Monday, March 4, 2019

billboard figures


Here's a case of how language takes over from the logic of the eye.  Once you've seen these scrappy bits of hoardings - painted over, but torn in a few places - as two figures; one (on the left) hunched over, and the other deliberately striding away; with maybe a third, rather ghostly personage between them, it's hard to see them as abstract tears and scratches.  I've never quite bought into James Elkins's argument that we tend to make sense of the world by seeing faces everywhere - two eyes and a nose, wherever we look - but maybe I've fallen into some analogous representational trap here.

No comments:

Post a Comment