Thinking about Surrealism, automatic writing, automatic drawing, asemic writing, blobs, body parts turning into abstractions, and abstractions into body parts. Bodies.
What happens when language fails? Isn’t art the thing that is bigger and better (subjective) than language? Art goes places language cannot find a foothold. Art is the language universal. Art is about finding expression in objects, forms, and marks that exceed language’s capacity.
A result of my having spent so much time in the past year looking at other people’s art, thinking about it, assessing it—ever increasingly using this part of my mind—is that I can’t help but look at my own work through the same lens, or at least in the context of a much larger whole of contemporary artistic production. And I find it lacking.
When I consider how my text-based work is about putting words in drawings, and using drawing to take language places it otherwise can’t quite go, I am often thinking of the silence woman, for whom language has failed. Systematically, historically, creatively, language has fallen short of being as powerful as it should and can be. Is this a societal failure? A byproduct of patriarchy. Thus the female must find the liminal, the cracks, the alternative, the suggestive and subversive routes of communicating things. Of making points.
When I consider my commercial work of the past decade, it has become an automated practice, objects made to sell. Machine-made decor. They don’t have much fire, despite what people say when they meet me in person the first time. It’s just words. Falling flat.
Returning to the body and chance and the peculiarirty of forms feels more grounded in something I’m trying to get at. Ten years ago, figurative drawing and painting was considered second-tier to more conceptually-grounded work. I miss those days a bit (nostalgia, merely, but maybe there’s more to it). The figure has been done to infinity and back. What’s left to say? More than what can be drawn with words, that’s for sure. Text-based art is difficult and the pool is terribly small. Not even a swimming pool, it’s a kiddie pool at best, and some giants have taken up all the space.
The body is a language too. A semiotic playground. I return to using watercolors—water with the thinnest colors, to lay down whispers of bodies, limbs, suggestions of spirit. Tension between two figures is what I return to. Two figures supply everything you need: narrative (always obscured), tension. Make one a skullish figure—like Ensor—to add some spice. We are all reckoning with our lover, Death, right? From birth, our one constant companion. Eros and Thanatos never get old.