It knows not what it is

Fletcher, BA

Abstract

My recent work is both an exploration of devotional imagery and the nature of abstraction. The plastic paintings draw upon the icon and the logo. Icon derives from Greek, it means picture, and has become associated with the image of Christ. Logo, also from Greek, Logos, has always had a more fluid meaning. It refers to speech, but also the source of order in the universe, and it has become associated in the Christian mindset as the word of God.

In contemporary culture the terms have taken on a new resonance. Icon is used to describe almost any image that has become fetishised in the popular imagination, and the logo is the most quintessential signifier of capitalist economies; an object of near religious devotion, and one that inspires loyalty and veneration. The contemporary icon/logo has become the bearer of a branded identity and a marker for taste, sensibility and social aspiration.

Abstraction is often defined in terms of what it is not: non representational, non objective, non figurative. It is grasped as a ‘via negativa’, a means of coming to understand an incomprehensible, ineffable God. And indeed the early abstract pioneers, Mondrian and Kandinsky both sought a spiritual plane (albeit under the auspices of their belief in Theosophy). Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the modernist anxiety concerning abstraction was always one of ‘meaninglessness’. Abstraction, like religion, requires a leap of faith.

‘It Knows Not What It Is’ takes its title from the Irish poet WB Yeats’ celebrated poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. The poem is a complex meditation on art, artifice and the transcendental. The poem celebrates Byzantium as a city of abstractions, a city filled with art of a largely abstract character. Yeats imagined the ancient city of Byzantium as an ideal. And yet by the end of the poem Yeats appears to argue that art too, however close it may reach for the transcendental, remains a folly, an artifice, a mere abstraction.

Citation

Fletcher, B. It knows not what it is. 12 June 2009 - 16 June 2009. (Unpublished)

• Exhibition Performance Type: Exhibition
• Start Date: Jun 12, 2009
• End Date: Jun 16, 2009
• Deposit Date: Dec 9, 2010
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 9, 2010
• Additional Information: Number of Pieces : 0; Funders : Arts Council England (ACE);EagleWorks, Wolverhampton