Hank Ehrenfried
Index

“Here I was, face to face with a nameless painter reaching from the dark to show me what he could do, saying to me as clear as any words, ‘If any part of me survives from time’s corruption, let it be this. For this was the sort of man I was.’”
—J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country

These paintings began with a collage I found in my childhood home that I made when I was eight years old. It is supposed to show a camel walking alone in a desert. (It appears, rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise, in “Turned Camel Collage.”) I remember cutting up the magazine image of a glistening steak and thinking it would make a great stand-in for the camel’s fur. The sky is primarily made of images of the ocean. A cut-up picture of a potato and a photo reproduction of a cave painting comprise the desert floor.

Several years ago I began making collages again, painting them from life as trompe l’oeil. At the time, it nagged at me that this impulse seemed very unlike me, and I worried that my sudden interest in collage was somehow forced or dishonest. I had always been a drawer, filling sketchbooks almost compulsively, so where did the cutting and pasting and hoarding of pictures and books begin? Finding this collage was a reassurance. I am, somehow, still the person I have always been.

My collages are assembled from disparate sources whose primary connector is that they live with me in the studio: rudimentary how-to guides for drawing manga, a book on Poussin, Etruscan pottery and sculptural objects, the color guide for Old Holland oil paints, porcelain from the collection of a small Connecticut museum, Bruce of Los Angeles photographs taken from an archive that lives on Google Drive. These things get shuffled together, cut apart, and folded up. Information on the front of an image is exchanged for the information on its back. Once the assemblage is satisfactory (never for any narrative reason) it is nailed to the studio wall and painted from life. All the physical manipulation of the paper becomes flattened into an illusion, and what information might be implied by a fold or shadow is lost.

An index points. The word is related closely to “indicate,” a term which perhaps better explains the name of the digit—the index finger is the indicator, the pointer. An index gives direction but no definition. It is information without the information. A container that refers elsewhere toward what it explicitly does not hold. It is organized dislocation, a record of the extent to which terms, things, and dates are scattered. An index’s order is an archival farce as an arrangement almost completely removed from the actual order of what it contains. It is a system that is incoherent to the source it scrambles. In an index, you may find that a beefsteak and a camel live side-by-side.