[Fis] More Art and Meaning

[Fis] More Art and Meaning

From: Jim Cogswell <[email protected]>
Date: Thu 16 Feb 2006 - 19:03:54 CET

Dear Colleagues,
I have enjoyed the tangent that recent conversations have taken and
would like to interject some more visual contributions. This time I
will put the textual information up front, within this message. That
is probably appropriate, since the projects whose images I send are
in large part responses to texts. But, please, do not think that the
text has given you the essential information. Images are sent as
attachments.

Jim

**********************************
The Fountain and Tattoo

These two murals were inked directly onto gallery walls with a set of
rubber stamps, twenty-six alphabetic compositions and five morphing
grids. Both installations were transcriptions of texts from Herman
Melville�s Moby Dick. Both texts allude to a quality of
indecipherability appropriate to the system of signs that I am using.
But they are also sharp reminders of the limits of our perceptions,
the cost of our search for certainty, the unknowable core even of
that which seems most obvious.

The grids are animations of a dance sequence that was translated
frame by frame from video stills imported into a computer program
designed as a bio-statistical tool to detect anomalies in the human
brain. Like the alphabetic compositions they punctuate in my murals,
these grids map the human body into a patterned system of signs
measuring, recording, and obscuring human experience.

The Fountain, a collaboration with graphic designer Ben van Dyck, was
part of a group exhibition titled Water. The timing of the show
coincided with a period of national obsession over the inundation of
New Orleans and the South Asian tsunami a year earlier. Melville�s
speaker might well have been debating policy coverage with an
insurance adjustor: damage by wind or water?

The stamps were applied over a grid of chalk lines. Areas of the
wall were painted in spumes of off-white color behind the stamps.
More layers of paint veiled sections of inked wall over which my
collaborator applied an array of enigmatic markings in string, tape,
and tinted plexi-glass. Letters in wood, vinyl, and acrylic quote
directly from the text; �from air� at the upper left, �water� at the
center.

Tattoo was installed as part of a solo exhibition of small-scale
paintings, drawings, prints, and mixed-media images from my alphabet
series. The stamps flow under and around a wine cooler, a fire
extinguisher, and two framed drypoint prints of anthropomorphic
letters, each tattooed by a morphing grid excised from the paper
using a Laser CAMM.

The title of this solo show, NOW SEE HERE, was adhered to the
gallery�s front window in an arrangement of ten vinyl images. There
it blended with the street-side parade of vinyl retail signs, the
cacophony of names and logos of businesses whose existences depend on
being transparently obvious.

**********
But why pester one with all this reasoning on the subject? Speak out!
You have seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you not
tell water from air? My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to
settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the
knottiest of all. And as for this whale spout, you might almost stand
in it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 85

************
And this tattooing, had been the work of a departed prophet and seer
of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on
his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a
mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in
his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one
volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his
own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore
destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon
they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 110

*****************

Jim Cogswell
Professor, School of Art & Design, University of Michigan
2000 Bonisteel Boulevard, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2069
Phone: (734) 764-0397
mailto:jcogs@umich.edu
http://www.art-design.umich.edu/faculty/cogswell/
http://www.umich.edu/~jcogs
http://fis.icts.sbg.ac.at/resources/jim_cogswell/that.html

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The_Fountain.jpg The_Fountain_detail2.jpg NOWSEEHERE_windowvinylweb.jpg
Received on Fri Feb 17 10:14:51 2006


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