Attachments / Zero
Objects strewn about and attached on a blank canvas. The blank canvas is a modified reliquary for ideas and images, a matrix of thoughts. The parameters of these thoughts expand constantly and the criteria for choosing each image/object fluctuate. The objects/images are ordinary but deemed relatively sacred, equivocally serving as a reminder, instigator and catalyst for a thought, a buried feeling, a hidden memory – or, out on a limb, coaxes a very abstract response from the inner depths. Persons throughout epochs have recorded such occurrences – the simple scattering of seashells on a beach arranged by the waves, rock formations eroded unto the face of a mountain. These taps into the innate wiring that must respond to the intangible and immaterial.
It is not easy to plot the origination of what attaches to which, or which to what. By instinct, we are drawn to these compelling models of interesting form by their own virtue, waiting to be found, yet, in a more metaphysical sense, the object/image actually finds us. An invisible power, and/or rhyme and reason, controls and coordinates the occurrence of these arrangements, and with eyes wide open, they reveal themselves in every post and corner.
Negotiating these inversely directed attachments at a relatively zero level of intervention and manipulation is its normal course of action. Zero, in its present use, is about the stepping away from the usual expectation of what comprises the conditions of an art object – somewhat echoing the procedure of “stripping down the bride” called for by the Great Gentleman, Marcel Duchamp. Operating on Zero degree is clearly a denial of one’s appetite for sensuous materials and paints, opting for the exclusion for that which dolls up the Muse – she has her own mind and speaks it now. The perfect suitor for the Muse is the one who respects and listens, overturning the dominant machismo that contorts her into so many twists and poses that she no longer is aware of who she is.
