Translation of Found Cosmologies
By Crichton Atkinson
Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi:
The artists Sam Bornstein, T.B. Lambergini, The Late Propagandist Dr. Richard M. Money, Devin Powers, and Rachel Schragis take found structures and repurpose them for original ends. These repeated languages were picked up by the artists and exist outside of their use but are adopted to express a singular idea.
Sam Bornstein paints imagined structures based on puzzles, infographics, heraldry, and other non-written sign systems. T.B. Lambergini’s drawings are a perverse bricolage of cultural icons. The Late Propagandist Dr. Richard M. Money combines Brut, Povera and Pop sources in a profane union aimed at uprooting and irrevocably curdifying the Real. Devin Powers uses the strictness of geometry to delicately graph ideal forms and objective materials, and Rachel Schragis takes the construction of flow charts, normally associated with business, to make visuals that lend power to social movements for political, economic, and ecological change.
De-Script:
The show’s title alludes to the singularity of a voice, similar to the personal quality of handwriting (script), as opposed to its opposite (de), which would be coded uniformity or anything repeatable such as language, typing, and mechanical production. We give descriptions of what we encounter by bending the duplicated sign to our intention, and that is what the artists in this show have done. They are like scribes in that their work exists inside of a context, to get the joke or understand the meaning you have to have been a witness to the subjects they have chosen to speak through. This independent expression in an age of reproduction is a little like David vs. Goliath, or an entrepreneur in American capitalism, or Jean-Luc Picard taking on The Borg—the artist’s perspective is a counterpoint to dogmas that are oftentimes problematic.
Script:
Handwriting, as opposed to typing, is unique to everyone. You can figure a lot out about a person by the way they write. Graphology is the study of handwriting used to infer a person’s character and whether it is accurate or not we all understand that there is an endearing personal quality to the hand that the machine erases. I have letters from loved ones who have passed and their handwriting gives me a sense of their life. The humanity in their penmanship, the time it took for them to move the writing utensil along the page. The rhythm and pattern of their body’s acquired strokes, the learning and years they spent as a child in school. Their penmanship adhering to either practicality or aesthetics, their pace in the moment that they wrote it—was it an intentional letter or a rushed note? Either way, handwriting traces the body and therefore the mind and we sense the singularity of both the person and an instant.
De:
There is a difference between communication and language. Communication can be a singular expression, nuanced and specific, whereas language has to be repeatable and therefore generic. Fortunately, language, as shorthand for exchanging information, can be reframed, broken, and bent. Language is not just verbal, art history is a language in itself, schools of thought designating styles and content. The artist that communicates something necessary learns that they must eat their masters. The teacher who taught them about structure and form, about style and the code of saying something right must be put aside. The artist is a maverick and as such they have to be willing to simultaneously admire and destroy their teachers, the forms that brought them up will also cage them.Craftwork Machine:
Using their hand to mark the surface the artists in De-Script craft their intentions uniquely during an age dedicated to manufacturing products and uprooting the subjectivity of the artist. These handwritten images draw the story of applied time, the body directly tracing the psyche. They intensify with purpose transgressions of the norm.
In the past, perfecting representation limited the artistic genius into a style, but ideas have replaced craftsmanship, thank you Duchamp, and an artist’s signature style has transformed from a byproduct of the hand into a vehicle for a concept. The factory of Andy Warhol was an extension of the market that transformed production into teams of assistants, repetition of subjects, and industrial manufacturing. The hollowness of duplication replaced the one-of-a-kind masterpiece. This is not unlike other systems where multiplicity irrevocably changes specificity, similar to Stein’s ‘Rose, is a rose, is a rose’, or high school lovers who refuse the pollution of defiling their love with its sign.
De-Sign:
As we move into a media age it is good to consider the passivity of social organization. What are the moral consequences of identifying by what we find vs. what we do? Graphic design has had a resurgence with the availability of new media. It is not a coincidence that Mad Men, a TV show about advertising during the design era of the 1960s, is popular during a technology boom that makes design affordable and common. From Apple to Ikea, Photoshop to Blogger, consumerism has reached a tipping point where a product has to be affordable, user friendly, and aesthetic. Beauty and simplicity have always been in dialogue but this time the paring down is taking objects out of the physical realm into the strictly visual. The cleanliness of digitizing your photo albums is also a loss of a tactile experience, and we give an emotional weight to objects that images will never be able to possess. What I see and what I touch are two completely different relationships. This is not to say that all organization breeds distance, but it is good to know what we are trading. Organization can eliminate specificity but art stands up as a radical force in a landscape of consumer passivity, the lack of personal agency has a sneaky hand in reproduction.
Handwriting:
Hand painted signs say something about economy and community. How many hand painted signs do you see everyday? Does typography give us a sense of trust? Does the ability to afford the cost of printing say something about the quality of a product? There is a smallness associated with handwriting, drawing, and painting that locates the writer as a body. The product stays attached to the person who made it or sells it and the consumer is forced to acknowledge them. Design, organization, and corporations dehumanize the encounter of exchange leaving the consumer in a wonderland of goods where they barely engage with other people.
Most consumer products provide us with our greatest luxuries— identity and seclusion. We socialize to provide for our needs, but if we can get products without dealing with other people it is easier, simpler. The perfect example is in transportation where the EZ Pass is replacing the tollbooth operator, when given a choice most people chose the economy of the machine. When there is an option to buy train tickets with a person or a ticketing booth the consumer would rather be alone. These are examples of the ultimate capitalist prize—product and privacy.
Mass marketing and media have the ability to reach a large population, but quantity and distribution aren’t always as ethical as quality. Maybe the only privatization in an evolving landscape of disposability is the luxury of a singular expression.
Language:
Every human is unique yet our body machines give us similar desires, goals, needs, and social conformities. You can’t get what you want from Mama unless you learn to say ‘baba’. Language has always been a system of exchange across the inherent boundary between two people, or between one and many, and thus it is the basis of social and cultural structuring. The illusive film that distinguishes privacy from alterity has its shortest link in language where we bend the word to our will and bidding. We communicate in a thousand ways and we can understand what others mean without speaking, but symbolic language requires uniformity, it must be able to gesture the same way twice. We communicate with all of our senses, but formal language is capable of repetition based on our commonality and it breads renewal in the speaker, the listener, the writer, and the reader. Our minds are changed by languages structure and we develop in thanks to what it conveys.
The mechanical bond of language and its ability to produce is a major component of cultural identity. Language provides the framework that we are born into but it also gives us the tools for rebellion.
Revolution:
Rachael Schragis uses her artwork for political means, going beyond the social liberties of communication into the realm of radical discourse. You might recognize her work from the Occupy Wall Street movement where she co-opted flow charts, normally associated with business, to evoke change in the biased economy of American capitalism. It is fitting that this rizomatic political structure, created by a multiplicity of voices and bodies gathering in the streets, would use a web-like chart as its visual icon. Her chart favors the dissemination of information above a strictly aesthetic, visual, or problematically concise emblem. From afar, the repeated logo was a flowery swirl of hand drawn lines, words, and compartments, but on further inspection a universe opens up to reveal possibilities for social reorganization and equality.Cheap Revolution:
Like other activists such as Bread and Puppet, Schragis uses rudimentary materials. The cost of her supplies is minor—Sharpie, paper, and printing. Like her predecessors, the content is handled with a touch of playfulness and sincerity to deliver the heavy drama of facts. The cheapness of the materials is political in itself, facts belong to everyone and anyone can express themselves with paper and pen.
Vocabulary:
Everything will change and everything has potential.
Systems are managed by the simple actions of normal people who struggle through the day and are fooled by unseen forces. Movements are a great reminder that there is nothing constant or stable in an economy or state. The consistency of government is a choice, the uprisings that have swept the globe in the recent years are the perfect example of the power of the streets, from Greece to Egypt, Turkey to New York, people have collected under the banner of a cause. The power of public assembly has changed our vocabulary. Now that an example has been made about the power of organizing, people have the terms to talk publicly about dissatisfaction with the government. Occupy Wall Street taught us in a contemporary way how to talk about uniting through dissent.
Arrows and Laurels:
It is not the strengths, but the duration of great sentiments that make great men.
–Nietzche
History is defined by its uprisings marking the turnovers of power. The American eagle clutches in its talons the arrows of war and the laurels of peace—the power of the state is between turbulence and calm. Activists are a part of that, the measurement between taking up arms and providing safety. History might archive the human condition by the stories of war more than the stories of peace, but it is the artwork, the emblem of excess, that leaves traces of culture and defines the past. The human trail is buried in the dirt on shards of pots and stuffed in tombs. With all the life and activity on this earth, we track it as a story in time by art and by politics, and it is interesting that Schragis is active through both.
