Human Scale 2014 Oil on wood
Stalemate 2014 Oil on panel 168 x 35 cm
The Kraken's Level 2014 Ink on paper
Degree of All Things 2014 Oil on panel 82 x 122 cm
Stalemate 2014 Oil on panel 168 x 35 cm
Stalemate 2014 Oil on panel 168 x 35 cm
The Measure of All Things
“Man is the measure of all things” – Protagoras
“A pig or a dog-faced baboon, or some yet stranger monster which has sensation, is the measure of all things" - Socrates
Our units of length, weight, and volume were at first subject to the whims of monarchs, who would standardize them based on their own shoe size or on the length between their nose and an outstretched thumb. Measurements were once based on the human body, and like myth, they positioned the human at the center of the world. But as the need of merchants and scientists, required ever more accurate measurements, a system of standardization supplanted the human based system with an abstract mathematical model. Mythology similarly has been supplanted by materialism, the result of which is a decentering of the human experience away from the anthropocentric and towards a physicalist view, where our engagement with the world is stripped to a mere yes or no.
However, It is important to remember that while these forms, whether measuring devices or mythological structures, can be standardized, the content is always open to interpretation. There is a danger in forgetting that these tools were created by humans in order to frame their perceptions of the world, and do not themselves exist materially outside of perception. Even in the most utilitarian of objects, the ruler and the square, it is possible to find poetry, they certainly have an aesthetic, and maybe between the black ticks marks of space and time there are new myths ready to spring up from the unmeasured gaps.
“A pig or a dog-faced baboon, or some yet stranger monster which has sensation, is the measure of all things" - Socrates
Our units of length, weight, and volume were at first subject to the whims of monarchs, who would standardize them based on their own shoe size or on the length between their nose and an outstretched thumb. Measurements were once based on the human body, and like myth, they positioned the human at the center of the world. But as the need of merchants and scientists, required ever more accurate measurements, a system of standardization supplanted the human based system with an abstract mathematical model. Mythology similarly has been supplanted by materialism, the result of which is a decentering of the human experience away from the anthropocentric and towards a physicalist view, where our engagement with the world is stripped to a mere yes or no.
However, It is important to remember that while these forms, whether measuring devices or mythological structures, can be standardized, the content is always open to interpretation. There is a danger in forgetting that these tools were created by humans in order to frame their perceptions of the world, and do not themselves exist materially outside of perception. Even in the most utilitarian of objects, the ruler and the square, it is possible to find poetry, they certainly have an aesthetic, and maybe between the black ticks marks of space and time there are new myths ready to spring up from the unmeasured gaps.