2010: Is Text Cheating?, FOST Gallery, Singapore
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One of the first introductions to structured education a child encounters is writing exercises, where one is taught to trace the shape of a letter over the dotted guide and then to practice by repeating the letter on the empty line. Praise, stars, accolades are heaped onto tots with good penmanship. And so it begins: to be successful you have to stay within the ‘lines’, follow the path that has been set. God forbid the tail of your ‘q’ strays willy nilly two lines below.
That Matthew Bax, a tax accountant in a previous incarnation, founded critically acclaimed bars in Melbourne and Singapore and is a successful artist in three continents, is paid testament that straying is a good thing, if not even better.
This is the second series of works Bax has created since relocating to Singapore 18 months ago. His first titled My Life is an Open Book was also bibliophilic in theme. Text in art no doubt blurs the line between graphic design and fine art. However approach Bax’s works from a purely aesthetic point of view and you experience the joy of spontaneous brushwork and freedom of random splatters reminiscent of action paintings. Read the text and you experience the wit of the artist, who simultaneously probes, questions and challenges the status quo.
And while the imagery of lined exercise books and index cards is somewhat old school, the tongue-in-cheek title is a decidedly contemporary reference to modern day communication. The question posed in the title would not have made much sense even a short a time as a decade ago. With text messaging, flirting need no longer be conducted face to face, instead feelings can be instantaneously conveyed (or masked) with seemingly harmless emoticons, expressions made up of punctuation marks and indecipherable unless read sideways. And even if physical boundaries may never be crossed, the same cannot be said for emotional ones.
Blurred boundaries, crooked lines and words askew – that is Life.
Stephanie Fong
Director
FOST Gallery, Singapore
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And As It Goes …
… Without Saying
Beginnings are often fraught with anxiety and dread. Anxious that what follows must fulfil that incipient vision of what-it-should-be. Dreadful that it nearly always isn’t so. Beginnings are also transitory states1, in the sense that what gets first airing must often be re-examined and re-appraised in light of what follows. And yet, the kernel of what is to follow must already be contained in that first note … first line … first intonation … first mark. Or as what John Sallis had remarked in The Verge of Philosophy: “In order to begin, one must somehow know what, on the other hand, one cannot, as one begins, yet know.”
In encountering a blank canvas; a clean sheaf of paper; a fresh screen; or a silent audience, the idea of what is to be communicated is held in place by threads of possibility. It gradually takes on a tangible form – of language; of composition; of passage; of materiality. And yet, these cumulative forms are, at best, tangible interpretations and not the idea2. And yet, again, these (tangible) forms must also emanate from the same source which gave rise to that (intangible) idea. In so many other words, it is an attempt to say, the unsayable; speak, the unspeakable; to write, to draw, to paint, to make sense of the un-sensible.
“And yet – if bordering on the unimaginable – beginnings are made.” – John Sallis, The Verge of Philosophy
… In Between Things
And as sense is being made, the idea becomes increasingly and seemingly tangible. But never to the point of being an actual thing, but akin to a shape-shifting entity which traces out the boundaries and limits of what it is – and delimiting what it is not, by default. It is, perhaps, this perennial confusion of what-it-is-not for what-it-is which results in a misplaced confidence in identifying or representing ideas. That confidence arises from a need to be certain – of belief; of naming – as boundaries shift and ambiguities mount.
If ceci n’est pas une pipe, then it has to be something else. It must be – as it cannot be just not, or non-sense. It is, perhaps, also a habit of thought which seeks the tangible, grasps the recognisable, and discerns the true. It is a habit which builds a sense of exclusion – albeit, momentarily before becoming entrenched as a habit of thought – for the sake of knowing – or believing.
Such confidence, being exclusive, would necessarily belie the primacy of revisions, rejections and erasures3. It is only by a constant turning and re-turning of frames of reference that ideas become sensible. It is not so much a search for that perfect sense, or representation, but one of mapping the (un-sensible) idea by delineating its multitude of shadows, traces, echoes which must necessarily exists in between (tangible) things.
…
With the trace, one discerns but is never certain. With the echo, one hears but cannot be sure of its trajectory or source. With shadows, one sees but incompletely. These are anxious modes of discernment which, not so much as question the very basis of knowing but, point to the implausibility of certitude. It is not an abdication of saying what it is but rather an acknowledgement of what it is not yet could be.
The not-yet-could-be thing becomes like a stain4 : suggestive yet inconclusive; visible yet tentative; inscribed yet unnameable; is yet not. It is perhaps as stains that we can better understand thoughts or ideas – as permeating, emerging, fading, accidental; or otherwise. As indelible not-things. And as things go, they can only be said – drawn, or painted, or … – in order to make sense, yet again.
Lawrence Chin
1. When I was first introduced to Matthew Bax’s work, I was intrigued. It was plainly evident that Bax had tremendous store of commitment to the painted medium, even when we think of painting as somehow “historical”. When later introduced to Bax and speaking with him about his ideas in his work, I was more than intrigued. It came across as a deep-seated search for a sense of rootedness in our fragmentary world. When I was first approached to write for this exhibition, I was hesitant but relented as I thought I had to give form to what I had experienced in coming into contact with Bax – his work and his ideas.
2. Bax’s current series extends some of his earlier concerns found in My Life is an Open Book, which is driven by his continual dialogue with the need to understanding life and its myriad transformations. It is an attempt to make sense of the world around, much like jotting down lists and thoughts onto pages or cards, often tinged with the personal hope that such acts of observation and recoding could somehow suffice in drawing out the essence and mystery of living. Yet the vigorous attempts at whiting out the text, while leaving them marginally legible, serve as a reminder of the tension between the tenuousness and tenacity of our meaning-making rituals or habits.
3. The tentativeness of inscribing one’s thoughts is carried over into the deliberate use of chalk marks in a number of Bax’s new works. These marks, verging on the playful, bring to mind the obvious reference to formative early childhood years, which are often times remembered in terms of emotional states rather than cognitive understanding. The displacement and uncertain relationship between memory, emotion and thought become yet another indication of why we can never be sure of what we think we know.
4. As an amorphous entity, what we know or see or hear is then constantly revised, not for want of a definite meaning, but in concert with the acceptance that we can only know imperfectly. Bax exemplifies this approach in his visual thoughts.