The popularity contest that accompanies art also applies to politics, here one day, gone the next, yesterday’s news. As such, these fashions define the culture of their times, like the cave paintings in Lascaux, our markings become our history.
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes:
Artwork often falls short in its ability to actually change anything. There is a natural politicizing in all forms of cultural display—the body that describes itself is standing for a position. But the ability to ignite others, to stretch the process of your motto past the borders of consumerism—that crafty industry whereby the viewer is passive and the commentator active—is normally where the exchange ends. With Schragis the object is a conduit for the action of others, it is visual, informative, it has vitality and a spark. The flow charts inspire action, not awe, and it is this intention and result of an object that ultimately describes its purpose far beyond the borders of its beauty or its form.
Flux/Flow:
The first and last thing required of genius is the love of truth. –Goethe
The flow chart is a public and personal research, an informed public stance and a personal one. The author of these charts has not abstracted herself into a bodiless objective observer. Similar to anthropologists observing and influencing other cultures, it is considerate to acknowledge your position when discussing a collective, to not pretend that the platform of your perspective is capable of magical neutrality. While a certain moral stance comes from the middle road, the observing party always holds power over the subject of their gaze. The storyteller has the last say. In an era of Fox News opinion propaganda and an onslaught of blogs and subjective reporting, it’s refreshing that the author of these flow charts is self-aware. She is standing as a voice for Occupy Wall Street, but her framework is both for a horizontal interconnected equality and as a singular agent, a humble royal We.
Ideal Form:
The activism charted by Schragis is similar to the web-like cartography of Devin Powers in that they are both organizing ideal states. Powers uses geometry to imagine perfection and the infinite. His geometric illustrations are one way of envisioning that which does not exist but reflects human perfection. The line is the most basic yet profound invention we have. Just as the wheel transformed human society, or the reasoning behind bombing ball bearing factories in WWII, it is often the profoundly common, overlooked, and simple devices that change the world.
The line is our organizational tool that gives us everything else. Imagine a sci-fi reality where humans never conceived of the straight line, the visual landscape of production would be completely different, our whole process of thinking would have a transformed, dynamic shape. Our homes, streets, the paper we write on, the chair we sit in, the computer, the microchip are all in thanks to the straight line.
The line stands for correctness, directness, and clarity. It symbolizes connection, it maps the distance between two points. The line stands as a model for the unfathomable and the mundane. We construct our logic in relationship to connections, the synaptic availability of this makes that, cause and effect, one thing leading to another, as though on a timeline. The process of our mind is often illustrated as a network, lines uniting points. We learn by grouping, finding relationships, distinguishing one thing from another, the line is our means of organization.
Order/Chaos:
The line made the word and the word made God.
The word passes along what others have seen. The word conjures images like deities, an outline of something nonexistent that guides our actions. Our idealism tries to protect us—the line steps in as a superhero leading us from the formless void of chaos with the tools of creation. Out of innumerability and disorder the line is born creating geometric order, the intangible's map, understanding starts to appear from the confusion, a light from the dark halls of space.
The tragedy is that life is not as simple as the art that defines it. Art like geometry is another reality—it is an alternate source with an internal logic. Fracturing the tangible with art and geometry symbolizes our higher thinking. Abstraction has something to do with patterns that can’t be tracked or predetermined. There are more potential synaptic connections in our brains than there are atoms in the universe, so it is remarkable that we can begin to illuminate our silent corridors with shared signs. Geometry is our attempt to grasp the out-of-control transitions of space and time. Powers' drawings are expansive, like thought, like space, illustrating just a fraction of the possible through diagrams that are simultaneously holy and scientific. They stand for nothing in particular, but they trigger thoughts of the boundary between concept and reality, mind and body.
Unity/Distinction:
The line says that structure can be achieved. The line retaliates against negative forces and protects us. It stands in for all logic, systematizing and imprinting our schema over the uniqueness of the world as it is. Symbolically the line unites and delineates, the line breaks one into two, two into four, it corrals and separates. Lines are drawn in the sand, lines mark the border, they create culture, grouping, we symbolically decipher difference and distinction.
Nature/Industry:
The crystalline form draws straight lines in nature but the perfect line is rare. The line is the language of humanity and industry. The line allows construction despite decay, building control in opposition to entropy. The line marks humanity’s need from nature, it renders useful that which would otherwise be complicated. It simplifies, aids, suits our growth, our survival, our will.
The line, when connected to other lines creates an enclosure, the division of an interior from an exterior. Three lines compose the triangle which is inside every home and bridge in the industrialized world. Four lines compose the diamond, or the ultimate shapes of utility—the rectangle and the square.
Symbol Machine:
Inside the trapping of the canvas these lines and triangles speak of an expansion beyond their necessary limitation. We can imagine the pattern extending without stopping. The mind holds many concepts that can't exist in tangible or simple ways, such as the idea of eternity. Math is our international language to decipher the largest, most intangible concepts. Math is the human translation of a void that gives us access to reality beyond the sensory or the tactile.
In contrast to his perfect geometry, Powers' ink is smudged from adjusting the ruler. This lack of control reveals an appreciation of the immediate and physical, the drawings are absolutely material. Powers’ images reveal the magic trick behind the subject, the act of representing utopia with the absolute thereness of the inks application. Powers grabs the impalpable and ties it to the here and now, to the basic objective truth of the object without reference, where the canvas as a three-dimensional form is the body of a symbol machine.
Physical Code:
This appreciation of materials and devotion to symbolism also appears with imagination and grace in the paintings of Sam Bornstein. Heraldry has been used for centuries to define the moral virtues of a family. The real and imagined animals, buildings, plants, and objects take on a resonance and symbolism that far exceed their image. They allowed the illiterate and the literate to understand territories and allegiances through a language of illustration. Signing the things in themselves is the basic principle in Bornstein’s paintings. If you can take a dragon, a castle, and a griffin to form a family crest, then you can expand that magical vocabulary to include the hammer, the gun, or the Dalecarlian Horse. The objects seem random and purposeful at the same time and it raises questions about our basic relationship to sounds and images that we have formatted into our linguistic codes.
English Teacher:
We adapt to communicate physically and verbally with others. The baby reaches out and feels the mother long before she sees the mother, speaks the mother, or writes the mother. By Bornstein distancing the relationship between the object and its use, he brings us back outside these common things to once again, if only slightly, return them to a material state outside of purpose. What is language without practice but a simple dead object waiting to be interpreted, abused, or adored? Language bends us as much as we bend language. Its meaning is performed by the writer, the speaker, the reader, and the listener. It changes thought patterns through observation and application of its form.
We become the dream product of language’s usefulness and construction. That English teacher long ago who desired you to write correctly was only wrong in forgetting to say why. She taught the faith of English, but the writer must know how to break the formula of correctness correctly. In the same way the painter as a writer of objects has the right to take heraldry and transcend its classical history into a contemporary use. Objects applied to the territory of language find a broken home in Bornstein’s odd no-man’s-land.
All language is a metaphor derived originally from a material in action or from observation of occurrences. The same way that the Greeks personified abstract ideas such as The Fates, we can examine the embodying symbol.
Can we take away the make, model, or practice of Bornstein's gun? Its brutality remains though its location and interrelationship to the other objects takes place in a void. Normally relationships give us content but here it seems to draw attention to the objects as they stand alone, singular, without a relationship to anything. The generic perfection of his forms sign their uniqueness and their ideal. The hammer you see in his painting is not unlike the hammer you envision in your minds eye when you think ‘hammer’.
Celebrity Code:
The universal language of objects as they are brings us to the culturally specific montages of T.B. Lamborgini. These humorous depictions of celebrities are a relieving and demented conversation with American TV, film, and music. In Lamborgini’s drawings cultural icons are staged in a relationship to one another creating a commentary on the pervasiveness and everydayness of the characters and personas represented in the media. We have Annie from Misery taking a sledgehammer to the fluxus duo Yoko Ono and John Lennon promoting their Bed Peace. In contrast to their calmness is a brutal predator, like a cultural blender gone haywire, these responses to the everydayness of pop culture point out how vivid a mythology the personas have created for us. There is a moral vocabulary in celebrity that is something between reality and fiction, the beloved space that keeps the viewer in control while remaining passive, socialized yet alone. It is a reminder that images as propaganda can deliver any message they choose.
Celebrity Myth:
The love associated with John and Yoko is exaggerated by the brutality of Annie whose fictional nature makes the scenario extremely tongue-and-cheek. The lighthearted response to the perversion of celebrity inception embraces the strangers as mythological beings, not too different from the Greek gods, each one personifying different character traits of the human condition but this time in the framework of consumer desire. The true celebrity is located in the purgatory between wo/man and the immortals. They become our dollies, avatars standing in for the angels and demons of our nature.
