You Don't Say

I would never write an art manifesto or indicate what themes are appropriate for artistic expression. Prescribing art's appropriate content wrecks the absolute freedom Joni Mitchell called the only reason to become an artist in the first place. However, several of my pieces express a theme for which I have much enthusiasm I expect


Magic Elves (Come, ask our stockholders: they're made by magic elves and there's no factory), 36 X 36", (2024).


Glyph (Of which you know naught, y'ought say nothing. --Wittgenstein), 27 X 27", (2024).

no one else to share: the impossibility of communicating the full, human existence of one individual to another in any medium, whether visual, verbal or the smoke in skywriting. Of course, I reject on principle the possibility of making a likeness that remotely represents the substance of any human subject. A painter with twenty years of painting in oils, learning every trick and technique appropriate to the medium, can produce a dazzling painting that has everything to do with the artist's ability, the artist's reality, and zero to do with the "nature" or even empirical facts of the subject. Consider an alternative meaning of the word "medium": a fourflushing tea leaf reader who first gets someone else to buy him a cup, and then portrays a kind of crummy, opaque intermediary between us and the spirit world. You know, like acrylic.

A traced hand found on a cave wall in Lubang Jeriji Saleh, Indonesia, is 52000 years old, and the same site has a bovine figure over 40000 years old. Reportedly, art historians have different opinions about whether these figures are art. Fear not. I am ready to resolve the conflict! The figures represent the oldest evidence of a man or woman expressing a consciousness apart from nature; the artists had the cognitive ability to refer to an individual existence, hopelessly stranded outside nature and other people.

The first art we know about expressed the accumulation of skill and insight by a human creator intent on one object: to scrawl on a surface more permanent than flesh his or her pictographic representation of mere presence, in defiance of death, the ravages of time, cruel chance, and every other kind of obliteration. That art's completely impractical and marvelous purpose could have changed across millennia I think completely implausible. We could say of technology that from pointy rocks to the keyboard and mouse it offers a continuous suggestion of what having fingers might be like, but it says exactly dik-dak about what it is to be burdened with self. Art is one of them Captcha doohickeys that prove "I am not a robot."

Alone and doomed remains the defining chacteristic of humanity. Whenever abstracting gestures were first performed by our ancestor to express a being, apart from his surroundings with knowledge of living and dying alone, art history commenced. I believe the first "art" appeared along with language and consciousness, and the artistic gesture is indistingushable from the very idea of humanity. Separating the two is impossible, like seeing the difference between a star and a pinprick of light in a black velvet, celestial curtain, winking at us in the dark from Heaven's brilliance.

Many times I have asserted my only interest in any piece of art is its expression of the hand of the artist. Like a signature are the creator's strokes and constructions, his or her interaction with the materials. To the degree the work implies the artist, I value it. Every other human life is inexplicable to me, ineffable as the God of Job. Lamp in hand like Diogenes, I'm looking for an honest-to-God human. Whether I penetrate the mystery of others or define myself by not knowing it, I don't expect anyone to communicate the essence of their existence to me, but I call art anyone's earnest attempt.


[D]rew+bus (Our lower orders believe the world runs on prayer, while our corporate overlords understand it goes like clockwork), 30 X 32", (2024).

My existence is dominated by ideas I can't communicate (and grievances that aren't worth expression). The origin of many of my pieces is some artifact of language, a verbal abstraction. My work rejects the challenge of faithfully imitating appearances or even the problem of representing the feeling of being alive. My series of rebuses represents the falseness of a visual representation of physical things by using every available shorthand in newsprint advertising and paste to picture a subject. The images represent sounds, phonemes, not the thing they obstensibly look like. I think the works emphasize the disconnect between an image and what it portrays. Besides using only the most well worn conventions to express an object, the ideas the rebuses phonetically signal aren't meaningful except as the answers to a puzzle, and a damned obscure one, too, clumsily expressing the interior life of their maker with the few deft strokes of a Quasimodo.


