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“…the imitation of nature in her manner of operation.”
— Ananda Coomaraswamy “…the nostalgia for living forms that haunts geometry.” — Jean Baudrillard “Since no one form is intrinsically
superior to another, the artist can use any form whatsoever—from literary expression, either written or spoken, to physical
reality—in equivalent fashion.” — Marcel Broodthaers _______________________________________ 2014 “How can a material be a carrier of meaning in specific
contexts? By applying a set of rules to a process that is performed on various media, the mechanics of translation in cross-platform
analogues is explored." —
artist’s statement Pas de deux, 2012 “A pas de deux of a poet and the Other, or a word and its context, or an author and the reader, or an artist
and the spectator, or a text and its translation. A text as raw material—sorted and stacked, or woven.” —
artist’s statement from Pas de deux published in TrenchArt: Surplus Aesthetics, Los Angeles: Les Figues
Press, 2012, pp. 35-41 Words of Love,
2011 “In recent years conceptual artists have undertaken the appropriation and deconstruction
of texts and books, in most cases accompanied by a rearrangement of the original material – as in the strategy of “erasure
poetics” with the reduction of a source text into verse; in paraphrasing as a method of re-interpretation; in Gareth
Long's Don Quixote in the Computer Age based on a computer-generated translation; with Mark Rutkoski [in Words of Love] by means of the statistical arrangement
of the material; in David Jourdan’s transformation of prose into another idiom; or
in Alison Turnball’s Spring Snow through a visualization of the original text.” — from Janet Boatin “Appropriated Translations:
New (re-) Ordering of the Material” (original text in German), presented at Workshop: For the Appropriation
of Texts and Books in Books, May 5-7, 2011. Berlin: Free University, 2011, p. 1, 1n2. Beehives, 1984
This series of works
on paper are based on the hexagonal organization of wax cells found in nature. They are constructed by
melting two kinds of wax (microcrystalline, a petroleum by-product used in lost wax casting for the darker, “honey colored”
cells and bleached beeswax for the white cells) on handmade paper from Nepal which becomes translucent when immersed in the
molten wax. The flow of the wax over the paper is preserved as the wax cools. Each hexagon
(cell) is cut out separately and welded onto the background with a tacking iron. The cells are arranged
in various formats in order to investigate the transformations performed upon a naturally occurring structure, the beehive. —artist’s statement accompanying the one-man exhibition, Beehives,
at John Gibson Gallery, New York, February 2- March 3, 1984.
Finnegans Wake, 1982 “Rutkoski’s
images are visual concepts rather than representations: terse, quasi-geometric and multi-dimensional. The minimal idea of
‘Foreword” that begins the sequence is that of the circle whose plain blue (enamel, wax and paper) hints at the
Odyssean colour that Joyce requested for the covers of the first editions of Ulysses. That circle
is then segmented into four in subsequent images to suggest a Celtic cross, a compass, or the Four Ages of Viconian history
that underpin the structure and thinking of the Wake. The circle divides into the Euclidean erotic
figure that Shaun explains to Shem in the ‘School-room” episode of Book Two. Circles are arranged
into the perfect astronomical phenomena of ‘Syzygy,’ when the planets fall into alignment. They
offer a series of models of periodization and eventually become the schematized ‘Tree’ that is punningly suggested
in Rutkoski’s kabbalistic revision of the hexagonal benzene molecule which makes its first appearance in his ‘Father
& Sons’—that molecule on whose discovery much of the modern technology of plastics was founded. Words, or
rather verbal signs, play as diligently here as do circles. The letters of Joyce’s name printed in
elegant capitals at the start return in reverse order for the appropriately literary ‘Afterword.’
The Finnegans Wake family characters make their appearances in the letters that algebraically gloss these
diagrams: not least in ‘Father & Sons,’ where Shem and HCE are spelled out, leaving an image whose significance
oscillates between astronomy and paternity.” — from Richard Brown,
“Mark Rutkoski,” James Joyce Broadsheet (Leeds, England: University of Leeds), no. 15, October 1984,
n.p. includes illus. of paintings by Mark Rutkoski.
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