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A Floor.
Layout design application Quark Xpress, as well as
Illustrator and other programs has a function entitled
‘Group’. Once you apply ‘Group’ to any selected item,
it binds the designated selection together as one. The
document then becomes two layers: the layer of the empty
page and the layer of the ‘Group’.
Similarly, in my painting “Floor with Cigarettes and
Bottle of Water” made in 1999, there is the layer of
the floor and the assortment of associated objects.
The pink floor behaves like a QuarkXpress or Illustrator
page.
What is a floor? Why not consider it simply as part
of the ‘Group’? Without a floor the Net of objects would
float still together or it will be dispersed?
The Floor’s Color
Consider an empty computer screen. Look intensively
into the screen for some time. Then close your eyes
and experience the flash of light before your retina.
The color field you have just experienced is a floor
and it divides your familiar 3-D space from it’s absence.
Even if the quality of color that is experienced in
the field is closer to a black-ish green, I prefer to
think of it as an iridescent pink; a color with metaphorical
power.
The Net of Objects (2 cigarettes, a bottle of water
and some other stuff including some video-game controllers)
A unique cigarette-unlighted- can be used to represent
Past. (The mere existence of an unlighted cigarette
suggests its other two possible states: the small fire
with a finite duration and the wafting smoke).
Multiple cigarettes on the other hand, could represent
infinity.
Yet two cigarettes, side by side are deeply disturbing
because they question the singularity of any given moment.
Something similar happens with the cubicle containers
of water. There are many kinds of ‘vertical’ bottles
of water-such as Evian and somehow we trust them all.
A vertical concentration of water seems natural and
correct. Perhaps we reflexively dismiss the shape as
natural because of the cubical structure of our stomach
linked with the linear esophagus passage which reinforces
the preconception. But when water is packaged in alternative
rounded cubicles it looks offensive. It’s as if someone
cracked a bad joke against our perception of reality.
Stuff such as Adidas shoes, cables and video-game controllers
are inclusive only as a reference to Hermes, the God
of Pop.
Image:
Hermes Is Nailed To The Floor; But What Is A Floor
If Not A Compromise For Keeping Us Rational?
Sentence:
Our Enemy Is Dead.
Good Fortune. Success.
* “The Fabric of Reality” by David Deutsch, 1998.
Miltos Manetas, 1999
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