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l'homme tombe/man falls: Mark McDean 2011 Acrylic and pen on found artwork. 25 x 20 cm |
Here is Mark's response to my previous artwork in this collision series and my initial thoughts:
There's a nursery rhyme we remember from our childhood:
There's a nursery rhyme we remember from our childhood:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Hympty Dumpty had a great fall
All the king's horses and
All the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
I'm interested in the fact that in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass (1872), Humpty Dumpty discusses semantics with Alice, he says: 'When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.' So, with this in mind I'll accept that when Mark said: French brings a certain 'mystique' to the image that he is being semantic, that he is interested in the meaning attributed to the words in the context of the image ~ the man in question fell down. But since the words are in French they form a disguise, one that might baffle those who who do not understand the language. However, the text overlaid upon the image, like a veil over a face, does not prohibit understanding or accessibility, it just adds a little mystique or fascination. Can we assume the words refer to the nursery rhyme and the man cannot be remade as he was before? L'Homme tombe/Man Falls may be a reference to Mark's own accident several years ago when he fell down and injured himself or it may point to the words of French theorist Michel Foucault that I included in one of my responses in this collision project. We right read Man falls as the fall of humanity from innocence to guilt as described in Christian doctrine, or Nietzsche's pronouncement in Twilight of the Idols (1895), Wherever man is depressed at all, he senses the proximity of something "ugly." His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride — all fall with the ugly and rise with the beautiful. However we read this image, the words and text collide in the most interesting way.
Love it. Another riddle, like the ones posed by the masks.
ReplyDeleteChris Barron said:
ReplyDelete"Et mon espirit, toujours du vertige hante/ jalouse du neant l'insensibilite./ Ah! ne jamais sortir des Nombres et des Etres!" Baudelaire 'Le Gouffre'. Re. Pascal, where everything is abyss, and infinity is seen through every window. Perhaps the curate's egg ... not entirely fallen, but fallen enough with dual plumage. "And heaven reached, like Lucifer I fell."
Translation of Baudelaire's text:
ReplyDeleteAnd my mind, always haunted by vertigo, Is jealous of the nothingness of insensibility. Ah! Never to be free of Numbers and Beings! The Abyss (1866)
Maybe Mark is responding to the egg-like shape in the left hand corner of my work and how this shape relates to the pearls I've included, which represent the 23 pairs of nuclear chromosomes that we each have in our cells.
ReplyDeleteIf Mark is Humpty Dumpty, does that make Julie Mother Goose?
ReplyDeleteJulie doesn't usually wear a tall hat and a shawl, so maybe not but LOL anyhow
ReplyDeleteAnonymous ~ At no stage did I suggest that Humpty Dumpty was Mark and Mother Goose is a fictional author of the 17th Century so can't lay claim to being her. But I suspect you are actually saying something else?! I have a few ideas, but won't put them here. Later thoughts about this piece have included the fact that the figure is flamboyant and rather comical, both these ideas connect with Mark's research interests.
ReplyDeleteSteve ~ I have been known to wear a tall hat and shawl, though never at the same time (Big smile to both comments).