Wendy Mark: Beginning with Square One

BEG INNING WI TH SQUARE ONE Notes by the artist on the exhibition

Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, “As always, Life, (art, gesture, work) must without despair testify to an ineluctable disappearance”

“The essence of an object has some relation with its destruction”

from Berlin “Metro” “I was on a Paris Train

I emerged in London Rain”

1) One idea is to use scale to re-interpret The Renaissance Landscape. You have to Zoom IN through a small window frame/turn on a screen. 2) But the images of atmospheric changes, dots and cloud-like forms refer forward to computer generated abstractions. The colors are heightened. The thunder-struck clouds, cartoons of clouds or snapshots of a cloud / and Sigmar Polke dots with shadows. 3) The idea of Zones of ideas and accumulation is there in the cloud. 4) Robbes-Grillet’s “dreamy speculations” where, from his novel Repetition, repetition calls into question the original authenticity or seriousness of the first view or image. Or Soren Kierkegaard from his essay on repetition: “Repetition and recollection are the same movement, only in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, it is repeated backward, whereas repetition properly so-called is recollected forward.” 5) There are stations of meaning. A sentence whispered again and again, losing and gaining meaning along the way. A Telephone game.