In the Gesture: The Story

“In the Gesture” is a series in progress of works, including drawings, paintings, prints, and sculptures, made under the influence of the book Gestures (2014) by philosopher and media theorist Vilém Flusser. My work depicts figures in a style informed by 20th-century Western and Eastern modernisms, the Rinpa School, and alternative comics. In this series, the figures are reading, playing with a cat, drinking tea while admiring the view, cooking breakfast. Gestures provided a framework for thinking about such actions in a way that felt philosophically significant. These acts, however commonplace, are how we situate ourselves in existence. They elude noticing, but bringing attention to them and to the context in which they take place can transmute the commonplace into the profound.

The project has three parts. First are the works of art themselves. Second is this website, a hand-built mechanism for preserving artistic process, whose spine is a Log of gestures. Third is an essay on what Flusser’s conception of the gesture reveals about art, attention, and experience, and how it shaped my studio practice and its documentation.

They grew out of one another. Take the figure drinking tea: it is a gesture. The drawing of her is another, a thing made and offered as art. Aesthetic action goes on all the time; works of art bring it into view. A painting made after the drawing is a third gesture. A photograph of that painting in progress, posted to the Log, is a fourth. The page that presents it is a fifth. Recognizing this recursion led to months of journaling and recording, and to a programming effort aimed at a digital presence that would transcend, aesthetically and philosophically, the dry act of archiving. Presence in the digital sense means, merely, that information is available to users of internet-connected devices. In the phenomenological sense, presence is the foundation of time, space, and attention that undergirds experience itself. This project nudges the former toward the latter.

The Log holds diaristic entries, snapshots, notes from reading, views of art in progress, and images of finished pieces. Each entry is authored as structured data, and a script gathers the entries about each artwork into its own page, reachable from the index of The Work. The output is plain HTML with no scripts, databases, or platforms behind it; I call the architectural notion “acid-free web development,” as the essay explains.

Together, the works, the mechanism, and the essay constitute a gesture of gestures.