EXHIBITIONS / TEXTWORKS

07.07.2011 to 30.07.2011

In 2004, when travelling in China, I was on an early morning flight from Hong Kong to Nanjing with the Chinese airline Dragon Air in a state of being half asleep after flying from Sydney during the night. The other passengers were all Chinese, as expected, and sat rustling behind a sea of newspapers and smelling rather strongly of cheap tobacco.

Once settled, fatigue and gentle rustling of the Hong Kong Times drew me once again into a half-asleep dreamlike state in which the sense of self and the world seems to come undone and within which strangeness and familiarity are completely interchangeable. In my half-waking state I heard the sounds of mothers softly talking to their children, couples arguing in subdued tones and friends gossiping. My waking did not hear the meaning, but in my sleepiness and too tired to struggle with unknown language, I forgot to listen to words and only heard the tone of what was said.

Listening to the tone of so many voices without really listening, I heard another meaning than the prosaic, conscious “text” whose meaning we imagine we have control of when speaking. A mother comforting a frightened child became as clear as day; a nervous lover’s impatience; trivial gossip all appeared in the expressive sounds of voices whose words I could not grasp. In my half sleeping state, meaning seemed as clear as day and shocked me so that I jumped awake.

It seemed to me that I had heard the expressiveness of humanity, surely culturally specific, but with the common interests and exchanges necessary for all human existence and which appears in a variety of ways in the many culture of the world. But what was I listening to? What had made such meaning so clear? It seemed to me that it was the tone, texture, timbre, rhythm and accent and in short, the style. Each individual lays claim to a style with which an identity is expressed and to which a sense of morality appropriate to a time and place is connected. The sense of “I” and the rightness of the how that “I” expresses its self is a matter of style. My interest is from what that style is assembled and in particular, the style of the visual world, rather than a prosaic meaning. I am also interested in the crossing points between styles of language. In English, for example, breaking the artist into two parts; “art” and “ist,” disrupts the style by connecting it to German and at the same time giving the split word a double meaning.

In this exhibition, I have used the styles of text used in the visual world associated with images from which the real is constructed. I have drawn on literature, painting and philosophy and a number of other fields and in each case have used the stylistic focus on its own as a work.

For example, The Essence of Love is a painting that uses the stylistic key to the early 1960s painting Love by Robert Indiana. The letter at a forty-five degree angle and the primary colours assembled in a single “punctum” (a term used by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida) that gives the rest of the word its artistic power.

There are a number of theoretical threads that could be taken up from here. These include, among the plethora of writers of “continental” philosophy, the linguistic games of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, linguistic anthropology, Derrida and the dominance of the sign and even Deleuze and the machinic assemblage. My preference, however, is for the simple idea that style, because it is so important in meaning, is moralised when used as identity. Cultures are built on this effect, which means that moral value is also a fundamental cultural effect built into the claim for identity. Friedrich Nietzsche argued long and hard against the equation of morals and style but it seems to me that such a disjunction is only possible for an “alien,” not for those that include themselves within the stylistic modes of a particular culture.

Perhaps all artists are aliens which is why they have to remain where danger is mitigated; outside the centres of intellectual power and in poverty. In any case, for a society to retain its power in changing circumstances, especially those that we find ourselves in at present, such alienation may well be necessary. What better to instruct us in its ways than art?

Click an image to view an enlargement