Homer Poet, 18" (2023).

The cracked form of Homer Poet is my visualization of the depleted shorthand that is all that remains of the oral traditions of Homeric times. A blunderbuss of a language that uses the word "incredible" interchangeably with "awesome" or "nice" and deploys "literally" to mean "what I am saying to you, now" diminishes our ability to express the nobility of mankind. We enslave others because that's what we understand of human dignity, and we destroy our environment to demonstrate our indifference to that which our ancestors called the absolute precondition for humanity. Homer's archetypes of human courage, sagacity, tragedy, and fate were handed down across the whole written history of European culture--up until the current century. "Old folks left me another busted appliance!"

I do not believe Homer's poetic abstractions can be communicated otherwise than in literature and most of us don't read. Bought into an entirely different understanding of human life, where virtue isn't a birthright but must be paid for like everything else, wage earners can't afford to romanticize over some damn essay by Rousseau. College humanities departments closing down everywhere and an institution like the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts shuttering after 212 years should not surprise us: knowledge that doesn't boost income isn't essential to our self concept, it's trivia. Dante expresses our universal humanity in Divina Commedia, and knowing this bit of egghead poof gets you the 500-dollar box on Jeopardy!

If your kid's high school is in a suburban district, some teacher put "Who wrote The Iliad?" on a quiz and taught it in such a way that it only exists as a quiz question, no more meaningful than the crossword answer for 33-Down. Moreover, we have exempted our leaders from maintaining humanity's ancient aspirations. The depleted language we need to name our heroes, the decrepit means of expression left to us after the embrace of mass illiteracy, is nevertheless completely sufficient to express our remaining ideal: to get rich. Money is not a content. It doesn't articulate either ideals or desires, and conveys not one word about living peacefully with others, but people express human hopes and dreams in dollar amounts. Even artists moan about a rigged market that pays more for bad art than good. They're fortunate: now they know the dollar amount their work must be sold for to qualify as worthwhile. (Lucky devils. I have to use a whole other measure.) Babble about money is less meaningful or interesting than the gibberish of infants. Did you know, babies learn not only language but literally every guideline and dimension of the human reality they were thrust into? Kind of a shame they can only get that information from the previous generation.


Head Case/Suitcase Flying Open (2015), 70".

When I was a kid, I marvelled that my mom, a stenographer could take shorthand, which to me looked inscrutable as Sumerian. No one needs to know shorthand, today, because hardly a sentence one hears in a whole day could be any more clipped and stripped of meaning than it already is. After all, emojis convey everything worth saying. I'm guilty as anyone of paring accounts of my experience to mere slogans like advertising copy. I sigh over the worn out phrases I use to talk about myself to myself. After several attempts, I finally built an adequate presentation of the three satchels in Head Case, representing the by-rote, desiccated set piece I recite to say who I am. The hollow of a human head in a sample case is an emblem of the tedious narrative streaming every waking hour in the black interior of my head. I'm rehearsing the answer to any stranger's second question ("What do you do?"), and agreeing my day job explains me completely. Head Case represents the pathetically unexpressive, portable versions of ourselves we all cultivate, and the moment when the wind picks up, the suitcase flies open, and the trite platitudes we learn to say in case some interviewer for an underpaid job asks us to describe ourselves in two words go tumbling like weeds down the street.


Atlas (2010), 5 X 4'.

Boswell (2012), 23 X 27".

Atlas and Boswell identify the processes and materials used in my very particular, rough-hewn, paper-mâché barony. The instructions and descriptions are quite complete, but the inventory is inadequate to convey the art's content. In fact, nothing in either frame expresses it. Boswell, of course, was the biographer of Samuel Johnson, composer of a list of every word in English and its musical origins. I wouldn't say that tidbit alone is irrelevant, but I was equally interested that Boswell invented the biography as a form. His was the first narrative of a life, organized by date. (The dustjacket said, "Not your mother's Plutarch!") Boswell shaped the conventions of shorthand sufficient to convey a recognizable verbal portrait of a public life. Like the tag that identifies the source of cardboard in the picture Boswell, no one should think the fabricated form of a biography can possibly convey Johnson's mental brilliance, years-long depressions, or the prolonged period of mania that produced his dictionary.


