So, having been pressured and cajoled by numerous people, here I find myself, Mieke Eerkens, in the blogosphere, blinking about me like a midwestern tourist speeding through Ulaan Baatar in a taxicab. And this, it would seem, is my first entry. But what sort of blog do I want to create? A themed blog? An extremely personal blog? A professional blog? Oh my blog, I haven't a clue...So, I suppose we can leave this entry at a general explanation of the title reference to "Omitist" and "Self-Erasor", words coined by myself (and co-coined by Peter Liebregts, giving credit where due). Years ago, I was walking through the L.A. County Museum of Art, and came across a rather benign painting of mountains entitled "Mountains". Its obviousness left me somewhat limp, and when I left the museum, I couldn't stop thinking about this urge to create a new painting. My version would be called "Mountains", yet would contain only desert and sky, with a huge void where the mountains should be. I thought that the power of omission in such a painting would be far more potent than inclusion. This is, of course, not a new idea. Studying creative writing and literature, I was aware that the elements suggested but never overtly included in a work, carry enormous weight and are often the most important elements to a work's success, critically speaking.

Years later and studying English literature at Leiden University, I often laughed about the seriousness with which those who studied literary criticism discussed various movements and subsets of those movements. I recounted my idea for a work of art based on its omissions, and said I must be an "omitist". This tongue-in-cheek term grew to encompass a number of faux essays and academic letters between Peter and I which would be right at home in any postmodern scholar's journal of literary criticism, down to the obscure subset of Omitists, the "Self-Erasors" (post-omitists?), about which very little is known, strangely...Only the most learned scholars can make any sense of the erased novels and poems of this elusive group and their vast body of erased work.

Levity aside, there is perhaps a nugget of legitimacy in the jest, and I guess I am an omitist at heart. Stephen King wrote  "The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out."  

So without further ado,

 

What did you think of this article?

Liked
Disliked
No Opinion