Roberta Allen
1
POINTLESS ARROW
COLLAGES 1972
Arrows indicate direction or placement. Pointless arrows, lines without arrowheads, indicate directional loss or states prior to direction. Pointless arrows drawn on printed office form cut-outs composed of identical units, provide an impersonal framework for containing and isolating paradoxical information. Specifically, printed grids, used to support pre- or post-active situations function as spacial boundaries, obstacles to further change, separating pointless arrows as static measurable marks. Business forms, displaced from familiar contexts, mounted on drawing paper, present juxtapositions: verbal labels confined to drawing paper define images placed within collaged grids.
Pointless arrows as frozen rising and falling energy patterns refer through repetition to Kierkegaard’s idea of endlessness; additions of finite-nesses rather than infinity. Pointless arrows represent suspended states between being as ascent and being as fall.
Images from a very large series.
All works on this page in private collections.
"Allen hints -- with, I think, some humor --at one affinity that art has with lanuage in general: in both cases flexibility derives from a fundamentally arbitrary allusiveness."
--Artforum 1974