Annie attacking the passive John and Yoko is similar to the playground of destruction that we encourage our celebrities to delight in for our pleasure. Like the mischief of the immortals, they personify what all capitalist objects aim to do, distract us from the senselessness of the real. The narrative of celebrity creates a common denominator between people, they give us the power of a shared subject. Woody Allen, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Cloe Sevigny are simultaneously strangers and household names. They guide us in our average lives, glamorizing the otherwise mundane duties such as putting on clothes or styling ones hair. Suddenly there is a theater to the simple, a shared social construct of beauty and organization, to look good in response to masculinity or femininity as a shared sexual object, or to define yourself in opposition to it.
Either way celebrities are a commodity, they are the object created when the fake collides with the everyday. TV and film take what is actually in front of the camera and make it lie, twist it to delight and perform magic tricks, illusions that we can feel better than, ones that turn us on, make us afraid, essentially becoming a replacement for lived experience. We give media our most cherished possession, our time, in return for the treasures of distraction and entertainment. Some people spend more time with their favorite TV shows than they do with their own families. The television is a replacement family, a comforting mother, a watchful nanny, a commanding father, a playful companion. We bring these public personas into our most private places, the living room, the bedroom, interior locations reserved for family and friends.
Celebrity Vessel:
The repeated image starts to form a resonance as we ascribe connotations to its persona. There are certain celebrities you would never see together because they start to represent different archetypes—the bad-boy, the social activist, the tragic downfall seeking attention, the drug addict scientologist, the attractive father figure, the naive girl next door. We know them not as people but as icons, empty vessels to be filled by the waters of the media conforming to any shape that suits the public’s needs. They regale us yet we can kick them when they’re down and spit in their face. They are better than us and they give us something in our helpless lives to feel better than. Elevated on the cloud of media's familiarity they have flexibility to be both devil and saint, the more highs and lows the more we pay attention to them. One might argue that breakdowns, divorces, and expensive weddings are a side project of their jobs. They play out the stories we are all interested in but would never care to live as we plod along in our regulated lives, going down the same roads to the same old places.
Celebrity is the mechanical drug that elevates our mechanical service to a mechanized society. We need these gods to fall in love and spurn each other, their auto-production allows them to do the ultimate act that we can’t do of staying young forever. We watch their plastic aging like a clock that helps us recognize our own development, a mirror of life marching down the path of mortality. But Annie from Misery can be played again, our own past interest alive in the present with just as much ferocity and cunning as she had in 1990.
Celebrity Hieroglyph:
Lambergini asks you to have been a watcher in American culture to get his wink-winks. TV is a coded dialogue of experience, we have given our time and body into a repeatable experience, a shared rise and fall of constructed expressions. There are places where people don’t know what Lambergini is talking about, parts of the world where the economy of American storytelling has yet to reach. In those spatially attuned minds that know nothing of our two-dimensional entertainment pollution, these images lack a referent. The passivity of the TV has astronomical effects—it creates killers, it talks nations into war while Presidents pose with animals and children. Politicians and news anchors take notable pauses and definite tones to signal their trustworthiness and strength, but the performance of the media is very dangerous.
Lambergini isolates TV, film, and celebrity as a system, a language of cultural sources that we can be in dialogue with. He responds as someone laughing at the absurdity of these common yet strange creatures. In pointing out how crazy it is that celebrity is a part of our lives he gives a visceral humanity to our relationship to these people and to our attunement to spectacle. Besides, violence is not perverse if it is justified, or so TV told me.
Speech, Speech, Speech:
And still we speak, we speak aloud, all unaware of the nature of those beings that we are. And of him who does not speak according to the rules of language, the men of reason that we must be assert that he is mad. –Bataille
The Late Propagandist Dr. Richard M. Money is a hack schizophrenic who returns respect to the lost history of outsider art. Many of the drawings are direct quotes from people who murdered their father because they thought he was the devil, or killed themselves so as to not poison their brother with their breath- people who burned down churches, people who thought they were God. He is not elevating schizophrenia or childishness above being sane, but he is giving a platform for all expression to be legitimate. High or low art is defined by culture where there is no restriction to what an artist can quote.
Warhol’s silkscreens, like the soup cans he represented, were repeated into meaning nothing. This repetition is similar to saying something over and over again until it stops making sense, separating the sign from the signifier, returning the word to being an object. This is like the body of one child machine outputting similar drawings to another. While the sketch of a child is a singular expression their hand is not learned enough to manipulate exactly or uniquely. The authorship of one child’s work as opposed to another is indecipherable. We all pass through the training of our body, so we speak a similar language. The beauty of the human machine is that we have all been there, at one time Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, John James Audubon, Norman Rockwell, and Kehinde Wiley could only scribble—no one is born a master of anything.
Without tools to describe our hidden uniqueness we arrive on the surface of the page as scratches, brutally striving to express our intricate thoughts. The outsider artist’s ‘expressive strokes’ are attempts to reveal and a failure to accomplish. The brutal gestures speak more for themselves than the interior necessity of the author. It is often for acceptance that we succumb to recognizable forms, like the butterfly drawn by Dr. Money’s mother, included in one of the panels. We have seen that same loopy butterfly a thousand times so it is both safe and dangerously absent. Whether it is a generic illustration, or intellectual terms like ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’, we learn to control ourselves to speak and think in repeated forms due to shame or fear at what we cannot do well. To hide our incapability we socialize, slipping on discernible symbols we can repeat and agree upon.
Doctor Freuden (Freud/Freude):
German- ‘freuden’, English- ‘joys, delights’
These mental disorders are only accessible to therapeutic influence when they can be recognized as subsidiary effects of what is otherwise an organic illness. This is the gap which psycho-analysis seeks to fill. It tries to give psychiatry its missing psychological foundation. –Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
For psychoanalysis, to proceed technically is to proceed like a detective. Its economics is inseparable from a semantics. This is why there are no “facts” nor any observation of “facts” in psychoanalysis but rather the interpretation of a narrated history.
–Paul Ricouer, Technique and Nontechnique in Interpretation
Who is Dr. Money anyway? What is identity, or false identity, or pseudonym? Fake self, impersonation, invention, qualifier? There is no self. There is no perceivable truth. We are vessels that find and claim. We collect information like the Bowerbird decorates its nest to attract mates.
Dr. Money uses bad puns and sloppy materials- nothing is too lowly or shitty for him. His hand moves quickly, is he conjuring the devil, why does he piss on the canon? The smudges could be the hand of a child, a lunatic, an imbecile. It is reminiscent of Shakespeare's King Lear where the fool speaks the profound from the demoralized position of naivety.
Bastard child, negligent, erratic.
What the intellectual neglects the child can conceive with clarity, after all the learned Dr. Faust burned his books in exchange for youth. The hallways of thought are ripe for connection in the over stimulated mind of a child. The untamed leaves room for multiplicity. The baby can crawl through life unaffected by pattern, taste and touch without the previous encounter to spoil the experience with answers.
The child cries to describe a complex experience without comfort, an exclamation without the refinement of language. Their nervous system is in hyper drive, churning with adrenaline from instances that an adult judges as trivial. We shrug off the kid or hold them tight without really understanding the reason behind their suffering. This sensitivity to their environment is untamed and desiring, it is manic and brave. The wandering child, loose and free--could it be in-tune enough, capable enough, to survive without an adult assuring that this is being made into that?
I(.)d(.):
Crazy—is it in you, or of you?
Another body, another mind, your body, your mind, possibilities.
Habitat:
Habit.
Technik* and Lawlessness:
*While English distinguishes between “technique” and “technology”, the German word Technik means both.
I had to acknowledge that I was not capable of forming a story out of these events. I had lost the sense of the story; that happens in a good many illnesses. –The Madness of Day, Maurice Blanchot
The same way the schizophrenic falls through the stasis of a rational mind, the child carves alternative realities without the restriction of correctness. This liberty of ‘wrongness’ is one part of Dr. Money’s use of the line. His purposeful crack in the cohesion of craftsmanship is the ultimate control, to not be a schizophrenic, or a child, but to behave like one. To have the liberty to imagine sprawl from a distance, the unstructured observed from the safety of structure. Dr. Money honors the ones he speaks about, enough to say them, enough to hold their stimulated bodies and shape his form to their form.
