Media Specificity

ARTIST STATEMENT:

I wanted to focus on Literature and specifically within literature I wanted to focus on the aspect of the medium that deals with sentence structure and words. No other medium uses the written language with such a force as literature. No other medium is so dependent upon the formulations and organization of words as literature is.

My idea was to take a couple pages of an already established piece of literature and rewrite a new story within the book by rearranging the words and crossing out some of the text. I often find that when I am reading, sometimes I miss a word a two or even a whole page and the story changes dramatically and what I then take away from that medium is altered. By doing so, I wanted to point out how within literature sentence structure and words are up for interpretation and rearrangement by the reader. The author does not have complete control; it is up to the reader to interpret the text in a way that works for them and in a way that the words formulate for them.  So to represent this I took a story already told and told a new one by using on the selected words that I, the reader wanted to see.

When reading the articles about the modern art paint exhibits and the editor not understanding them, I began to think about how this is also a common practice within literature, but the viewers have more power to alter their and the actual perception of the book. It’s easy to read something and not understand it but unlike paintings, there is such a long process to engulfing yourself in the art that your brain could easily rearrange words and meanings within sentence structures to formulate a new meaning that flows better with your interior thought process.

This may not necessarily be considered another form of media, but this project led me to think about the magnetic poetry that people have on their fridges and how  it’s just a group of words that people can come up and arrange however they want and then they have a story and others can come up and change one word and it’s a completely different story. The concepts are very similar between my project and this interior-decorating item.