Glossolalia or Language by Other Means.
The collage series ‘Passages back to the Old World’, ‘…with Vague Reference to the Shameful Self’ and its companion, ‘the Phantom Cremaster’ draws on the deliberately fabricated mythical economy of the late Victorian era. To be more specific, the material is sourced almost entirely from publications of German master wood engravings. The pages are populated by scenes of social exchange, legends (entrenching nationhood), ideations of beauty, classical mythology, Romantic landscapes and scenes of Historical import; battles won, treatises signed, and theologies reformed. In their totality, these bound collections of prints constitute a kind of constructed archetypal world, via Neo-Classical pictorial means, for the proto-German at the other end of the Western Roman Empire.
In a mimetic parodying of the unifying agencies of ‘the’ Empire/Nation, suture, graft and pastiche are the implements of this kind of Image-making. The result is a fabrication in the same way that ‘the nation’ is a fabrication; controlling the image, you see, like controlling the mint, has a uniting capacity, empire making ‘by other means’. The hero and the heroic, here, become a central motif and hero making a continuation of this ‘alchemy by other means.’
Whilst they are squarely situated in ‘their time’ (The late 19th Century) they also betray the ever-present fetishistic activities of our own time and our own ‘place’. They reflect, in their source material, the successes of the globalizing mythos. The recognisability of theme and content speaks to the effective dissemination not only of the code that defines but also of the capacity of the code to perpetuate itself. The heroic image of the state, the quiet suggestion of violence and our sentimental recognition of the symbols of resistance and triumph give proof that the victors are already here.
The collages, however, expose, in a way, the methods of their making without conceding their illusionistic dimension. They are, hopefully, suspended in a deadlock between image as a window into the fantastic ideological world and image as surface, as a flat obfuscating field. Like Mephistopheles, they warn that “…by magic art, this cloud of incense, can be changed to gods.”
2014 - 2018