Re:TheAshLad - Sandbooks

painting. These anxieties fell. primarily into two groups. The first
centers on the nature of meaning. and the second on my approach to
painting.. Through looking and discussing the work of David Salle. I
had become increasingly interested in the philosophical questions.
surrounding the nature of meaning. This arose from a simple disagree.
ment. I felt Salle's paintings were meaningful. Someone else
disagreed.. In pursing a solution I found it was first necessary to
address the. question of what exactly meanings is. Central to this
question is another. question how can meaning be destroyed If meaning
can not be. destroyed then nothing can be meaningless and everything
must possess. meaning on some level. If meaning can be destroyed then
it is possible. have meaningless items but what process achieves this
result. Obviously from this question arises the question how is
meaning. formed. Realizing I was not in a position to find answers to
these. questions without considerable work I went to ask some advice.
Having. seen a commonality between James Joyce's Ulysseus and
David Salle's. paintings I went to see the University of Victoria's
expert on Joyce. Dr. Trevor Williams. I felt that stylistically Salle and
Joyce's were very. similar. They both use imagery in a disjunctive and
unconventional manner. Yet. I had thought critics saw Joyce as
maintaining meaning within his work. while critics of Salle saw his
work as embracing meaninglessness. This. assumption was
demonstrated to be false in my conversation with Dr.. Williams. He
informed me that while Ulysseus is generally held to. possess meaning
Joyce's later work Finnegans Wake is held to embrace. a form of
meaninglessness. And from the examples I could show him he. felt
Salle's work was very similar to Finnegans Wake much more so than.
Ulysseus. Yet there is still a distinction between critical writings on.
Salle and Joyce. Salle's work is held to be meaningless in a cynical.
way whereas Joyce's meaninglessness is described as indulgent and.
pleasurable.. egg roll. but. if that confuses matters then matters will be
confused. germinate Jow. Because the duplicity of artwork hardly
began with Internet. It reaches back. what Rancire calls the aesthetic
regime of the arts which emerged not. coincidentally at the end of the
Ancien Regime. Aesthetics is the name of an. indistinction where fact is
inseparable from fiction where the lowest can. become the highest and
viceversa. The aesthetic regime of the arts ruins the. historically prior
regime of representation with its hierarchies decorum. and strict
separation of genres but also its Aristotelian distinction between.
chaotic accidental history and wellconstructed plausible fiction.
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