The time that the doctor spends with each subject is less about the application of the hand running vigorously over the page in furious streaks of power and powerlessness—it is an application of time spent in study absorbing words and complexities. Dr. Money spends his hours wearing the mask of these patients, to conform to their behavior, retracing their body’s movements. He repeats the images he finds in psychology books. He quotes the actions of the insane. The language and gesture of the patients displaces the doctor’s behavior into an anterior space. Language is the third mask, the second is the gesture that bore the insane person into history, and the first is the face or the face of another.
The regression in the doctor’s exaltation of brut, art povera, or outsider art makes his quoting post-outsider, an educated man interested in creating equality between high art and low art, and presenting the stories of people who struggled with sanity. There are many levels of repression at play. Repression of representation by cultural institutions that define what is and what is not justified to present. Repression of individuals into asylums, their stories locked away from the functioning of the rest of society. Repression of the id into the ego. Repression of desire into socialization. The private repressed by the public, technik overriding lawlessness.
The family triangle of mom, pop, and baby can be applied innumerably, phallus-to-tit-to-womb, all will, desire, and libidinal flow. Anti-Freud. Freud organizes the chaos of schizophrenia into his own map. Implanting his visuals inside his reporting, translating ephemeral subjects into codified structures that say just as much about the author as they do about the psychoanalyzed. Freud is speaching the unspeachable. The schizophrenic is irrational, tortured by their visions, without law, without land. Lacking habit and habitat, wondering through a sauvage landscape like Oedipus kicked out of Thebes. Blinded by his own hands, the king’s eyes faced inward. He could see only his mind’s eye while his hands retrieved the feeling of the world translated through darkness. The schizophrenic’s eyes are turned in the same direction, outside of socialization the schizophrenic is also an outcast, alone as a God burning churches and preaching the Gospel of Anarchy. The law of logic is ignored in the schizophrenic, they have a new order, a new framework. They organize an irrational landscape, a unique universe, unusual neurological pathways, alternate realities.
Epic Fail:
‘When that which lives,’ said Zarathustra ‘is in command of itself, that which lives must expiate its authority and become judge, avenger, and victim of its own laws.’ -As quoted by Bataille in Nietzsche’s Madness
The human machine can malfunction—sometimes more is said in the hiding than in the doing, in the editing than in the saying, exposing through the covered, the shameful, parapraxes, entropic disclosure. We stuff the dying into homes and hospitals and erase death. Honor comes by our looking because we worship what we see. Repulsion slows a worker down, the desiring machine of capitalism can’t be bothered with boils, cists, glazed eyes, failing lungs, or sour sweat. We seclude the sick and ignore the stuttering swollen faces of the mentally ill. Schizophrenia is a scrambled system from the vantage point of sanity. It is a wilderness where the assumption of law is decayed into the seemingly endless possibilities of nature. The sober mind is forced to stay outside the sauvage schizophrenic like a baseball team owner watches his players from the booth—associatively living through the jocks while physically sitting, munching hotdogs, pinching his wife’s hot ass.
The New Book:
…we believe that civilization is to a large extent being constantly created anew, since each individual who makes a fresh entry into human society repeats this sacrifice of instinctual satisfaction for the benefit of the whole community. -Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
The stroke of the pen need not say more than a theatre of found objects, such as the found tombs of thinkers the way the reader finds them in a book. The discovery of the deceased unearths and revitalizes them to speak in the living, for the living, to live by our reading them. The dead have lost their time, the hours in their human clock have ticked out, the days, like pages in the book of their years, have been turned. The instruments of experience that bore the thinking, the genius made through working and living and finding out, is reconstituted in our reading them. We are because of all the others. The same way Duchamp can find the urinal is the same way that we discover the language of the past and reframe it in the gallery of the present to consider its form in a new perspective.
The thinker is found again in our thinking, like the Evergreen that stays green in the winter, the words of the mind signal a life beyond the grave in our misconception and reconnection of them. The others—the ones who said and passed, are immortals, still breathing in our breath so long as somebody cares to think them. As such the reader is a monument to the writer, and like all monuments or symbols of culture, they eventually go away and are forgotten. In reverie and desire for knowledge writers are the torch that burns bright through the night of our logic, they guide us like the lighthouse when the sea alchemically bonds to the sky in thick fog.
Time passes, it belongs to no one, not even you, and the fragility of life reminds us that nothing belongs to us, not even life. The body that does not know itself does not know that it is meant to die, that its purpose involves an end. Time ate the body of every great contributor to the human cause. Our limitation defines us, and in a grand distraction from the eventual purposelessness of every action or cause, we stretch the boundary of communal awareness in a feeble attempt to say and do more than what has been said and done before. We write to protect humanities knowledge on the backs of past languages. We use our refined tools to guide the human race.
Mechanization vs. Singularity:
There is no need to speak if what you are trying to say has already been stated. Repetition is the death of originality. All unique statements apply a formal agreement, a shared coding that shapes ideas into order. The singular sensation of a thought conforms into language in order to deliver its sentiment. This boundary of communication allows thought to build on top of itself, stacking its symbolism into the tower of Babel wobbling its way to the heavens. The word on the tip of your tongue is proof that thought is structured by language, in that moment when you sense the word you are looking for you flip through your vocabulary like a rolodex of ‘sounds like’. Content plays no role at this point, it is a symbolic quest of the absurd.
The simple act of reading is done with the eyes on a page. In a similar way the image is a hieroglyph, a language that speaks to all eyes. The artists that have been brought together in this show are scramblers, DJs. They took the found object and remixed it, made it say something original. The word is the logos, the image—a pathos, a speaking thing without the distraction of culture or learned language.
The words of Schragis are a direct relationship to the America she loves to reorganize, defending the powerless with information. The voiceless have a platform to speak about class inequality through Occupy Wall Street and she spreads facts about the dangers of Global Warming advocating for the unborn who will inherit the riches or the poverty of our actions.
Powers works with simple materials, paper, canvas, and ink. Simple colors: black, white, and grey. Simple forms, lines, and structures, but simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, it involves technik. Simplicity is the most complicated thing to achieve. It provides a sense of calm and correctness. Humans are drawn to symmetry, to perfection and beauty, the justice of balance, the sensation of equality. Powers’ forms tumble over the surface with intention meeting chance, the perfection and imperfection in the placement of shapes, the measurements, and the application of the pigments. These topographic designs are powerful for their limitation and specificity.
The still-life of Bornstein’s paintings reach back to a time when language could not be read by everyone so the image had to sign for borders and boundaries. A picture is a language without language, a sign rather than a code. We understand usefulness and materials before we understand their signifier, we feel before we say. These distinctions of family and economy, of tribes and territories are forgotten in Bornstein’s painted fantasies that speak for the visual nature of language itself and the substantial materiality of a symbol.
T.B. Lamborgini connects the dots between celebrities in ways that one would never expect. These surprises make his drawings delightfully absurd. Highlighting the strangeness of spectacle is simultaneously a lowbrow and highbrow joke. The TV is easy to watch, to be seduced by, yet it is a false reality, and in that way it is a disorienting one. By allowing us to respond to the neutrality of entertainment we are given our agency back. We can laugh at the alienation of the celebrities’ humanity reduced to persona while we grapple with the vast spread of technology.
Dr. Money doubles back with his montages as though to say ‘I am not what I show’. His quoting of children and the drawings of the mentally ill reminds us that this educated man was once a child too and still is a child trapped in an enigma. He reaches through color and gesture into the imagined space of the unconscious and the logical illogical.
Author.ity:
Why did Sylvia Plath, Sarah Kane, or Virginia Woolf commit suicide? Why did Neitzche go crazy in the last ten years of his life? Is there something about a mind in flux that leads to genius and instability? Is real power volatile, liberated, and abstract? The mind that can pull apart reality into its finite forms and specificities maybe hostile to itself. I am thinking of Jung's Red Book, his Liber Novus or New Book, his diagrams from deep in the woods, where the genius was mad, drawing a personal bible of unconsciousness speaking with and without language. Illustrations illuminate beyond the codified structure of A, B, C, D etc. Drawing allows the mind to search for itself rather than sharing answers, it desperately seeks clues about its private untraceable form. The mind is distinct from the materials it collects, we can’t define ourselves simply by what we find, thank you Duchamp. The artist as anthropologist is always present.
There is a danger and insecurity in naming. Language is the harmonious system by which we order the unknown. Our world is the mind matching materials. Language is a found object, it is the pulpit from which we explain our reasoning, by which we understand and gain access to what would otherwise be foreign. Benjamin says the storyteller brings news from afar, but our mind or the mind of another, that three pound grey lump, is absolutely estranged from everyone and from itself. Language allows the mind to format the intangible, its artifice abstracting the enormity into specificity, into logic, into law, with believable sensations categorized as truth. Our internal kosmos justifies and arranges the strangeness of the chaos, but life is not as simple as we think it into being.
