DEAR DISAPPEARED

It's been years since I saw you last. What happened? You just upped & went! You were ubiquitous 3 to 4 years ago: exhibitions, awards, funding, curators' tongues, envy. And then…    I miss you. Well not “you” exactly, your work, which is you, not you & everybody else I guess. When I noticed you gone I began to piece together the absences into a cavity that bit down on the memory. Sorry, it took 3 to 4 years to bite down. Who knows if I'll miss you in another 3 to 4 years. I hope so. See, your work existed in relation to the work of the moment. It's like this: without them there was no you; without you a part of them is now missing. I really don't think artists realise how important one tree is to the forest until that one tree falls from view. Some of your peers have disappeared too. You hear later they took up teaching jobs or hooked up International. New forests I suppose. I can't find you on Instagram either, which compounds things, questions, desire. I Googled you the other day — nothing. Last year, surprised by absence, I Googled an artist I was silly about for 3 to 4 years, one of the lucky few to get gallery representation by one of the most desired galleries (you know the one!) & found a biography with no mention of the life before. Nothing. Seems nihilistic don't you think? Or do you understand the absolute erasure? Most artist's make a point to list their institutional parts in savant detail — the empty Instagram bio is just posturing. Artists talk about career suicide in the choices they make but career suicide is the absolute rubbing out of everything, the good & the bad, to start again, forget. I think we ought to miss artists and not tolerate their visibility. We should wish for another exhibition while believing it's the end. Desire is something that's missed & whispered. Visibility threatens seeing. If I reminded you when in the process of forgetting — sorry.  

I hope your new forest is evergreen, knowing that art is always deciduous. 

Best.

—James Merrigan

DEAR SKATEBOARD

Congratulations!

You debuted at the Tokyo Olympics this week. Mainstream newspapers — The New York Times, Guardian, Independent — have embraced you out of novelty rather than passion. The coverage is shallow and repetitive, journalists depending on the second-hand words of their peers for their copy, not real experience. “Sellout” headlines follow you amidst this Olympic “achievement”. The writers depend on Nyjah Huston alone to poster boy their ignorance. You are more than Nyjah or Tony Hawk, more than gold, silver or bronze, more than airbuds, shoe deals or skate games, more than the billion-dollar industry that you have become, more than an official sport sponsored by Nike that's been nationalised, uniformed, institutionalised, named. I still hesitate to call you a sport as you were so much more to me than a sport when I adopted you from age 12 to 23. You were a lifestyle, a culture, a rebellion, an attitude, a style, resistance, art. 

New Yorker Magazine, 1999. (READ SUBHEADING!)

We first started skating you down steep hills in a rural Wicklow, Ireland; power sliding and pivoting, creating an explosion of noise that was socially abnormal and individually awakening in a cow-caked universe that never changed its clothes or its smell. We shredded on you down those hills all day, leaving bits of ourselves (and you) on the hot tarmac and spattered gravel. The feeling on those hills was fun, free and full. You owed us nothing; we owed you everything. As the late editor of Thrasher Magazine Jake Phelps put it: “Skateboarding doesn't owe you anything but wheelbite in the rain.”

Thrasher Magazine (1st Issue) January 1981

Fed up of wheelbiting in the rain we imagined there was more to you than a horizontal deck — grip tape up top, trucks and wheels down below. Problem was there was a famine of influence where and when we found each other. This was potato Ireland, before the Internet and the grey bureocracy of skateparks. We had silly glimpses of the possibilities of you in 1980s films like Police Academy or Gleaming the Cube. We broke the ReWind button on the VHS player to piece together something that we could use to lift you into the air. In those Video Days we surgically discovered how to Ollie then flip via watching videos via watching each other. We continued with severe drive, individualism and independence to keep you underfoot. My 6.6 ft. frame broke you so many times that I couldn't afford you anymore at €50+ a pop. But when I did I popped you big, flicked you big, grinded, pressured and wrapped you big: kick, heel, tre, pressure, impossible, cab, nollie, fakie, switch to the slap of a horde of you.

Jamie Thomas & Donny Barley. 1990s; photo: Ed Templeton

The people and police were against you from the start. They didn't see the thing that we saw in you. I cannot describe that thing we felt riding you. Perhaps it was the push and pull of the world underfoot while the external world eyed you up so disapprovingly. We were young and disobedient, wanting attention for the wrong things. When I look at you today I see you elicit an unapologetic elegance and grace in the awkward and rebellious teenager. You make embarrassed and sulky youth dance and smile. It's a weird meeting, you and the angst-ridden. But you saved us from patterned shorts and socks. You split the world into two: those that walk the main thoroughfare and those that skate the road seldom taken. You gave us a choice.

