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TITLES: Soft Target; the dimming vision; oh
terrible language; long in the tooth, ribs removed to
identify position in the cavity of the chest; a ghost pain;
articular motives; disarticulation; mask to identify virtue;
not listening; a thing that hinges hold; sentimental
resignation; slitting my memory on a poetry of glass shards;
dislocated pressure; if you were oyster and your teeth
pearls; can you see, a pool of frozen water on the moon,
intention exists before language.
Bolts, screws, glass, leather,
aquarium, stitching, armour, torsos, xerox, lungs, ribs,
wrist braces, head braces, finger braces, frames, rivets,
lamp, canvas, lace, photographs, a face with the skin peeled
back, brown teeth embedded like wood rooted in the jaw bone.
Architecture-like appendages that are lifeless mimics of the
body (masks, braces, trusses). The endoskeleton becoming the
exoskeleton, medical and moral structures for correcting the
body, for holding it together, for confining it, for
describing and escaping its formlessness or fracture or
potential to fly apart. Electric copper and white on white
on white thick paint.
Not listening not listening not
listening.
Concise Oxford
p 737 medicine, medick,
medico, medieval. p
597 incise, incision,
incisive, incisor, incite, incivility, inclement,
inclination, incline, inclinometer, inclose, inclosure,
include, inclusive, incog, incognito, incognizant,
incoherent. p
61 articular, articulate,
articulation, artifact, artifice, artificial, artillery,
artilleryman, artisan, artist.
This sexual bind, which both Bertha
and Goldman recognized, is still one of the major definers
of women's lives. In terms of this bind, the complexities of
understanding of women's lives found in Boxcar Bertha: An
Autobiography renegotiate the
schism between the feminists who have interiorized the
"Virgin" of patriarchal religion and society into their own
beliefs and those feminists who refuse to comprehend that
sexuality because of sexism is a problem for most women.
--Kathy Acker, "Introduction to Boxcar Bertha", Kathy
Acker, Essays (Serpent's Tail,
London and New York).
The squeezing of language through a
very tight space--is it the freedom (entrapment) of
painting, the back turned only to face the freedom
(entrapment) of language -- language is a way out of
(towards) painting and painting a way towards (out of)
language.
From richly painted collages of the
distressed body, with intense tactility and a large
vocabulary of materials, to exquisite, precise etchings on
glass and their cast shadows, which ironically, next to
paintings heavy with physicality, are the most palpable
objects in the gallery. The archival photograph of a
cage-like helmet in Justl's construction mask to identify
virtue epitomizes the myth of the
morally perfected body, but the etched pieces defy
entrapment by casting a living shadow invested with
presence. The third possibility: If you peer through the
slats of the skeletal -- the mechanical workings of
things -- you find a secret passage of evasion. This
work experiments with evasion as a necessary strategy in the
act of subversion but there is irony in the armour-like
bravura of Justl's constructions -- riveted, glued, and
bolted together -- she addresses at the same time their
beauty and permeability. It is the shadow that survives as
the unshatterable "intention before language" because it is
more palpable than the white on white on white and black on
black and tar and rivets and and lace, which are, in
themselves, rich and strange and beautiful -- a world of
the subconscious worth getting lost in. The glass, most
delicate of substances, creates a shadow which is
ungraspable, and therefore safe from damage. The most
profoundly living element is the one that the hand has not
touched.
The space outside representation which
was once referred to as "ether" (p 401 - a medium
formerly assumed to permeate space and fill the interstices
between particles of matter), which because of its lack of
definition or form is experienced by some people as paranoid
space, is now called "technological" space. No technology
need be present. It addresses the ethereal. This work has
nothing to do with technology. Yet technology has brought on
a new description of the space in these pieces that is
altering the description of ether, so that I find
technological space haunting these etchings and their
shadows. Justl's etching of a fey, medieval disembodied
hand, floating on glass against black velvet, has a
melancholy, futuristic ominousness, as arm braces now imply
cyborgs and body reconstruction is circling again in a
revivified but equally baroque context.
Karen Justl is battling with the
conundrum of the physical bind that is inseparable from the
social bind which includes language. She fights it with an
interplay of the excessive and the spare. This is the most
complex and essential of battles.
p 61 articulation: to speak fluently and coherently
(of sound or speech) 2. having clearly distinguishable
parts. 3. having joints.
Susan Chafe is a Winnipeg based interdisciplinary artist
whose work includes independent and collaborative
productions. Susan is also the co-ordinator of the Lives of
Dogs Artists' Book Collective.
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