tweasing (2007-9)
tweasing is an intermediary between tweaking and teasing. These are the the yin and yang of painters. This artwork offers a meditation on the process of looking, in this case at painting, and the historical backdrop of that process: content, context, affect. This process is imbued with the logic of aesthetic control, what Ranciere calls “the police” -the system of the distribution of the sensible. In this context the sensorial overtones of devotional imagery are appreciated in their context and via contemporary extrapolations, from transcription to connotation.
The notion of control through aesthetics, and an attempt at a resistance are the central focus here. Where bodily forms are made visible through the composition of folds in fabric: a subtextual, antithetical ideology is codified within an existing (religious, authorized) narrative. Resistance here eroticizes the spiritual, and in doing so forms a model followed by successive generations of artists, ultimately producing a revelation in art: abjection, fueled by philosophers such as Bataille. This book includes a provocative text in the introduction. Never wanting to give too much away, I prefer to use such space to provide an illusion of orientation, wherein the process of confusion and discovery mirrors the activity of ‘reading’ this kind of book.
(2007-2009, printed 2009)
160 pages