It’s not for the artist to make sense of the world’s absurdity, but to be the authentic witness to its diversity. Art is not an instrument of understanding, but of consciousness. It is the presentation of the sensuous, the carnal made concrete. Armitage’s later works are drawings of the flesh, conflicts of bones and flesh, of the skeletal and the visceral, and they signify nothing more than the absurdity of the body that the human spirit is condemned to occupy… forms as a protest against the absurdity and finite limitations of existence. These are all phantoms, images of helplessness, yet they are effective by virtue of their expression and their deep meaning.
There is no end to this gallery of the metamorphosis of human representation. The complexity of modern life, the vulnerability of modern man worked directly and more abruptly than in earlier times. Are we witnessing a disintegration and annihilation of the human figure, of the equation with soulless mechanisms, machines and automatons? Is this the reflection of a dehumanization in the age of atomic energy and cybernetics? - Tragic desire for “unmasking” …stranded survivors. …In conformity with the universal occurrence, ugliness, dissonance and evil penetrant art …lost in the infinity of space geometry. “The iconography of despair” and challenge… “images of flight, of ‘ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas’, of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear.” (adapted from Herbert Read and T.S. Eliot)
For, the origin of all the programed directed machines remains the creative, perceptive substance of human thought. - Karl Tabéry (written sometime in the mid to late 1950’s)
