Experiencing curiosity

by Edroger Rosili

People are disturbed not by things, but the view they take of them.
-Epictetus (2nd century Greek Philosopher)

We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.
-Walt Disney

It was during the opening of Possibilities of Maybes at Threesixty Art Development Studio in May last year when Encik Muhammad Nazli Aziz, the owner, had offered me to organise a group show. Thankfully, almost a year after the generous offer was made, it came true. Young and Curious exhibits latest works by Radin Erus, Rahman Idris Abas, Mior Mohd Nafis and I.

Firstly, I would like everyone to know that the four of us are still very new in the art scene. People who have ‘had their time’ may think we do not really come up with any new (art) problem in this exhibition, but in a ‘naively’ good way such a problem of art is still brand-new to us. Therefore, there is no real pressure to impress people’s judgement on us. Well, at least for now, while we are still young and curious!

Back in the art school, I remember being trained to be sceptical, to be investigative, and to develop research before we can exteriorise with a work of art. While I was there, the attitudes of people towards making art and being in a race against everyone else to be different from each other have nurtured a good environment for our art to progress.

Thus, this exhibition is hoped to show how an artist can begin his journey with an investigative undertone. The challenge here is to show how a simple problem can trigger us to come out of our shells, not empty-handed, but with something that we can use to suggest to others as something ‘different’. For us, new ideas mean having something different from what we have seen; something fresh. Our intention is not to create artwork as a solution to the problem, but to present the problem itself as a piece of artwork — to share with people the same curiosities the artists have experienced. We want to put ourselves together with the audience into a strange and rare vehicle of experiences, where together, we would wander into the intriguing world of seeing and understanding what we are seeing.

People may question: what does curiosity have to do with art? As a concept — it is to wonder, with a desire to know more, a kind of appetite for investigation, an urge to reason, or to speculate curiously upon a phenomenon. Philosopher Descartes proposed that wonder is the first of passion, as a primary emotion, a reaction to be unexpected, new or surprising phenomena. As a scientific behaviour, curiosity is interpreted as asking questions. I think the questions to be asked are endless in art. Philosophically, what we have as art is not necessarily valid in all situations and valid to everyone, as the results may vary. There are no solutions to the problems in art, only suggestions that will be put up as discussion. Development in art is always about creating a new reality. In researches, such new knowledge can be attained through analyses, hypotheses, syntheses and antitheses. Try asking, “What happened in the artwork? How does it work? What else can we know for certain? What else can be done?” or “Why do new arts always put us in a strange place, and peculiarly, at times, we feel ‘good’ being in that condition?”

Questions unveil to us more than what the answers provide. In a gallery, an art exhibition is a realm of wonder, a place where we can actually ‘see’ questions popping out. How do artists breed wonders? Artists, as the very first audience, ought to have this kind of ‘rare experiences’ pertained in his problem. We may get rare experiences in how we put things as a choice of attention. It could be simple things, simple problems, not necessarily from the popular issues. Sometimes, the choice of attention to things in our daily life could have easily been ignored due to its mundanity. A simple problem can rise easily as we are always walking through a mist of information around us in a state of the conscious mind. This is what happened to Isaac Newton when he picked up the “just-another-fallen-apple” and began to reason about gravity. Take a simple thing as a problem, put it up as a choice of attention, and see where it takes you. I think that is how we can share the awkwardness, the weirdness, and the strange thing about art and how it tickles our curiosity, to perpetually ponder the questions we have.

Our purpose is to encourage people to engage with art in what we feel as ‘being different’, focusing on the process of inquiry rather than a proposition of answers. Radin wants to understand how much information we need in a visual; Rahman wants to see how human subjects in paintings can be de-familiarised and create displacement in how we understand such subject should normally be presented; Mior is troubled with the problems of perception on solid and elusive appearance of matters; while I want to look for the possibilities in making bad photography painterly interesting.

Art development will keep on taking us into the exploration of new ways to provoke query, trigger curiosity, and stimulate our enthusiasm about how we, as humans, have understood and tried to understand art. We should take time to look carefully, reason deeply, and, of course, question. We may be surprised with what we can learn from things that make us curious.