Domenico de Clario

2047

15 June - 9 July 2011

Live piano performance 2:30pm Saturday 18 June

2047 (the immortal)

How has 2047 (the immortal) come about? It may have begun with the need to address a
persistent memory that for a very long period of time has insisted on being acknowledged. Then
again this project may simply result from an attempt to come to terms with certain aspects of
finality that I am beginning to apprehend at this point of my life.

Though there is neither prospect nor desire to arrive at any definitive conclusion, the following
notes are an unstructured attempt to consider a little more closely the possible reasons for
having made 2047 (the immortal), in the hope that whatever might be revealed through this
process can assist to fix, even if in a fugitively fragmentary way, the sometimes bewilderingly
ephemerality of the confrontation with the inner made manifest.

So firstly, to the possibility that an insistent memory has been the catalyst for this project; that
memory, as fallible and as selective as all memories are, is the following.

One chilly July morning in 1957 my mother, my sister and i catch the suburban train from
Flinders Street to North Brighton station and from there we walk briskly to William Street. My
father, with the help of some friends, has been fixing the little cottage at Number 89 for us to
move into. The front door is wide open and the smell of fresh paint is overpowering. We enter
the house; my father greets us excitedly and then leads us into the newly painted living room.
Its four walls have in turn been painted deep red, royal blue, ochre yellow and viridian green. He
proudly points to what once must have been a fireplace, now neatly covered over with a cement
sheet. He specifically directs our attention to the gleaming multi-coloured patches he has
painted all over its surface, each bright patch delineated with a thick glossy black line. The four
of us admire this handiwork in silence for a few moments. He then confidently proclaims that
this ‘painting’ is to his mind an undoubted example of ‘arte moderna’

As the three of us stand silently in the centre of the room considering what ‘arte moderna’ might
be, he points to the floor, more precisely to the half-dozen or so tiny cans of enamel paint
scattered on the floor near the fireplace cover, as though they were incontrovertible proof that
the painting he has made is indeed a work of modern art.

Why has this memory persisted for so long? Did the manifestation of extraordinary confidence
with which my father, uneducated in the arts, enthusiastically appropriated ‘modern art’ as an
experience achievable by anyone that cared to, really impress me so deeply? Did witnessing
this high romantic act facilitate for me, perhaps misguidedly, a sense of the simplicity with which
one might approach the creative life?

My ultimate un-belief in the outcome of self-conscious approaches to ‘art making’ has perhaps
then directly resulted from this experience. Though I do not believe that the outcomes of selfconscious
approaches to art making add much value to our understanding of our condition
(except to affirm a certain confidence in our cognitive abilities) I do believe in the value of an
instinctive apokalypsis* taking place between individuals, if this exchange is able to lead to a
kind of reflexivity, which in turn might lead to certain insights being gained regarding the nature
of the continuum we inhabit.

Am I then not really interested in any aspect of the manifestation of contemporary art, except
where that manifestation might lead to some kind of insight or revelation, not matter how tiny or
fleeting, of the nature of being human? My conclusion is that I am probably not.

Apocalyptic exchanges might also be marginally about art, but more significantly about how
paradoxical ideas about risk and failure and expectation can be negotiated in one’s life. Perhaps
even more precisely about how the very nature of paradox, namely the dynamic between
substance and appearance, process and outcome, might affect such exchanges. Even
regarding the nature of self, if a single self indeed exists.

This last question leads me directly to the second of my considerations regarding the reasons
for the existence of 2047 (the immortal); the increasing fascination I am experiencing regarding
the approaching finality I am undoubtedly beginning to feel over the last few years.
Essentially this fascination manifests through my repeated attempts (obstinately made,
irrespective of my deep ignorance and limited intellectual capacity) to scratch away at the door
of the vast room containing the simple answer to the question of the nature of self and how this
self, single or not, is projected through the identifiable identity we hold on to so tightly.
Regarding the question of whether identity and self are one and the same: endless texts attest
to the discovery, on the part of a large number of individuals, that the momentariness of the
arisings of various aggregates of experience, including the entire edifice of causality (the circular
structure of the binding chain of habituality, each link being unceasingly conditioned by each of
the others) constitutes the normal pattern of human life as the never-ending circular quest to
anchor experience in a fixed and permanent self.

But might the belief that a single fixed and lasting self abides through endless arisings of
various collections of experience constitute a fruitless search for the inexistent? And if we
indeed have no single, identifiable self, why do we continue to think, feel and act as though we
did – endlessly seeking to defend that non-findable, non-experienced single self?

Whilst I am considering such notions another unexpected thing happens. One evening a few
months ago, I am reading to some friends a story titled ‘The Immortal’**.

