Thinking in Tongues
What is voce –is it a straining of the air, with sound itself acting as a kind of pathos, a suffering, as air is battered, stretched, percussed? Voice never simply appears, it is expressed, formed and shaped out of resistance. Consider the German term Stimme as both a tuning, a pitching and voice itself. A voice is a structure of stresses and strains, it is pitched against itself like a bridge – the stress of structure holding itself in place. Voice is the body’s syntax, its uprightness, its tone, tension and extension. It enables us to be where we are not, prevents us from ever being anywhere but beside ourselves. It stretches us out between here and elsewhere. We might ask, can a voice be, if it never leaves the lips?
Thinking in Tongues, is a collection of paintings that I produced as part of a poetic and personal investigation into the flow of thought during the act of painting in the stillness of a space set apart for this purpose. Outfitted with a particular set of thoughts, during a very particular period of time, I ask - can one create a register of the quiet and private thoughts that lick at the mind? Can one trace the thinking tongue without speaking out loud?
I see these surfaces as slow almanacs, calendars of the measurement of calm rumination, tracings of the wandering mind, as markers of a time spent in deep contemplation, of trailing off, of finishing midsentence, a syncope of stutterings and of words on the tip of the tongue.
The process is simple, a small batch of paint is mixed at the start of each day and when depleted, a new mix of pigment will be made afresh. Slight color shifts, line variations, small pressure changes, optic glitches, brief hesitations and interruptions tickle the surfaces into a static chorus of marks. Actions, reactions, translations and feedback loops, all serve as testimony of mark, in an attempt to give articulation to thought through hand and eye, in an undertaking to record and weave the stream of thoughts into a rippling visual hum.
We think in “tongues” - our mothertongue, our fathertongue, in tongues that are not always our own. The tongue reaches into the world to fetch, to bring the world closer. In early depictions of voice, a scroll unfurls from the lips (instead of the contemporary speech bubble) – like a tongue, a flamboyant ribbon, a lasso. We throw the voice into the world, and pull back with a retort, a dialogue.
It is an act of ventriloquism – an eidetic and private talking to oneself, an act of speaking for a distanced self, of bringing voices to silences. It is a conversation with people who can’t, it is a process of picking up dropped sentences, of annotating the unspoken. It is a conversation that does not cross the lips. The brush is the needle of the audiograph, a sharp tip that - like the seismograph - etches, records and evidences the activities of the unquiet interior.
Text by Maja Marx