Artist Statement 

 

L’édition Arrière: Ingress at the other end.

“Someone had left the membrane more permeable then when I last was here.”[1]

 

As a parody of a title, I once scrawled down the words ‘Trojan Whor[s]e' and, then, sometime after but before the exhibition of the work, I added with a titter, "to be reared from the view". With a simple naivety, I recognized the implication of that particular arrangement of letters/words, the accord it struck with its objects and materials, and, at once the novel triviality of it all. At the other end, I could hear gnawing, an ineptly affixed jaw was assimilating the eschewed words and making them part of her, there was a subtle exchange taking place between what was supposed to lay outside of her (the work) and title, a frame and the thing framed (she had no conventional frame). At once I conceded [2], the artwork as an object is a trivial matter, like any form, any language, it necessitates participation. For the artist to have communion with the work they too had, after the fact [3], to become spectators that add meaning, participants that intersect with the otherwise inert matter of the image/object [4].

 

Surely I, in my artistic guise, [5] have certain vacillating intentions and ideas when producing any given work. I contribute to its textures, to the text, condensing and compressing signs, adding difference and deference/s. But my objectives, suspended as they are in the medium of chance are, rather, an interplay ‘between’ the intentional and unintentional, A dog-eared page finds another’s text and texture imposed on the present, a number, a syllable, a sign. One finds meaning in the imaginary arabesque traced in the sand below the gallows. It is only when sense, sensibility and the intellect are brought into contact with these textures that depth is brought to the surface. Once the object, by whatever forces have conspired to put it there, is ‘given’ to the participant it is they who have to ‘rear’ the object/image for it to become something of significance.

 

Duchamp mentions, about his Large Glass's cracks, a ready-made intention…the cracks unintentionally expressing an unconsidered objective, an intention that the artist nonetheless appropriates as her/his own. The question of an artist's statement then, as I understand it, is a question to be answered by a spectator.

 

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[1] De Selby, Golden Hours. 1st ed. (with the two last pages missing).  

[2] “There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are “immediate certainties”; for instance, “I think,” or as the superstition of Schopenhauer puts it, “I will”; as though cognition here got hold of its object purely and simply as “the thing in itself,” without any falsification taking place either on the part of the subject or the object.” (Nietzsche)

 

 [3] There can, however, be no ‘after the fact’ as the work/artist/spectator is caught up in a sedimentary process that continually adds and takes away, supplements one sign for another one. Nietzsche wouldn’t believe in any absolute, refuting the existence of god because he didn’t seem like a dancing god, “I could only believe in a god who dances”. He prompted us to be brave when faced with the atrophying meaninglessness left in the void of truth, to create meaning freely and joyously where no meaning and all possible meaning is one and the same. “I do not know any other way of associating with great tasks than play” (Nietzsche, somewhere else)                 

                                                      

[4] Who was it that said “…the outside always comes inside in order to define itself as inside” and added “… [from] above and beyond the ergon (the work) accomplished, the accomplishment of the work. But it [that which is outside the work] is not incidental; it is connected to and cooperates in its operation from outside”?

 

[5] …but “we are all better artists than we realise.”