Mitch Glassman

Art is opti­mistic when it rec­og­nizes the insur­mount­able prob­lem. The task is to step back from our ordered world and rec­og­nize the pos­si­bil­i­ties. For this artist, the chal­lenge has been dis­cerned in the nature of silence and how that unfolds in time and space; and how by serendip­ity it may offer insight.

If min­i­mal­ism aims at doing more with less… and less, than fur­ther still there is the pur­suit of absolute silence. Silence may not have voice but in the artist’s mind it does have lan­guage, ges­ture, time­less text. Mitch Glassman’s mark mak­ing has evolved into a script coined marcog­ra­phy; a seman­tic cod­ing of exis­ten­tial rela­tion­ships; a silent dia­logue reveal­ing rela­tion­ships in nature, sci­ence, poetry and prose; offer­ing an intense affect that may bridge the gap between per­ceived irrec­on­cil­able differences.

If there is truth in the notion (para­phras­ing Gilles Deleuze) that Humans ter­ri­to­ri­al­ize them­selves through lan­guage, then pre-constructed lan­guage deter­ri­to­ri­al­izes us; no longer con­trol­lable or rec­og­niz­able, tak­ing us beyond tem­po­ral­ity… reveal­ing the poten­tial of lan­guage and cul­tures to encounter and cre­ate, rather than rein­force already con­sti­tuted forms.

Mitch Glass­man spent sev­eral months in the Mid­dle East work­ing with Pales­tin­ian and Israeli artists dur­ing the Intifada (2002), and in China and Tibet (1998), dur­ing the efforts of cul­tur­algeno­cide, demon­strat­ing an open sys­tem of lan­guage which tran­scends nation iden­tity. —Mitch Glassman