Metalogue

1987 + 2021 Victor Acevedo
Source: 1987 + 2021 Victor Acevedo

Victor Acevedo

Metalogue ,
Documents
  • Metalogue
    image/jpeg
    1050 × 720
Description
Archival Digital Print, Sizes: 8”x10” and 13”x19” Epson Pigment inks on cotton rag substrate or Light Jet digital photo prints. (plus custom sizes or NFT by special order) Date created: 1987

Metalogue was titled after interdisciplinary anthropologist Gregory Bateson's name for his didactic-allegorical conversations called ‘Metalogues.’ The artist was thinking specifically about one called "Daddy, why do things get in a muddle?". The notion of the metalogue is that the structure of a dialogue, can in fact progressively mirror its own content - thus the two way conversation can also be apprehended as a metalogue.

Looking at the picture: the 'muddle' is evoked with the curious Surrealistic jumble of elements arrayed against a jet-black void. On the left is an "anti-gravity" table suspended in the air replete with a still-life arrangement.

On the right is a little girl standing on (her) daddy's head. This being obscured slightly by a rectangular edge-vector ‘tower’. Acevedo has indicated that the tower was not originally intended to be a stand-alone feature but was a reference to the possibility of the scene being enveloped by a triangulated cubic lattice built from the intersection of the converging and visible perspectival vectors. The top rectangular cell being inscribed by two interpenetrating vector tetrahedra. This is the same structural device the artist used for his 1983 drawing called Void Matrix Moment.

Just left of center in the composition, is a young man (also seen in the Ectoplasmic Kitchen series) frozen in a quizzical-eye-squinted 'praying - mantis' stance. Perhaps he's the perplexed audience-of-one to this dialectic in a muddle.

(excerpted from Acevedo in Context, 40-year career survey 1977-2020 with contributing author Peter Frank and others. To be published in 2022 by Acevedomedia
Keywords
  • aesthetics
    • assembled
    • experimental
    • narrative
    • visual
  • genres
    • digital communities (social network)
    • digital graphics
  • subjects
    • Arts and Visual Culture
    • Body and Psychology
    • History and Memory
  • technology
Technology & Material
Hardware
IBM PC Clone
Software
Pansophic/WestEnd Film : Artworks software
Bibliography