Mark Cameron Boyd - Artist Interview
Mark Cameron Boyd in his studio, Beltsville, Maryland, March 2005.
Copyright 2005. All rights reserved. Reproduction of photograph without permission is prohibited.
"Within a system"chalkboard paint, chalk, Conte crayon, graphite and oil pastel on wood
H24"xW30 5/8"xD3/4"
Mark Cameron Boyd
Copyright 2005. All rights reserved. Reproduction of artwork without permission is prohibited.
"Discursive context"
blackboard paint, Conte crayon, drywall compound, oil pastel and pencil on wood
H24"xW30 5/8"xD3/4"
Mark Cameron Boyd
Copyright 2005. All rights reserved. Reproduction of artwork without permission is prohibited.
H24"xW30 5/8"xD3/4"
Mark Cameron Boyd
Copyright 2005. All rights reserved. Reproduction of artwork without permission is prohibited.
JWB: Mark, your work in the Text Gallery of Seven really touched me at a profound level for many reasons - primarily because I so appreciate the use of text in art when it achieves that very rare thing, the successful creation of a new language. I think you have realized something that few artists working with text in their work have authentically accomplished – you have successfully created that new language. Can you talk about the "construction" of your work in Seven and the language of your text? What were the creative acts that went into making this art? What elements are at play?
MCB: First, thank you for your kind words and your appreciation of my work, James. This current work is a manifestation of my exploration of text as both a system of representation and as a language for painting. This whole process got started in 2003. I’d been fascinated by blackboards ever since I began lecturing on art theory, and had wanted to do something using chalk and writing, like making lecture notes on a board. My first attempts were very direct, simple transcriptions of my random thoughts during mark making, somewhat like automatic writing, and some phrases were legible, although conveying seemingly unrelated, nonlinear thinking. The series has evolved conceptually and practically, to tape recording my spoken thoughts about art, language and the futility of meaning in these systems. I am extremely focused during these sessions because my intent is to capture my speculative intellect as it works through ideas about words as signs, the subjectivity of art and meaning. It is important to note that each thought I have during these sessions was taped, then I wrote that sentence down exactly as it exited my mind through the speech act. These thoughts weren’t edited but were transcribed verbatim. These initial sessions were archived, to be used later as text templates for subsequent works; that is to say a particular session could yield several works.
JWB: I’m cautiously reminded of the WORD virus theories of William S. Burroughs when viewing your work - the idea that the WORD is a virus that infects the human mind to automatically respond either favorably or not to the words that others use. The terminal practice of Burroughs’ WORD theory being, for example, that the state says something like "We’re good and they’re bad" and so people line up to kill one another based on the definitions and use of words. I find an exceedingly rare element of liberation from the virus of the WORD with your use of text in your art. Can you talk about the confines or restrictions of text and words as we commonly understand it and how you approach these problems with your paintings?
MCB: I am vaguely familiar with that idea, from reading Burroughs in my youth. I can make some comparisons of his "word theory" to other linguistic theories, yet the crux of my work would be post-structuralist, that is to say, I believe that the meaning of any word cannot be determined conclusively, and that meaning is infinitely deferred. You know, signs, symbols, words are constituted by the system of representation they reside in and, as such, their meaning is established within that system. The idea that a word or a sign can have a negative or "bad" meaning is determined by its use through context to suggest a "negative" connotation. I do believe, like you, that "people line up to kill one another based on the definitions and use of words" and because of ideological constructs of words. Words and signs contain no true meanings in and of themselves but the users of words can give it a "false" reading or meaning, depending on their own agendas and the word’s framing.
One way that I’m dealing with these issues in my art is to embody a different content instead of invoking the conventional and problematic "meanings." I am trying to visually engage the Derridean "strategy" of reading text under erasure, by using a process of bisecting the sentences that I write on my paintings and drawings. This is my reflection on the linguistic concept that the validity of each sentence depends on the definitions of the words within the sentence. The sentences themselves become suspect, or invalid, because they are composed of words. I use a process of bisection to strike through every sentence. Ironically, I don’t consider this negation to be final, for the negation of meaning opens to an excess of potential meanings. To strike out each sentence symbolizes the potential of deferred meanings. But rather than a process dictating the form, I consider my art to be a visual construct that empowers my "writing" as visual code that can be used to decipher the work’s "meaning."