By Crichton Atkinson
Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi:
The artists Sam Bornstein, T.B. Lambergini, The Late Propagandist Dr. Richard M. Money, Devin Powers, and Rachel Schragis take found structures and repurpose them for original ends. These repeated languages were picked up by the artists and exist outside of their use but are adopted to express a singular idea.
Sam Bornstein paints imagined structures based on puzzles, infographics, heraldry, and other non-written sign systems. T.B. Lambergini’s drawings are a perverse bricolage of cultural icons. The Late Propagandist Dr. Richard M. Money combines Brut, Povera and Pop sources in a profane union aimed at uprooting and irrevocably curdifying the Real. Devin Powers uses the strictness of geometry to delicately graph ideal forms and objective materials, and Rachel Schragis takes the construction of flow charts, normally associated with business, to make visuals that lend power to social movements for political, economic, and ecological change.
De-Script:
The show’s title alludes to the singularity of a voice, similar to the personal quality of handwriting (script), as opposed to its opposite (de), which would be coded uniformity or anything repeatable such as language, typing, and mechanical production. We give descriptions of what we encounter by bending the duplicated sign to our intention, and that is what the artists in this show have done. They are like scribes in that their work exists inside of a context, to get the joke or understand the meaning you have to have been a witness to the subjects they have chosen to speak through. This independent expression in an age of reproduction is a little like David vs. Goliath, or an entrepreneur in American capitalism, or Jean-Luc Picard taking on The Borg—the artist’s perspective is a counterpoint to dogmas that are oftentimes problematic.
Script:
Handwriting, as opposed to typing, is unique to everyone. You can figure a lot out about a person by the way they write. Graphology is the study of handwriting used to infer a person’s character and whether it is accurate or not we all understand that there is an endearing personal quality to the hand that the machine erases. I have letters from loved ones who have passed and their handwriting gives me a sense of their life. The humanity in their penmanship, the time it took for them to move the writing utensil along the page. The rhythm and pattern of their body’s acquired strokes, the learning and years they spent as a child in school. Their penmanship adhering to either practicality or aesthetics, their pace in the moment that they wrote it—was it an intentional letter or a rushed note? Either way, handwriting traces the body and therefore the mind and we sense the singularity of both the person and an instant.
De:
There is a difference between communication and language. Communication can be a singular expression, nuanced and specific, whereas language has to be repeatable and therefore generic. Fortunately, language, as shorthand for exchanging information, can be reframed, broken, and bent. Language is not just verbal, art history is a language in itself, schools of thought designating styles and content. The artist that communicates something necessary learns that they must eat their masters. The teacher who taught them about structure and form, about style and the code of saying something right must be put aside. The artist is a maverick and as such they have to be willing to simultaneously admire and destroy their teachers, the forms that brought them up will also cage them.Craftwork Machine:
Using their hand to mark the surface the artists in De-Script craft their intentions uniquely during an age dedicated to manufacturing products and uprooting the subjectivity of the artist. These handwritten images draw the story of applied time, the body directly tracing the psyche. They intensify with purpose transgressions of the norm.
In the past, perfecting representation limited the artistic genius into a style, but ideas have replaced craftsmanship, thank you Duchamp, and an artist’s signature style has transformed from a byproduct of the hand into a vehicle for a concept. The factory of Andy Warhol was an extension of the market that transformed production into teams of assistants, repetition of subjects, and industrial manufacturing. The hollowness of duplication replaced the one-of-a-kind masterpiece. This is not unlike other systems where multiplicity irrevocably changes specificity, similar to Stein’s ‘Rose, is a rose, is a rose’, or high school lovers who refuse the pollution of defiling their love with its sign.
De-Sign:
As we move into a media age it is good to consider the passivity of social organization. What are the moral consequences of identifying by what we find vs. what we do? Graphic design has had a resurgence with the availability of new media. It is not a coincidence that Mad Men, a TV show about advertising during the design era of the 1960s, is popular during a technology boom that makes design affordable and common. From Apple to Ikea, Photoshop to Blogger, consumerism has reached a tipping point where a product has to be affordable, user friendly, and aesthetic. Beauty and simplicity have always been in dialogue but this time the paring down is taking objects out of the physical realm into the strictly visual. The cleanliness of digitizing your photo albums is also a loss of a tactile experience, and we give an emotional weight to objects that images will never be able to possess. What I see and what I touch are two completely different relationships. This is not to say that all organization breeds distance, but it is good to know what we are trading. Organization can eliminate specificity but art stands up as a radical force in a landscape of consumer passivity, the lack of personal agency has a sneaky hand in reproduction.
Handwriting:
Hand painted signs say something about economy and community. How many hand painted signs do you see everyday? Does typography give us a sense of trust? Does the ability to afford the cost of printing say something about the quality of a product? There is a smallness associated with handwriting, drawing, and painting that locates the writer as a body. The product stays attached to the person who made it or sells it and the consumer is forced to acknowledge them. Design, organization, and corporations dehumanize the encounter of exchange leaving the consumer in a wonderland of goods where they barely engage with other people.
Most consumer products provide us with our greatest luxuries— identity and seclusion. We socialize to provide for our needs, but if we can get products without dealing with other people it is easier, simpler. The perfect example is in transportation where the EZ Pass is replacing the tollbooth operator, when given a choice most people chose the economy of the machine. When there is an option to buy train tickets with a person or a ticketing booth the consumer would rather be alone. These are examples of the ultimate capitalist prize—product and privacy.
Mass marketing and media have the ability to reach a large population, but quantity and distribution aren’t always as ethical as quality. Maybe the only privatization in an evolving landscape of disposability is the luxury of a singular expression.
Language:
Every human is unique yet our body machines give us similar desires, goals, needs, and social conformities. You can’t get what you want from Mama unless you learn to say ‘baba’. Language has always been a system of exchange across the inherent boundary between two people, or between one and many, and thus it is the basis of social and cultural structuring. The illusive film that distinguishes privacy from alterity has its shortest link in language where we bend the word to our will and bidding. We communicate in a thousand ways and we can understand what others mean without speaking, but symbolic language requires uniformity, it must be able to gesture the same way twice. We communicate with all of our senses, but formal language is capable of repetition based on our commonality and it breads renewal in the speaker, the listener, the writer, and the reader. Our minds are changed by languages structure and we develop in thanks to what it conveys.
The mechanical bond of language and its ability to produce is a major component of cultural identity. Language provides the framework that we are born into but it also gives us the tools for rebellion.
Revolution:
Rachael Schragis uses her artwork for political means, going beyond the social liberties of communication into the realm of radical discourse. You might recognize her work from the Occupy Wall Street movement where she co-opted flow charts, normally associated with business, to evoke change in the biased economy of American capitalism. It is fitting that this rizomatic political structure, created by a multiplicity of voices and bodies gathering in the streets, would use a web-like chart as its visual icon. Her chart favors the dissemination of information above a strictly aesthetic, visual, or problematically concise emblem. From afar, the repeated logo was a flowery swirl of hand drawn lines, words, and compartments, but on further inspection a universe opens up to reveal possibilities for social reorganization and equality.Cheap Revolution:
Like other activists such as Bread and Puppet, Schragis uses rudimentary materials. The cost of her supplies is minor—Sharpie, paper, and printing. Like her predecessors, the content is handled with a touch of playfulness and sincerity to deliver the heavy drama of facts. The cheapness of the materials is political in itself, facts belong to everyone and anyone can express themselves with paper and pen.
Vocabulary:
Everything will change and everything has potential.
Systems are managed by the simple actions of normal people who struggle through the day and are fooled by unseen forces. Movements are a great reminder that there is nothing constant or stable in an economy or state. The consistency of government is a choice, the uprisings that have swept the globe in the recent years are the perfect example of the power of the streets, from Greece to Egypt, Turkey to New York, people have collected under the banner of a cause. The power of public assembly has changed our vocabulary. Now that an example has been made about the power of organizing, people have the terms to talk publicly about dissatisfaction with the government. Occupy Wall Street taught us in a contemporary way how to talk about uniting through dissent.
Arrows and Laurels:
It is not the strengths, but the duration of great sentiments that make great men.
–Nietzche
History is defined by its uprisings marking the turnovers of power. The American eagle clutches in its talons the arrows of war and the laurels of peace—the power of the state is between turbulence and calm. Activists are a part of that, the measurement between taking up arms and providing safety. History might archive the human condition by the stories of war more than the stories of peace, but it is the artwork, the emblem of excess, that leaves traces of culture and defines the past. The human trail is buried in the dirt on shards of pots and stuffed in tombs. With all the life and activity on this earth, we track it as a story in time by art and by politics, and it is interesting that Schragis is active through both.
