Charles Mahaffee – Sentence

During a fluxus performance, live on German TV in 1964, Joseph Beuys built a wooden cabin, covered its floor with felt and greased the corner with margarine. Then he instructed his assistants to write the following sentence on a piece of paper: "Das Schweigen des Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet" ("The silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated.") What did he mean? Duchamp, renowned for his ready-mades, had quitted making art and preferred to play chess. With his banner Beuys expressed his disapproval with Duchamp's "cold" and indifferent silence.

Charles Mahaffee also chose a banner to transmit his own sentence: "The silence of Joseph Beuys is understandable". Actually Beuys didn't speak at all while acting his various performances. But his silence had nothing absolute; it was not meant as repulse. There was no need to speak; all was obvious. So Charles Mahaffee seems to approve the silence of Beuys. He chose the writing on paper to express his comprehension of art.

It is in this harshly insistent intellectual compulsion to reorganize and recode written and spoken codes to an adjusted variation that contains a measure of insular meaning that is in no way independent of the normal coded meaning of the pre-existing structure that I arrive steadily at repetition as an acquired means from its source to dislodge this insistent repetitive definition described without any chronological limitation transpiring between or betwixt reading and defining. (Charles Mahaffee)

So Charles Mahaffee takes words out of context and produces sentences. On the paper phrases of compact meaning or hermetic closeness are repeated over and over again. They form structures of delicate beauty, often surrounded by a frame. The banners are diaphanous so that the viewer could read the words. But they often appear in mirror writing. Charles Mahaffee lifts them up to a higher level of abstraction while taking away their legibility. But the word "sentence" has different meanings: condemnation and penalty are close to the description of a neutral phrase. The banner, symbol of subjective opinion transported in the streets, often have a reduced repertoire in order to degrade the opposers. Thus a simple sentence can be instrument for constructive or destructive aims. Is this the reason why Charles Mahaffee includes his sentence "unable to go" within the contours of a violin?

CHARLES MAHAFFEE, born in Decatur, Georgia, in 1980, received his B.F.A. in 2005 and his M.F.A. in 2007 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been shown in several solo and group exhibitions in Chicago and the US. Mahaffee is also a musician and performer and acted in public performances for example in "I Took up Drawing for the Third Time" in the 1900 Gallery, Chicago, in 2009.

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