| Millennium Scream: Death by directed gaze... | ||||
|
home essays |
||||
|
"What's your favorite horror movie?"
When one of the characters in one of the SCREAM films (don't ask me which one...) is asked this question during a telephone conversation with an anonymous caller, she does not know that her answer will determine the manner in which the caller plans to kill her. |
||||
|
In the
beginning, there was not necessarily 'heaven and earth' or even 'wind on the
water' but perhaps only a single, poetically inclined zealot who wanted to make
a living from his Art. (It seems appropriate and likely to put the creation of
the Abrahamic God, the Father, into the hands of a
patriarchal poet.) He should be pictured publicly performing his
narrations of the Deuteronomy to informally gathered groups of rural
inhabitants, thus putting into circulation what would become a written scripture—whether
Christian, Jewish or Islamic—which, in turn, would be interpreted and
reinterpreted by politicians and followed by sequels written by similarly
zealous poets, attempting to make a living (alms being the historical equivalent of
royalties).
However, the picture of the poet is not enough to explain the chaos now experienced in civilized Western minds. Also necessary is a paranoid, schizophrenic believer, willing to put him or herself into the hands of the text and its interpreters. The moment that this we can visualize this believer allowing him or herself to be defined by the poetic inventors of God, we can see the beginnings of the collusion between mortal fear, religion and language and a driving force to find reliability of meaning. It is at this point that the interpretation of texts and theories of meaning become more than a topic for socio-philosophic gatherings since, in order to know where one will land on the 'final' judgment day, one must completely and exhaustively know the laws and be able to rely on the interpretation of them. Thus, the believers had a stake in a stability and the importance of the literal message. Paying attention to anything in one's peripheral vision might be deadly. |
||||
| It is the inherent danger of this tunnel-visioned search for stability of meaning that I see implicitly addressed in Slovakian artist Stano Filko's Quadrophony piece, exhibited at this year's Biennale in the Czech pavillion. | ||||
 Photo: M.W.J.* |
I walk into the hall. Immediately prominent in the visual field are three rows
of multiple plexi-glass sheets (each approximately 5m in height, 2m in width),
suspended perpendicularly from the ceiling. o study the text fragments printed
on the surfaces. |
|||
 |
On each sheet are printed text fragments in random patterns. The effect of the
transparent, almost invisible sheets is that of overlapping text fragments,
layers of meaning and floating signifiers suspended in three dimensional
space—words covering other words, associate loosely with other ideas.
The plexi-glass can move, changing the relationship of the signifiers randomly. The 'system' is not firmly attached to the floor or the ceiling; it seems to be hanging from 'heaven,' but only by a thread. The worst fear of the true believer—the open system. Because the majority of text is at eye level or above, the viewer is encouraged to look up slightly in order to study the spatially interactive nature of the text. |
|||
 |
This focal point becomes a hazard when one moves to view different angles of the 3-D, floating text, since the floor has been strewn with small metal balls, which one may kick or upon which one may slip and fall. While the kick concreticizes the 'ripple effect' of meaning and the fascination of random interaction in the open system; the hard, stone floor, makes a slip potentially lethal, thus physically embodying an idea of death by directed gaze, death by focus on the literal, or, in a less direct sense, focus on the wrong danger. | |||
| What is your favorite horror movie? The one where nobody knows what's going on. | ||||
| Copyright on images and text by Deborah Griggs unless otherwise noted (as below). My work is free for use in educational activities with proper citation. | ||||
| *Image courtesy of Manfred W. Juergens, Wismar |