Looking at a Printed Page

I may see contemporary society as formed of various flat surfaces (the TV screen, the facade of a building, the billboard, the shop window) which contain, or conceal, meanings (cultural, economic, historical, political, social, etc.) beyond simply their appearance or their physical presence. This printed page is one such surface.

In looking at this printed page I feel a tension between these meanings (which echo the complexity and ungraspability of life within modern capitalism) and the page's existence as an object (a piece of white paper which I can touch and fold and crease and crumple: a thing which makes sense in a confusing, rapidly changing world of events and opinions which can never properly be pinned down and understood).

As I run my fingers across this printed page, and feel the texture of the paper, I wonder whether this involuntary action reflects my desire to own things in this society. To have control over at least something in my life. Even to identify myself with a possession.

In creating the text printed upon this page I respond, consciously or unconsciously, to certain pressures and controls. To such forces as the artworld (whose customs, history and institutions I ignore at my peril). Or the capitalist class system (which places those involved in art in an isolated, middle-class world). Or the modern State (that most powerful and pervasive force which now constricts and directs us all).

The power of the State mainly lies in its formation of an ideology which represents the interests of the ruling class as being my interests, as being 'common sense'. Because the State is a social structure it has become internalised and so, in a sense, I am the State: it exists in my mind and I reproduce it in my daily life. Even as I create this text.

The ideological power of the State derives from those institutions and forms which effect a cultural/educational role and which thus include galleries, colleges, art magazines, the printed page.