An off hand comment that a student librarian made concerning the book that I was checking out raised my curiosity about the history of the process of checking out books. My questioning led me to discovering the signatures of SFAI faculty members from the 1950s. I scanned each card and compiled six of them, which contained Clyfford Still’s signature. I have titled this piece Still Life, which I think corresponds nicely with a quote by Still himself: “How can we live and die and never know the difference?”
I liked how these collective signatures revealed these artists' whereabouts and interactivity. I began to reflect on the human signature or 'autograph', as an archetypal form of imaged energy. The act of signing one’s own name can be used to acknowledge an individual's presence, to give consent, or to mark one’s authorship of ideas or actions. Human handwriting in general seems to lie on that magical cusp between mental reality and physical actuality.
Thinking about our Imaging Energy class, I wanted to image our collective energy through a similar accumulation of signatures. I decided to use the ones we had already given on our weekly attendance sheet, (so the writers would not be self conscious while writing them). After getting permission to photocopy all of the attendance sheets, I was disappointed with the copied versions. They didn’t seem to resonate with the same authentic ‘aura’ conveying the energy of each individual on a particular day, as did the originals. So I arranged for a trade. After this transaction, I reflected on ‘authenticity’ and the cult of the real. There is definitely a difference between an actual signature and a photocopy of a signature. The former has the person directly behind it, while the latter feels diluted in its energy, its power.
No comments:
Post a Comment