Reading Deleuze and stuff, I frequently get to a point of utter incomprehension. I see words, and related words, whole sentences, and can make no sensible connections. I read and read again, and progress is slow. It disappoints me to find myself in such a position with all that it implies of my mental faculties. And yet to be in this position is itself interesting. Sometimes my incomprehension seems so profound that all I have left is to smile at it. It is an experience of the sublime. I hope that coming to understand something is an evolutionary process; given appropriate experience, the light will turn itself on; understanding is not something that you do, but something that happens to you. So with the Cake as Art, I don’t know if there is anything sensible in it, or if it was simply a perverse thought on a particularly grumpy day. I continue to ponder on it; it is a little self destructive, maybe even a form of mental self-harming, in its potential for the ridiculous. But we have no power over our next thought until after it is born. In a sense I am trying out thoughts on the Cake, to see if they might make sense, to see what happens to me if I trust them to tell me something. Something totally unexpected might happen.
In a world of signs, where visual qualities seem to become irrelevant, the cake as signifier has a place. Its visual qualities drop away leaving a sign And paradoxically the visual qualities of the cake become the source of its being. The cake demands meaning. Its everyday social use is wrapped in its significance as cultural signifier; the cake becomes Art when the wrapping is exposed. In Asda today I made a point of looking. It is a visually harsh place, red and green in a visual clattering over the aisles, but as far as you can get from John Hoyland. The latest slogan is ‘Chosen by You’ signifying, ‘Do as The Label Tells You.’
