"I Never Said That"

My dear, quirky friend Corkey Sinks is a genius. So is her artwork. "I Never Said That" is one in a series of tattered fabric pieces she first created for Presence and Performance: Queer-Feminist Bodies, an exhibit I curated in San Francisco in June of 2007.

In this series, Corkey has carefully, meticulously, yet hastily, and literally, crafted and constructed visual text as we manipulatively craft and construct everyday speech. The identity of her speaker, or speakers, is/are invisible, and the phrases float freely, delicate comic-strip speech-bubbles coasting across imaginary tongues.

In a sense, images of this series could accompany, and counter, the very first entry of Pity from the Stars (see September 2008). It softly and succintly shows us a banality of language, the meaningless phrases we regurgitate everyday, void of emotion or personality. We rid ourselves of scraps of conversation, empty our minds of meaningless words and strings of thoughts piling up in immediate, vapid responses, filling formulas and completing patterns. Everyday we perform exchanges of both heartfelt and vague intimacy through recitation and dictation.

Setting aside the mechanics of semantics, we are left with the inherent limits of language, not to mention automatic misunderstandings and mis-communications resulting from the misalignment of feelings with the actual expressions of them. What does what we say say about us? What takes place when we refuse to pay attention, to take responsibility for, or to infuse or recognize meaning in our words?

The absence of quotation marks in these works speaks volumes, as we become hyper-aware of the accountability we must take for our speech and conversation and language; quotations, marking our words in time and space, contextualizing them for an audience (including ourselves), cannot save us from the impact they have the moment they are uttered, nor the dead, silent stillness when we fail to take care, when we find--or lose--ourselves mumbling in our most mundane moments of ineptitude, of ambivalence, of avoidance. They are somewhere forever, and yet dissolve in our reality when we decide we don't give a fuck.

Why did I choose this particular phrase? It was the most ingenuine. "I never said that." Can we ever really control the effect our words have on the world, on those brief moments that shift our lives forever? What do we really mean when we desperately defend or deny? If we've said something that inevitably becomes open to interpretation because, essentially, it exists once it's been spoken, how do we manage it? Did we ever really not say something because it's been understood or interpreted uniquely, if undesirably? What is there in language, in the words we use, that can be owned as our own, precisely molded to fit "our" meaning? Shall we return to authorship, to Michel Foucault? I also happen to have said this many, many times myself.

I finally framed this piece; it will soon be hanging above my bed, though I wouldn't mind falling asleep right next to it. It's incredibly warm. Check out Corkey's brilliantly inventive Austin, Texas gallery Okay Mountain, fairly recently featured in the equally amazing Art Papers.