Thursday, March 27, 2008

Witttgenstein & Wolff


I did a series of paper paintings using Wittgenstein's aphorisms (as I call them) out of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I don't pretend to understand the book at all, but I really like the little bits. This one caused a lot of reaction when I hung it in a show at a restaurant upstate. The show was called Sex & Death and went up around Halloween. I left a blank book for people to give their opinions. No one objected to images of Death (as I usually depict him as a skeleton with one wing), but this piece got to people. No one seems to have read the quote and looked at any of the images included except for the anatomical one. I thought that the selection of volumes (ladle, vagina, skull top, and carved white pumpkin) along with the words was pretty interesting. When I'm in the studio I'm not thinking of ways to unglue the viewer. Its more about what I find fascinating and visually twisty enough to unlock the eyes, brain & heart together. And then, of course, I always want to share it with others.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

i could not agree more with your thoughts...

at the end of the day are you creating to please or to communicate?

funnily enough.... i have just finished a typo-film taking on the same silogism mechanics ans Ludwig Wittgenstein´s Tractatus.

Homo Modernus, Tractatus Philosophicus
If in a parallel universe Ludwig Wittgenstein and Marshall McLuhan had married, their robot child would have created something like this animation.

Here are two links, one for the complete version, and one for each separate episode...

Complete version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZRuGGXAxew

Single episodes (13):
http://www.youtube.com/user/Homomodernus#g/c/CA29679D4BA1F556

thanks for your time!