Description
Formerly, the image illustrated the text (made it clear); today, the text loads the image, burdening it with a culture, a moral, an imagination.
(Roland Barthes)
The book is not in the World
The world is in the Book
(Edmund Jabes)
…since then words do not cease to conceive worlds. Growing rapidly, multiplying to an incommensurable extent. I know some painters would pride over hatching/brooding an alternative world bereft of words – beyond words. A translingual world of unpronounceable experiences (as some mystic would claim).
A moment came where such claims (of Modern Art/Modernism) were ripped apart by its bachelors. Debunked as confiscating a fake autonomy. Orders were reversed. Writing over speech, hyper-reality over reality, provincial over original, irrational over rational, play over seriousness, contingent over permanent. For instance, the German neoexpressionist George Baselitz signed his representational canvases upside down. Tantamount to literature of silence, Yves Klien’s (the minimal/conceptual artist) exhibition stating void was supplemented with nothing on the walls. Mystery, illusion, depth, the most cherished attribute of art were put on trial and Spoofed.
Bewildered, bedazzled or provoked, you the reader/onlooker may locate me somewhere in there dancing on the razor edge whose one side is coated with a whooping painter and the other side is a glitter of an artist disconcerted with the ever-melting line between words and the things they stand for.