The popularity contest that accompanies art also applies to politics, here one day, gone the next, yesterday’s news. As such, these fashions define the culture of their times, like the cave paintings in Lascaux, our markings become our history.
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes:
Artwork often falls short in its ability to actually change anything. There is a natural politicizing in all forms of cultural display—the body that describes itself is standing for a position. But the ability to ignite others, to stretch the process of your motto past the borders of consumerism—that crafty industry whereby the viewer is passive and the commentator active—is normally where the exchange ends. With Schragis the object is a conduit for the action of others, it is visual, informative, it has vitality and a spark. The flow charts inspire action, not awe, and it is this intention and result of an object that ultimately describes its purpose far beyond the borders of its beauty or its form.
Flux/Flow:
The first and last thing required of genius is the love of truth. –Goethe
The flow chart is a public and personal research, an informed public stance and a personal one. The author of these charts has not abstracted herself into a bodiless objective observer. Similar to anthropologists observing and influencing other cultures, it is considerate to acknowledge your position when discussing a collective, to not pretend that the platform of your perspective is capable of magical neutrality. While a certain moral stance comes from the middle road, the observing party always holds power over the subject of their gaze. The storyteller has the last say. In an era of Fox News opinion propaganda and an onslaught of blogs and subjective reporting, it’s refreshing that the author of these flow charts is self-aware. She is standing as a voice for Occupy Wall Street, but her framework is both for a horizontal interconnected equality and as a singular agent, a humble royal We.
Ideal Form:
The activism charted by Schragis is similar to the web-like cartography of Devin Powers in that they are both organizing ideal states. Powers uses geometry to imagine perfection and the infinite. His geometric illustrations are one way of envisioning that which does not exist but reflects human perfection. The line is the most basic yet profound invention we have. Just as the wheel transformed human society, or the reasoning behind bombing ball bearing factories in WWII, it is often the profoundly common, overlooked, and simple devices that change the world.
The line is our organizational tool that gives us everything else. Imagine a sci-fi reality where humans never conceived of the straight line, the visual landscape of production would be completely different, our whole process of thinking would have a transformed, dynamic shape. Our homes, streets, the paper we write on, the chair we sit in, the computer, the microchip are all in thanks to the straight line.
The line stands for correctness, directness, and clarity. It symbolizes connection, it maps the distance between two points. The line stands as a model for the unfathomable and the mundane. We construct our logic in relationship to connections, the synaptic availability of this makes that, cause and effect, one thing leading to another, as though on a timeline. The process of our mind is often illustrated as a network, lines uniting points. We learn by grouping, finding relationships, distinguishing one thing from another, the line is our means of organization.
Order/Chaos:
The line made the word and the word made God.
The word passes along what others have seen. The word conjures images like deities, an outline of something nonexistent that guides our actions. Our idealism tries to protect us—the line steps in as a superhero leading us from the formless void of chaos with the tools of creation. Out of innumerability and disorder the line is born creating geometric order, the intangible's map, understanding starts to appear from the confusion, a light from the dark halls of space.
The tragedy is that life is not as simple as the art that defines it. Art like geometry is another reality—it is an alternate source with an internal logic. Fracturing the tangible with art and geometry symbolizes our higher thinking. Abstraction has something to do with patterns that can’t be tracked or predetermined. There are more potential synaptic connections in our brains than there are atoms in the universe, so it is remarkable that we can begin to illuminate our silent corridors with shared signs. Geometry is our attempt to grasp the out-of-control transitions of space and time. Powers' drawings are expansive, like thought, like space, illustrating just a fraction of the possible through diagrams that are simultaneously holy and scientific. They stand for nothing in particular, but they trigger thoughts of the boundary between concept and reality, mind and body.
Unity/Distinction:
The line says that structure can be achieved. The line retaliates against negative forces and protects us. It stands in for all logic, systematizing and imprinting our schema over the uniqueness of the world as it is. Symbolically the line unites and delineates, the line breaks one into two, two into four, it corrals and separates. Lines are drawn in the sand, lines mark the border, they create culture, grouping, we symbolically decipher difference and distinction.
Nature/Industry:
The crystalline form draws straight lines in nature but the perfect line is rare. The line is the language of humanity and industry. The line allows construction despite decay, building control in opposition to entropy. The line marks humanity’s need from nature, it renders useful that which would otherwise be complicated. It simplifies, aids, suits our growth, our survival, our will.
The line, when connected to other lines creates an enclosure, the division of an interior from an exterior. Three lines compose the triangle which is inside every home and bridge in the industrialized world. Four lines compose the diamond, or the ultimate shapes of utility—the rectangle and the square.
Symbol Machine:
Inside the trapping of the canvas these lines and triangles speak of an expansion beyond their necessary limitation. We can imagine the pattern extending without stopping. The mind holds many concepts that can't exist in tangible or simple ways, such as the idea of eternity. Math is our international language to decipher the largest, most intangible concepts. Math is the human translation of a void that gives us access to reality beyond the sensory or the tactile.
In contrast to his perfect geometry, Powers' ink is smudged from adjusting the ruler. This lack of control reveals an appreciation of the immediate and physical, the drawings are absolutely material. Powers’ images reveal the magic trick behind the subject, the act of representing utopia with the absolute thereness of the inks application. Powers grabs the impalpable and ties it to the here and now, to the basic objective truth of the object without reference, where the canvas as a three-dimensional form is the body of a symbol machine.
Physical Code:
This appreciation of materials and devotion to symbolism also appears with imagination and grace in the paintings of Sam Bornstein. Heraldry has been used for centuries to define the moral virtues of a family. The real and imagined animals, buildings, plants, and objects take on a resonance and symbolism that far exceed their image. They allowed the illiterate and the literate to understand territories and allegiances through a language of illustration. Signing the things in themselves is the basic principle in Bornstein’s paintings. If you can take a dragon, a castle, and a griffin to form a family crest, then you can expand that magical vocabulary to include the hammer, the gun, or the Dalecarlian Horse. The objects seem random and purposeful at the same time and it raises questions about our basic relationship to sounds and images that we have formatted into our linguistic codes.
English Teacher:
We adapt to communicate physically and verbally with others. The baby reaches out and feels the mother long before she sees the mother, speaks the mother, or writes the mother. By Bornstein distancing the relationship between the object and its use, he brings us back outside these common things to once again, if only slightly, return them to a material state outside of purpose. What is language without practice but a simple dead object waiting to be interpreted, abused, or adored? Language bends us as much as we bend language. Its meaning is performed by the writer, the speaker, the reader, and the listener. It changes thought patterns through observation and application of its form.
We become the dream product of language’s usefulness and construction. That English teacher long ago who desired you to write correctly was only wrong in forgetting to say why. She taught the faith of English, but the writer must know how to break the formula of correctness correctly. In the same way the painter as a writer of objects has the right to take heraldry and transcend its classical history into a contemporary use. Objects applied to the territory of language find a broken home in Bornstein’s odd no-man’s-land.
All language is a metaphor derived originally from a material in action or from observation of occurrences. The same way that the Greeks personified abstract ideas such as The Fates, we can examine the embodying symbol.
Can we take away the make, model, or practice of Bornstein's gun? Its brutality remains though its location and interrelationship to the other objects takes place in a void. Normally relationships give us content but here it seems to draw attention to the objects as they stand alone, singular, without a relationship to anything. The generic perfection of his forms sign their uniqueness and their ideal. The hammer you see in his painting is not unlike the hammer you envision in your minds eye when you think ‘hammer’.
Celebrity Code:
The universal language of objects as they are brings us to the culturally specific montages of T.B. Lamborgini. These humorous depictions of celebrities are a relieving and demented conversation with American TV, film, and music. In Lamborgini’s drawings cultural icons are staged in a relationship to one another creating a commentary on the pervasiveness and everydayness of the characters and personas represented in the media. We have Annie from Misery taking a sledgehammer to the fluxus duo Yoko Ono and John Lennon promoting their Bed Peace. In contrast to their calmness is a brutal predator, like a cultural blender gone haywire, these responses to the everydayness of pop culture point out how vivid a mythology the personas have created for us. There is a moral vocabulary in celebrity that is something between reality and fiction, the beloved space that keeps the viewer in control while remaining passive, socialized yet alone. It is a reminder that images as propaganda can deliver any message they choose.
Celebrity Myth:
The love associated with John and Yoko is exaggerated by the brutality of Annie whose fictional nature makes the scenario extremely tongue-and-cheek. The lighthearted response to the perversion of celebrity inception embraces the strangers as mythological beings, not too different from the Greek gods, each one personifying different character traits of the human condition but this time in the framework of consumer desire. The true celebrity is located in the purgatory between wo/man and the immortals. They become our dollies, avatars standing in for the angels and demons of our nature.