JWB: One of my favorite pastime hobbies is doing tomb-stone rubbings in abandoned cemeteries. Over time the degradation of headstones results in paper rubbing that are have a very abstract quality, yet still retain the faint traces of test. These tomb-stone rubbing images also have a spiritual and naturalistic presence and quality that I recognize in your work. What ideas beyond text influence you with the creation of this work?
MCB: Haven't done the tombstone thing but have done the "dead cat" thing with my brother, Scott, back in Arkansas! Obviously you can tell that I'm constantly influenced by my ongoing research and teaching of art theory. These theoretical approaches to art making, and other ideas concerning identity and subjectivity, all kinds of philosophical and even psychoanalytical things, have been influencing contemporary artists for quite a while now. With my work, I think the idea that words are ubiquitous, whatever the field of knowledge, continually inspires me to approach text as a unique visual system. Art is a cultural system of signification and it requires a defining system and a discursive context to establish meaning. I believe that individual works of art are meaningless, and systemic because they exist as individual signs within a system. This is why meaning cannot be found within an individual work of art. Therefore, I can say that my individual paintings and drawings are part of a larger and unbounded body of work. This body of work exists within the field of knowledge we call "art," and it attains "meaning" only within a discursive context, like this interview or a lecture.
JWB: I’m also profoundly moved by the connectivity I see in your work to the Hoodoo practice of "The Secret Name". In ancient society it was often believed if one knew the "secret name" of an enemy's god one would have power over that god, e.g., the Egyptian myth of Isis acquiring the "secret name" of Ra. Such ancient extortion is similar to our modern gossiping about celebrities. We believe because we "know" something about the private life of a famous person ...we have power over them. I get the sense that your work might be providing us a clue to a "secret name" for something to help us have "control" over it. It’s a prospect that so engaging to me with your work. What secrets can you share with us about this work?
MCB: I can respond by saying that a secret is a thought or knowledge that is not revealed. I suppose I can share "secrets" with you about my work by saying that I believe my thoughts remain interior and subjective, while I keep them to myself. When my thoughts are revealed in writing on a painting, it becomes exterior, yet it is after the fact of having that initial thought. One revelation here is that the putative subjectivity of a work of art refers to the maker of the work and the maker’s thoughts, and not to the work of art itself. One other secret I can share involves my discovery of a logical randomness that I have witnessed more than once in my work. My art making process involves several stages of writing phrases, using the left-to-right, top-to-bottom Western mode. I follow through from the bottom right-hand corner, continuing repetitively, back at the top left, through roughly four stages of making a painting or drawing. In any case, these sentences are also bisected so that the visual recognition factor is reduced. However, totally randomly, words have realigned themselves by accident. Perhaps we can attribute this to the idea of "quantum super-position," that things can and do exist in more than one place at a time. Or we could just say that this replicates language and thought as a state of flux, with linkages drifting and comprehension delayed as we grope our way through layers of possible choices toward what we cynically know can’t exist - a certainty of communication between beings.
JWB: What’s in the future for you and this body of work? Where do you see yourself going next after the close of Seven?
MCB: Well, it’s becoming my mission now and I believe I’ll continue working through the series. I am investigating the expansion of my work into site-specific installation, setting up the walls of a space so that my process becomes a performance, revealed as the works are being constructed. I would also like to engage in interactive modes with the public, allowing people to participate in my process as a way to begin a discourse about language as a system, and about the lack of possibilities in communication using this system. This is the essential thing for me, to use language, particularly writing, as both material for making visual work and intervention into the processes of thought.
Artist Bio:
Mark Cameron Boyd was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas and studied painting, printmaking and sculpture at Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock, where the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation purchased his abstract works for their collection. He received his baccalaureate from the University of Arkansas and did graduate studies in painting at Washington University in St. Louis.
