Exhibition 2024
"The Weight of an Idea"
In this exhibition, Second Year Durham College Fine Art students were asked to engage in a dialogue about whether ideas have weight, actual physical weight, and can they be measured or quantified in physical terms? Is it possible to substantiate an idea’s tangible form? If so, how could that substantiation be depicted by an artist, and how can the metaphorical weight or tangibility of an idea be visually conveyed?
Imagine you are enrolled in an academic seminar. At the start the facilitator shows and passes around a book. The facilitator explains that the book is the primary source that informs the intended seminar instruction. Its contents support the ideas, arguments and focus of the learning. Now suppose that all participants in the seminar are native English speakers, but the book being passed to them is printed in German.
The facilitator is aware that the seminar participants cannot read German. The passing around of the book is not an invitation to directly investigate specific passages in the text. It is a perfunctory act and means by which the facilitator can connect the participants physically to the ideas slated for discussion. Symbolically, giving physical form to the ideas to be discussed can be considered a means by which the facilitator assigns authoritative weight to the discourse.
The notion of authoritative weight is curious. A certain gravitas can be associated with a book or text that is identified as significant and trustworthy. In the context of the seminar scenario the passed around book becomes the vehicle by which authoritativeness can be established. Thus, the weighty ideas found therein now embodied by the actual weight of the book have the potential, as discussed, to convincingly enlighten the seminar participants.
In a different context, the notion of authoritative weight can be assigned to lived experience and resilience in the face of trials and tribulations. In a Journal Article titled ‘Weight’, Author, John Edgar Wideman writes:
“My mother is a weightlifter. You know what I mean ... She lifts weights to stay strong. Not barbells or dumbbells, though most of the folks she deals with, especially her sons, act just that way, like dumbbells. No. The weights she lifts are burdens, her children’s, her neighbors, yours. Whatever awful calamities arrive on her doorstep or howl in the news, my mom squeezes her frail body beneath them. Grips, hoists, holds the weight.”
Wideman’s writing is poignant. It conveys the emotional weight or burden a parent can bear caring for needs of others. There is an implication that the weight his mother lifts is suffered at the expense of her own needs. Inherent in that implication is a sense of authoritative confidence that the griping, hoisting, and holding of the weight ultimately strengthens her.
Symbolically, and metaphorically, the concept of weight is useful in language. Combined with an adjective such as authoritative, or allegorically employed it can help narratively describe human emotion, actions, and circumstances. The word weight on its own and simply defined refers to the “relative mass of an object and in particular, the force acting on the object due to acceleration or gravity.” Philosophically, in context to the noted usage and its simple definition, the following query can be initiated:
Do ideas have weight, actual physical weight, and can they be measured or quantified in physical terms? Is it possible to substantiate an idea’s tangible form? If so, how could that substantiation be depicted by an artist, and how can the metaphorical weight or tangibility of an idea be visually conveyed?