Bottom line you upset the status quo; the A-Z flow of unfreedom. You came with a stereotype which our adolescence then lived up to: drink, drugs, self and public annihilation. But we held and rode you with pride in our indifferent difference. When we got our hands on Thrasher Magazine and VHS videos Hokus Pokus, Useless Wooden Toys, Welcome to Hell — you made sense: you and life were inseparable. We had permission to be no matter what they said. We had a community that cliqued. The early zines and videos in which you starred portrayed the personality and style of the skaters, but also the personality and style of the culture that popped you. Under the arms and feet of these skate video icons you became a lifestyle that was all and nothing, nothing and all.

Nyjah Houston’s Instagram post after the disappointment of placing 7th in the Street final.

You got me arrested many times, even strip-searched when I was 18. During those times you taught me that difference was not tolerated by the main thoroughfare. You formed my identity in those moments when the world pushed back. The music we listened to got louder, the fashion we wore baggier, the style and the tricks we made our own more in touch with what we needed to express. You never made us anti-social, you made us exhibitionist. It was your presence on the thoroughfares of normalcy that made others anti-social in their reaction and resistance to a way of life we had chosen for ourselves.

Tyshawn Jones, fakie ollie with a fontside drift; photo: Mehring

23 is the year Ernst Gombrich tells us the artist comes of age. I gave you up to be an artist at 23, but your culture, especially the one I bonded with as a teenager, has influenced me to this day in my art, writing, and institutional critique borne on a subcultural attitude to break in order to create. After wearing the slogan “Skateboarding is not a crime” for so, so long, you are now an Olympic sport. It's funny, as a teenager I met and asked skater Jason Lee for an autograph in a skate shop on Haight Street, San Francisco. When I recognised him in Hollywood films much later – post the box-office failure of Mallrats – I thought he had sold out. There is something about the transition from subculture to the mainstream that grates on the nerves of skateboarders dedicated to retaining the image and identity that attracted them to skateboarding in the first place as kids. The rub rubs deep and long. I rolled on you that second time because of the first feeling; I skated you for over a decade because of everything that you pushed and pulled me against. You were always against; a dissenter rather than cementer of opinion. 

Ed Templeton's demo car artwork; photo: Donny Barley

You might be interested to know that a new breed of skateboarder will be riding you at the Olympic Games, one who is the antithesis of Nyjah Houston's competitiveness, and who is conflicted about his participation, summed up in a quote that vies the creative spirit of skateboarding against the competitive spirit of the Olympics: “Am I there to help skateboarding, to help spread creativity throughout the sport, or am I there to place the best and try to beat everybody?” His name is Andy Anderson, who solely represents his native Canada, and — as his Instagram handle evinces @autheticandyanderson — the authentic spirit of skateboarding. He will ‘P’ you all over the Park — plant, pivot, primo and pop — at the Tokyo Olympics. And going by his Olympic qualifying run at Detour, which blended freestyle with early and contemporary street and vert, the judges will be hard pressed to judge his “Malto manual shit” against what his peers are doing today. Andy Anderson is a wholesome and nostalgic redescription of what skateboarding was — an anti-social and destructive urban menace — and what it has become, a billion-dollar industry and competitive Olympic sport. Problem is, if Andy Anderson's ideology is collective rather than individual in spirit, he will have to compete at the Olympics as only the finals will be televised to the world.

Olympic Gold skater, Yuto Horigome, filmed by skate icon, Eric Koston, switch tail-sliding an 18-stair rail in his part, The Yuto Show, 2021

You are now on the world stage. Mainstream newspapers keep on waving the white flag for you by suggesting you have finally soldout to the mainstream (This is also a sentiment shared by a percentage of the hardcore skateboard community). “Sellout” reads as a triumphant tagline – the editor's wet dream of misunderstood misfit come good. As an Olympic sport more money, films and fashion will be made in your name that will outfit you in nostalgia, what Jean-Paul Sartre diagnosed as a “retrospective illusion”. The money-making percentages will breed inequality. But you will still aggravate the world: it's curbs, rails, walls and security guards. Like the artworld, we can choose what terrain, what grain to slap and pop you against. Subcultures never grow up, no matter what resistance or acceptance is put in its way.

