posted 15 October 1997
Erika Chang
New York City, USA
email: [email protected]
web site: taliesin
![[painting of Green dissected into 3-panels]](../../IMG/thegang/Eria-grnbg.JPG)
oil on canvas . . . 36" x 63" total |
Okay, I confess this isn't so much a tribute as an appropriation of Green. Invoked as an icon (hence the saintly halo, or could have been a stark white hat), 'he' functioned as an emptied sign, recalled to do my bidding and to act as a vehicle for my own frivolously useless thoughts. [Be prepared for a load of nonesense to follow, much of it made up after the fact. Therefore, accuracy of references to Green and Scritti is not intended.]
The thoughts went something along the line of the conflation of various trinities. The most obvious of these being the mind, body, spirit trinity, which I read into Green and his work anyway. His intellectual bent (mind) are blatantly obvious. At the same time there are countless glimpses of the fairly materialistic sides of him (body) in his glamour, his oafishness, and his self-destructive habits. Lastly, in spite of his professed faithlessness, a strange passion and desire bordering on faith (spirit) shine through in his songs, even in the sterile polished surfaces of the later songs with their borrowed words. After all, anal obssession is merely a different form of passion and an expression of life, and it's his phrasing and his loaded but obscured usage of borrowed words which give life to those words again.
But rather than emphasizing a divided sphere of three separate aspects, I was amused and taken by his intergration of these contrasting aspects into a schizophrenic, heterogenous view of himself, the psychological/philosophical subject (is that an oxymoron or what, a hetereogenous subject plagued by schizophrenia?). So I attempted a far-fetched equivalent intergration by relying on a (hopefully) believable unified visual field (an ambiguous smoking Green) stretched across into all three panels.
Although never completed, I had intended that each panel evoke a dynamism appropriate to its aspect of the trinity that is at the same time frozen or suspended. The aim being to create a sense of elusiveness and confusing discomfort, much like how the man himself comes across and what he supposedly intended for his songs. Thus in the body panel, for example, the decaying body is suspended in the kinetic process of sitting down or standing up. The spirit panel has the frozen streaks of immaterial (?) and meaningless smoke. The mind panel, the least complete, would have had texts which in and of themselves would be static as written words but vivacious in the thoughts they represent which are intended to be brought to life again through reading.
Towards that same aim of unsettling by appropriating a popularly accepted style and then building in contradictions, I painted in what amounts to a surrealistic style. The painting is essentially illustionistic and representational, which makes it easier for most people to relate to without having to acquire a vast knowledge of art history. But I've included plenty of visual abstraction to prevent it from becoming a comfortable illusion. There's nothing particularly absurd and dreamlike as in the paintings by the original Surrealists, but together the three panels can't possibly be depicting the same space. Similarly in Green's lyrics there are the familiar words of pop songs, yet the way they're put together, with loads of contradictions thrown in, creates for me a sense of something so familiar yet other, something surreal.
As Green's songs occasionally are conscious of their own artifice, so too I tried to point to the artifice of the painting medium. So, for example, where She's A Woman points to the fact of itself being a performance by having Shabba calling Green up to the stand, the painting also tries to point to its borders and limits by including the space of the wall within itself (the gap between the smoke panel and the head and body panels).
Another example: Where The Word Girl points to what's taken for granted in pop songs by fussing over its usage of the word 'girl', the painting also tries to counteract its own illusionistic representational painting style by fussing over the various effects of the paint itself and pointing to the paint by using its effects to signify. Thus the body panel has wrinkles and chipped paint to stand for the decay of the body. The smoke panel is glossed and gelled to invoke that overwhelming oceanic feeling that many experience in spiritual moments. The head panel is made flat and unembellished to emphasize that the richness and depth of words and thoughts (in the text which never made it into the painting) comes externally through animation by the mind that reads and brings to bear a vast well of memories and associations.
Unfortunately not all of the effects of oil paint are readily transferable into two-dimensional images for the screen. The tactile quality of oil paint plays a big part in the symbolic vocabulary of the painting. It is all but lost here. Such is the lot of translation. Something always gets lost or displaced by other things not intended. Much like listening to Scritti or tracing Green's words, isn't it?
Like Green's 1991 aborted LP efforts, this painting, which was started around the same time, has been similarly abandoned. This type of painting has always been more like a workbook rather than an illustration of some preconceived idea. So, there has never been an urgency to 'complete' it. But maybe with the Scrits back in the studio, perhaps it's also time for me to pick up the brushes and knives again? Like icon like worshippers, traces of the whispers without as the Other within...