As much op as pop, imagism meets hard edge. Silhouettes of soliders, massed and menacing. Or not. Their shoulders slumped, their guns held loosely in tired arms and pointed down. Standing against, before, what? There is nothing, a blank.
"Look here..."
Marbell with a laser pointer on the projected slide.
"There is a virtual gap between figure and ground, and that gap is partly filled by line and shape, party even by gesture. And partly, eventually, by the artist himself. Where the image recedes, the artist...ascedes? Is that a word? In his choices of form and medium. But this presence is illusory. As illusory as that of these soldiers, detatched from their struggle and placed here, with us.
Are they here? Remember that there is an almost temporal element to all this. Remember Derrida: ‘The present becomes the sign of the sign, the trace of the trace. It is no longer what every reference refers to in the last analysis. It becomes a function in a structure of generalized reference. It is a trace, and the/a trace of the erasure of the trace.’
The virtual gap."
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