Annie attacking the passive John and Yoko is similar to the playground of destruction that we encourage our celebrities to delight in for our pleasure. Like the mischief of the immortals, they personify what all capitalist objects aim to do, distract us from the senselessness of the real. The narrative of celebrity creates a common denominator between people, they give us the power of a shared subject. Woody Allen, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Cloe Sevigny are simultaneously strangers and household names. They guide us in our average lives, glamorizing the otherwise mundane duties such as putting on clothes or styling ones hair. Suddenly there is a theater to the simple, a shared social construct of beauty and organization, to look good in response to masculinity or femininity as a shared sexual object, or to define yourself in opposition to it.
Either way celebrities are a commodity, they are the object created when the fake collides with the everyday. TV and film take what is actually in front of the camera and make it lie, twist it to delight and perform magic tricks, illusions that we can feel better than, ones that turn us on, make us afraid, essentially becoming a replacement for lived experience. We give media our most cherished possession, our time, in return for the treasures of distraction and entertainment. Some people spend more time with their favorite TV shows than they do with their own families. The television is a replacement family, a comforting mother, a watchful nanny, a commanding father, a playful companion. We bring these public personas into our most private places, the living room, the bedroom, interior locations reserved for family and friends.
Celebrity Vessel:
The repeated image starts to form a resonance as we ascribe connotations to its persona. There are certain celebrities you would never see together because they start to represent different archetypes—the bad-boy, the social activist, the tragic downfall seeking attention, the drug addict scientologist, the attractive father figure, the naive girl next door. We know them not as people but as icons, empty vessels to be filled by the waters of the media conforming to any shape that suits the public’s needs. They regale us yet we can kick them when they’re down and spit in their face. They are better than us and they give us something in our helpless lives to feel better than. Elevated on the cloud of media's familiarity they have flexibility to be both devil and saint, the more highs and lows the more we pay attention to them. One might argue that breakdowns, divorces, and expensive weddings are a side project of their jobs. They play out the stories we are all interested in but would never care to live as we plod along in our regulated lives, going down the same roads to the same old places.
Celebrity is the mechanical drug that elevates our mechanical service to a mechanized society. We need these gods to fall in love and spurn each other, their auto-production allows them to do the ultimate act that we can’t do of staying young forever. We watch their plastic aging like a clock that helps us recognize our own development, a mirror of life marching down the path of mortality. But Annie from Misery can be played again, our own past interest alive in the present with just as much ferocity and cunning as she had in 1990.
Celebrity Hieroglyph:
Lambergini asks you to have been a watcher in American culture to get his wink-winks. TV is a coded dialogue of experience, we have given our time and body into a repeatable experience, a shared rise and fall of constructed expressions. There are places where people don’t know what Lambergini is talking about, parts of the world where the economy of American storytelling has yet to reach. In those spatially attuned minds that know nothing of our two-dimensional entertainment pollution, these images lack a referent. The passivity of the TV has astronomical effects—it creates killers, it talks nations into war while Presidents pose with animals and children. Politicians and news anchors take notable pauses and definite tones to signal their trustworthiness and strength, but the performance of the media is very dangerous.
Lambergini isolates TV, film, and celebrity as a system, a language of cultural sources that we can be in dialogue with. He responds as someone laughing at the absurdity of these common yet strange creatures. In pointing out how crazy it is that celebrity is a part of our lives he gives a visceral humanity to our relationship to these people and to our attunement to spectacle. Besides, violence is not perverse if it is justified, or so TV told me.
Speech, Speech, Speech:
And still we speak, we speak aloud, all unaware of the nature of those beings that we are. And of him who does not speak according to the rules of language, the men of reason that we must be assert that he is mad. –Bataille
The Late Propagandist Dr. Richard M. Money is a hack schizophrenic who returns respect to the lost history of outsider art. Many of the drawings are direct quotes from people who murdered their father because they thought he was the devil, or killed themselves so as to not poison their brother with their breath- people who burned down churches, people who thought they were God. He is not elevating schizophrenia or childishness above being sane, but he is giving a platform for all expression to be legitimate. High or low art is defined by culture where there is no restriction to what an artist can quote.
Warhol’s silkscreens, like the soup cans he represented, were repeated into meaning nothing. This repetition is similar to saying something over and over again until it stops making sense, separating the sign from the signifier, returning the word to being an object. This is like the body of one child machine outputting similar drawings to another. While the sketch of a child is a singular expression their hand is not learned enough to manipulate exactly or uniquely. The authorship of one child’s work as opposed to another is indecipherable. We all pass through the training of our body, so we speak a similar language. The beauty of the human machine is that we have all been there, at one time Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, John James Audubon, Norman Rockwell, and Kehinde Wiley could only scribble—no one is born a master of anything.
Without tools to describe our hidden uniqueness we arrive on the surface of the page as scratches, brutally striving to express our intricate thoughts. The outsider artist’s ‘expressive strokes’ are attempts to reveal and a failure to accomplish. The brutal gestures speak more for themselves than the interior necessity of the author. It is often for acceptance that we succumb to recognizable forms, like the butterfly drawn by Dr. Money’s mother, included in one of the panels. We have seen that same loopy butterfly a thousand times so it is both safe and dangerously absent. Whether it is a generic illustration, or intellectual terms like ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’, we learn to control ourselves to speak and think in repeated forms due to shame or fear at what we cannot do well. To hide our incapability we socialize, slipping on discernible symbols we can repeat and agree upon.
Doctor Freuden (Freud/Freude):
German- ‘freuden’, English- ‘joys, delights’
These mental disorders are only accessible to therapeutic influence when they can be recognized as subsidiary effects of what is otherwise an organic illness. This is the gap which psycho-analysis seeks to fill. It tries to give psychiatry its missing psychological foundation. –Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
For psychoanalysis, to proceed technically is to proceed like a detective. Its economics is inseparable from a semantics. This is why there are no “facts” nor any observation of “facts” in psychoanalysis but rather the interpretation of a narrated history.
–Paul Ricouer, Technique and Nontechnique in Interpretation
Who is Dr. Money anyway? What is identity, or false identity, or pseudonym? Fake self, impersonation, invention, qualifier? There is no self. There is no perceivable truth. We are vessels that find and claim. We collect information like the Bowerbird decorates its nest to attract mates.
Dr. Money uses bad puns and sloppy materials- nothing is too lowly or shitty for him. His hand moves quickly, is he conjuring the devil, why does he piss on the canon? The smudges could be the hand of a child, a lunatic, an imbecile. It is reminiscent of Shakespeare's King Lear where the fool speaks the profound from the demoralized position of naivety.
Bastard child, negligent, erratic.
What the intellectual neglects the child can conceive with clarity, after all the learned Dr. Faust burned his books in exchange for youth. The hallways of thought are ripe for connection in the over stimulated mind of a child. The untamed leaves room for multiplicity. The baby can crawl through life unaffected by pattern, taste and touch without the previous encounter to spoil the experience with answers.
The child cries to describe a complex experience without comfort, an exclamation without the refinement of language. Their nervous system is in hyper drive, churning with adrenaline from instances that an adult judges as trivial. We shrug off the kid or hold them tight without really understanding the reason behind their suffering. This sensitivity to their environment is untamed and desiring, it is manic and brave. The wandering child, loose and free--could it be in-tune enough, capable enough, to survive without an adult assuring that this is being made into that?
I(.)d(.):
Crazy—is it in you, or of you?
Another body, another mind, your body, your mind, possibilities.
Habitat:
Habit.
Technik* and Lawlessness:
*While English distinguishes between “technique” and “technology”, the German word Technik means both.
I had to acknowledge that I was not capable of forming a story out of these events. I had lost the sense of the story; that happens in a good many illnesses. –The Madness of Day, Maurice Blanchot
The same way the schizophrenic falls through the stasis of a rational mind, the child carves alternative realities without the restriction of correctness. This liberty of ‘wrongness’ is one part of Dr. Money’s use of the line. His purposeful crack in the cohesion of craftsmanship is the ultimate control, to not be a schizophrenic, or a child, but to behave like one. To have the liberty to imagine sprawl from a distance, the unstructured observed from the safety of structure. Dr. Money honors the ones he speaks about, enough to say them, enough to hold their stimulated bodies and shape his form to their form.
