Description and De-scription

 

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 1^st 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?