Splinters

While the internet, like the acting and marketing professions, has created for web designers a community of sorts by providing a semblance of normalcy for their sociopathic behavior, it seems that not all are nerds interested only in trash culture and solitary, violent engagements with virtual reality. Some of them hone their skills in order to promote what exposes them (and us) to the world rather than each brick in the self-constructed wall. The other day I spoke to the artist Andrzej Jackowski who gave me the URL to a site dedicated to his painting. Richard Sedley?s design for it is beautifully clean and simple.

I saw Jackowski's work for the first time at the 1994 Reveries of Dispossession exhibition. In fact, it was one of the first exhibitions I ever visited. The thumbnails can't give a sense of how impressive the paintings are in a live context ? they are all as big as dining tables. Yet as each implies there is a story to be told, one needn't get excited about actually being there*. One looks and looks, and although no revelation leaps out at one, that looking creates a vertiginous, uncanny moment that seems linked to that story, whatever it is. That's about all I can say about it at the moment.

*Footnote: the cult of experience, manifesting in people talking loudly in bars about how one simply must see a particular film on the big screen, or read a particular novel in the original language, or such like, which is a kind of myth of presence, needs to be addressed somewhere in connection with the internet.