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| 'She cries' - hand-carved cup with acrylic paint & pink texta: Julie Clarke 2011 |
As long as I can remember, I’ve been a bit of a flâneur and rag picker. Dumpster trucks and hard rubbish left on footpaths, has always held a certain interest since they might contain valuable objects or materials to inspire art or poetry. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. However, it is the potential of the object to be transformed that is most absorbing. On 25 October, 2011 I found a discarded hand-carved, wooden mug with face (most probably a vintage New Zealand artifact) and immediately thought of some of Mark’s works in the Collisions project that relate to identity and masks, but I was also aware of the ethnographic and physiognomic details of the cup, which serve to produce a sense of otherness to the object. My response (using the found object) is less to Mark’s actual artwork and more to the photograph of the performative aspects of him wearing it, since the sash could be read as referring to competitive behavior and warrior culture. Because the garment forms an X over his solar plexus - a site of emotion, I regard it as topography ~ X marks the spot; a kind of somatic mapping of the spatial and temporal aspects of his body. I’ve painted the cup black and white to correspond with Mark’s black object over his white t/shirt and being mindful of the fact that it was the French poet, Charles Baudelaire who theorized the notion of the flâneur, I’ve written on the cup words from Baudelaire’s poem Le Masque/The Mask (1861) to demonstrate my psychological and physical state at the moment of altering the cup. The text reads:
She cries, you fool, because she has lived!
And because she lives! But what she deplores
Above all else, and what makes her tremble down to her knees,
Is that tomorrow, alas!, she must continue to live!
Tomorrow, and the next day, and always! -- like us!
Charles Baudelaire’s The Mask/Le Masque, 1861
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