NOTE: This is a statement for an exhibit at Simon Watson in New York in February 1991. Reading it now, in 1999, I realize I was taking a stab at trying to understand how Information Networks work and was attempting to transform "stories" into "information" or data so they can be transmitted over a network like we have now with the Internet. I was not engaged in more traditional issues of painting images, which confused many people who were trying to unearth the meaning of the images (as they would with someone like Anselm Kiefer). There was nothing to unearth and so I had instinctively absorbed the working concepts of an artist more like Gerhard Richter even though at the time I hadn't read anything about him that I know. Perhaps I had depending on when his "Bader Meinhoff" series was shown in New York at the NYU Grey Art Gallery.I gained access to the Internet the next year (1992) and found a more suitable environment to work in though the shift was such a great one that I haven't, until recently, been very focused on creating visual images. Looking back and rereading these texts I find I made a conceptual leap from Richter to the information theories of Freidrich Kittler quite naturally, if not very elegantly.
Images from the exhibit can be found at http://artnetweb.com/iola/imagearchive/stories.html
A related text called "The Autobiography of Robbin Murphy By Paul Rykoff Coleman" was a collaborative effort with a journalist friend of mine inspired by Gertrude Stein where I transmitted my "story" orally to him and he transmitted it back to me as written text.
This text can be found at http://artnetweb.com/iola/journal/history/1991/9102bb.html
--RMS T O R I E S
Heinrich Schliemann discovered the lost city of Troy by using a tool most of his contemporaries ignored -- he read the Iliad as a map and saw a whole new story of Troy through that Homeric legend.
Schliemann, in fact, found many physical "Troys" -- nine cities built one upon the other, from prehistory to the New Ilium that Alexander the Great, in his day, thought was Troy. Today there are a multitude of Troy stories consisting not only of literary references by Homer, Hesiod, Pausanias or Arrian but also Schliemann's own Troja as well as the mass of data accumulated from the excavation over the hundred or so years since his death.
There is also the current excavation in what is today Islamic Turkey, a far different site and political situation than faced Alexander. But the story of Troy includes more than that one site. You can sit with your pungent cup of Greek coffee in the old Zonar coffeehouse (thought by some to be at least as old as Troy) in smog-choked Athens and watch Greek boys on mopeds speed past Schliemann's home, now a government building. Priam's gold and the other artifacts he found were sent to Berlin but were destroyed by allied bombings in World War II. Now part of Troy lies under German soil.
All those sites are a part of the story of Troy as is my writing this or Joyce's Ulysses or Walcott's Omeros. The manifestations of the story of Troy, taken with this view, could be endless.
What you have with these collected "stories" is a model of my history. Let's call it the Murphy model because it is subjective. Once I use these images and stories there is the possibility of an alternative model developing and let's call that the Art Model.
The Art Model could just as well be called the objective response of the viewer scanning the images. If the viewer starts developing a model based on the Murphy Model that is the Art Model.
It is at this point you have to start considering what the purpose of art is. The modern legacy has given us the artist/hero creating for his or her own personal ends an object that can be obtained (bought) or traded. That has previously been the role of the artisan or craftsperson who had to contend with the market fluctuation. The artist was an individual who executed commissions, whose craft was known to the extent that someone would enter upon a contract with them to create a work of art.
The distinction is hazy but it explains the need for something called a masterpiece to proove the artist's capability. As a boss of mine once adivsed: Never do anything on spec. The artisan works on spec, the artist on commision.
The concept of masterpiece is out of fashion but the idea is still functional. Now we call it style, or paradigm. Rather than the masterpiece there is the entire body of work (or a particular body of work) that the consumer can judge. Or there is the extraneous material (reviews, monographs, publications).
Getting back to my point. Each piece I make is a part of the Murphy Model or a representation of it. That has little value in the marketplace.
Stories and philology are an integral part of my method. Take every place you've ever lived, everything you've seen and consider them as one site to be excavated. Then take all the words that have been written, all the stories told and use them as a map of that excavation and you can see the form of my project -- and the difficulty of carrying it out fully.
I use images that I have a personal relationship with and so each work has an annecdotal aspect. That may tempt the Freudian to try an analysis: Raphael was my father's name and he was a sailor; I like the beach; I've lived in several houses; I was beaten by two cops; forest fires are an important leitmotif in my life etc. While any life can be interesting a knowledge of my relationship to the images and texts is not essential. I chose images for their flexibility and broadness.
Many of the images form a kind of travelogue of my family and its stories. And many of the texts I use do indeed involve travel and displacement. But the images could and do belong to any family. One story of my family that particularly fascinates me is my Scottish greatgrandmother Sara's arrival as a maid through Ellis Island. She married a disreputable man much older than herself she'd met in Central Park and went with him by train and covered wagon to settle on Peone Prarie outside of Spokane, Washington. I don't know much more than that and for my purposes I don't need to. That story spreads from site to site until it gets to me, back in New York. Along the way it takes in farms and cities, homes and travels, Catholics and Protestants, Egypt, Washington and Las Vegas, Nevada. An American story.
There are three general catagories of work I do as a main project. The first is direct image editing: buildings, trees, fields, parks, monuments etc. using both photographs and on-site drawing as a source.
The second category is of images that I use secondary source material to create: i.e. forest fires. The third is of images constructed out of unrelated sources: i.e. cops.
Then there are three levels of work. Small canvases that I do as qroups, large canvases and multipanelled pieces, and installations and collaborations, such as last season's "Set the Woods on Fire," that evolve from the first two levels. Some of the canvases have words in gloss varnish on the surface done after the painting is finished and the text is applied. They are responses. Others have words in relief that are done before the painting. They are instigations.
The following "BODIES" are the twenty-three texts, mostly pages or excerpts taken directly from books, that I use to form "fields" on the paintings. The specific contents of the texts play a part in the construction of the work, certain kinds of images are matched with the same text (i.e. parks and Thorstein Veblen). Not being able to read the words on the painting sets up a duality by attracting the viewer to the surface yet distancing the viewer from the image. But since the texts are an integral part of the work I've made them available as a source material.
These are some of my stories. Now they are also yours.
ROBBIN MURPHY
FEBRUARY 1991