Everything is connected. Interconnectivity, by a variety of means and modes, is ubiquitous.
Maybe the World and an Individual is similar to a Text and a Reader, and the acts of Living or Reading, and the production of meaning and the ways of understanding, are dependent on various frames of reference, cultural conventions, the individual reader’s experience…Maybe it is like a detective assembling a solution from clues that can be assembled in an infinite number of ways, that can yield an infinite number of solutions—like the diversity of beings that can originate from the different organizations of a set of DNA/chromosomes—and, with each of these different solutions having a unique bearing on the meaning of the World/Text and the understanding of the Individual/Reader. The particular way a life is lived or one reads has consequences on the appearance/perception of the World/Text and the subjectivity, identity of the Individual/Reader.
Opening up to various methods of living/reading respects and utilizes the endless potentiality that exists virtually everywhere. Just beyond the Actual, behind every mundane and superficial perception of what is Real lies the Virtual bubbling with numerous unrealized possibilities. Some sources may tell us this isn’t true. Institutional control and the cultivation of consumers by capitalist enterprises, requires a reasonably stable ideology of the status quo and enforces the pressure of a reductive movement of homogenization. The Individual/Reader, however, may yet have unlimited opportunities to slip out from under this wave of homogenization and enter into a polymorphous production of rhizomatic play. Question habits, tastes; approach situations/look at things differently. Be, Exist, Differently.
These or parallel ideas emerged from and ran through (although in a rather vague and intuitive way) my art practice and process of painting. I liked the flat, two-dimensional surface that painting uses because this surface limitation can throw into relief the unlimited possibility of graphic marks that can be executed upon it. The surface holds a potential for a boundless array of articulations. I tried to vary my approach, do away with plans and pre-conceived notions, make shapes or use colors that I thought were “ugly,” question my tastes, aesthetic notions, open up my methods to allow for the unexpected, etc. I found that certain elements would continually occur. I was happy to discover these elements and allow them to appear, feeling that they indicated a more important or deeper level in my psychic disposition than the more superficial media or questionable (commercial, corporate) culturally derived sources. (A way to clean up, wash off a layer of filth). I made many free associations, let forms grow, then intuitively covered up areas, allowing only traces to remain and suggest new structures, on which new tissues of markings could be added…
To uncover processes of painting through which sensations of difference can become manifest, and thereby enter into consciousness.
Underneath the distinctions, beyond where the categories fall apart and leak out all their contents, an undifferentiated All churns in messy, seething flux. And, though our way of life, and maybe our sanity, may depend on the mediation and/or denial of it, it is still out there, all around us, pulsing wildly and absurdly, despite our actions and discourse.
Tags: art process, ideology of denial, interconnectivity, potential, Virtual, world as text