The Ruth Kligman Story (2014), 24 X 30".


Flight of the Modiglianis (2011), 26 X 33".

I have several times concocted pictures where the sordid, personal details of the artist's life become a shorthand for his or her work. The possibility that someone will not mention Van Gogh's ear in any conversation about him seems as remote as the possibility The William Tell Overture won't make me think immediately of the Lone Ranger. The Ruth Kligman Story reduces Pollock and the only survivor of his fatal crash to a lurid movie poster. Kligman was an accomplished painter, and mistress of both Jackson and deKooning, but who knows her work? Modigliani, mad with tuberculosis and his all-alcohol treatment for it, tossed himself from the third floor on Friday, and his pregnant mistress followed him out the window on Sunday to top off the weekend. How very simple are these soap operas compared to expressing the meaning of a Pollock splattered landscape (with paint, I mean, not the artist) or Modigliani's creation of a completely new visual vocabulary to express the human form?


The Harrow (after "The Penal Colony"), 19 X 10 X 11" (2023).

Honestly, for me, the worst reduction of human aspirations to a bunch of hackneyed phrases and visuals occurs in my own consciousness. (Granted, I've only done the one survey.) In my head as the idiom has it, a litany of self-characterizations pleads for justification in an imaginary courtroom. Trivial incidents spanning my whole existence I recall using the same labels every time I am reminded of them, making the scant memory of some decades-old social gaffe or misspeaking all that I recall of events that must have had a greater scope and complexity than the shaming blot I've boiled them down to. On the other hand, my experience also teaches me that the stupid baggy pants routines running all the time in my consciousness have no relationship to the true foundations of my personhood and can't diminish the urge to express myself in signs and symbols no matter what the hell I say in my belfry. (You can't talk to yourself. You know that, right?) To my conscious self, the true center of my organism is unknowable--or at least inexpressible in my ordinary, human birdsong.

Kafka's "The Penal Colony" describes an instrument of torture that engraves the letter of the Law into the flesh of the penitent. Kafka (Happy Birthday, Franz!) explicitly tells us the Spirographic design etched on the racked out body is illegible on paper even before it oozes blood. A disconnect between the word and the flesh is a given. The Commandant explains with awe the look of understanding and acceptance of guilt that comes over the condemned man's face when the stylus has crisscrossed his flesh for hours. It must be the same expression on a man's face just before he bleeds to death. My Harrow compares the shorthands for experience I stumble over in my internal dialogue and the lacerating characterizations, real or imagined, I've endured from others to a row of razor sharp typewriter bars. The wounds they stamp in the flesh are indelible--and fatal--since the way things are going, I'll still be nursing them when I die, and even then I won't know what connection they have to the "man in full" or my storied "crimes."


Démon Sans Visage (2022), 20".

As Mom used to say about any of my childhood agonies, "Don't dwell." Démon Sans Visage expresses my comfort overall with the man I am, despite the recriminations buzzing in my bonnet. Fiend Without a Face was a 1950s schlock-fi movie that was bad in such an inventive way, it's in the Criterion Collection. The missuse of atomic power causes the consciousness of a scientist to be manifested in ordinary space as an invisible brain-and-spinal cord combo. When it is blasted with some made-up bandwidth of the spectrum, the creature becomes visible, looking just like the Schaper Cootie. Considering the celebrity starring as the monster, the death it delivers is fairly banal: strangulation of the victims using those coiled vertabrae like a length of rope. My sculpture is a purely fanciful, "molecular" representation of consciousness, which as a purely scientific subject corresponds to no physical structure known to man.

