Well here you have it ladies and gentlemen,

FUCKED

‘BASICALLY’

by Jim Savage ©2024

Artist Statement / The Long Answer.

‘Back Two Basic’

Codes, Symbols and the Written Word

Socrates, 5th century bc, purportedly never wrote and abhorred the advent of writing, believing it would dull the mind. Memory was imbued with music from an oral aural world. Perhaps it was literacy and the dissipation of knowledge away from its true scholars was his concern. I wonder what he would say of the advent of the cyberworld.

Original Signs.

Intrigued as a boy by codes and symbols, I often visited the Ogham stones at theentrance to the Cork museum, an area dense with megalithic structures. I found those massive menhirs, marked with mysterious notches, magical. I learned morse code from my ‘radio ham’ father, tapping out dots and dashes with a practice key of my own and was in first computer programming class in our school in the 70’s. Come university feeding stacks of punch cards into a real live mainframe. The first chair in mathematics at UCC was George Boole of Boolean Algebra fame and Apple had been in Cork since the early seventies. The shift had begun. We were the generation I called the BC/AD’s, ‘before computers/after digital’. We had L.E.D. watches but no calculators. That changed.

Those early days of ogham and morse, basic and fortran, dots and dashes, ones and naughts still fascinate me. Although programming was not my calling, my love of codes, symbols and the written word endures and inflects in much of my work over the years.

My first great synthesis of icons and symbols manifested in the vast mural, ‘It’s Like Jazz’ that I created for the great Japanese designer, Yohji Yamamoto in NYC. I shadowed the ground with a multitude of ancient or extinct scripts, phoenician, ge’ez, micmac, half buried beneath the encaustic, then blazoned the surface with sculpted ancient icons, sacred and profane, taken from the world over, playing early codes and old symbolism off each other in a great dance.

The written word itself has dominated several of my pieces over the years, most notably in ‘MM11’, a divine feminine encaustic piece inspired by the writings of a wanderer to the temples of the Himalayas. ‘Molly’ a joycean piece is made up of 92 ‘yes’s’. As of writing my mind is lately meandering to my earliest fascination, ogham. But first to basic.

‘Ones and Naughts’

The ‘precursor’ to this series, the first of my ‘MainFrame’ pieces, was heralded by my friend Joey Millevolte in the late Nineties. Joey was working I.T. for Citibank at the time and charged with replacing their old mainframe. He asked if I wanted some of it. Rooms full of bays full of cabinets full of motherboards once worth millions were unceremoniously pulled like rotten teeth. I could have filled trucks but settled with the few boxes I could get in a cab. Forty Two of the motherboards fitted perfectly on a panel I had. Auspicious, as I had an interest in the 42 commandments of Ma’at at the time. A city like landscape that I’m currently reworking some hard drives and motherboards are slated for satellite pieces.

While exploring ways to incorporate the hardware with some software an accompanying binary series emerged, destined to have it’s day… and night.

‘Basically’

Exploring opposites, pairing dichotomies and conjugating extremes I’d start with the basics . Up and Down, In and Out, Black and White, Good and Evil. And then November.

Once in a while in an artists career an unconsidered gem manifests itself alongside long planned work, something so prescient or obviously of the emotional zeitgeist it breaks itself into the conscious creative process. I’ve had such treasures, ‘The Makropoulus Case’, ‘BlackHearts’, Angel and ‘Trinity’ stand out. I consider myself fortunate to have had any.

Those moments are not binary, they’re quantum. A miserable year, clawing for materials, studio rent and trying to keep the lights on ended with the election and impending ominous new world order. I’d bound the edges and prepared some heavy watercolor paper for a large goddess charcoal piece and had it affixed to a studio wall. The flash of an idea manacled me for a while and then there it was …. ’BASICALLY’ came into being.

I played with fonts, laid out sizes and soon had a cartoon to work from. This impulse of an idea would be the lynchpin of the series. The perfect millennial sentiment and not ironic in my catalogue.

On December 7th 2024 on the 42 by 55 inch paper, I drew the six sets of eight digit bytes. Innocuous, elegant, minimalist. It reads, FUCKED.

Jim Savage October 2025 New York