and yet - it's rather curious, you know, this sort of life!'
I.
Artists, like philosophers and certain young girls, can never resist heading down a rabbit hole; often without considering how in the world they might get out again.
So it is that, later this month, Maria Baldacchino, Karl Fröman, Maria Fröman, SJ Fuerst, and Luca Indraccolo, will individually explore and conceptually map out as best they can a series of surreal landscapes in an exhibition curated by Melanie Erixon entitled The Rabbit Hole Collective #1 [1].
Visitors can look forward to encountering Lego-animals, gravity-defying pieces of fruit, painted inflatable pool toys, Pulcinella among the ruins, and other enigmatic figures looking for a coherent narrative within an environment in which it is reasonable to expect the impossible.
II.
The phrase, down the rabbit hole, is, of course, taken from Lewis Carroll's nonsensical novel, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and generally refers to the fact that it is often easier to get lost in one's own reality - or to find oneself in a strange and perplexing situation - than might be imagined once a collective frame of reference (i.e. common sense) is abandoned (or you take too many psychedelic drugs).
Arguably, the best and most brilliant discussion of Carroll's work is by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who, in his 1969 work Logique du sens [2], challenges the conventional view that falling down a rabbit hole invariably ends in mad obsession or delusion (and is thus something that one should probably avoid doing).
For Deleuze, the rabbit hole is primarily a zone of indeterminacy between two distinct states; i.e., a unique liminal space which he relates to his philosophy of difference and becoming.
Thus, for Deleuze, the rabbit hole doesn't only allow for a shift in perspective or the exploration of new ideas and experiences, but provides an opportunity for molecular change via an opening up to alien forces (this is not simply an imaginative game or fantasy, but an event that has demonic reality and involves a natural play of haecceities) [3].
I'm not sure if the five artists involved in the upcoming exhibition at il-Kamra ta' Fuq have read Deleuze; nor if they care very much about his reading of Lewis Carroll in The Logic of Sense.
However, one artist who has certainly read Deleuze and who does seem to care a good deal about his (and Guattari's) thinking on holey space [4], is John Beckmann [5], who, in 2019, was responsible for a conceptual installation in New York entitled Rabbit Hole (for Gilles Deleuze).
In this work, full of clever and often subtle artistic references, Beckmann filled an empty gallery with live rabbits, ladders, and all manner of artificial holes, tunnels, and escape hatches for visitors to explore. The aim was to create a rhizomatic space of complexity, ambiguity, hybridity, contradiction, and otherness, in which nothing was quite what it seemed.
Amusingly, Rabbit Hole also raised a question that many critics have posed about the contemporary art scene:
"Is it really a powerful underworld of counter-cutural subversion whose liminal spaces allow people to move beyond society's status quo? Or is it a warren of anxiety, self-reference and solipsism?"
Answers on a postcard please ...
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Notes
[1] The exhibition will run from 25 April until 11 May, 2025 at il-Kamra ta' Fuq, New Life Bar (1st floor), Church Square, Mqabba, Malta. For more details please click here, or visit artsweven.com
[2] The English translation of Deleuze's text by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, was published as The Logic of Sense by Columbia University Press, in 1990.
Assembled from a series of thirty-four paradoxes and an appendix of five essays, the book is essentially an exploration of meaning and meaninglessness. For Deleuze, there is the kind of superficial nonsense which Lewis Carroll delights in and then there is the more profound (and violent) kind offered by Artaud. But nonsense of either kind can only be viewed as that which positively has no sense (as opposed to any absense or lack of sense).
[3] See Deleuze and Guattari writing in A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1988), pp. 252-253.
[4] See Deleuze and Guattari, writing in A Thousand Plateaus ... pp. 413-416.
The argument is that there are some people who are of necessity cave dwellers; individuals who love to bore holes and "turn the earth into Swiss cheese" [413]. Theirs is a space that is permeable and full of subterrannean passages that branch off in multiple directions and connect in unexpected ways; a space often associated with clandestine or illegal activities.
[5] John Beckmann laid the foundation for his New York based contemporary interior design studio Axis Mundi in 2004, drawing upon his scholastic roots in philosophy and visual culture. Those who wish to know more about him can click here.
