#mark.making

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In Smith, Bernard, and Terry Smith. 1991. Australian Painting, 1788-1990. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

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Vernon Fisher, The Long Road to Nowhere

Jenny mentioned this bloke today – seems a wonderful reference for me. Excerpts from the press release:

“disjointed streams of consciousness and the non-sequiturs of modern psychology"

“investigates the fluidity of the mind at work with endless fascination and a comic’s sensibility”

“preoccupation with archive, information transmission, memory, and taxonomy”

“blackboard paintings recall pedagogical lessons or speculative renderings, oftentimes replacing sequential logic with "disordered notations"” 

“literary references, pop cultural imagery, and cartography with his own symbolic lexicon [...] renounces the convention of a singular, autonomous narrative in favor of a seemingly endless metonymic chain.” 

"often contextualized within a postmodern lineage, Fisher's work shares affinities with Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg”

Frances Colpitt's monograph essay for Vernon Fisher produced for  Vernon Fisher: K-Mart Conceptualism, his career retrospective at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

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“Kafka knew even as a child that writing was not only an activity, but also a gesture...

...In other words, writing was not just an act of communication, but the act itself communicated. [...] The idea of writing as a gesture blossomed, according to Stach, when Kafka came in contact with the tradition of Japanese art. He didn’t encounter it directly. A traveler returned from the East displayed woodcuts in Prague that were based on paintings by Utamaro, Hiroshige, and Hokusai. These paintings, were the result of hard work, yet they had a beguiling simplicity in which the technical aspect of art seemed to have been suspended: a single motion was evidently all it took to capture the essence of a person or a landscape, and the odd “flatness” of their pictures reflected a lofty refinement of extreme reduction.

Here was an aesthetic — art as the simple and complete gesture — perfectly adapted to Kafka’s longing for purity. Like everything else in Stach’s rich biography, this insight feeds directly back into his overarching inquiry into the act of Kafka’s writing. Kafka was trying to import the gestural aesthetic of Japanese art into the medium of literature. Each intense abortion of a novel, for example, seemed to falter in the same way a gesture would falter if it took too long, if it were interrupted by other movements. “I am in the disgraceful lowlands of writing,” Kafka once wrote in his diary, as the gestural energy of one of his attempts at a novel was beginning to peter out. “Only in this way can writing be done, only in a context like this, with a complete opening of body and soul.”