The Jammed Screen

As edifying as postmodernist concerns are for artists, they can be, for those with more traditional concerns, somewhat willful and dismissive of other ideas, or put better, modes of thinking. Here and there artists leave it aside, at least as a primary interest (though always, there is overlap), and evoke referents to a different set of concerns. The American poet Wallace Stevens said: “Whether one comes to the idea of God as a poet or as a philosopher, matters greatly”, and those with a bent towards the poetic need to hold to that as an indispensable quote. As potent as some current philosophical underpinnings are and as deeply as they are held primary, there remain types of investigations that predate and will undoubtedly outlast contemporary investigative methods. The age-old questions tend to be light sleepers. 

    Silkscreen printing, by design, is built for mass reproduction: many copies of one thing. By using the process against itself a single image is created instead: the opposite. The screen through which ink would normally pass and be deposited onto a secondary surface is jammed. The ink, or in this case, oil paint, is left to dry in the screen, mid-process, creating a single, one-off image. This inversion is a refusal of sorts, or an insistence on the unique, short-circuiting the dispersal of many in place of the single. 

    The final presentation of the work ties into this. The traditional manner in which paintings are presented, stretched over a wooden support and sometimes framed, is dropped. Once completed, the pieces are removed from the stretcher revealing the ‘canvas’ in its entirety. The edges, normally wrapped around the stretcher and hidden, are shown openly and even worked consciously in conjunction with the central portion of the painting, the rectangular area one would normally see when directly in front of a standard painting. The added intimacy with the materials this gives is done for a reason, though to say it like that is misleading. The way that any work grows tends to be an organic, slow-moving business as opposed to a rigid, logical execution, and that includes the back framing of the ever-evolving aesthetic of any body of work. So, it’s a more glacial movement when it evolves in real time than when one describes it after the fact, in this case, years after, although the intuitive developments that unfold when creating one piece after another over time often tend to be well understood in the work itself, just not on the level of talk. Seeing what you are actually doing, behind the thoughts you may have at the time of creation, takes time.

    One element that emerged in that way was a realization that in their own way, every piece is a sort of relic, a thing that was made at a specific moment in time and stands up as an artwork in and of itself, but at the same time, it happened during a specific moment in personal time, in the roil of what is not yet quite thought out loud, the understandings that live glimpse-like in the corner of your mind. This relic quality, again, over time, began to insist that a different way of showing the work was needed, and resulted in the pinning of each piece to a secondary support, a presentation more like that of the most ubiquitous type of relic, the flag. In fact, for a long time, in exhibition they were ‘flag paintings’, mimicking the way a flag is often presented, in its entirety and with all the scarring and error that a historical object would have. A flag can be a beautiful thing, a piece of design and production that has a certain aesthetic value in its own right as an object, and you can appreciate that in the same way you can a painting. But it also takes on a second but equal aspect if it, for instance, flew at a particular time, in a particular place. Then it not only has the character of artistic undertaking, but it represents a state at a given time, an idea that held a place in the mind. It is an object and an image at the same time. So it is with paintings, and more than in an art historical way, but paradoxically, in that deeply personal way in which we experience for ourselves alone, the motions and undertakings that so many others have undergone before us. These are the flags of confusion and epiphany, rejection and acceptance, prognostication and understanding, and every other state the vague snapshots our memories provide.

    What the technique and the presentation ultimately embody is not just an interesting (hopefully) mannerism or novelty but the vehicle for content. In the same way that the Spoken Word pieces are not about grammar or syntax alone, the paintings use their fundamental building blocks as a ground for investigations of a personal and particular nature. The singular image, not the information contained in mass-produced copies (to extend the analogy of the ‘jammed’ screen), is what the technique insists on, and what allows the work to engage the sacred, the limits of language, and the human condition: form and content working in tandem.