Ghosts Outside the Machine

Simone Decker is a multi-disciplinary artist from Luxembourg presently based in Frankfurt, Germany. She distinguishes herself by having a large body of writing which intellectually supports and elaborates her work. She has developed art works often using tromp l’oeil and optical deceptions which pose and challenge assumptions about proportion and scale while creating a narrrative of multiple interpretations. This art often revolves around a common thread of materialism through its analysis, a very coherent challenge to mainstream belief structures.

Simone Decker, Ghosts

Decker’s photos, installations and objects comment upon the role of art in the public space , and playfully confuse the viewers perception, bringing them to reflect on more wide ranging issues. There is a depth of thought in her work which challenges the foundations of materialism.

Her series of sculptures ”Ghosts” provides a work which seems to synthesize and crystallize her thinking in a provocative yet accessible manner. Ghosts looked at the personal significance of surviving the demise of the human body and its relationship to our perception of material in the material world regardless of ideological ”ISM” camp one is aligned. Its this McCluhan type of categorization, to group the commonlities of materialistic thinking without fragmentation from within that makes her approach compelling.

” The very notion of ghosts does achieve on thing-it challenges the very foundations of materialism, a concept that is basically at work and at the heart of the main contemporary ideologies, from Marxism and post-Marxism to capitalism and so on”. Decker, effectively realizes the artists role of restoring a sense of equilibrium in the thought process, and restores a sense of balance in within the conscious and subconscious.

Ghosts

Ghosts uses the work of Leibniz to question the the sort of ”necessary illusions” that have been adopted as axioms of faith in Western thought. The adoption of Descartes theories is effectively challenged, particularly his dichotomy of the world into the mental and physical entities, each mutually exclusive. The Leibniz theory is the view of everything as ”substances” ; thinking substances ( mental) and extended substances (physical) which is an important difference implying a non-localized intelligence, and a connection between nature and the spirit world similar to American native peoples belief.

”There is no chance that the purely mechanical principles of materialism can account for the undoubtedly present phenomenon of consciousness, so there must be something beyond, something of true unity that allows for perception and consciousness.” The ghost is a manifestation of a spirit eternally restless, perhaps a signal of disunity since materiality is infinitely divisible it is unable to produce true unity. The theory of materiality is therefore predominant only for the purpose to divide and apportion property.

Ghosts, Winston Churchill

The role of the artist, as articulate as Decker is to create art around this central void within and without the ”real” yet somewhat impossible and unknowable; a comprehension and creation of a unified field theory in an artistic laboratory based on Leibniz’s conception of the ”Monad” or real atom.