Refereed Publications
Wojtas, V. (In Press). The Accident in the Digital Process of Making: Cause for Double Reflection, Design Principles & Practices: An International Journal, Volume 2, University Press Journals, Common Ground Publishing, Ltd. Melbourne Australia, 2008.
Abstract:
The role of the ‘accident’ is significant within the history of art making. It is the moment of the unexpected, where a supposed mistake or unintended mark causes a sort of epiphany within the creation of a work. This moment, wherein an artist discovers a new move by chance, or coincidence, brings a freshness or life to the work that may have otherwise been missing. These moments, often romanticized, can be significant for the artist, and development of the work. In the age of digital media (or at a time when digital media are used in tandem with traditional media) such accidents can often happen as consequences of the media itself. The moments of static, misprinting, or silence afford the artist both formal compositional accidents, and open the role of accident to greater cultural scrutiny: a scrutiny, which examines the formal aspects of the technology, and via its deficiencies, on the significance of the medium in culture. The technologies shortcomings expose the belief and/or social dependency with which it is imbued in the 21st century. For the artist that engages such accidents, these become opportunities of both form and content within the work. The work, which employs moments of technological imperfections, comments upon itself as a product of that imperfection (the antithetical idea of technology), and reflects upon the condition of art making in the 21st century. This paper examines the significance of such accidents in recent art history, and in my own work as a painter.
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Conference Presentations/Posters
Digital Landscapes, Mid-America Collage Art Association, Biennial Conference, Indianapolis, IN, October 2008.
Abstract:
How we perceptive the natural environment is as old a question as Western Culture itself. Do we perceive the natural order (nature) as something outside of ourselves, or as a projected perception of the mind and its mechanisms of understanding?
Beginning with Greek Metaphysics, arguments framing the perception of nature have been strongly linked to questions of the mind, and human perception. In this area of inquiry, Geometry has emerged as one of the strongest symbolic contestations. In the Classical world, geometric orders perceived with the mind, where taken as the true reality hiding behind the visible world (nature). In centuries that follow, these perceptions shift. The Enlightenment reverses the scenario, believing in Geometry as a tool of reason and the mind. As a tool it is used to measure and calculate the natural environment. Consequently, nature becomes romantic, and the source of emotion in the seat of Romanticism. The pendulum has continued to swing between these polarities of nature and geometry, rationality and emotionalism.
These polarities poignantly continue in the 20th and 21st Century Artworld. They emerge in the Neo-Platonic ideologies of Mondrian with his reductive, Neo-Platonic structuring of the DeStijl Movement. The rationalism and order of his primary colored compositions harkens to the ideas of Plato’s harmony found within Nature. While other abstract expressionists like Rothko, find a strong sense of emotion in reductive geometries that emulate the wonderment of a sunset or darkened misty forest. His soft geometric works embody the same emotional charge of the German Romantics landscape painters such as Casper David Friedrich. Against this background, the grid that structures the computer screen, the digital print or the LCD monitor in the late 20th and early 21st century becomes part of the conversation about nature and geometry.
Artists, now working in this context have been conditioned by Postmodernism to see all images with irony, and to realize their passive, impermanent, constructed nature. The grid, in relationship to nature, becomes both part of (nature), as well the mediator in the cultural experience of nature. In this paper, I will examine the significance of such geometry in relationship to technology and landscape in the work of contemporary painters, such as Dan Hays, and Yeardley Leonard as well in my own work. All three of us use the grid, the pixel, and the geometry of the digital media to interpret and comment upon the natural environment. The commentaries vary, reflecting both critical and playful reinterpretations of nature via the use of technological geometries. Through this discussion, I will argue that the internet and the digital age demonstrate a continuation of our ongoing relationship with nature, and not a departure from it.
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Hypothesizing Jasper Johns: An Unspoken Castration Anxiety, Art and Psyche: Reflections on Image Conference, Jungian Institute, San Francisco, California. May 2008
Abstract:
A hypothetical situation: time is not linear, and a Modern or Contemporary artwork could be selected for Sigmund Freud’s study at Berggasse 19 in Vienna. Jasper Johns’ Tantric Detail I (Figure 1) would be a potent selection. This is a minor work from the later part of Johns’ career. Tantric I is made up of three panels aligned vertically. The canvases are covered primarily with an abstracted field motif of linear patterning, in shades of gray with small bursts of primary colors: red, blue, and yellow. When the painting is hung at eye-level, the viewer is confronted with dismembered male genitalia. The scrotum remains, but the penis shaft is gone. Corresponding at the level of the viewer’s genitalia is a gray skull, which matches the gray of the dismembered genitals above. The hypothetical juxtaposition of these canvases within the spatial rubric of Freud’s study opens a reading of Johns’ abstract expressionistic language in a way that engages and challenges Freudian psychoanalysis. The decapitated scrotum as presented in Johns’ work can be read as an inversion of “castration anxiety,” given the sexual orientation of the artist, and the particulars of the way in which he presents the image. This interpretation draws from the richness of Freud, but simultaneously challenges the Oedipal theory, by inverting the presentation of castration. Not all of the genitals are removed in Johns’ work, only the shaft. Further, the interaction with the viewer, engages an eros/death cycle narrative where Johns’ imagery offers a more particular reading of the Oedipal complex.
This paper seeks to address a more inclusive sexually orientated interpretation of Jasper Johns late work Tantric Detail I by contrasting it with Freudian psychoanalytic theory. It will engage the more traditional interpretations of this painting by Leo Bersani and Mark Rosenthal while drawing from the work of Lee Edelman and Jed Perl for the sake of expanding the interpretations. It will draw upon the history of image making within Johns own career to further expand the reading of this work. Additional theories of psychoanalysis (such a Jungian), will be also be invoked. Ultimately, Johns’ painting can offer insight by inverting the significance of the Oedipal complex to better reflect the developmental struggle of the homosexually orientated male.
Multicultural Residential Design in the Studio Curriculum, Poster Session, Ohio Association of Family and Consumer Sciences, April 2007.
Publications in Progress
Geometric Tracings of No-Thing: Negative Theology in Pierre Soulages’ Stained Glass Windows at St. Foy
Abstract:
In the 1990s, St. Foy’s Cathedral, the ancient Romanesque structure built in Congues, France at the end of 1050, underwent renovations. Pierre Soulages, a French artist, was commissioned to replace the ancient windows. At first glance, the change seems timely for the ancient cathdral, given the Twentieth Century tradition of Modernist stained glass windows in sacred spaces (Matisse, Le Corbusier, Gerhardt Richter, et al). The windows play a significant role in how they complement the structure void. This transformational interplay of light, void, and history invokes a new dialectic where traditions are re-mediated through contemporary cultural understandings.
St. Foy’s Cathedral is at once a sacred place and a void to be filled by an individual desiring ”fullness” in the space; it is also a corporeal place that represents a negative space of boundaries that surrounds subjects. Drawing from the interpretations by scholar Donald Kuspit of Soulages’ paintings and the scholarship of Theodor W. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, I build a case that the St. Foy dialectic can be read as a negative “theology of space.” It is from this negative re-mediation that new insights (no-thing) emerge as significant for sacred space design today – even if for a momentary, monochromed glimpse.
Perspective Beyond the Vanishing Points.