IN SHORT:
UPRIGHT: Assessing your options. An impasse, and checking in with one’s inner compass.
REVERSED: Indecision, haziness, perplexity. The challenges of translating complicated intellectual impulses. Stalemate.
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IN DEPTH:
The Two of Swords shows a blindfolded woman, dressed in a white apron, holding two knives crossed in an X over her chest. This is the artist’s blind run at an artwork she conceived earlier that morning. The idea appeared to her, earlier that day while on a walk with a boyfriend. The idea initially appeared as a notion both vague and deeply specific. She couldn’t quite find the words for it, she just needed to get into the studio and work the ideas out in real-time. She is wants to let the artwork choose it’s own direction.
She is working through a constellation of ideas on paper and on-screen. She is figuring out how the cultural language of her appearance in these places mirrors a larger system of how women in general are asked to appear while being seen by the world. Her eyes do not meet yours, the gaze is internally fixed—a socratic method as silent film. She makes swift and strange choices about how each tool should experienced. She imagines a variety of audiences for this piece, but she knows full-well to manage her expectations. She guards her tender heart with two fists defensively wielding kitchen knives. To some (mostly men) it might make no sense, to others (mostly women) it resonated with something deeply known but hard to describe. Behind her a wistful poster of the ocean, sloshing about concealing a world below. Her body makes subtle jerking motions, as she experiences each kitchen tool radically a new.
She has perhaps gotten ahead of herself. And yet if she allows herself the time to be inside the art-making process, a process that is both brutally slow and terrifyingly fast, the world will catch up with her, and the artwork will become an institution unto itself.
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“I was concerned with something like the notion of ‘language speaking the subject,’ and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity.”
-Martha Rosler.
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