Tuesday, March 20, 2007

The Page

This is the page, the page turned to, which is about the page turned to arrive here and the pages this will turn to come. It is not the epiphany it is about the epiphany
It started in the process of manually deleting junk mail the filter of my mail client missed , After a glance I deleted one I identified as junk, but in the split second before it flashed off my screen and wound up in my trash folder something caught my eye about it, the tile was FAMILY CONNECTION ? the all caps and question mark made me think it was spam, I looked for it in the trash folder but realized manually identified junk email is directly deleted, I didn't think anything about it, When I turned on my laptop the mail client downloaded it. It turned out to be from a relatively close relative, my father's cousin's daughter. She explained she was also an artist and found my web page when doing a search for her father, who was also named Joseph, she wanted to know if we might be related. That lead me to do a search for Giannasio's and the search popped up a couple of links about me I hadn't known about. One
I found revealed I had appeared on the Saatchi Gallery web page as a Your Gallery Critics' Choice by Ana Finel Honigman ,which has a short review, in which she conjures allusions between the action I exert in my process and the figures in an 1875 series of painting by Gustave Caillebotte titled "The Floor Scrapers". I had never heard of these paintings, nor had I seen them, and to my recollection, I don't remember anyone being around to see me in the process of installation. I curiously did a web search and after a few tries found an image of one of the paintings the similarities of the subjects in the painting to my process, and the composition of the lines scraped on the floor, could have been painted of me in the determined state of labor to my craft.
Joseph Campbell described the eternal presence by asking is it the light that shines from the light bulb, the energy that ignites the bulb, or the light bulb? It can be described as all three, ah how we love trilogies don't we.
If I had seen that painting earlier, I don't think I would have ever scraped a floor into rolls, I started out doing the same basic task as Caillebotte's Floor Scrapers, but picked up where they left off, transformed their task into my art. I wonder if through the eyes of Caillebotte I was witnessed from the past, in my studio, the first time I rolled a strip of paint from my studio floor, or if I were directed by Caillebotte, or if both were merely players in a larger performance, with our aerials up, tuned to a frequency that transmits and receives, part of the same signal. A message that once received, affirms, transmitted and confirmed.