Obliterature

Katherine Jackson’s “Invisible Cities”

By Chris Thompson

Paintings by Katherine Jackson” is at Zero Station Gallery through September 9, Cottage Road, South Portland. Call (207) 767-2788.

She is a character of her own invention in the novel of which we are the authors. This shouldn’t make sense but her paintings make it so. We might imagine her sitting and working in the glow of a desk-lamp in an otherwise dark studio. She pauses to shake the cramp out of her hand. Putting the pain back in painting, she would have been writing all day long and well into the night, the same single line, literally ad nauseum: “It was while watching him that I wondered if we cast a shadow cast a shadow.”

The line comes from someplace in Samuel Beckett’s trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable). None of the clues that Katherine Jackson gives us in her painting “Beckett I” would permit anyone but a Beckett scholar to say exactly where. “Beckett I” is not so much painted as it is wrought out of painstaking, rhythmic script, Beckett’s phrase written vertically in even, incessant, measured bars like the score for the moment in the life of the character who wrote them. It’s not so much a painting as an existential experiment that takes place on a canvas instead of a word processor or parchment.

Jackson began her creative career as a painter, but spent the bulk of it as a writer, scholar, and teacher, and has returned her focus to a practice that combines all of these. A flip through her resumé and a look at her paintings both point to the same concern: finding the line where seeing and reading flow into, as well as disrupt, one another, and navigating the territories opened up by their interplay.

For Jackson, Beckett’s pushing of language to the point of its disappearance was a kind of provocation. In closing her artist’s statement she explains that her recent text-based works, like “Beckett I” and “Beckett II,” “take their inspiration from Samuel Beckett’s statement, ‘we must say words as long as there are any.’ ” In considering the implications of its ambiguity, she asks, “What if there aren’t any words, then what do we do? Maybe you start using your eyes instead. What is the end of writing? What is the end of seeing? How do they meet, and what are their limits? It’s hard to talk about this without saying too much and then undermining the painting.”

So in this respect our scholarliness matters little to our experience of Jackson’s work. Knowing that the line written again and again in “Beckett II” (“the murmurs are coming”) comes from such and such a page of Malone Dies, far from being of service, would only confuse things further. The charge of her work lies elsewhere than in this kind of hyper-erudite labyrinth. Ultimately, its impact owes to its ability to target this zone in which our two most habitual ways of experiencing the world — via the visual and the verbal — shift between one another. She therefore gets us to feel the fullness of the fact that the labyrinths in which we wander are those of our own construction.

An earlier group of works use the imagery of cartography to explore this condition. “Necropolitan I” (pictured) grew out of Jackson’s interest in ancient Chinese maps. She found that they spoke a familiar visual language but were at the same time alien and unreadable. She describes them as “counterparts to what you know but with a distinct character that jars your expectations and makes way for instant shifts to our usual complacent mental platform.”

We tend to approach maps as both strictly utilitarian and entirely objective — as if they merely reflected the world as it is, rather than actively constructing it as we would like it to be: intelligible, navigable, readable. Jackson was struck by how radically different these ancient Chinese maps were from those to which we are accustomed. They contained a wealth of information about human doings and ways of interacting and co-habitating, considerations that we would be shocked to encounter on a typical map but which would have been important to the emperor for whom they were made.

As a result, “Necropolitan I” is a study in contradictions and ambiguities. Its desertscape is covered with a glossy resin surface. The scene itself seems at once to be a view from above and from underground. The loosely-drawn array of tiny structures gives the feeling of an archaelogist’s blueprint for excavation, while the fluidity of the blood-red ground and the incompleteness of its crypto-demographic information suggest scenes imagined or remembered, far afield from scientific certainties. The tiny areas circumscribed by ochre lines appear simultaneously to represent erased walls of former dwellings, groupings of individuals, and records of routes long forgotten.

Rather than work to resolve these contradictory realities, Jackson’s work revels in them.

She refers to her work as “a field of play, a ground for association: is it a real, psychic, or symbolic landscape? Is it a landscape at all? An interior or exterior space?” Answering these questions would, as Jackson suggests, only undermine the painting. And yet the importance of the painting is that it makes it possible and necessary to continue to ask them.

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com.