I know very well how preposterous is the monster in my head. It compulsively supplies full sentences of meaningless characterizations of myself and others and conducts endless dress rehearsals for defense summations that will never be released into the atmosphere, especially not by me. My consciousness-- a bad habit, truly, and I wish I could quit-- has no relationship to the form of me residing in muscle and sinews, and no hold over me, except for droning on and on like the relentless buzz of a poorly mounted exhaust fan. As above so below, however: while I admire products of human language in general, their ability to either express or influence the whatever-the-hell-it-is that stands for our shriveled humanity is demonstrably nil. But, the impulse to express experience in crazy glyphs and typefaces endures, even when all the artist knows to express is the experience of watching an entire culture shriveling on the vine and having no tricks of language or the light to stop it.

What the hell. We'll always have Paris.

I used to feel insecure about representing verbal abstractions in my work because they have no physical dimension to compare the final product to. Without testing hand-me-down truisms, I believed the freedom I had to invent my own signs and symbols apart from any artistic conventions diminshed my accomplishments, like the asterix next to Barry Bond's career home run total. Eventually, I saw how painters of subjects with a physical existence were, as Kant explains, imitating the impressions of flawed sensory apparatus that are as far from empirical truth as Aurora's illustration of the epigram "We don't live in the real world, we just use it keep score."


Aurora. 38 X 24" (2021).

Indeed, Kant says our ideas are more authentic than impressions from empirical observation: we deduce or infer abstractions from an internal experience independent of senses that evolved to find food and shelter--not beauty or truth. A logical deduction exists only in our reason, unfettered either by myopia or the arbitrariness of a fixed physical viewpoint in infinite space. The composition of Aurora, including all that unnatural lettering, comes not from easel observations but from the visual rhetoric of comic books. The six, bright yellow characters hanging in outer space over a backlit Earth refer to the Greek goddess of the dawn (it's starting to come to you), but they also name a popular 1960s plastic model company that specialized in representations of movie monsters like Wolf Man and Dracula. My work borrows forms from pop culture like the ones Michelangelo used to paper that Sistine Chapel.

Recalling H.P. Lovecraft's leather-winged Ancient Ones, my interplanetary Squiddly Diddly carries in each tentacle a famous idealogue. Karl Marx's anguished cry to superhero team member Ayn Rand foreshadows this month's cliffhanger. NRA president Charlton Heston whips out an automatic weapon, ensuring lots of innocent lives will get in the way of preserving his right to bear arms. Karl's ideas were the rationale for tens of millions of murders in China and the Soviet Union. But wait! There's more! How about Ayn Rand's idea that Darwin's principles of natural selection justify the creative capitalist who ravages a whole planet as proof of his natural superiority? Let's put over here the twisted idiocy that whoever has the most money is the fittest person. We have yet to learn the final body count from that particular deformation of human cognition (which also happens to be the bedrock of American society). Good work, idealogues!

Aurora expresses the hand of its creator because my use of and experience with paper-mâché results from uncountable individual choices guided only by my own, let us say, quirky imperatives. No one taught me how to make indecipherable art from incommunicable ideas; I came up with it all by myself. One among a dozen works expressing the impossibility of any verbal or artistic medium communicating one man's experience of being alive, the figurative language of the subtitle for Aurora contains an unequivocably literal truth. The abstraction speaking to you now is not flesh and blood but a ponderous amalgam of strict ideals and prescriptive axioms in which I believe passionately but for which no empirical evidence exists either in my head or my measurable activity. Not only do I reject my interior life as being equivalent to my soul, I admit I have no idea in what kind of alphabet the guidebook to me is writ: chains of wordless molecules, endless ribbons of zeros and ones, or blocks of cunieform on an as yet undiscovered fragment of pottery in the caves of Qumran. "Who am I?" is not a real world question. It's an art question with a real world answer that can't be expressed in physical space.

Never mind. I'll just take the cash.

--Drew Zimmerman, July 3, 2024