Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

The following text is taken from a presentation I gave on my work up to the end of my first semester in graduate school. It follows a powerpoint presentation.

My name is Wayne Madsen and I am a cross platform artist and this is my first semester in the graduate program here at San Jose State. In this class I have previously discussed my primary work in oil paintings. Today, I will be encompassing the entire perspective of my work, dealing with my investigations into language, the philosophical differences between culture systems and the transversal of the out-group to the in-group.

Language can be defined as a body of words and the systems for their use common to a people who are of the same community or nation, the same geographical area, or the same cultural tradition. Language traditionally consists of two sub-set groups: speech and a set a pictorial symbols which convey constructs. The principle use of language is debated over continually, but for the sake of understanding my work, we will be evaluating language as a system used for the conveyance of thought.

I became interested in language after reading one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s seminal works: Philosophical Grammar, translated into English. Wittgenstein was a philosopher from the early 20th century generally accredited with the foundations of the philosophy of language and the ontological approach to literature and language. In response to Wittgenstein’s work, there necessitated in the philosophical community an evolution on the philosophy of language and there emerged two schools of thought on the matter. The first approach to language is that language precedes conscious thought and that thought can’t be formed without language. The opposing school on language and thought is that thought doesn’t require language. I am, along with Wittgenstein, a believer in the former school – the school of continental philosophy – rather than the latter. Language is not only a tool for conveying thought, but also its fundamental medium. By using language, we transmit ideas between parties and the ideas are thus limited by the language used.

Language, as I have investigated it, is interwoven with the culture which uses it. In 2002, Jacques Derrida, a more contemporary philosopher, gave one of his final addresses to UNESCO about the language basis for a culture’s philosophical thought. UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Its duties are to set up programs to sponsor international collaboration between the scientific and cultural communities in order to preserve human rights and the “fundamental freedoms” proclaimed in the UN Charter. Jacques Derrida, in his address to UNESCO, attacked the blanket belief that a world-wide universal philosophy could be attained, due to language systems. Since each language comes with a set group of parameters, albeit one which evolves over time by introducing new words and eliminating others, Derrida argued that due to the western civilization’s root in Greco-Roman language, we also share a communal bond in Greco-Roman philosophy because of the features and constraints of our language, excluding those societies which root in different language traditions. This creates cultural in-groups and out-groups with other societies which have distinct properties due to their language.

Within a social stratosphere, there exists in-groups and out-groups. Within our in-group of inner social confidants, we usually have our intimate family members – perhaps not those people we like best but with whom we share an intimate bond that has been created because of time and proximity. Outside this group, usually lies the second tier of intimacy – often times this is our relationship partners and closest friends. Usually this includes the people with whom we share everything but who don’t know us as long or as well as our families do. Next we approach the close friends group, then possibly good co-workers, colleagues, fellow graduate students, and as we go out from our inner group we reach professors, acquaintances, and finally the people who you see around and you only connect to them through eye contact (commonly known as familiar faces). This sphere consists of our social in-group. Within the out-group, lies everyone else, commonly referred to as “The Public.” The distinct division of communication between the out-group and the in-group is one of the primary investigations I’m interested in. In order for communication to happen between these two groups, a vast library of information must be translated from one culture system to the next. Although the language divide between these systems can easily be breached, as a system becomes more specialized, it distances itself further from being understood.

One important influence for my work is the theorist and clinical psychologist Dr. Brent Slife. Dr. Slife’s main work is centered on questioning the psychological emphasis of using quantitative research for assessing qualitative non-objective values. Through the past century and a half, psychology has attempted to place itself as being a hard science through fundamentally altering its language and philosophical approach to evaluating constructs. Non-objective constructs, such as love, are thus quantified in order to put this discipline into the scientific community. As specialization occurs within a discipline, the outsiders from that community understand less and less of what that community is talking about, ostracizing them. For example, my wife got her master’s degree in computer science and I have realized that, despite my technical skill, I understand little of what she says about her work anymore.

I began, in the summer of 2005, to access a database of codified graphic symbols used throughout all walks of life called the Symbol Sourcebook by Henry Dreyfuss. This book was compiled in order to “identify symbols out of context and to aide designers in developing new symbols.” As I was fascinated by the miscommunication between disciplines, I wanted to create a set of paintings which used these coded messages which couldn’t be read except by the individuals within that walk of life – disciplines outside of the art community.

Although I felt these coded messages questioned the narrative nature of painting and the codified presence of language, the visual quality of the paintings felt hollow.

I explored my other personal interests and found the image of the “cute” robot surfacing in free form image paintings I did.

Cute imagery, along with the pop-art tradition it follows, comes from a history of looking at the popular vernacular of a culture. By touching the vein of a culture’s iconographic media, something can be shown about our culture in the language of the banal.

My imagery comes from the reproduction of a cartoon-like quality, appropriating style and characters from contemporary so-called digital popular artists.

I have been highly influenced by Jeff Koons’ contemporary approach to the disgusting nature of kitsch and questioning its place within high art.

