Thursday, June 05, 2008

The Strange Catalog Text That Will Keep Us Together



I've posted Jacqueline Mabey's fantastic essay on my work from my exhibition she curated at the Belkin Satellite in March.
This is easily my favourite piece of writing about my work. Jacqueline spent nearly a year traveling to my studio and exhibitions researching and listening while I told tall drunken tales about burning studios and late nights with one-legged bikers.

" Since it is superfluous to the ends-means rationality of capitalism at its most base form, art’s very existence – its continued existence – proves the insufficiency of dominant ordering narratives. As the excesses of auction week attest, art can be a part of reproducing said ordering narratives. Nonetheless, it undercuts the fiction that there is only one way that the world can be organized. In its polysemic generosity, the painting of Wil Murray does not foreclose on the viewer’s possible interpretations, possible emancipations, that moment of disassociation with a socially constructed subjective position. Its everyday associations and the bodily confrontations it stages with the viewer propound that the emancipatory moment is not something out there at a cerebral remove, but possible within us in the most quotidian moments and spaces"


From: Jacqueline Mabey, "the strange space that will keep us together: Painting and the Possibility of Postmodern Utopias" Vancouver: Belkin Satellite, 2008.
Available as PDF or .doc file.

*A note on the photo, it is Fred Herzog. I saw his exhibition while in Vancouver for my Belkin Show. Virtually everyone I know who has lived in East Vancouver now owns his book and uses as memory.

1 comment:

kim said...

I found a similar idea, the finding which I think is really neat, which relates to Jackie's first quote by Derrida and also to your paintings as challenging the idea of time and process in painting:

"We must understand time as the subject and the subject as time. What is perfectly clear, is that this primordial temporality is not a juxtaposition of external events, since it is the power which holds them together while keeping them apart." (Maurice Merleau-Ponty in 'Phenomenology of Perception')