My aim here is to provide a short and inevitably overly-simplistic summary of my work. Suffice to say, its a long way to literary.
“Contrary to popular belief, in the beginning was not the word. In the beginning was the badly scrawled image of a hairy mammoth. These very early men and women could neither pronounce nor spell hairy mammoth. Hairy mammoth! Say it out loud. This noise, this modern grunt, did not come into existence until very recently. It is with this realization that I have decided to return to not just my roots but everyone else’s, and present a collection of extremely short stories, conveyed by a series of visual signs confined to a rectangle supported by only the flimsiest of sentences. To call these mini-narratives cartoons is demeaning. It’s demeaning of life. What is demeaning of life? … I’ll shut up now.”
~[Flacco, “The Flacco Files”, Allen & Unwin, 1999.]
the combination of text and image, usually results in the naming of the image, as is the function of the caption, label, or title. it lodges the images within the language of the text associated with it, turning the image into a simple referent of the words, a mere metaphor for the apparent meaning of the text. in these works, the text is completely unrelated to the image, and the potentiality for interpretation is simultaneously restricted, and freed. the images are based on 1950’s technical drawing handbooks, and the texts are appropriated from the internet.
the melding of the traditional and the virtual, the image and the text, the ‘high’ of art (and painting) and the ‘low’ of diagrams and the internet is a mixing of boundaries, of styles, of binaries, blah blah blah….
its very postmodern, hell, it could even be trendy.
but that’s not what im concerned about. im just making these pretty little patterned silhouettes, with their odd phrases, to try to make you (the viewer) think about what the hell you are doing while you stand there looking at these things; to realize that, perhaps, what you see is what you get; perhaps, what you get is what you went looking for in the first place; perhaps, it just doesn’t make sense at all; perhaps its not supposed to.
the images have been reduced from informative, technical diagrams, to simple, unnamed, and unidentifiable silhouettes. this reduction transforms them into mute, ambiguous shapes that have little definition, and no indication of their ‘exalted’ educative origin.
the texts are phrases and sentences gathered from internet chat rooms. taken out of context they are as ambiguous as they are bizarre. in combination, the image fills the void of the lacking subject within the text. the unidentified object depicted becomes the ‘it’, ‘this’, ‘thing’ or ‘that’ clearly, or subtly referred to in the text. the image becomes subsumed by the language that suddenly surrounds it.
a literal interpretation can lead you down the garden path of narrative. the creation of narrative is a result of the viewers’ interaction with the work. there is no “correct” “definitive” or “intended” reading of the individual works, and there is also no ‘wrong’ reading. i only consider the narrative of each individual work, in terms of the potential readings, ensuring an array of possibilities, that have no grounding in reality, or in my personal beliefs. in other words, the reading the viewer gains, is entirely his/her own, and dat is demeaning of dis work.
all images are 45cm square, vinyl and enamel on ply, except for image 9, which is vinyl applied directly to the wall.
- I was little, and confused.
- I have to justify buying rubber on a stick.
- That seems like quite a job.
- Don’t say I didn’t offer.
- I prefer red sexy ones.
- I’m using a monkey on a stick.
- I just have one big one.
- I just poke commands.
- girl with bear – I have some good ones.
