Gone A’Missing in Plato’s Cave

 

 

 

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Gone a’Missing in Plato’s Cave is a continuously looping three-screen animation (mounted horizontally like a large landscape painting) that is initially very simple in its formal appearance. The piece adopts the familiar early animation trope of human eyeballs floating and conversing in a pitch-black cave. But instead of belonging to cartoons, these eyes belong to specific artists, philosophers, and political figures. And rather than debating how to get out of the cave, or whether or not to light a candle (that always turns out to be a stick of dynamite), these floating eyes pose theoretical observations to one another and the viewer about the nature of art, culture and contemporary society. Alt-Right filmmaker Steve Bannon insists that, “The current economic crisis is not a failure of capitalism but a failure of culture.” 19th century French realist painter Gustave Courbet who participated in the Paris Commune obliquely responds, “In the society in which we live, it doesn’t take much to reach the void.” Theodor W. Adorno asserts that “Radical art today is synonymous with dark art: its primary color is black.” And a small rolling eyeball makes an exit but not before citing Karl Marx’s famed statement “Well Burrowed Old Mole!” All dialogue is based on actual quotes, all the sound is generated by me, and all the while we witness this repartee the eyeball characters engage in smoking, weeping, tumbling and swimming through the darkness. Still, answering these complex problems is not the goal of Gone a’Missing in Plato’s Cave. The viewer is never offered a neat, logical explanation for what they are experiencing, nor do they find a clear-cut resolution to the inquiries and comments that the eyeballs engage in with one another. Instead, the project aims to intervene into this terrain of cultural discourse in order to stimulate debate and critical reflection.