Description and De-scription
By Tom Wachunas
“…Cursive, after all, remains for me the most urgent if
not earnest form of drawing.” -from
my Oct. 19 ARTWACH post
My hypergraphia is
acting up again, prompting yet another response to this protracted season of
national trauma. These are turgid times. Caught up in a torturous maelstrom of manic
anxiety and sociopolitical tensions, we writhe, blurting our pledges and
prayers through gritted teeth, desperate for deliverance from our disease and
dissension.
My most recent
artwork (which I have tentatively titled Politics and Religion) was
sparked by watching a TV news report on the presidential election as I simultaneously
flipped through one of my art history books. Something ignited in me when I saw
a photograph of Lacoön and His Sons. It’s
a magnificent, life-sized Greek marble sculpture from the 1st
century BCE. The sculpture illustrates a moment from the Trojan war when the
priest Lacoön warned Troy not to let the giant wooden horse, “gifted” by the
Greeks, inside the city walls. The gods were angered, and sent serpents from
the sea to kill the priest and his two sons.
My graphite
rendering (along with some altered photo-transfers) of the statue is not,
however, intended as a remembrance of the mythological narrative per se. Nor is
it necessarily a commentary on divine wrath. It’s more a metaphorical
springboard into my concerns about the current spiritual state of our country -
the gripping drama of a society in the painful throes of a tragic identity
crisis.
And so it is that
my piece does include a written (in cursive) narrative of sorts. It’s drawn
from a phrase in the American pledge of allegiance: “…one nation, under God, indivisible…”
My written script is a series of repeated re-arrangements of the phrase’s original
word order. Call it a serpentine, run-on scrawl, creating other meanings,
questions, and emphases suggesting a troubled society adrift in its
dividedness. InoneGodundernationdivisible.underonegodgodnationonedivisiblenationingodunderinonegoddivisiblenationinonenationunderdivisiblegodinonedivisiblegodundernationonenationgodindivisibleunder
Etc., etc.
One nation? Under
God? Indivisible? Really? What have we wrought?
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