The Reed library also had back issues of these magazines, so I went searching for more information about Bartlett.  Here I found quite a bit about an exhibition some five years earlier titled “Rhapsody.”  It consisted of an enormous installation of 987 one foot square steel plates.  Each plate had a unique image on it.  The images consisted of a number of variations of ways of representing four subjects: trees, houses, mountains, and ocean.  The plates were arranged in sequence, seven plates high and extending for literally over one hundred feet.  The subject was about the transition and the interplay between the four motifs of things represented and the styles of representation.  One thing that really caught my attention was Bartlett’s assertion that “Rhapsody” was as much about the space between the plates as the plates themselves.  “Ah-Hah! This is a conceptual comic book!!” I thought to myself.



In the Fall of 1981 I had been briefly obsessed with the idea of reducing comic book frames to their barest elements: a Rothko-esque circle or a square, a perspective system (2 or 3 point perspective vanishing points), a frame that simply meant “Stop” or “Go.” I had even had an especially vivid dream of existing within comic book frames. All the frames in my dream were orange; perhaps, I had spent too much time in acting class doing exercises like pretending to make the sound that a blue vase might make. Whatever the reason, the plates in “Rhapsody” that consisted of solid color (like orange) or simple shapes seemed like they were trying to get at the same thing I had been thinking of.  There is nothing like projecting one’s own pretensions onto a well disciplined and talented other to boost one’s self esteem.



During much of the time I was working on this project Bartlett’s “In the Garden” was being shown in ways that seemed to reinvent it.  I was always on the look out for news of her work.  There was finally even a huge “mural” consisting of those one foot metal plates.  The plates, again, had that “empty space” between them that so much interested me in “Rhapsody.”  But they seemed to function like a mosaic to create 4 huge images, again - of that same garden: conceptual and figurative all at once.  At least this had been my somewhat willful take on it.

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Remember, at the time, I was unable to draw even basic figures; but there were some things that I could draw (kind of).  Maybe if I made these things that I could successfully draw (beds, buildings, cameras, cars, cassette tapes, clocks, etc.) into the “motifs” of my project, then I might be able to create a kind of systemic representation of concepts.  Yes, there would be symbols (and their overt “romance”); but what success I might have would be about showing how these various symbols (and their various visual manifestations) were like and not like one another.  OK, I wasn’t skilled enough to create a narrative; but maybe creating 40-50 pages of a series of “dynamics” might be a substitute for this kind of conventional narrative.  Hah! Who needs conventional narrative anyway?!  I realized that my little visual sequence would be highly unconventional (even boring); but at least I could have this rather pretentious aspiration as a fall back rationalization for what I was trying to.