* E M P A T H I N C . | SOLO FLIGHT

I focus on bumps on the wall, finding life in a box, your mothers Bauhaus, overworking the space, reading between the lines, 2-D or not 2-D, learning my own rhythm, polyphonies in 11/4 time, holes in the road, more bumps on the wall, misplaced modifiers, palatial space, doubling the exposure, eyesight and earshot, secrets revealed, dotting the T and crossing the street, being clear about abstraction, daring to screw up, carnal knowledge, embracing the mistakes, not getting it all in one piece...Um...selling out, catching up, falling behind, facing death, one foot in the sandbox and one in the shrine, action/reaction, response, responsibility, not holding back, dysphasia, dyspepsia, dyslexia, lysdexia, truth to materials, true voices, desires, habits, addictions, worst headaches, not thinking-just doing, method painting, risking it all, TV, the inside of your mouth, discovery, following the tryst, possessing fear and doubt, dog farts and back streets, the economy of clarity, the lushness of obscurity, the union of opposites, fantasy, curiosity, empty rooms, deprivation, boredom, logic, irony, humor, pain, joy, loss, pleasure, grief, history, ecstasy, activity-spawning ideas.........more activity and more activity, acceptance, rejection, from weakness to asset, camouflaging, mirroring, reverberating, technique taught-----art sought, lust, pride, envy, jealousy, sloth, suspension of disbelief, living in time, finding the loading zone, late for lunch, alpha waves, shock waves, talismans, fetishes, sports, food, cooking, learning, eating, watching, looking seeing.....density, a sense of the aggregate, evidence of life on other planets, TEXAS, a higher being, the back of the bus, the Blues, the source of the Nile, money, politics, Jazz, sex, duct tape, basic instincts, rear speat seakers, dyslexia, half lives, Ohms Law, Mho's hardness scale, the image not the f-stop, where the rage lives, going to the out of my mind, too late to make a long story short, love, telekinesis, Band-Aids, critical thinking, boat drinks, the journey not the destination, the Caribbean, contradiction, oxymorons, paradox, paraducks, erasing the evidence and defacing the norm...........the space.

ART IN AMSTERDAM 2005
A two week artist residency program organized by Charles Goss and Robert Siegelman.

"How is there truth in his image -- the man that he fashioned of snow?"
The Story of Ung by Rudyard Kipling

EMPATHINC. 2005 – Rationalists focus on what they call necessary truth. They declare that certain things are necessarily true, always, universally. A priori truth. A priori truth (Latin for "beforehand") is something you know must be true before you even start looking at the world revealed by the senses.

The most basic form of necessary truth is the self-evident truth. Self-evident means you don’t really even have to think about it. It has to be true. The truths of mathematics, for example, are often thought of as self-evident. One plus one equals two. And yet when you analyze this self-evident truth, it is possible to consider that this simple calculation leaves out the relationship of the items counted as signified in the words/operations ‘plus’ and ‘Equals’. In this case the self-evident “truth” only speaks to one level of accounting. Furthermore, if self-evident truth is defined as truth that is "evident in itself without proof or reasoning," the truth does not proceed from the rational examination of the pertinent facts or concepts and therefore is not the product of an intellect’s reason. It is thought that these truths should be so obvious, so rational, and so morally sound that their authenticity is beyond reasonable dispute.

The phrase "self-evident truth" has a particular meaning in the Western philosophical tradition. It means a proposition whose truth is known as soon as the definitions of the terms in question are known. This would indicate that the truth might not be known without context. Without an understanding of the environment that this truth must occupy, the truth evidenced has no self to relate to. It becomes free floating – opinion. This is indicated in the language utilized by the framers of the American Constitution. Thomas Jefferson made some assumptions about truth as revealed in his phrase "self evident truths": he assumed his audience shared this concept of truth.

In 1933 the Polish logician Alfred Tarski published a paper in which he discussed the criteria that a definition of ‘true sentence’ should meet, and gave examples of several such definitions for particular formal languages. It is said that a language is fully interpreted if all its sentences have meanings that make them either true or false. The semantic theory of truth holds that any assertion that a proposition is true can be made only as a formal requirement regarding the language in which the proposition itself is expressed. Tarski's Indefinablity Theorem, roughly states that the concept of "truth" for the sentences of a given language cannot consistently be defined within that languageIt is often expected that an artist must develop and present a sensorized language that is at the same time both a personal and a “universal” expression of intent or observation. Under this burden of expectation the artist can only attempt to access what may be perceived as a truth, or the truth or even THE TRUTH. Capital “T” Truth. And yet, in a culture where the idea of truth is often defined in terms of that which is not true, or where the idea of truth is denigrated to a stream of ‘satisfactory’ information, the ensuing language may do well to be more concerned with a specific accuracy than the truth. Many truths are spoken with ferocious attachment and certitude. They become precious not as mandates or opportunities to be true, but as rigid stances. In dialoguing within the boundaries established by these stances, it is often necessary to develop another vernacular altogether. This is where a possibility of truth may exist, and uses the strategies of metaphor, appropriation and decoys.

Artist and critic Martha Rosler has said that her work is a series of decoys. A work masquerades as one thing, "but the more you look at it, the more you see that it's asking you to think about something else." By using the odd and seemingly innocuous image of a duck decoy within an individualized and particular language, artist Charles Goss is able to bring to question issues of truth and how it may play against issues of accuracy. The actual physical nature of the pieces speaks less to collage and more to a resourceful cobbling together of bits and pieces of visual information. In his collections of lists and personal artifacts, Goss presents a ‘self-portrait’ that allows not just a glimpse into his own habits, follies, and duties – it accurately develops a language that is clear in it’s portrayal of a type of humanity. While this may not qualify as a universal truth, it does qualify as an accurate portrayal of one truth.

This type of collection and investigation becomes then necessary for any ‘true’ evaluation of that which is or may be true. Its symbolic imagery allows for a possibility of dialogue regarding truth and the expressions of truth rather than a didactic diatribe on what truth is.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these
are Life, Liberty,and the Pursuit of Happiness ...

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