- Énoncé de l'artiste : Michael Christopher Lawlor

By this time in the development of a history of art moving towards the future we are (I am) well aware that the above list is a short one. Art History usually speaks of art work as being a culmination of previous factors, limitations which are suddenly and shockingly transcended by an act of creative genius. This historical interpretation of art demands constant perusal of the past, which is then used to provide a context within which an analysis of the present may be molded. This approach is informative but does have its limitations, the biggest of which is that now is always seen as a part apart from the past.

As an artist I am engaged in a practice which is aimed towards the future. I make art work with the anticipation of watching as it slides through meanings into the future. The significance any act or object is only as static as the context within which it is placed. Time is change, and change is merely alteration of contexts. Change in place can also alter context.

In Impact I placed work inside the Creaghan Building, which had essentially taken on the aura of a gallery; and I placed work outside on Main Street, in five information kiosks which are maintained by the City of Moncton.

All of these works are part of one single piece, Landscape, which I am currently (Oct. 16, 1992) in the process of making. Landscape is to be a room totally covered with pictures I am making from a large selection of magazine purchased in May of 1992 at Mel's Tearoom in Sackville, N.B. I work with magazines because there are more magazines than television stations, and because they can target and market to many more of the minority or sub-cultural groups of people who make up the communities we live in. Each magazine presents particular sets of ideas about the universe we live in, and each purchase of a magazine represents support for those ideas. Thus, I consider the presentation of a large selection of these images to be a landscape of the place in which they are sold. Due to the way in which magazines are marketed, this place may be defined as Sackville, or the Maritimes, or Canada, or even North America. I leave that decision to you.

I put works in the kiosks on Main Street for purposes different from those for which I installed the fifty foot wall work inside the building. The kiosks are used to present information about various events, many of which are arts related. Each side of these double sided bulletin boards contains about 18 square feet of information about the city. The audience is people on the street who may of may not be interested in the information. On the top half of one side of each kiosk I put up a two by four foot colour image. There was one of lips; one with two cows; a fighter airplane; a car and airplane side by side; and a windmill landscape with a toy Uzzi machine gun. Work like this placed in public space is meant merely to create minor disruption in the habitual perceptual pattern of people going by, or hanging around, on the streets, as they catch sight of something unusual.

An installation within the gallery brings a different audience, one on which an artist may make more demands. They may be expected to take more time and give more consideration to the work presented. Lingerie, so called because it was in the lingerie section of the old store, presented 400 square feet of enlarged magazine images, placed together in arbitrary associations with each other. The anchorage of these images, their seeming rootedness to a single meaning which was a factor of their original presentation in a magazine context, is obviated by their integration within a field of other, similarly disfunctionalized, or perhaps, re-functionalized, signifying images. The original purpose of a picture of people walking on the beach is subverted when it is placed in conjunction with a picture of a nuclear missile at lift-off, or with a picture of women protesting in front of parliament. My work is affected by a quest to know how we can know things, and how that can be altered as time passes.

Media, art and definitions, operate in a perpetually oscillating progression wherein each swing of a sign symbol is charged with the affecting previous swing. Contrary to abstract physics, each swing of a pendulum is different from its initiators'; time creating history and a context within which all swings are merely copies of preceding swings. Thus the analysis of a sign -- as a sign within a code, (or codes), of signs -- alters future significances of the use of the (new) sign.

If a less paranoid approach to mass media is taken than the norm -- which usually dead-end with charges of alienation, moralistic accusations of implication, or demands for representation of ideal utopian concepts not yet in effet -- new insights into the reflexive interactions between cultural and personal (public/private) identities can be gained. This means that the disavowal of self often evident in politically rooted (pre-determined) media analysis must be eschewed. The identity of the artist (author) must be implicated within the a framework of production which accepts, at the same time, the fact of further (multiple) authorships by those engaged in the finished work. (or, is it ever finished?)

When an investigative approach is engaged in, I, as the presenter of selected texts and images, must also account for my own desires within the selection. As work is made it is recognized as emanating from my personal likes and dislikes, desires and fears. In this work I must be accounted for. Participatory interaction by others within this fabrication must be interrogated similarly. The personal is, if not completely shaped, at least affected by the political. What are secrets today?

Media are anything which carries ideas, and objects are ideas concretized. My work concentrates on printed media, utilizing the landscape of images and text to highlight imbricated concepts lying below the surface of the pages skin.

The nature of my installations are actively influenced by my personal process of interaction with the images selected. I often find that my inital response to an image I have chosen for the work changes as I incorporate it within a selection of other images.

The anchorage of these images, their seeming rootedness to single relatedness with some particular concept which is merely a factor of their original presentational context, is obviated by their integration within a field of other, similarly disfunctionalized, or perhaps, re-functionalized, signifying systems.

- LAWLOR, Michael Christopher


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