Verisimilitude

Liane Lang


"In a sense, the power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualises by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialties, and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to another. It is easy to understand how the power of the norm functions within a system of formal equality, since within a homogeneity that is the rule, the norm introduces, as a useful imperative and as a result of measurement, all the shading of individual differences." (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 184)

The artist has made her replicas, they are working in the studio. Keeping company, toiling with matter and meaning, suffering the discomfort of the windowless space, the isolation of the studio, the toxic vapours, the life of uncertainty, expressing their empty selves. The artist may now be inanimate or get lost in the crowd of supercilious hecklers and sectarian profiteers, finding the trail of bread crumbs through the thicket of a social moment concerned not with reality but verisimilitude, the perfected artifice.