SECTION ELEVEN: MARKINGS AND DELINEATIONS
SON: EVEN KINGS LIE
A man stands in the absence of a horizon, landscape details, or other clues about the spatial environment. Solely his body achieves a sense of space. His nose, dropped towards his feet, creates the mental image of the control space they occupy. The breeze bellows, matting his mass. He removes the cardboard from his collar, pulls a pencil from his pocket and proceeds to display the inconsistencies of his draftsmanship. He has incomplete control of the pictorial space. He whirls. Any indication that the physical law of his particular micro-universe is understood is confirmed in his nonsensical scratches. Yet, in stride and in stroke, he carries on creating something that is unclear but also unfettered. Proud patinations . . . but years of marks add up to nothing. Nonetheless the man is self-contained - an environmental illusion unto himself. He stops, exhausted, but full of bliss. He is successful in his mind, quite sure of his non-vision.
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Costumed for performance or for the still object, the line marker has encrusted its language on chosen surfaces to put forth its place as the allegorical emblem of urbanization. Painting, both verb and noun (v,n) have been significant towards establishing a methodology for the line marker, with or without art historical relevance. Utilized as a global environmental schematic that is cross-cultural; the line marker’s imageability as an emblematic form provides both historic context and contemporary meaning.
As communication, the line marker operates in an analogous way and has been propositioned over the years as: a pop culture signifier, common men, terra tattoos, emotive currency, cultural compass cards, topophilia treatises, graffiti’s distant cousin, idea trips, wires for pedestrians, margins for vehicles, wanderlust windings and topographic typings. Line markers hum but they do not sing, they cradle the written word but not the slogan; they are expected, documented, noetic, post-aesthetic, rural, urban, country, city . . . about historicity.
As Paintings (n) they are constructed to be oscillators – simulation the wet lawn, representation the sidewalk. Simulations proclaim to be the whole of whatever is being simulated with no reference point from which one can distinguish what is and isn’t genuine. Line markers painted on canvas art canons simulate their worldly affect. Same schematics, same mathematics, same hues and significantly, same way-to-do. The physical substances of the paint, its properties, are one with the process. They are in the medium of their own making.
As representations, they are used to distinguish falsehoods, because by definition, representations are about something else. Representations are way finders. We say, ‘this is that or this is a portion of that or at the very least this could be that’. Line markers painted on canvas art canons represent their worldly use; functioning alike an image-index to whole, entire line markers, all line markers, everywhere.
Further, they are abstract representations, alike maps, which when pushed, default to their linguistic character and their given civic coded meanings and truths, provided by their engineers, cartographers, not artist or poets.
Painting (v) within line marker endeavours is about intervention, landscape and topography. This has been purposeful in order to emphasize the multi-nuances of the environments which the code functionsin. A line may be a line, which may be a line, all with the same given semiotic meaning: yet the surrounding environment in which the line exists is uniquely individual and unfolding.
What would it suggest to conversely consider that the re-painting (v) of a line marker at a chosen location to be at one in the same time another? A space that is translocal seems easier to imagine when the ‘gesture’ is wrapped in coded, communicative meaning.
Translocal spaces allow an investigation of how extended physical space can be shared by things or actions. Linking a ‘local’ site with a ‘remote’ site raises particular challenges for our understanding of new paradigms in communication. A simple connection by latitude or association by trajectory is not exactly the Butterfly Effect, but at least the interface becomes useful. If such an investigation recognizes how parallel schematic systems can converge or affect each other, it can perhaps consider how we integrate other realities into our social experience.
The line marker as simulation and as representation is abstract, but it is socially abstract. The social orientation toward sensual environments and its plasticity (v,n) is not directed at euphoric assumptions about virtual reality or even at the contemporary art interest in ‘navigational art’; but rather at concrete, synaesthetic processes and tactile explorations of the environment. Roman line marker paint is different than the Canadian (Pelee) version in hue and texture; but it is the same.
Further, fictional geographies (Rome in a film through Fellini’s lens), familiar objects (the line marker line and ladder schematic), and their mediated presences (paintings on canvas) restructure and enlarge the environment and its projection are their shared latitude. ‘Latitude’ primarily thought and used as a cartographic means of connection may intuit an antiquated feeling . . . maps and sextants and such; but the idea of a shared latitude as a conceptual connection reads beyond romantic lore and seems powerfully useful. Association by arc (a).
This association and the arc are not about calendar and postcard aesthetics of the landscape, but there is an aesthetic. Codes, rules and regulations (Section Eleven) inform both and provide this aesthetic. These specs, their global commonality, their ubiquity and their level of presence in our minds and lives are our scale of negotiation. The Painting (v,n) or Re-Painting (v,n) of these truths, lies, interpretations or facts is not a creative act. They are ‘discover’ acts. Found. Painting’s (n,v) found object.
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And after the man died, all that remained was the cardboard collar. And through time and atmosphere the marks revealed a map. And others asked if the map was there all along. And no one knew, and few cared, and even fewer realized it was his way home.