Matt Bollinger’s America none-the-less
“It’s 4:30 A.M. on a Tuesday
It doesn’t get much worse than this
In beds in little rooms in buildings in the middle
of these lives which are completely meaningless
Help me stay awake, I’m falling...
Asleep in perfect blue buildings
Beside the green apple sea
Gonna get me a little oblivion
Try to keep myself away from myself and me
”
“fantasy is not the object of desire, but its setting”
There’s a story that Slavoj Žižek tells, well a Freudian case study, about a woman who recounts a dream from the previous night. While in the thrall of telling the dream, the woman admits to being muddled about certain details, so she skips over them. Žižek says that Freud has a brilliant insight with regard to the muddled parts. He doesn't diagnose the missing or muddled parts of the dream as muddled or missing parts, but part of the dream content itself, and so part of the interpretation, which involves repression. The woman is muddled because she is repressing content. Further, Freud claims, the muddled content is integral to the more lucidly told or translated parts of the dream. Žižek adds to Freud’s insight by saying the muddled content is called the form of the dream, whereas the more lucid parts of the dream are the content.
Form and content, in Freud’s universe, are one and the same thing, two sides of the same coin, a mobius strip, and so on. Susan Sontag, who, in her 1964 essay “Against Interpreation” critiques our Freudian drive to exorcise content from cultural expressions in cinema, literature or visual art, posits a new era of “an erotics of art” to replace the never-ending hermeneutics of art that continues to plague third-level humanities to this day. Contra-Sontag, who saw content and form as separate, or binary, Freud’s indivisible content-form insight is the best definition of contemporary art I know.
This all comes to mind on the day I give a lecture on “the gaze”, followed by the experience of American painter Matt Bollinger’s paintings and painted animations presented at mother’s tankstation Dublin. If we were to transpose Freud’s insight apropos form and content onto Matt Bollinger’s work, where would the relationship between form and content stand? First, as Sontag advises, we would need to describe, not interpret. But, to put it mildly, in descriptive terms, there’s not much to describe in Bollinger’s work beyond what is in plain sight.
By the public pool; by the petrol pumps; by the ice box and slush puppies; by the weeds, Bollinger’s universe is a universe of by-and-by. Before long, something may happen, like the embedded subplot of the “school shooting” in the 3X3 minute painted animations presented in the anti-chamber before you enter the gallery proper; liquid expressions that provide a backing track of voice and music to the whole exhibition. And whether by grim prescience or service to the present, the newspaper headlines are clear here, but not conceptual: guns and oil, NRA and Russia. But before then, before the terror and slow aftermath of nothing, then something, Bollinger’s universe clocks on and clocks off, day and night, night and day. It’s a shit-storm without the storm, mostly.
On the train journey home I see Bollinger’s forms all around. Heavy-set forms. Forms that have volume and ennui. They sit across from me in the train booth, empty vehicles that enliven my subjectivity the more and more they show their dumb volume in the scattershot fluorescence that paints the carriage yellow and blue. It’s like what Sartre or Lacan said about the gaze: for us to imagine ourselves as thinking subjects, we have to see other people as objects. Objectification is not only the plight of women, it is the plight of humanity in its warped relationship with the other.
mother’s tankstation stove
So we look, and we look again, noting that Bollinger’s characters do not look at us, but look askance. Light-sabre blues and button eyes cross streams, directed at a spot on the horizon, that is not there, just memory. There’s no future here. They are here in form but not here in spirit. Bollinger seems to want to monumentalise the not-noticed or ignorantly ignored ignorant. His characters are monuments. Monuments that, when we try to imbibe their natures, fill us with nothing. They stand there, squat there, sit there, slack-jawed, poised for a photograph, not even reluctantly, while the pink dusk slices through blue Tuesday P.M; waiting statues that hang around long after the photograph has been taken and the photographer gone, nobody telling them to move on. The slush puppies long melted.
They remind me of a cartoon I watch with my kids, Steven Universe, set in a kind of parallel small-town America, inhabited by super-power infused gem beings, against a backdrop of small-town fast foods and fat disappointment. Bollinger’s universe is Steven’s universe without the superpowers. This is a world that runs on empty: fuel and calories. It’s Ozark without the Byrdes; Springfield without The Simpsons; Smallville without Superman. It’s fucking depressing. But it is paint. And Bollinger may not love the lives he paints, but he loves paint (or, he is in love with the lives he paints, if love is the violent choosing of one over the many). Nevertheless, his love of paint is absolute, especially paint that describes such a depressing lifeworld with such fractal light. Bollinger paints chiaroscuro with colour. And the same goes for Bollinger’s weeds, which he imbues with an élan vitale that his humans don’t possess. A dandelion tries to mimic the outline of a love heart; a garden fire spits fire; a trapeze traffic light singles red on the high wire. None-the-less (never was a word so fitting), Bollinger’s Masaccio forms, signify, by way of form and content, a small town America that is God-made and American-made, and where faith has been given up to Medusa’s gaze.
Matt Bollinger anywhere else in Dublin but here wouldn’t have the same effect on the nervous system. Here, his indie world is incubated. Incubated from the world at large, and larger for it. This is a world within a world that denies the next tragedy because things like that ‘don’t happen round here’. And yet, amongst this nothingness, something appears. The liveliest figures in this ___ville of despair, are the glimpses of hands and arms that open the Auto Parts door or attend to the nothingness at hand, within. The uncanniest is spotted in the bowels of the shop, beyond the shelving with the plump gallons of oil. A person of interest who makes no attempt to stand in the light of the shop window, but stays hidden for all to see, in plain sight. Neither being looked at or looking, just gazing into nothing. —James Merrigan