Jean-Marie Clarke

Art translates matter into mind, mind into matter.
°1951
affiliation: independent
en

Being trained in art history and practiced in art, I describe myself as an "artistorian": My research has essentially been a metaphysical one, although off-road, which means mostly outside of academia and without direct reference to the canon of Western philosophy or its history. I have integrated and used elements of Far-Eastern thought and practice (taoism, zen, yoga, meditation). My object of research was limited to a painting by Rembrandt in the Louvre erroneously titled "Philosophe en méditation". In fact, it represents the blind Tobit and his wife Anna waiting for the return of their son. By necessity, my research extended to Rembrandt's name and signatures. We are talking about a period of nearly forty years, in the course of which my art practice led me to update the Rembrandt painting in a process work using an installation and performance work: "OZONE STATION PROJECT (1993-2000)". This project enabled me to develop a 4-D model of the human mind, its meta-media (word, image, number), and in particular consciousness, which I consider as the "Ur-Medium". Working in various media made it possible to sidestep some of the pitfalls of thinking solely in terms of verbal concepts and discursive logic.

My life and work are based on a spontaneous "satori" experience made at the age of seventeen. It gave me the certainty of consciousness as the focus of experience.

research

research expositions

  • The Rembrant Search Party (2016) author(s): Jean-Marie Clarke published in: Journal for Artistic Research
    The object of my research involves an elementary particle of meaning: a letter of the alphabet. The claim that a single letter can make to meaning is clear in the case of an initial—which is usually a single, capital letter—and even more so when this initial appears in the context of a signature. Specifically, my research deals with the initial letter "R" used by the 17th-century Dutch painter Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669) in his signatures. The meanings that an initial letter can mediate are not limited to identification and references to a full name. Letters of the alphabet, while being basic verbal units, have visual, not to say pictorial features. All by itself, a letter is not yet a word or phoneme. It exhibits the formal characteristics of a sign, grapheme, symbol. Many of the major writing systems in the world—phonetic or not—were derived from pictograms, from representational pictorial symbols. We all learned to write by drawing letters before combining them into words. The pictorial history of letters and writing (then printing) has been ignored by mainstream art history, which has devoted its attention to works of "high art," like painting. At what scale does an intentionally-made visual form become pictorially significant? The pictorial component is obvious in calligraphy and typography, even if only to a specialized audience. But there is a blindness relative to letter forms, such that, for example, few readers are aware of the shapes of the type or handwriting they are reading. This blindness is all the more surprising considering the fact that even phonetic writing was a visual achievement: the rendering of speech visible. Given this, the traditional opposition between the verbal and the visual, between word and image, needs to be reconsidered in terms of vision coupled with blindness. Vision, because eyes read texts and see pictures. Blindness, because in both cases the medium—print or paint—is overlooked. I postulate this seeing/not-seeing paradox as a principle of vision-based works that could be summarized by the word overlooking. This ambiguous term can mean both "not seeing things" and "seeing things." Often, we end up either not noticing certain things or "seeing things" by virtue of looking too much: this is a basic risk in research of any kind. In reference to Edgar Allan Poe's famous detective tale, The Purloined Letter (1844), which provides a paradigmatic case of overlooking, I like to call it the "Purloined Principle." Given the pictorial significance of a letter of the alphabet, a study of Rembrandt's signature—the graphic sign of his identity—will reveal that it may be considered as a historical, existential and esthetic document in its own right.
     open exposition comments (0)

comments

Exposition: Rudimentariness: a concept for artistic research (01/01/2016) by Anik Fournier
Jean-Marie Clarke 13/01/2017 at 15:22

I would have liked to get into this exposition, but could not because of its wordiness (formal, academic style of thinking), This wordiness does not serve the purpose of "rudimentariness," which is much too artificial a term to begin with. The adjective "rudimentary" is so rarely used that it can be considered an archaism. If it is used, then only to mean "rough," "unsophisticated," "basic": i.e. mostly with slightly negative connotations. To want to make a noun out of it, suggests a certain taste for jargon. Especially if the artists' word was "innocence," which is also inacceptable, but for other reasons. "Naiveté" might have been better, and in any case closer to the truth.  I have no suggestions to replace "rudimentariness," other than the "beginner's mind" of Zen practice, but that opens another can of worms. As a nudge in another direction, let me quote Marshall McLuhan: "It may very well be that in our conscious inner lives the interplay among our senses is what constitutes the sense of touch." Neurological research may or may not be confirming that insight.