He moved to Los Angeles in 1976, working as an artist and musician and co-founding an alternative art space to exhibit the work of then unknown artists like Raymond Pettibon and Jim Shaw. He later traveled to Europe as publicist for the Nina Hagen Band and began teaching self-designed courses in film noir and pop culture at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
Boyd moved to Maryland in 1996, where he completed his MFA in painting at the University of Maryland, College Park. Since 1999, he has taught art theory, drawing, painting and photography for University of Maryland; film noir for the Monterey Museum of Art; drawing, photography and two-dimensional design for Montgomery College. He is currently adjunct faculty for Corcoran College of Art and Design where he teaches art theory and abstract painting.
Boyd has exhibited nationally and his works are in many public and private collections in the US.
MCB: First, thank you for your kind words and your appreciation of my work, James. This current work is a manifestation of my exploration of text as both a system of representation and as a language for painting. This whole process got started in 2003. I’d been fascinated by blackboards ever since I began lecturing on art theory, and had wanted to do something using chalk and writing, like making lecture notes on a board. My first attempts were very direct, simple transcriptions of my random thoughts during mark making, somewhat like automatic writing, and some phrases were legible, although conveying seemingly unrelated, nonlinear thinking. The series has evolved conceptually and practically, to tape recording my spoken thoughts about art, language and the futility of meaning in these systems. I am extremely focused during these sessions because my intent is to capture my speculative intellect as it works through ideas about words as signs, the subjectivity of art and meaning. It is important to note that each thought I have during these sessions was taped, then I wrote that sentence down exactly as it exited my mind through the speech act. These thoughts weren’t edited but were transcribed verbatim. These initial sessions were archived, to be used later as text templates for subsequent works; that is to say a particular session could yield several works.
JWB: I’m cautiously reminded of the WORD virus theories of William S. Burroughs when viewing your work - the idea that the WORD is a virus that infects the human mind to automatically respond either favorably or not to the words that others use. The terminal practice of Burroughs’ WORD theory being, for example, that the state says something like "We’re good and they’re bad" and so people line up to kill one another based on the definitions and use of words. I find an exceedingly rare element of liberation from the virus of the WORD with your use of text in your art. Can you talk about the confines or restrictions of text and words as we commonly understand it and how you approach these problems with your paintings?
MCB: I am vaguely familiar with that idea, from reading Burroughs in my youth. I can make some comparisons of his "word theory" to other linguistic theories, yet the crux of my work would be post-structuralist, that is to say, I believe that the meaning of any word cannot be determined conclusively, and that meaning is infinitely deferred. You know, signs, symbols, words are constituted by the system of representation they reside in and, as such, their meaning is established within that system. The idea that a word or a sign can have a negative or "bad" meaning is determined by its use through context to suggest a "negative" connotation. I do believe, like you, that "people line up to kill one another based on the definitions and use of words" and because of ideological constructs of words. Words and signs contain no true meanings in and of themselves but the users of words can give it a "false" reading or meaning, depending on their own agendas and the word’s framing.
One way that I’m dealing with these issues in my art is to embody a different content instead of invoking the conventional and problematic "meanings." I am trying to visually engage the Derridean "strategy" of reading text under erasure, by using a process of bisecting the sentences that I write on my paintings and drawings. This is my reflection on the linguistic concept that the validity of each sentence depends on the definitions of the words within the sentence. The sentences themselves become suspect, or invalid, because they are composed of words. I use a process of bisection to strike through every sentence. Ironically, I don’t consider this negation to be final, for the negation of meaning opens to an excess of potential meanings. To strike out each sentence symbolizes the potential of deferred meanings. But rather than a process dictating the form, I consider my art to be a visual construct that empowers my "writing" as visual code that can be used to decipher the work’s "meaning."
JWB: One of my favorite pastime hobbies is doing tomb-stone rubbings in abandoned cemeteries. Over time the degradation of headstones results in paper rubbing that are have a very abstract quality, yet still retain the faint traces of test. These tomb-stone rubbing images also have a spiritual and naturalistic presence and quality that I recognize in your work. What ideas beyond text influence you with the creation of this work?
