MARK DANIEL COHEN: The Trick Of The Light

Karen Gunderson: Black Paintings
ClampArt, New York, NY

February 21 – March 31, 2007

The difference between a sign and a symbol is that one of them moves. As things stand within the life of the mind, the sign is an inert mass—a lump of intellectual clay, a thing, which remains merely a thing regardless of whether it is housed in and houseled by the principle of pointing or the principle of resemblance, regardless of whether it makes its meaning plain by aiming a denotation at that which it claims or by simulating it. A word, an image, a gesture, may sound, look, or seem like what it calls or may call to it recognizably by generally assented convention. Either way, it is an item merely—something of a commodity.

The issue here of course is representation, the standing for by proxy. But there is of necessity something intrinsically prosaic about the function of the stand-in, of the masque and shadow play of such forms of thought, of the moving of pieces around the board, and any good logician knows there is space for ingenuity, for surprise and astonishment, in what the less adept believe is nothing more than a game of predetermined necessities. There is a point at which the pieces unfold, open up into possibilities, and mere approximation is not the soul of the game—we grow distant from the mundane. We are missing here the magic.

When we think, denotation, unambiguous or otherwise, is far from all we do, from all we use. There are components of our thoughts, things we think about, think through, that are active. We possess them and are possessed by them in a dynamical relationship. There are moments the mind can turn to that are transformative. If this were not the case, then art itself would have to be an exercise in the semiotic, and we should know by now to throw in the towel. Were it so, then a work of art would be a matter for interpretation, and thus nothing more than an instigation for daydreaming, and the art nothing in itself—nothing better than a ridge of clouds that seems at times like a camel, or backed like a weasel, or very like a whale.