Concentrated Words

At the core of Stefana McClure’s austere yet vivid works on paper is a highly idiosyncratic transformation of word into image, and in a way that extends to a more or less constant crossing or testing of borders, for instance between film and drawings, between language and drawings, between different languages, and ultimately between different cultures and mind sets. McClure’s process is exacting but straightforward. Using successive sheets of tracing paper atop a single sheet of specially chosen graphite or wax transfer paper, she inscribes a text of her choice, usually lengthy, time-consuming ones, like pages of footnotes from the famous 8th century Japanese text The Kojiki, or all of a movie’s subtitles, such as all of the English subtitles to the Polish director Krzysztof Kieskowski’s film Blue in one work, and in another all of the Japanese subtitles to the same film, both times in the location where they’d be if you were watching the film either on a movie screen or on your TV. McClure, by the way, who has a real knowledge of Japanese paper-making techniques, pays enormous attention to the physical details of her work, for instance to the very particular color of the paper that she chooses and to its equally particular texture. It’s obvious that she likes to handle this stuff, that she’s richly familiar with it, and that it resonates for her, but this doesn’t prevent her works from suggesting (however partially, however obliquely) the very unpaperlike glow of high tech video monitors or miniaturized renditions of full-tilt movie screens.

As the text McClure is transcribing builds up, the colored surface of the paper gets slowly eroded: she makes her works not by adding to, but taking away, what is already there. And through this taking away, the surface of the paper becomes a complex visual structure on its own, and oftentimes with a pronounced beauty that is enthralling and meditative. Whatever this structure is, however, is not determined by the artist’s subjective choices but by the properties of the language itself, as letters, words, or, as the case may be, Japanese characters, rub against one another, get overlaid and impacted, cancel one another out. At the bottom of McClure’s vibrantly blue works dealing with Kieskowski’s film one sees these empty, but markedly luminous horizontal stripes—a super-condensed version of a couple of hours’ worth of subtitles. Here, language has been shrunken, so to speak; it’s been shortened, blurred, fiercely gathered together, and reconstituted as an ambiguous, borderline force somewhere between presence and absence. It has been turned into a kind of enigmatic silence or stillness that also doubles very nicely as spare geometric forms in a monochromatic field, and one of McClure’s achievements is to make some quirky, conceptually juiced-up renditions of minimalist-inspired works altogether.

Typically, McClure is drawn not to the focal point of whatever film or text she is dealing with, but instead to slightly out of the way or peripheral things like footnotes, subtitles, or definitions. In a memorable work not included in this exhibition, she transcribed two definitions of the concept of sin, from a Christian text and a Buddhist one. You notice that one (the Christian one) is a lot more marked up, busy, packed, and congested, while the other bears significantly fewer marks. McClure’s transformation of written language into a purely pictorial one succinctly reveals whoppingly divergent cultural and religious mores. In any event, the language McClure uses is almost always involved in some kind of negotiation, in the form of explanation, exegesis, translation, and in general the difficult attempt to pin down slippery matters, oftentimes not exactly perfectly, as the frequent mishaps that one finds in film subtitles clearly attest. It’s also interesting to note that as an artist from Northern Ireland who has spent much of the past 10 years living and working in Japan (and who is fluent in Japanese) McClure has had more than her own share of cross-cultural and cross-lingual negotiations. Hardly is this work about, or illustrative of, such an experience, but it’s certainly informed by it in some measure, perhaps deeply so. Several of the Western films McClure references (Mystery Train by Jim Jarmusch, Tokyo-ga by Wim Wenders) specifically concern encounters with Japan; her own inscriptions of Japanese characters reach back into a tradition of calligraphy; and her acute focus on paper suggests an engagement with another long-standing tradition in Japanese art.

One of her most striking works here is an almost crazily satisfying, velvety red field subtly festooned at the bottom with two rows of subtly luminous, tiny white squares. What those squares consist of is a record of the Japanese subtitles in Wim Wender’s film Tokyo-ga: a film by a German director set in Japan, subtitled in Japanese, and then brought into an entirely new condition by a Northern Irish artist who lives part time in Kyoto. Different sensibilities, genres, facilities with language, and intentions mingle and collide, while at the same time, one is drawn into the spare, enigmatic beauty of McClure’s work. Those tiny squares at the bottom recall minimalist-inflected serial repetition but they also seem like nodes or modules packed with elusive information, perhaps as well like some arcane code, or talismanic diagram.

For all Stefana McClure’s crisp, conceptual rigor, there is also something coolly hilarious about her approach, obsessive, and over the top. Transforming all of a feature film’s subtitled dialogue into 2 thin white bands at the bottom of an otherwise monochromatic field is a wonderfully nutty enterprise, as is laboriously copying out footnote after footnote from a major Japanese text dealing with the early days of the culture (The Kojiki). Still, the more one enters into McClure’s peculiar methodology, the more one realizes just how much it consists of a tug between, or a dialogue between, opposites, starting with her much-scrutinizing, labor-intensive transcriptions which nevertheless result in works on paper that seem extremely quiescent and sensitive. Austere drawings cross over into renditions of television screens. A lustrous gray field bares the faint impression of a faded but still visible text: you think it’s some sort of excerpt from an ancient holy volume but instead it’s an entire daily newspaper in Japan. An obvious film buff’s much-watched treasures morph into compact visual objects, occasionally with an odd conceptual twist, as when the seven deadly sins appear on sinfully-colored red paper in the form of the English subtitles of seven different French movies. Throughout, Stefana McClure’s much-thinking, much-scrutinizing sensibility yields works on paper that also have a quiet sensuality and a keen visual appeal.

Citation:
Volk, Gregory. “Concentrated Words.” Stefana McClure: Footnotes and Subtitles. New York, NY: Fifth Floor Foundation, 2000. © 2000 Gregory Volk