metropolis m

I worked for many years using images from popular culture, but never related to the word ‘appropriation’. I’m not interested in stealing images. I want to know what this strange world of images is that I live in. This is why I deconstruct images, take them apart, to find out what they’re made of, how they function and how they picture the world for us. A symbolism is attached to particular images, becomes marked in the unconscious. So I abstract objects that socially carry a strong emotional charge or symbolic significance. The arrangement of images is loaded in many different ways which allows multiple interpretations. The viewer completes the act of interpretation. It allows even contradictory interpretations. To me, a picture is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture. To exorcise it, to rearrange it, to reshape it, to make it my own, involves unearthing it, describing it, deploying it in form, and then rearranging it. Casting my world back into the given world. It’s like a reformulation of language, a recreation of a new metaphor. I’m interested in as many layers of meaning as possible. The more you know, the more meaning and the more history can be brought to bear on it. Ergo the viewer is very, very important. He is the tablet on which all the quotations that make up an image are inscribed without any of them being lost, so to speak.

I did a lot of commercial art for money and freelance illustration stuff when I was younger, so I do understand how magazines work. I use images drawn from that culture because I see in each piece an interface between my personal subjectivity and a given world. Being socialized within similar constructs of myth and desire, it is not surprising that most people are comforted by popular depictions. Sometimes these images emerge as ‘semblances of beauty;’ as confluences of desirous points. We have seen that pictures and words have become the rallying points for certain assumptions. There are assumptions of truth and falsity and the narratives of falsity are called fictions. In most design work, received images and words are arranged and aligned to produce assigned meanings. I am engaged in rearranging and realigning these dominant assignments. The idea is to broaden the discussion, not to narrow it.

The idea of multiple images and mechanical reproduction fascinates me. When I first started to work as a commercial artist, I was really interested in how advertisers dealt with the idea of originality. If they wanted an image, they’d just take it. It was never an issue of morality; it was always an issue of utility. There was no sense that images belonged to someone; all images were in the public domain and as an artist I found that very liberating. I just imagined that they’re mine. Over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that copyright and so-called intellectual property is a euphemism for corporate control in so many ways. But don’t get me wrong. I believe in copyright. I do. But it’s been taken to such lengths. So much of our sense of art history is based on copies, fakes and forgeries. I think of originality as a trope. It’s not that I don’t think that the word ‘originality’ means anything or has no meaning. I just think it’s gotten a very narrow meaning lately. What I think about in terms of my work is broadening the definitions of the word ‘original’. Sometimes when things are almost original they can be as disturbing. When it is close, but not the same, as the original, in my mind, there’s a different kind of tension. The pictures I make are really ghosts of ghosts; their relationship to the original images is tertiary, that is, three or four times removed. I like to celebrate doubt and uncertainty. To provoke answers but don’t give them. To withhold absolute meaning by incorporating parasite meanings. As far as the visual presentation goes, I purposely avoid a high degree of difficulty. A lot of people are like me: they have relatively short attention spans. So I shoot for the window of opportunity. Whatever power, whatever affect the images have, works on its own. A new work should have as much aura as its reference. The tension between the reference and the new work doesn’t really exist unless the new work has an auratic presence of its own.  It’s all about what the work makes you think about. Somebody would say, ‘They’re really awful but come to think of it, they’re really beautiful.’ A picture’s meaning lies not in its origin, but in its destination.