MCB: Haven't done the tombstone thing but have done the "dead cat" thing with my brother, Scott, back in Arkansas! Obviously you can tell that I'm constantly influenced by my ongoing research and teaching of art theory. These theoretical approaches to art making, and other ideas concerning identity and subjectivity, all kinds of philosophical and even psychoanalytical things, have been influencing contemporary artists for quite a while now. With my work, I think the idea that words are ubiquitous, whatever the field of knowledge, continually inspires me to approach text as a unique visual system. Art is a cultural system of signification and it requires a defining system and a discursive context to establish meaning. I believe that individual works of art are meaningless, and systemic because they exist as individual signs within a system. This is why meaning cannot be found within an individual work of art. Therefore, I can say that my individual paintings and drawings are part of a larger and unbounded body of work. This body of work exists within the field of knowledge we call "art," and it attains "meaning" only within a discursive context, like this interview or a lecture.
JWB: I’m also profoundly moved by the connectivity I see in your work to the Hoodoo practice of "The Secret Name". In ancient society it was often believed if one knew the "secret name" of an enemy's god one would have power over that god, e.g., the Egyptian myth of Isis acquiring the "secret name" of Ra. Such ancient extortion is similar to our modern gossiping about celebrities. We believe because we "know" something about the private life of a famous person ...we have power over them. I get the sense that your work might be providing us a clue to a "secret name" for something to help us have "control" over it. It’s a prospect that so engaging to me with your work. What secrets can you share with us about this work?
MCB: I can respond by saying that a secret is a thought or knowledge that is not revealed. I suppose I can share "secrets" with you about my work by saying that I believe my thoughts remain interior and subjective, while I keep them to myself. When my thoughts are revealed in writing on a painting, it becomes exterior, yet it is after the fact of having that initial thought. One revelation here is that the putative subjectivity of a work of art refers to the maker of the work and the maker’s thoughts, and not to the work of art itself. One other secret I can share involves my discovery of a logical randomness that I have witnessed more than once in my work. My art making process involves several stages of writing phrases, using the left-to-right, top-to-bottom Western mode. I follow through from the bottom right-hand corner, continuing repetitively, back at the top left, through roughly four stages of making a painting or drawing. In any case, these sentences are also bisected so that the visual recognition factor is reduced. However, totally randomly, words have realigned themselves by accident. Perhaps we can attribute this to the idea of "quantum super-position," that things can and do exist in more than one place at a time. Or we could just say that this replicates language and thought as a state of flux, with linkages drifting and comprehension delayed as we grope our way through layers of possible choices toward what we cynically know can’t exist - a certainty of communication between beings.
JWB: What’s in the future for you and this body of work? Where do you see yourself going next after the close of Seven?
MCB: Well, it’s becoming my mission now and I believe I’ll continue working through the series. I am investigating the expansion of my work into site-specific installation, setting up the walls of a space so that my process becomes a performance, revealed as the works are being constructed. I would also like to engage in interactive modes with the public, allowing people to participate in my process as a way to begin a discourse about language as a system, and about the lack of possibilities in communication using this system. This is the essential thing for me, to use language, particularly writing, as both material for making visual work and intervention into the processes of thought.
Artist Bio:
Mark Cameron Boyd was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas and studied painting, printmaking and sculpture at Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock, where the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation purchased his abstract works for their collection. He received his baccalaureate from the University of Arkansas and did graduate studies in painting at Washington University in St. Louis.
He moved to Los Angeles in 1976, working as an artist and musician and co-founding an alternative art space to exhibit the work of then unknown artists like Raymond Pettibon and Jim Shaw. He later traveled to Europe as publicist for the Nina Hagen Band and began teaching self-designed courses in film noir and pop culture at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
Boyd moved to Maryland in 1996, where he completed his MFA in painting at the University of Maryland, College Park. Since 1999, he has taught art theory, drawing, painting and photography for University of Maryland; film noir for the Monterey Museum of Art; drawing, photography and two-dimensional design for Montgomery College. He is currently adjunct faculty for Corcoran College of Art and Design where he teaches art theory and abstract painting.
Boyd has exhibited nationally and his works are in many public and private collections in the US.
posted by The Right Reverend James W. Bailey at 11:44 AM
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