Many of the images I use are those which are welcomed by popular digital culture – such as Pokemon, Nintendo style video game imagery, and artists who only display their work through internet sites, often reminiscent of physical graffiti. The vocabulary of popular culture is obviously vast and often unintelligible. The overpowering nature of such kitsch becomes more potent with the over stimulative nature of the artwork.

The more I saturated my works with individual cute characters, the more I realized my affinity for the horrific qualities these characters have. I do appreciate their cuteness, but I also appreciate these works for the horrific nature of the cute characters. The increase of size of the canvas and figures emulates the way our culture glorifies these icons. I worry about a culture which glorifies something so innocent and naïve. But at the same time, I find myself glorifying these characters and being pulled in by their seductive qualities.

Earlier this year, I had a show where the audience misread the meanings in many of these pieces, causing me to end my show early. This experience made me reflect more on the medium I was using to investigate the border between the out-group and the in-group. Oil painting was obviously limited in its ability to investigate this phenomenon on the transversal from the out-group to the in-group.

One of the in-groups my wife and I have considered entering is parenthood. My wife and I have recently been discussing having children. The idea of becoming a parent is a great fear of mine because I don’t know how to be a good parent. I realized that an enormous part of my identity stems from the experiences I had as a child with my family and this is the only perspective I have on childrearing.

In order to vicariously experience myself as a parent, I inserted my adult self into almost a hundred digitized slides which were taken of me as a young child. Becoming a parent includes learning things and language about that experience which changes your identity.

By becoming a parent, I would be crossing the boundary of the out-group (non-parents) into the in-group (parents).

I had hoped that these visual images would give me a comforting sense of myself in the role of parenthood, almost as if looking into a future mirror. At that time, my professor wanted to see a working installation using the images from this project. Despite my hesitations to make an installation space, I created a slide show presentation with couches and ambient sound including the display of this set of images. And I hated it. The question of medium tying integrally to presentation is at the heart of the questions I ask myself about my work. I couldn’t justify the installation I made because it had nothing to do with the experience of being a parent or trying to learn how to be a parent. Instead, it was only a heartless attempt to make an object out of a non-objectified construct.

If my previous project taught me one thing, it was how I needed to adopt more than a visual persona in order to understand the new social group. My next social experiment involved a group of medieval fighting enthusiasts. Some friends of mine and I would drive by a local park every Thursday evening and see, to our surprise, a group of grown adults fighting each other with foam swords while dressed in tunics and armor. Stunned by the unique nature of their club, I concluded that the experience of becoming one of the members of this club would be my next project.

We began our journey by reading the group rule books in order to assimilate ourselves to the language and society’s social norms. What we found out was that not only did we need to understand the rules of the “sport”, but we needed to look like the others within the group by dressing in medieval clothing, carrying weapons. But most importantly developing a backhistory for the character we acted out. Over several months, we assimilated ourselves in this group, fighting alongside people with character names such as “Gobo,” “Andric the King,” “Thornbrier,” and “Bacchaus, Rider of Rohan.”

We created character names and came to identify ourselves in relationship to this fighting society because we had taken upon ourselves the language and norms of this culture. What evolved from this set of experiences was documentation on film of the art project. Beyond this single documentation, though, unfortunately not much exists as evidence of this passing from the out-group into the in-group of this strange group.

I have recently become interested in “Do It Yourself” online cultures. Over the past several years, there has been a sharp increase in the number of online website communities which purport to instruct how to do things – all sorts of things, from computer hacking to knitting. What I noticed with many of these “so-called” Do-It-Yourself sites is there are necessary preconditions which are required in order to understand anything they are saying.

I am not able to go into Hack-a-Day.com and know how to recover my mp3 flash data without obvious experience in electrical engineering, not to mention programming abilities. As I stated before, my wife finished her master’s degree in computer science. I don’t understand what she is telling me anymore about her work.

I am currently attempting to go from the out-group to the in-group of computer programmers who write in java. It is fascinating that in the computer sciences, there is a distinct emphasis on the communication of language, between man and machine, as one of the essential processes behind this discipline. Much of what my wife does is a translation between English language ideas into a language which the computer can read and understand. The other half is a logical deduction of structures and open systems, much like what I have been interested in investigating through my work.

So, my wife is teaching me the java programming language. In order to maintain documentation of this work as it progresses, and especially to document my frustration in learning the language and symbols of programming, I have attempted to document as much valid data as I can while experiencing this project. Each session that my wife sits down and explains things to me, I document the session on film. These hour long sessions are then posted on a weblog I am maintaining for this project.

Every java file that I create, the code and the instructions for how to recreate it are also posted on this blog. My wife has even taken to giving me homework, where most of my time for this project is spent. In response to these homework readings, I write lengthy entries about what I understand of the terms used in the text. This project is currently in progress and will continue until I am acclimated into the java programming community experience.

In conclusion, my artwork investigates the experiences of language, and the effects it has on the individual. I have attempted to examine my experience in crossing the bridge between being apart of one cultural group and entering into a new one.