NOW, this page is determined.

Sometime around autumn, 1996, in the early stages of my second year at art school, I grappled with the significance of the image. What constitutes an image? How can text function as an image, or a painting, or a work of art. This text comes from my sketch book, pictured left.


NOW, this page is determined. Its path is chosen. It is contaminated. “They say, ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away.’ Why not just tell him to fuck off?” That was just a passing thought and in obvious fact unrelated to the fate of this piece of paper, however, simply because of its existence it has helped shape the outcome of this piece of paper as a work of art. However, this is not to say that this text is an artwork, merely it is a study in existence. Though such a text may seem artistically inclined the text itself is not artistic in intent. To the contrary the text is a medium to exercise the visual effect of text itself. Therefore what you are reading is a pile of crap. But a test to see if you will read, or how much you will read of a text with the visual effect of this. The test is both conceptual and individual to the reader.
As an artwork the visual effect left by an activity such as erasing a word and changing it, as done several times previously in this text, has an effect on the outcome of this piece of paper. Each mark effects its outcome, and in turn effects the impact of this piece of paper on a person viewing it or reading it. This is the crucial point: the page in front of you can be viewed or read. Indeed the two acts seem similar, however to read this text is to take in the words which have been written on the page, while to view it is to see it as a visual image as a whole – that being a page full of words. In most instances the two acts become one, or one follows the other. In the same way the ‘intent’ of the artwork and the ‘intent’ of the text become one, because one depends on the other to exist. And now, if not by luck, this art work is resolved because the subject of the text is exhausted and has also reached the end of the page.