February 1998
My work estranges me. This, as near as I can remember has always been the case. A few years ago I might have characterized this estrangement, the obstinate otherness of my work, as a function of one's inability to occupy the place of painting. I positioned what I imagined to be myself at what I imagined to be the absolute terminus of painting, namely its skin. But the longer I occupied this position the more topographical my metaphors for it became (painting as a territory with an impenetrable interior, painting as the unchartable landscape, painting as the theatrical space of stuttering narrative etc.), and in the end I began to wonder if it was fruitful to even imagine painting as having an interior at all - a core of some considerable significance. Now, I think, I'm less likely to think of painting as an interior kept from an exterior by an impermeable epidermis of colorful goo, and much more likely to imagine painting as a skin without a lining. Or, rather, I've started to think of painting in less material, medium-oriented terms (as a skin) and now wonder about it as an absence - a without. But the fundamental nature of this withdrawal seems less specific to the medium paint, and even to the genre of painting (which, as the place of the picture , is the most salient example of the kind of withdrawal that interests me), but belongs instead to the remove of the visible, to the dissolution of objects as appearances . It is a significant feature of my current work, therefore, that I consider the pictures I facilitate to be philosophical objects. This is not in anyway to deny their art-historical features, but rather an attempt to posit a way of thinking in the visual (to do work, in other words, in excess of language). Accordingly, my work reflects my interest in phenomenology insofar as it offers itself as evidence, rather than illustration.

Notes
1. A picture for me is an object that requires facing, and distinguishes itself from the space of its display by a clearly discernible perimeter.
2. In Literature and the Original Experience , Blanchot states that "...eventually all objects become immaterial, a volatile force in the swift circuit of exchange, the evaporated support of action which is itself pure becoming."