180425

I would love to be a writer. When a painter you can really long for expressing something clearly. On the other hand pictures are very clear in its own way. When I was young I read a lot of texts by Bartes and got interested in signs and symbols. The signifier and the signified. I got lost in his texts. Thinking a huge amount of his short description of the obtuse (blunt, unclear, unspecific) meaning of a picture. As I understood it it was what we as onlookers can see in a picture but is not necessarily intended to be there as a sign directed at the reader. In some way a residue of the maker. The decisions the maker did not take. I am not so sure how he intended it but I interpreted it as a very honest thing. That obtuse meaning. Like a tell of its maker. Something to unmask.

It seemed political too me to try to achieve this. Contrary to the notion I got from the art academy that good art only contains decisions. Maybe a leftover ideology from conceptualist traditions or a intellectualism that grew into art in the 20th century. To me, this is more what design is. A field where we try to communicate something with tools we invent. “This is a good thing because it fulfills it’s function”.

The obtuse was for me a leading word in what art is. More of an aesthetic fingerprint. A field where you constantly search to find that which we can not design. That “tell” of the maker that makes a piece of art so human.