The time that the doctor spends with each subject is less about the application of the hand running vigorously over the page in furious streaks of power and powerlessness—it is an application of time spent in study absorbing words and complexities. Dr. Money spends his hours wearing the mask of these patients, to conform to their behavior, retracing their body’s movements. He repeats the images he finds in psychology books. He quotes the actions of the insane. The language and gesture of the patients displaces the doctor’s behavior into an anterior space. Language is the third mask, the second is the gesture that bore the insane person into history, and the first is the face or the face of another.
The regression in the doctor’s exaltation of brut, art povera, or outsider art makes his quoting post-outsider, an educated man interested in creating equality between high art and low art, and presenting the stories of people who struggled with sanity. There are many levels of repression at play. Repression of representation by cultural institutions that define what is and what is not justified to present. Repression of individuals into asylums, their stories locked away from the functioning of the rest of society. Repression of the id into the ego. Repression of desire into socialization. The private repressed by the public, technik overriding lawlessness.
The family triangle of mom, pop, and baby can be applied innumerably, phallus-to-tit-to-womb, all will, desire, and libidinal flow. Anti-Freud. Freud organizes the chaos of schizophrenia into his own map. Implanting his visuals inside his reporting, translating ephemeral subjects into codified structures that say just as much about the author as they do about the psychoanalyzed. Freud is speaching the unspeachable. The schizophrenic is irrational, tortured by their visions, without law, without land. Lacking habit and habitat, wondering through a sauvage landscape like Oedipus kicked out of Thebes. Blinded by his own hands, the king’s eyes faced inward. He could see only his mind’s eye while his hands retrieved the feeling of the world translated through darkness. The schizophrenic’s eyes are turned in the same direction, outside of socialization the schizophrenic is also an outcast, alone as a God burning churches and preaching the Gospel of Anarchy. The law of logic is ignored in the schizophrenic, they have a new order, a new framework. They organize an irrational landscape, a unique universe, unusual neurological pathways, alternate realities.
Epic Fail:
‘When that which lives,’ said Zarathustra ‘is in command of itself, that which lives must expiate its authority and become judge, avenger, and victim of its own laws.’ -As quoted by Bataille in Nietzsche’s Madness
The human machine can malfunction—sometimes more is said in the hiding than in the doing, in the editing than in the saying, exposing through the covered, the shameful, parapraxes, entropic disclosure. We stuff the dying into homes and hospitals and erase death. Honor comes by our looking because we worship what we see. Repulsion slows a worker down, the desiring machine of capitalism can’t be bothered with boils, cists, glazed eyes, failing lungs, or sour sweat. We seclude the sick and ignore the stuttering swollen faces of the mentally ill. Schizophrenia is a scrambled system from the vantage point of sanity. It is a wilderness where the assumption of law is decayed into the seemingly endless possibilities of nature. The sober mind is forced to stay outside the sauvage schizophrenic like a baseball team owner watches his players from the booth—associatively living through the jocks while physically sitting, munching hotdogs, pinching his wife’s hot ass.
The New Book:
…we believe that civilization is to a large extent being constantly created anew, since each individual who makes a fresh entry into human society repeats this sacrifice of instinctual satisfaction for the benefit of the whole community. -Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
The stroke of the pen need not say more than a theatre of found objects, such as the found tombs of thinkers the way the reader finds them in a book. The discovery of the deceased unearths and revitalizes them to speak in the living, for the living, to live by our reading them. The dead have lost their time, the hours in their human clock have ticked out, the days, like pages in the book of their years, have been turned. The instruments of experience that bore the thinking, the genius made through working and living and finding out, is reconstituted in our reading them. We are because of all the others. The same way Duchamp can find the urinal is the same way that we discover the language of the past and reframe it in the gallery of the present to consider its form in a new perspective.
The thinker is found again in our thinking, like the Evergreen that stays green in the winter, the words of the mind signal a life beyond the grave in our misconception and reconnection of them. The others—the ones who said and passed, are immortals, still breathing in our breath so long as somebody cares to think them. As such the reader is a monument to the writer, and like all monuments or symbols of culture, they eventually go away and are forgotten. In reverie and desire for knowledge writers are the torch that burns bright through the night of our logic, they guide us like the lighthouse when the sea alchemically bonds to the sky in thick fog.
Time passes, it belongs to no one, not even you, and the fragility of life reminds us that nothing belongs to us, not even life. The body that does not know itself does not know that it is meant to die, that its purpose involves an end. Time ate the body of every great contributor to the human cause. Our limitation defines us, and in a grand distraction from the eventual purposelessness of every action or cause, we stretch the boundary of communal awareness in a feeble attempt to say and do more than what has been said and done before. We write to protect humanities knowledge on the backs of past languages. We use our refined tools to guide the human race.
Mechanization vs. Singularity:
There is no need to speak if what you are trying to say has already been stated. Repetition is the death of originality. All unique statements apply a formal agreement, a shared coding that shapes ideas into order. The singular sensation of a thought conforms into language in order to deliver its sentiment. This boundary of communication allows thought to build on top of itself, stacking its symbolism into the tower of Babel wobbling its way to the heavens. The word on the tip of your tongue is proof that thought is structured by language, in that moment when you sense the word you are looking for you flip through your vocabulary like a rolodex of ‘sounds like’. Content plays no role at this point, it is a symbolic quest of the absurd.
The simple act of reading is done with the eyes on a page. In a similar way the image is a hieroglyph, a language that speaks to all eyes. The artists that have been brought together in this show are scramblers, DJs. They took the found object and remixed it, made it say something original. The word is the logos, the image—a pathos, a speaking thing without the distraction of culture or learned language.
The words of Schragis are a direct relationship to the America she loves to reorganize, defending the powerless with information. The voiceless have a platform to speak about class inequality through Occupy Wall Street and she spreads facts about the dangers of Global Warming advocating for the unborn who will inherit the riches or the poverty of our actions.
Powers works with simple materials, paper, canvas, and ink. Simple colors: black, white, and grey. Simple forms, lines, and structures, but simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, it involves technik. Simplicity is the most complicated thing to achieve. It provides a sense of calm and correctness. Humans are drawn to symmetry, to perfection and beauty, the justice of balance, the sensation of equality. Powers’ forms tumble over the surface with intention meeting chance, the perfection and imperfection in the placement of shapes, the measurements, and the application of the pigments. These topographic designs are powerful for their limitation and specificity.
The still-life of Bornstein’s paintings reach back to a time when language could not be read by everyone so the image had to sign for borders and boundaries. A picture is a language without language, a sign rather than a code. We understand usefulness and materials before we understand their signifier, we feel before we say. These distinctions of family and economy, of tribes and territories are forgotten in Bornstein’s painted fantasies that speak for the visual nature of language itself and the substantial materiality of a symbol.
T.B. Lamborgini connects the dots between celebrities in ways that one would never expect. These surprises make his drawings delightfully absurd. Highlighting the strangeness of spectacle is simultaneously a lowbrow and highbrow joke. The TV is easy to watch, to be seduced by, yet it is a false reality, and in that way it is a disorienting one. By allowing us to respond to the neutrality of entertainment we are given our agency back. We can laugh at the alienation of the celebrities’ humanity reduced to persona while we grapple with the vast spread of technology.
Dr. Money doubles back with his montages as though to say ‘I am not what I show’. His quoting of children and the drawings of the mentally ill reminds us that this educated man was once a child too and still is a child trapped in an enigma. He reaches through color and gesture into the imagined space of the unconscious and the logical illogical.
Author.ity:
Why did Sylvia Plath, Sarah Kane, or Virginia Woolf commit suicide? Why did Neitzche go crazy in the last ten years of his life? Is there something about a mind in flux that leads to genius and instability? Is real power volatile, liberated, and abstract? The mind that can pull apart reality into its finite forms and specificities maybe hostile to itself. I am thinking of Jung's Red Book, his Liber Novus or New Book, his diagrams from deep in the woods, where the genius was mad, drawing a personal bible of unconsciousness speaking with and without language. Illustrations illuminate beyond the codified structure of A, B, C, D etc. Drawing allows the mind to search for itself rather than sharing answers, it desperately seeks clues about its private untraceable form. The mind is distinct from the materials it collects, we can’t define ourselves simply by what we find, thank you Duchamp. The artist as anthropologist is always present.
There is a danger and insecurity in naming. Language is the harmonious system by which we order the unknown. Our world is the mind matching materials. Language is a found object, it is the pulpit from which we explain our reasoning, by which we understand and gain access to what would otherwise be foreign. Benjamin says the storyteller brings news from afar, but our mind or the mind of another, that three pound grey lump, is absolutely estranged from everyone and from itself. Language allows the mind to format the intangible, its artifice abstracting the enormity into specificity, into logic, into law, with believable sensations categorized as truth. Our internal kosmos justifies and arranges the strangeness of the chaos, but life is not as simple as we think it into being.
