Date: Thu, 27 Feb 1997 10:58:22 -0600
From: ann klefstad <klefkal-AT-cp.duluth.mn.us>
Subject: Re: medium is the...


Anthony Stephenson wrote:
>Ann, excuse me for switching the title of your original "refelecting
>surface?" thread, but what you are saying here about language brings up
>an old reference/reverence. 

I'm sorry, but "reflecting surface" wasn't my title, and what I meant by
nonlinguistic meaning systems doesn't really have to do with any
McLuhanesque ideas of "cool." It has to do with more boring things like
gombrichean explorations of how visual meaning is made and other such stuff
that participates in systematicity but also extends into things like private
meanings and mute materiality. That there's a continuum, in visual art, from
meaninglessness to language proper.

>The other question you raise concerns how (metaphorical) language will
>"merely represent" something. 

And what I was trying to get at was not how language represents, but how the
notion of "language" has itself become a metaphor, or more accurately a
placeholder, for the concept of all human attributions of meaning, much of
which, I think, participates only peripherally in the systematicity and
reciprocity of language. I guess I'm interested in restoring to
consciousness the notion that language is a historical artifact, constructed
and held in common by a group, and it has frontiers, edges where it meets
muteness and seizes and shapes it, and is shaped by such encounters. The
borders between privacy and the communal, and the borders between the
material and the cognitive, are what I've always been interested in. When
language is conceived as "covering the world" such infinite (because
literally inconceivable) realms are lost to us, and our hybridity is disguised.

I've been plagued all my life by my own glibness and what I often want most
to find in my making is "dumbness" and the mute. The pieces I'm doing
lately--semicomic body extensions, "tools" for a possible life, reflect this
in part. A carved swing that takes 2 people to work, a pair of stilts
(usable! All this is usable!) carved from basswood in the form of lifesize
deer legs; the current work, arms for boxing with God, are (obviously) very
long, they tie on your forearms with leather straps like phylacteries, and
they come with a pair of binoculars built into a cap of similar leather
straps. A further work is a pair of wings equipped with torches (for night
flying; previously wings have been purely daylight affairs). I'm also, for
an outdoor installation, doing maquettes for a set of cast-iron vessels (a
kind of lexicon of vessel forms)--a bag, a bucket, a cauldron, a basin, and
the nest grave--grassy hole in the ground floored with white pebbles. An
installation in the works shows heaven to be a hot white well lit space, and
below it, there's a cool dark room, holes poked in the ceiling to admit
glimmers of the celestial light, with a pile of maglites in the corner. It
looks just like the prairie nights I remember as a kid. little town 10 miles
away, a small pile of light far off.

Ann Klefstad



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