the feather of ma’at

Contributors

Jeremy Fernando, Yanyun Chen, Sara Chong, Gabriela Golder & Mariela Yeregui, Alfredo Jaar, Olivia Joret, Isabel Löfgren, Ruben Pang, Lucía Sbardella, Ashley YK Yeo

Description

This text attempts to address the question, ‘what is the weight of a painting?’ A question that came to me not quite as a question, but as a musing. From a painter nonetheless. And perhaps more significantly, from Ng Joon Kiat, a painter who has long been questioning painting, and not just through the question of ‘what is a painting’, that is the materiality of what is added to, dabbed onto, plastered on, a canvas, on wood, onto aluminium, on a surface, but who is on a quest to explore ‘paint’ itself, on a journey of ‘playing with paint’.

 So, a question that might never quite have been meant for me. Thus, quite possibly only a quest that I am embarking on only because I have heard it as a question, have heard it call out to me, heard its call as a question, have taken it as to be a question, have inscribed the mark of a question on it. Have made it significant because I first started marking on it, have let it weigh on me. 

‘What is the weight of a painting?’

 Which is not the same question as, ‘how much does a painting weigh?’ For that, all you have to do is to get a scale.

 But rather, a question of ‘its weight’: of how much it ‘weighs down’ — not just on you, even as that is certainly part of the question, but perhaps even on itself.

 And where the text opens the possibility that the image is ‘the weightless weight’ one encounters — is the site of a coming-together of the work and the one who stands before it, whether by sight or in the mind’s eye — in the ‘gap between the frame and the viewer’; and like the feather of Ma’at, is the juncture in which judgment occurs, where there is a weighing out, where the status of the work as art is quite possibly weighed up, where there is a weighing in by everyone involved, and where what is considered ‘good’ might well entail an absence of weight.

Back cover blurb

Tackling the question « what is the weight of a painting? » Jeremy Fernando employs his usual expansive approach to lead his readers down a rabbit hole. Beginning with said question and meandering to ruminations on death, Fernando — with characteristically easy languor, as though chatting with friends at a bar — draws on a broad range of thinkers such as Plato, Georges Bataille, Socrates, Hélène Cixous, Adonis, Sara Baume, Werner Hamacher, Catherine Breillat, and Meatloaf, amongst others. Fernando will tell you that it is not so much the destination as it is the journey; in effect, this book invites you to focus less on actually getting at the answer, but to enjoy the literal and metaphorical twists and turns the book takes you on. Better still, Fernando’s text is accompanied by photo reproductions of artworks that make the trip only more remarkable.

 A beautiful book for any kind of day, weather, and time.

 ~ Junni Chen

Reviews

Janice Sim: The Singapore Review of Books

Responses

To look at art, which I do, a lot, is also to engage with it, to allow it to leave its mark and to be open to it quite subtly (and sometimes quite obviously) changing you. In < the feather of Ma’at > Jeremy Fernando invites the reader to pull up a chair, order a drink and sit awhile to ponder the ‘weight of a painting’, what is it that it gives, what is it that it takes and what exactly does it leave behind. Can a painting leave one’s heart weighty or weightless? Fernando will take you on a journey; a hop, skip and a jump of joy as he leads you through the world of a painting introducing thinkers, writers and artists along the way. He will draw you to the ancients giving Plato and Socrates a moment to speak. He muses on Breillat, Bataille and Cixous then allows Meatloaf, Lennon and Depeche Mode to interject, to ‘reach out and touch faith!’ Next he converses with the painters themselves, with Rothko and Rego and creates moments of reflection and illumination with the paintings of Yanyun Chen, Sara Chong, and Ashley YK Yeo, amongst others, allowing his text and their images to play a little, to interact and take time to get to know each other. In the end, he will bring you full circle, back to the beginning, a little lighter or heavier or maybe the scales are perfectly balanced. But you will have been around the world and you will be changed. Which is the whole point.

~ Clare Elson, response to the feather of Ma’at on ‘Snaps Art and Artists’