In Derrida’s reading of painting, the work as a ‘text’ cannot simply have one definable meaning, there is always more that can be read into and through the piece.
All art work exceeds the frames they occupy.
Just as improvisation can be considered a 'name for something which can't keep a name' (Bailey 1992: 203) a painting is a nexus of meanings.
The artist, the art work and the environment all interact at the same time to produce multiple readings. A painting may be considered an inert object, a representation of Otherness, an expression of human feling, a political concept, a cultural abstraction and even a piece of music. This deconstructionist view of art emerged out of my own creative process during this project.
One example of these multiple layers of interpretation in an art work comes from the image of a horse.
I began my residency by working on a composition entitled The Maghera Pony which itself was inspired by a photograph(pictured). When I began to work on my own prints, subliminally, the image of the horse/ pony kept appearing. This could be read as a response to the landscape in Clare (which indeed does have many horses) and/ or it can be read as part of my own self narrative. As Derrida describes (referencing Kant), when attempting to understand a painting of the horse, 'one must take account of the place of man...as the subject of aesthetic and teleological judgments' (1987: 105).
During my residency, and after reading Derrida's Truth in Painting, my own aesthetic judgement became obsessed with the image of the horse. It began to represent my own struggle for artistic identity and assurance. Sketch after sketch, print after print, the only thing it seemed I could draw was a horse. I borrowed books from the library with horse images, I stopped next to fields, I studied the bone structure of the animals, the line of their jaw. I began wondering, 'what gave the image of the horse it's essence?' How could I portray 'horse' with simple lines. How is it not a pig? Why is it not a pig? Why was the image of the horse in the field so powerful to me? Was it the quality of the Clare landscape I was trying to capture or something else? My internal landscape? Or was it the intermingling of multiple landscapes: psychological, aesthetic, auditory, kineasthetic, emotional, visual and cultural?
Perhaps, in the act of painting/ printing/ drawing we are deluded to think that we are representing something other than our self, to imagine that internal and external boundaries of reality are so clearly delineated. As Derrida states that, 'the horse is for man, in the service of man, and perceived by man only in its adherent beauty' (1987 :106).
I confess that the horse is indeed in service to my own artistic needs. I am conscious that I am not presenting the horse as an external truth seperate from myself. I am using the horse, to embody my own fragile identity and the ephemeral constructed nature of place. The horse is my own perception of wildness, silence, mystery, wisdom, strength, potency, bounded freedom and melancholy. For the record, the horse probably has its own perceptions of the matter.
Extrapolating Derrida's discourse on the horse, perhaps all of my own experiences of the external natural world (auditory/ visual/ tactile) could be considered to be at my service, in that I consider myself differentiated from them. As an artist (either visual or sonic) I use this differentiation to make my work. I use my senses to perceive the Burren landscape with its limestone mountains, Atlantic views, ragged coastline, rough stone textures, layered silt lowlands and coloured orchids. I may tell myself that in my painting or my music I am trying to represent this external landscape. However, the truth is the work I make are not the things themselves, they are merely extensions of my own perceptions. Yet these perceptions are still only one truth of the object.
Artistic reflection supposes that human consciousness (seeing/hearing/feeling) is the truth about painting. Perhaps our understanding of creative process reveals more about our hierachy of human perception in understanding the world than the meaning of art.
Meleau-Ponty's phenomenology goes some way to counter balancing Kantian aesthetics about the world and our place in it. However, the phenomenology of the 'carnal formula' is still reliant on human perception. Yet it does allow for the acknoweldgement that internal and external worlds are concurrent and complex.