I am struck by the following passage:
‘There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind all
creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible and
incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal. I have noticed, that in spite of religion, the
conviction as to one’s immortality is extremely rare. Jews, Christians and Muslims all profess
belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly
believe only in those hundred years, for they destine all the rest throughout eternity to rewarding
or punishing what one did when alive. In my view the Wheel conceived by certain religions in
Hindustan is much more plausible; on that Wheel, which has neither end nor beginning, each
life is the effect of the previous life, and engenderer of the next, yet no one life determines the
whole…’

I wonder how many selves I have facilitated through my six decades and more of life on earth.
As I consider the notion of an endless Wheel of Life it occurs to me that the first ‘century of life’,
irrespective of the number of years lived by each individual, might contain a certain number of
risings and subsidings of manifestations of various individual selves, each of which has been
generated through the ‘portal’ of a particular cathartic experience. This experience might have
occurred and subsided in an instant, but have been transformative enough to propel the lived
life forward for a decade or so, through its affirmation of a discreetly different self from the one
that manifested through the previous one. Each of these decade long manifestations of self
might seem, to all observers, to be affirming a coherently ongoing single self.

I wondered then if I could construct a model of this structure, describing through a number of
images and objects such a series of interlinked though discreetly individual selves, evolving
through the characteristics of each decade’s single cathartic moment until the next
manifestation of catharsis has taken place.

What might this model look like?

Would it be appropriately located inside a freshly painted living room, each of its four walls
perhaps in turn painted red, blue, yellow and green? Could the structure of such a Wheel be
defined by the gathering together of a series of images and objects defining each cathartic
moment of each decade, manifesting in the end as one single work spanning the idealized lifecycle,
whether or not fully lived out, of a ‘century of life’?

But how to decide which particular moments might constitute each of the ten decades’
epiphanic instants?

An impossible task, I thought. But as I more closely considered each decade of a single lived
life, in this case mine, a number of selves began to emerge. Some distinctly, some distinctly
blurred.

For each decade, beginning from the first (being generated by events that occurred in the few
minutes before the moment of my birth in 1947) until the one that began at 10.49 pm on March
23, 2007, I settled on the first recollection that emerged from the first year of each decade as its
emblematically cathartic moment.

For those decades yet to come, in order to compete a ‘century of life’, (beginning in 2017, 2027,
2037 and in 2047) I simply imagined a particular event that might be taking place during the first
year of each future decade. Of course my expectation is not at all that I will go on living for an
entire century; irrespective of the length of my life an infinite number of things will happen
beyond my death, as an infinite number have occurred before my birth.

This structure might then consist, I conclude, of eleven births and consequently of the eleven
deaths of those selves that have variously manifested from a single moment and have then
unfolded, until their demise ten years later, as lived aspects of an individual life.
Consequently 2047 (the immortal) gathers together eleven epiphanic moments that in joining
might construct a single life Wheel. This collection of images and objects might be a description
of such moments that have characterized my own life, or it might not.

Better still it acknowledges both the single self that was present through each decade and that
generated its presence through my lived experience, as well as those unknown manifestations
yet to come.

I have written an account of each of these eleven ‘portal’ moments so that you may consider
them, either separately or in the context of the images and objects I am suggesting they may
relate to. But then again there may be no relationship. And even if the image corresponding to
each account does not attempt to illustrate that particular moment, there may be inadvertent
affinities. They were not sought; they were in fact evaded. But in evading each possible
correlation some evidence, even if minimal, of what links dream to reality may have survived.

The process of gathering and then evading what one gathers, of editing, of avoiding, of
protecting, of representing, of manipulating, even of finally revealing one’s inner life, is as much
a dream as is each account I have written of each moment; it’s as much a dream as each
image, whether remembered or imagined, I have made in response; as much a dream as this
text I am writing is, as is Borges’ text, as is my life, as is your life.
All is dream, all is dreaming.

I am both mother and father of these eleven moments or even of these eleven ‘sons’# that I am
presenting to you; all were loved from the outset, but in the end all were rejected. Lovingly of
course, and with good reason, but rejected they were; seemingly, though I am not sure of this,
for the sake of an engagement with whatever comes next.

That again brings up the unresolved question of finality, and what might come after the current
self I inhabit, or any of its followers, decides to dissipate its momentum.
But that’s another story, and perhaps it’s for another time.

Domenico de Clario
June 2011

*Greek for ‘revelation’, or ‘unveiling’.
**Jorge Luis Borges, The Collected Short Stories
# Eleven Sons is a short story by Franz Kafka. The story begins with a father's declaration: ‘I have eleven sons.’ He
then goes on to describe each one of them in detail. Kafka told his publisher Max Brod: ‘The eleven sons are quite
simply eleven stories I am working on this very moment.’ The story was written between 1914 and 1917. In 1919 it
appeared in Ein Landarzt. Kleine Erzählungen (A Country Doctor), a collection of Kafka's short stories published by
Kurt Wolff (Munich and Leipzig).
2047 (the immortal) is dedicated to the memory of Joseph De Lutiis (Tocco di Causaria, Italy 1953 -
Melbourne, 2011)