On Feb 1, 2011, at 12:32 AM, William Conger wrote: > Most visual artists claim that words have no role in their artmaking. But I > think that words are central to artmaking. Everything artists do is related to > language although it's not clear whether words or images come first. It may be > back and forth. There are no images that exist without words and no words > without images even though no specific relationship is predetermined or > universal. > > Mando claims that he doesn't create with words. But is that possible? Is this > a case of the intentional fallacy? His claims may not determine what he does.
I suspect that the process of monitoring your own thoughts is largely, but not totally, verbal. For me when I'm painting--especially at the beginning of any stage--many ideas come to me as almost a visual collage, but as I begin to mentally sift through them, my thoughts shift from a "display" mode of images to as "discursive" mode of putting ideas into verbal propositions. I know that for myself, I comprehend stimuli and ideas associatively, and I even intuit the quality of a logical argument in an almost spatial way, as if I see the argument as shapes or areas in space. But when I begin to reduce these intuitions and associations to more coherent thoughts, I put them into a linear verbal form. One of the reasons I often use puns and multiple-entendres in conversation is that they are ways of pushing out from the linearity of verbal exposition, of exhibiting the simultaneity of associative images and ideas. There is a Heisenbergian dilemma to talking about making artworks, and that is that to pinpoint one moment of creative multiplicity is to reduce the multiple images to a single file picture-and-word show. Or maybe Schodinger's Cat. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
