Text and beyond

 

Working with pure text, divorcing meaning, working of texture, colour, surface.

Examining text, typography. Removal of myself from the text which is vast in meaning.

Doodling, thinking, noticing. What resonates. The pattern of the surface.

 

Markmaking, stitches, matrix, code breaking up, rendering it unreadable. Dissolve the meaning. Processing.

Tracing the marks left by the printer, expressing the defaults. Stitch marks breathing filth, the malevolence of humanity in delicate stitch. Brings to mind Craftism.

Stripping away the text. Digging into its meaning. 

Themes:

1. Self Congratulatory. Anggandisment; promoting oneself as being powerful and important 'smug idealogies".

2. Falsehood. We are kidding ourselves. We are a terrible scourge on ourselves and on the ecosystem we live within.

3. Chance, luck, fluke. That we are all here at all is luck. Where we inhabit and who we are as a species is all fluke, "biological accident".

4. Pointlessness of human endeavor. That the universe will go cold. The sun will burn out. The laws of entropy, against the dying light 

5.Inconceivable beauty that we are capable of. Tenderness, love, poetry, beauty, art.

It is the vastness of the spectrum; from the creation of the most exquisite objects to genocide. We are capable of the two opposite end extremes.

Futility

"Ephemeral irrational existance"

How can I encapsulate futility. It is intangible.

Yet I have just tried to express the sublime through woven cloth. Expressing something abstract, elusive. It is too vast to express fully? 

Express futility through a temporary artwork;

dissolvable fabric

an exquisite handmade object that disappears

ice work

timebased

timelapse

tiny

fragile

futile

exceptional

Meanwhile....

These two extracts lie either side of the blindly chosen text. There is an interplay. My eye is distracted and drawn in. There is influence. "Inhabit the planet of small gestures" "Find them. Notice.."

"..a form of collective perception, a social sensation, a subtle sense of everybody's noise?"

Art in Action

The immediate response to 'humanity is an error' was genuine but fierce. The easing of lockdown and the evident sense of entitlement that huge numbers of our society have are a far cry form the lockdown community pulling together previously. We have witnessed news stories of mass gatherings on beaches, drunken brawls, the mass littering of our outdoor spaces. The level of disrespect for land and community and the behaviour towards each other has been so utterly disgraceful. I am however, too angry to embrace this into work. I dont wish to occupy that headspace. Some make work to process those emotions or to help motivate change but I do not.

So to that end, I distance myself, physically and metaphorically. I am going to instead zoom into the text itself. The fabric of the typography, the marks on the page, the interpretation of the language itself. 

Zooming in, cutting into sections, editing, obscuring it. Highlighting words and phrases that seem to stand out.                                                                                                            

 

I like the mixture of hand drawn and typed marks and the way the text and page reveal textural qualities, edges blending. There are similarities to be drawn also from the patterns of the ringed words to Anni Albers woven pictures also. 

Anni Albers, Intersecting 1962. Image from Tate 

Refocussing on the text in this way is helping me to process the meaning behind the words more easily, picking it apart one word at a time. Its important for me to understand the meaning of it as a whole even so that I can think about a response. 

Immediate

 Immediate 

 

My thoughts immediately cast back to the first couple of weeks of lockdown.
The sudden snap of change.
Without movement
No human sound
Palpable silence
Deafening quiet
Fear, anxiety.
Birdsong unheard came forth
Every tiny whisper of each creature suddenly loud
and the sea boomed in the distance.

We looked for connections and a place to hold, a crag to hook a finger into. To carry the weight of it all. There were moments where all I could do was put hand in soil. Dig, dig the earth. Plants the seeds for the future days, planning ahead. Mending, invisible darning became worthy and welcome with the time to do it. 

My head then turned to wartime, of making do with less. "Make do and mend" "Your country needs you". A time where we were all united under a common threat and a need for communities to pull together. 

Due to enforced lockdown we were made to stop. This forced us to look around, evaluate our position, we had to help and care for our elders, be aware of our communities. Withdrawal from consumerism focused our minds on local economies. Less material wealth and more wellbeing. 

From this thinking came propoganda posters and the typography of the 1940s wartime. The use of illustration, typography to unify the nation, to communicate the common mission. In an age where we are ruled by sociopathic, narcisistic leader; with the rise of the hard right wing movement and the patriarchal backlash from #metoo, what followed next was the work of Shepard Fairey, who's work utilises wartime propoganda illustration with overtly political call to arms.

"MANUFACTURING QUALITY DISSENT SINCE 1989
The OBEY sticker campaign can be explained as an experiment in Phenomenology. Heidegger describes Phenomenology as “the process of letting things manifest themselves.'"Phenomenology attempts to enable people to see clearly something that is right before their eyes but obscured; things that are so taken for granted that they are muted by abstract observation."

https://obeygiant.com/propaganda/manifesto/

Phenomenology as Heidigger describes is "a way of encountering something"  (Heidegger 2009) By utilising phenomenological thought Fairey is presenting alternative ideas using to the public space that aim to disrupt mainstream political thinking and to breed peaceful dissent. "Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view." (Stanford 2013) Fairey's initial Obey sticker has gained momentum as a symbol for rebellious outside thinking and asks that the participant looks directly at themselves... "(it) only exists to cause people to react, to contemplate and search for meaning in the sticker" (Fairey 2020). Fairey's work exists to bring about ownership of ideas, of a personal responsibility to understand the systems they live in, to question the status quo. 

The Demagogue poster is more blatant in its approach; the tyrant that represents the growing right wing movement that threatens our way of life. The leader that excites audiences by enflaming prejudicial thinking, without entertaining meaningful discussion into the actual issues. It is undermining the work that has been done since wartime. Franz's Ferdinand name is directly linked as a reminder of the start of WW11. 

Faireys work encapsulates my deep seated fears for where humanity is heading and calls us to make change. BLM, Covid, environment, Brexit. We are in such tumultuous times. We unleash wars, we turn in ourselves and yet herald ourselves as something exceptional. This thought experiment passage brings out in me frustrations, anger but more than anything utter helplessness.The anxiety in the country is palpable. I am anxious. The lockdown heightened this anxiety but also made us all stop, embrace the silence and make positive changes in our behaviours. So is humanity an error? 

The response to Covid19 saw a lot of artists draw inspiration from the wartime propoganda posters. These are useful tools for getting a message across, direct visual language, but aligning them with the style of WW11 posters automates a sense of duty, a call to arms, your responsibility to respond to take part. The experience of WW11 so engrained in our cultural subconscious, we are reminded of the sacrifice and the community pulling together all the time and these propaganda posters are integral to that consciousness.

These images remind me of the good again in humanity. I am reminded that humanity is also kind and compassionate, that of all the Demagogue's ruling our countries that humanity will still pull together and work together.

Sylvia Bueltel. Stay In. 2020

Shephard Fairey

Das Frank Positive Propaganda Poster

https://www.artandobject.com/news/wwii-propaganda-inspires-covid-hygiene-posters