Merging the Word and Look

 

“In Michel Serres’s The Parasite (1982), he understands the “parasite” to be a kind of interruption or noise that operates underneath reality (“parasite” means “noise” in French): “Theorem: noise gives rise to a new system, an order that is more complex than the simple chain.” The parasite-as-noise is productive of meaning and order.” (Braune 2017 pp.55)

 

Within this final semester I am undergoing a dissertation, thus using this outlet to play with the whimsy I find integral to my work (1), and taking the opportunity to pare down, simplify and think through my aesthetic elements much more carefully, reducing them the weight of carrying all the twisted jouissance that comes with climate nihilism and living and dying through it.

In contrast to previous work, I wish to use black, white and brown (As these are the colours of crow).

The flapping bird imagery has been in (thrashing around, crashing against the walls of) my head since semester two, and I have only now realised it practically through the smooshing and scanning of bin bags; those black things torn on and caught up in the barbed edges of my practice and theoretical concepts.

I will build on this image, rework and commune with the sacred space (The Space Between Two Roads) 

 – a magic site where crows gather, ground is uprooted, litter is strewn, and no one walks (not a desire path in sight).

Moreover, if time permits, I wish to create a small artist book, possibly unbound in a box, where I can fully archive all the little sketches, images, stories, and pieces of deliciously busy art that lurks behind the scenes of the pared-down prints.

I wish for the aesthetic elements to have an air of dinge to them. The prints are smudged, crumpled, ripped, mis-matched, stuck up with cellotape amass a wall of blu-tac and adhesive strips, the off-white-ness of it all, I wish for it to look almost as if it had been created by a Crow. This adds an aura of temporality, fleeting Creature-Crow contrasted by immortal Symbolic-Crow, liminal creature, liminal site, vulnerable, as if only stuck to this world by a measly piece of tape. Imperfection, simplicity, silhouette of blackened crow, within the muck and muddle of our Anthropocene. (A word on this word- Haraway suggests Chthulucene, but why not Crowlocene? Our bleak, forboding epoch hiding a mysterious underside, other life, whole-hearted, clumsy, pecking otherness, how to describe this other? How to describe any other, as surely we are all other to another? Wheeler describes the path to unworlding, shaking up our interpretative templates, is being just that little bit less evolved, that small bit more transient, that tiny bit more Crow.

 

 

 

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1 ‘Integral’ as it comes sometimes purposefully or simply, through the joy I glean from the creating process, seeps its way into the art.