The creative genius of the artist is one of our society's best loved myths: Michelangelo, enmeshed in his own angst−ridden, manic brilliance, carving "David," Monet splashing color across a canvas. But in reality, the artists we have turned into demigods are not nearly as celestial as we make them out to be, and the artistic process is a whole lot messier.
Postmodernism has spent the past 40−odd years debunking the myth of originality and genius, and Frances Stark's work is a fresh take on the decades−long erosion of the mythic brilliance of the art world's Da Vincis.
Starks' current exhibit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's List Visual Arts Center, "Frances Stark: This could be a gimick [sic] or an honest articulation of the workings of the mind," is clearly a child of the postmodernist tradition. The primary discourse of her work is the frustration and struggle inherent in the creative process. Contrary to the modernist conception of the creative genius, Stark's work explores the trials and tribulations of attempts to be creative and to lead a normal life.
Stark's work is also autobiographical. Through her work, she states her identity not just as an artist but a mother, a divorcee and a woman — a multiplicity of identities that add up to a person who is not just an artist but a complex individual. Adding to the complexity of the material, a large part of the exhibition consists of pieces that incorporate text. Stark is also an author, and she uses text to reference this multiplicity of identities. This is also a reference to postmodernism's theoretical bent, where text became a vehicle for discussions of the transparency of symbols — words. In Stark's pieces, they serve as icons of both these cultural constructions and her own multifaceted identity.
The exhibition opens by presenting certain symbols that will be repeated throughout the show: text that appears in the form of a piece of paper with hand−drawn lines resembling a normal notebook paper; a chair propped up on stilts; a telephone; and the aptly titled "Portrait of the Artist as a Full−on Bird" (2004) — a collage on casein on canvas board. Stark draws on all of these symbols throughout the exhibit, playing off traditional images of iconography and disassembling their concrete forms.
The degrading permanence of words and symbols is a major theme in "And also another one at the same time, not" (2003), an ink and casein picture on canvas board. It is a vertical white sheet of paper, the bottom half is blank and about midway through, the words of the title are written horizontally. Stark repeats each word vertically, so that they resemble wavering branches reaching for the top of the page.
Eventually, each letter transforms into a simple line drawing of a bird. The transformation from blank space to words and then the ineffable and impermanent image of the bird visualizes for us the inconsequence of the words themselves as well as their impermanence and fluidity. Each word is endlessly repeated, in turn repeating and referring to others, and eventually their permanence dissolves into the tiny birds which escape our grasp.
The piece "I must explain (again)" (2001) is a collage on paper that further explores these artistic frustrations and the idea of the text as symbol. It is a large piece, framed at the top by a woman with her arms outstretched, holding a huge piece of paper with text. The writing on the paper talks about the author's anxiety−ridden writing process. How can writers ensure that a reader will understand what they are trying to do?
"May not a telephone call distract the reader's attention just at the moment when all the parts, themes, threads, are on the point of converging its supreme units," a portion of the text reads, recalling Roland Barthes' idea of the reader as the point where all the networks and cultural quotations in a text come together.
For Stark, the author's attempts to present such complex themes is futile for two reasons: First, because life frequently interrupts our moments of comprehension and creation, and second, because Stark suggests that text and art are both shaped by and part of a broader cultural discourse. Works and visual symbols as constructed in culture are fluid — they have no single meaning, so all writing and art constructed through them will be equally fluid and evade concrete meaning.
Stark's exhibit brings together an almost dizzying amount of information. But in this melee of themes and symbols, we see an essential thread of her "argument": The creative process is riddled with difficulty, nothing is permanent, and the "symbol" as a concrete concept constantly escapes our grasp.
In the same way that we chase after meaning in images, symbols and text, the artist chases after creative genius and is constantly thwarted. Stark asserts that artists themselves are made up of the same multiplicity of texts that make up work and life, and the process of rendering these into concrete form in art is a difficult and futile task.
