Jennifer West’s art draws mainly on three sources: the modernist preoccupation with the materiality of art as a means to side-step the subjectivist and ideological traps of representation; the psychedelic art of the ’60s, with its music and drug driven search for synesthetic experience; and conceptual-linguistic investigations into the structure of language and the way it produces rules and meaning. These sources do not always exert their influence in the same direction, and it is one of the strengths of West’s work that she does not try to smooth over the conflicts which are thus produced. After all, there is no immediate link between Minimalist investigation into language—think of Sol LeWitt, for example—and the Pop Art approach of Andy Warhol’s slides for the Exploding Plastic Inevitable in 1966 or the psychedelic multimedia shows designed for rock-concerts, like Amelie R. Roths­child’s images of the Joshua Light Show from 1969 to 1971. Yet something happens in West’s work, something that is less a synthesis than it is an approach that derives its coherence from sticking to set questions, which certainly have not been answered.

What is consciousness if we don’t filter our experiences through “self-consciousness”? What is the relation between what a material is, how it affects our senses in bodily or mental ways, and how we perceive it, packaged in certain culturally mediated forms? In the final analysis, what’s the relation between matter, its image, and the words we use to refer to them? In the face of these questions—all of them paradigmatic of modernism—the horizon of experience becomes this: that synesthetic objects are a way to experience something before or after all of the divisions, separations, and ordering that the questions create. Yet West is not naïve: she knows that a horizon is never reached; the closer we get, the more we can, in fact, post signs or coordinates which point in its direction. Thus, her Cameraless Film series engages with these questions, and with considerable humor. She does not simply use alcohol as a substance in which to develop strips of film in order to expose their effects and visual production by way of projection—foreclosing the “individual eye,” the subjective point of view of a camera lens; she also names it after cocktails, thus conjuring up uncontrollable associations, even with the names of perfumes, for herself, no doubt, but also for others, suspending us between commodified expectation and private memory.

In Seminar II , Jacques Lacan produces one of his myths, what he calls an “apolog.” Would there be a “consciousness” if one day all the people were to disappear from the earth, but the machines they have built, like cameras, did not cease producing pictures of the site in which they had been positioned, for example, the reflection on a lake? His point is—much as others, like Basin, wanted to say about film as a medium in general at the time—that the camera, free of any “subjective” guidance and intentionality, still produced a mirror of the world, a consciousness, in other words. In a sense, West takes this one step further by eliminating the camera, too. What is left is simply material and material, alcohol and a strip of film with certain chemical qualities. The result is an almost psychotic moment in which “the word is the thing”; the name of the cocktail, for example, immediately becomes a specific image, not by way of intention and ordering through experience, but simply by way of material reaction. West reduces herself, in a sense, to being a part of the machine. It is conceivable that the whole process could simply be governed by a computer without any interference whatsoever from the artist and with random, yet still highly specific results.

Where she takes us with this process is to the realization that there is so much more to perception than meets the eye. Not only do we constantly select what to ­focus our attention on—or, as Elín Handsdóttir’s work seems to argue, are we constantly selected by a focus beyond our intentions and control—but what we see, and how we see it and experience sensually what is selected “intentionally,” is also highly specific, never approaching the real of things. West investigates an aesthetics that allows us to not only be conscious of this fact, but also to dream a dream of the real, a sympathetic experience of what we and the world really are. As with all dreams, the meaning of this dream, too, has to be reconstructed, something which is accomplished dialectically. Since West focuses on synesthetica, her work asks to be talked about in order to separate its “latent” and “manifest” contents. In the process, we learn something, not so much about the materiality of film, but about the phantasm of our perception.