Sentences on Jon Meyer’s Work
By Elysa Lozano, February 2011
1. Making marks can be as spontaneous as doodling, as symbolic of identity and territory as graffiti tags, or as intuitive as a child that decorates the bedroom walls.
2. The unmeditated impulse to scribble becomes synonymous with recognition in the phrase ‘to make one’s mark on society’.
3. In inverse relation to self-realization through instinctive scribbling, Jon Meyer creates programmatic systems for making intentionally prototypical marks: circles, squares, numbers, lines, and squiggles.
4. He reaches for the outer limits of producing meaning through marks to document the discord between process, form, and observation.
5. His anaglyph drawings find the physiological limitations of the human machine for input-process-output. Drawing simultaneously with the right and left hand challenges the right and left eye.
6. Pixels Going On and Off (1000 Changing per Second), the binary shift of black to white pixels on a computer monitor, is the most incremental shift at the limit of visual perception.
7. Mark making within the highly symbolic field of art is determined by art historical precedent, employing sets of value judgments, and communicable intentions.
8. Value-determining hierarchies are collectively established by the participants in this field: which sets of marks are more engaging, aesthetically meaningful, or expensive than others.
9. Meyer’s work undermines hierarchical value-assigning systems by proposing a series of equivalences.
10. The logical human is proposed as equal to the machine.
11. The abstraction is equal to the representational.
12. The figurative is equal to both.
13. Aesthetic resonance of a drawing is translatable into geometric area.
14. The fine muscle movements of the hand are as compelling as the broad strokes of the arm.
15. The impulses behind the artist producing and the audience reading are the same.
16. The intentional and the unintentional mark carry the same weight.
17. A found biographical object is as individual as a programmatically generated artwork.
18. Sol LeWitt asserts that irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.
19. Jon Meyer proposes that a work that follows its own system and a work that breaks its rules are equally conceptually rigorous.
20. A gesture can be physical communication, using the body rather than words.
21. Gestural drawing indicates an object, without describing it in detail.
22. “I start with an idea of what a good "squiggle" should be (not too symmetric, non-figural, random but with a compositional unity) and then struggle with producing that kind of pattern for a long time. ” (i)
23. The only remnant of his gesture is the slight variation in speed and line.
24. Giorgio Agamben describes the gesture as a communication of communicability. The gesture can be rehearsed to the point of invariable execution; it exposes its own mediality.
25. The essential thing is that there is no sight of ends to this means.
26. Meyer’s gestures aim to be mute mechanics.
27. A gesture can be a movement of position within the chess game of conceptual art that establishes a new modality and a new set of values.
28. There is a certain amount of violence in destroying an old set of values or ideological position.
29. Gustav Metzger’s Auto-Destructive works disintegrate over time, defying the art market’s predilection to commodify them.
30. As a literal illustration of obliterating free choice, Shotgun Blast (The Longest Path Connecting 100 Points) is a drawing that finds the longest distance between wall shrapnel.
31. Constraint must be employed to make a programmatic system that denies the affective quality of marks. It also denies the audience’s avidity.
32. Violence can be used to restrain.
33. Violence is the release of restraint.
34. One of the first exercises of young artists is continuous blind contour drawing: the artist never looks away from the subject or lifts the pen from the paper. Supposedly it establishes a free flow between seeing-processing-reproducing by hand.
35. A continuous line can be a literal restriction as in One Mile Long Line.
36. The lineage documented in Keith Family Tree is an inflexible parameter of Meyer’s heritage.
37. Art historical lineage can confine interpretation of meaning.
38. Perhaps there is equivalence between inherited parameters and self-assigned ones.
39. Meyer creates parameters that restrict his ability to make choices.
40. When he creates computer programs or drawing systems, they delineate an area of free play.
41. Sol LeWitt says that the process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course.
42. Sometimes Meyer subverts his own systematic approach and draws a chicken or chooses the most aesthetically engaging drawings.
43. The system holds him back or he holds the system back.
44. Following a system can be equally as reductive as following human fancies.
45. Norkapp II is a video of Jon’s relative killing a polar bear.
46. Equality opposes hierarchy.
47. However creating equivalences violently suppresses difference and confines self-expression.
48. Creating equivalences is a totalitarian and exclusive regime.
“Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to
conclusions that logic cannot reach” (ii)
---
i) Jon Meyer, in conversation, 2011
ii) Sol LeWitt, Sentences on Conceptual Art, 0-9 (New York), 1969, and Art-Language (England), May 1969