Sunday, October 01, 2006

Mark Making and Shaky Personal Pronoun Use


The inevitability and simultaneity of the single final image, read by the static viewer looking down time, foreshortens the creation narrative to a point that sequential reading is ridiculous. The narrative is seen simultaneously through its end. Redemptive ends, modest and underwritten from the beginning, cloud the viewer’s eyes with their celebrations of post-death space. My actions, the removal and re-attaching of sections from the same painting, confuse the sequence even further, nudges a sequential reading into the vicinity of the absurd.

Without the possibility of moving along a narrative, as in books or songs or films, inconsistency in personal pronoun use in mark making confuses and celebrates the inevitable heroism of the final composition.

Marks made as:
The I and We of modernism.
The You of pop-art.
The They of contemporary painting.
He as someone outside of me.
He as me, referred to by myself, outside.
I in We’s clothing.
We with I insides.

All of these contained by the inevitable singular end. This embracing I allows the cell walls of affectation, authentic, ironic and sincere to dissolve and allows me to travel between pronouns, and act simultaneously within several pronouns without pursuing the simple translation between two from one to another. Transubstantiation and transmutation are so much more fun than translation.

To attempt, in mark making, consistency in personal pronoun use is to allude to an outside narrative the viewer could move along. An authoritative narrative that reduces the painting to a document describing the irrelevancy of its own form.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

don't wee in MY clothing.