Charlie Gere
SENSE DETECTIVES

The detective is someone who investigates crime, either as a member of a police force or as a private individual. The detective is responsible for uncovering and interpreting evidence and for interrogating suspects. In other words the detective is a kind of semiologist, responsible for making sense of the signs left by a crime, whether in the form of forensic traces, or as the testimony of witnesses or suspects. The early appearances of the most famous fictional detective of the 19 th century, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, coincided with the development of the idea of semiotics by Charles Sanders Peirce, of semiology by Ferdinand de Saussure, as well as Freud's psychoanalytical theories in which the operations of the conscious and the unconscious were subject to decoding. In his essay ‘Clues: Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes' Carlo Ginzburg compares the fictional detectives' hermeneutic with Freud's psychoanalytical strategies and with the close reading methodology of the art historian Giovanni Morelli, who developed a method of connoisseurship of paintings involving concentrating on small details. Ginzburg points out that all three were trained as doctors and that underlying their method is a concern for reading symptoms in a medical manner. In particular this meant eschewing the abstraction inherent in Galilean science, for a concern with the contingent particulars made available through the senses. Thus Freud, Morelli and Holmes were all ‘sense detectives'.

The period of Holmes' career (or rather of the publication of stories about his exploits by Conan Doyle) which stretched from the 1880s to the 1920s, was also that in which artistic modernism and the avant-garde first appeared. Among the principle concerns of such work was a repudiation of the realism of previous forms of art and literature and a shift to a concern with the sign itself. For such artists the world was a realm of signs that needed interpreting, not in the abstract terms aimed at by science, but in terms of the contingent particularity of the sensuous world in which we find ourselves. This is a reminder that the original meaning of ‘aesthetics' primarily concerned the senses, rather than art. This concern with the sensuous and sensual unites the projects being shown in the Sense Detectives series. Richard Colson's Image Recoder links the viewer's movements to differing modes of an image of a landscape on screen, thus making a link between gesture and representation that goes back to Cézanne. Oliver Ruellet's Synchromy explores synaesthetic relations between sound, image and motion, by the creation of an immersive audiovisual environment, linked to the gestures and motion of the viewer(s) . Alan Schechner's extraordinarily disturbing piece Six Million , confronts use with the impossibility of making sense of particular historical events, in this case the Holocaust. Colson, Ruellet, and Schechner are all ‘sense detectives', decoding what are senses tell us to make sense of our existence.

(This essay was published in the catalogue of the show Sense Detectives at Watermans 2006)