic and science. It is a game pitched at the neurosis of intellectual certainty and the unrestricted playground of what Freud refers to as the pleasure-principle. It is the space that occupies the siren song of lost youth and memory, with its potential to wreck those seduced by its call.

We tame nature by our intellect not conquer it, the sciences of the mind will not repel the chaotic forces of nature. At the core of Man lies internal forces at war, that between rationality and chaos; a front between fictional, poetic play and analytic discourse, pulling at the reigns of social order and challenging status.

Mine is a documentary of narrative, seeking the truth behind language, though aware my truth is itself a construct of falsity, a layering of disbelief.

It is the impossible quest for understanding of that which is not to be understood. Ultimately, the dialogue is with language itself and how it steers us toward certain codes of action and behaviour which affect our knowledge of self. My work seeks to re-appraise its influence and imply a note of caution in our conception of its influence and the imprint of beliefs it creates.

There remains an inner absence of everything to itself, which can never be directly experienced, a sense of presence only reached through a non verbal cognitive resonance.

'Words fly away; the written letter remains. Sound is absence, beguiling; out of sight, out of reach. What made the sound? Who is there? Sound is void, fear and wonder. Listening, as if to the dead, like a medium who deals only in history and what is lost, the ear attunes itself to distant signals, eavesdropping on ghosts and their chatter. Unable to write a solid history, the listener accedes to the slippage of time.'

Toop, David - Sinister Resonance. New York: Conrinuum Books Inc., 2010