As Eloquence Appears
Frances Stark's playful work is as richly literary as it is visually economic
Frances Stark has spent the last ten years making some of the most discrete, demanding, tender, sad, airy, nervous, maddening, self-conscious drawings in America. By using carbon paper (that messy, outmoded means of copying a letter-sized document) and casting herself as the poetic office nerd, she has constructed a cosmology of signs focusing on the subtleties and idiosyncrasies of language, fragmented utterances, Concrete poetry, literature and the act of writing.
If Stark were to exhibit a blank piece of paper (the cliché of a writer’s void or vacuum), her audience would know exactly what she meant: a vacant space that stands for an enormous amount of agony, that tenuous moment before the first word is written on the page, the first letter scratched onto the glaringly pale paper. She’s one of the few artists who could get away with such a hokey move and render it meaningful. If there is such a thing as an artist’s artist, then Stark is very much a writer’s artist she thinks about the troubles the scribe faces, or at least the difficulties their texts face once constructed. She has, for example, made a work entitled The emptiness in my head … (1997), which is loaded with static, fear, bliss – nothingness at its most pregnant. It comprises a rectangular field of blue and green words, spelling out over and over again the phrase ‘The emptiness in my head’ followed by ‘could melt with sweet peace into the emptiness of this view’. With the blue carbon cueing sky, and the green the earth below, Stark has produced a sublime landscape reminiscent of a Caspar David Friedrich in which the figure literally becomes the language, the first-person voice.
Stark often works with carbon paper, tracing sentences from classic texts by Emily Dickinson, Robert Musil, her hero Henry Miller and many others (Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard, the repetition masters, also figure), though she seems to be less interested
Benjamin Weissman
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