RE:MARKS

New York-based cultural critic and curator Carlo McCormick will give a keynote lecture on Day 2: Physical Space.

Re: Marks
By Carlo McCormick

It is problematic to predict a lecture of this sort before the ideas are fully formed, especially when I prefer to speak extemporaneously and remain wary of too much preparation as the surest way to make any talk a deadly dull affair. That said, for Stavanger this year we have settled upon “Re: Marks” as the most general title for our discussion. Remarks in that we hope to be as casual as any discourse will allow, but more formally to say that (as we parse out the Re:) we intend this talk to be “regarding marks.”

Mark making is an attribute of man, innate in our being and quite probably organically connected to the genesis of our consciousness. That is, our compulsion to make our mark defines us and is at once idiomatic of culture and inherent in all cultures. Perhaps as we understand this we might understand street art a little better. Certainly graffiti, a form of expression as old as civilization, is fundamentally about making marks.

As always, I borrow most of my ideas from artists themselves. In this I think of how Eric Haze, an early NYC graffiti artist who became a generation defining graphic artist, explained to me years ago how the mark of a graf writer was, through the endless repetition, proliferation through space and the constant perfection of the tag down to an iconic simplified form, in essence creating their own logo or brand. As well, the artist Ryan McGinness did a phenomenal body of work some many years ago in which he turned famous corporate logos into graffiti tags while conversely transforming graffiti tags into corporate logos. Intended as a book, the publisher ultimately backed down because it offered just too many opportunities for too many people to take them to court. I long ago lost the essay I wrote for that book, but I hope to get some images from Ryan for the talk.

All this is to say that if marks are intrinsic to people and culture, they are now not simply gestures of self-expression but broad-based signifiers of global proportions. If we consider the mark left by the artist on the street against the primary forces of trademarks and branding, we can begin to fathom where individuals exist within the vast mediated visual landscape, and how these artists are working to find their own space and autonomy through means of intervention and subversion, in oppositional symbiosis with the expansive field of signs that is our commercialized and privatized public space today.

    - Carlo McCormick

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