Letters from God
In service of the ongoing inquiry into what makes good art good--and it's not as obvious as it seems, why some works have what Curtis White so gracefully calls "the click of invention," and others so obviously do not--I have been thinking about whether rigorous inquiry is more the product of the artist or the viewer, in the making or in the experience. On the one hand, there are works that seem terribly overthought, that hammer at you with insisted meanings, that are more of an idea given awkward body than something grown naturally out of the artist's involvement with his or her materials. And on the other hand there are those tremendously fertile works that create a sense of blooming meaning in the viewer.
I was reminded of this the other day when I visited Lance Wakeling, a young artist in his last year at Cornish, to see his project of casting in plaster every letter that appears in the Bible's Book of Exodus. When I arrived he seemed a little dispirited, or maybe just tired (there are 151,286 letters and pieces of punctuation to cast, and he's completed, since starting the project a few months ago, about 20,000), peeling a series of a's and l's, set in Times New Roman, out of delicate-looking latex-and-bandage molds, with a slight sheen of plaster dust everywhere. There was a feeling of weary resignation to his posture. As he extracted the letters from the mold, some of them crumbled in his hand; the a's break a lot, Wakeling told me, on account of the delicate junctures, giving the labor of this project a more punishing--as opposed to devotional--edge.
But the meaning of the labor, as tempting as it is to equate it to something historically punishing, such as the Jews' enslavement in Egypt, is accidental, a connection Wakeling is discovering as he goes. "I just wanted to see a pile of letters," he told me, chucking out a broken "a." "The process has become more important than I meant it to be."
To my mind, it doesn't matter if this angle of the project is something the artist learns rather than plans. Those exceptionally fertile art projects seem to have that ability to create meaning out of thin air, and not just meaning attached to impenetrable theory. Such as the idea of the word of God broken down into its smallest units (even the i's are two distinct pieces, stroke and dot), and where it is, if anywhere, that holiness resides. Exodus, as a text, retains some mystery, some impenetrability that is not dissipated by being broken down into manageable components. Still, it's somehow thrilling to know that there are no capital q's in Exodus, and over 16,000 lowercase e's.
For now, the letters are heaped, also somehow thrillingly, in a box, and they may be displayed--this spring at the Cornish BFA show--that way. They may not. Wakeling hasn't figured it out yet.