To write, skate, make art — all the above and above all — is to resist.

Good luck Andy Anderson!

—James Merrigan

Albert Camus’ Rock

Albert Camus wrote somewhere in his philosophical essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, that the best source for creativity is negativity. This negative source should not be mistaken for the popular stereotype of the depressive artist who, during a lifetime of downs but high productivity, one day finds love & loses art. If you have never read Camus' philosophical novels, like The Outsider, or his anti-Communist journalism in Combat, his whole thing revolves around absurdity, defined, in his case, as the clash between our desire to find meaning in a meaningless world without God. And even though absurdity is linked to suicide in Camus' absurd hero's choice between living or dying in a godless world, absurdity is not all bad. Absurdity is the positive clash between meaning & meaninglessness, desire & resistance. This double talk takes place during the Liberation when Camus' early friend & later enemy Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: “We are condemned to be free.” Out of this clash something begins; a noise emitted. Camus is good at taking a narrative — one that has been rehashed over time to checkmate an argument — & sweeping aside the pawns & pebbles to look between the rock & the hard place of such narratives, like the Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to push a rock up to the summit of a hill & then release the rock back down the hillside to the valley below. Instead of getting caught in the absurd & eternal push & pull of this narrative loop, Camus swiftly takes the elevator to another imagining outside the narrative, the moment between Sisyphus' release & retrieval of the rock. What is Sisyphus thinking & feeling in that moment when walking down the hillside to retrieve his rock? Camus writes of many emotions, even joy: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” What is important for Camus is Sisyphus becomes the absurd & tragic hero at the moment of release & retrieval because he is conscious of his burden & thus above it. There's things here that concern the artist & art-making. I'll let you decide what those things are. Anyway, read Albert Camus. His The Plague (1947) has gone through successive reprints recently for obvious reasons.

Dear Art Institution

It's been a decade since I first addressed you so directly without recourse to the art that calls you home. Back then I was an exhibiting artist, moonlighting as an art critic. *Context: Before sitting down for an interview an artist referred to me as a “bull in a china shop”. I laughed, taking it as a compliment. The metaphor of the china shop was perfect, more perfect than the artist knew before he sat down to be interviewed like the porcelain doll he was waiting to be cracked open. That said, I was more of a baby than a bull in those days. Still dangerous, yes, surrounded as I was by the fragile world of the artist (if not art object) as I “cooed” and “ga ga'd” the language of art without being too self-conscious of my I’s and eye’s . 

Today, of course, I don't know what I am, like all of us, in the flux and flush of the present. I just write… and wait. I am still waiting for you to share my critical reviews, not just the love letters. I understand, or partly understand, why you don't share them, china shop and all. And yet I still wait. Your kind and private acknowledgements of my softer words by DM or email is appreciated, but what of the other words. I put more into those other words than the belle lettre ones. The other words come with worry and fear: worry that I may have cut too deep with my words in the necessary struggle to unpack the artwork, or worse still, ribboned the experience of art in kinky blindspots. But still I wait. 

I accepted long ago that art criticism is a fugitive and fallible event, something that flaps on the beach at sunset after being flung from the wide and deep ocean of art. But in your acknowledgment of some words and not other words, words that pose questions and sometimes perform provocations, you are claiming infallibility for the art you represent, infallibility for yourself, or art's helplessness in the face of its fallibility – fallibility being the most human thing in art. 

But I still have hope for you, hope that one day you might believe in the fallibility of the art you represent, believe that art can fend for itself without your cherry-picking custodianship.

—James Merrigan, waiting.

Anti-Ligature Rooms; Contemporary Art Writing Daily

Ever routinely watch cartoons on Saturday mornings (specifically Wile E Coyote vs Road Runner or Tom vs Jerry)? Ever spend a couple of hours in a jail cell minus your skateboard & trouser belt? Ever wallowed in the post-exhibition blues for weeks on end? Well, this trifecta of trauma was resurrected from my X Generation childhood, teenage years & current middle-age after reading Anti-Ligature Rooms by Contemporary Art Writing Daily, the anonymous blog that has been sleigh-riding on the hollow marrowless carcass of art criticism since 2014, when art criticism proper finally died following the extinction burst of panel obituaries on its demise (circa 2009), the same year I adopted the role of art critic with equal amounts of pleasure, pain & ignorance. Published by Plea & Cabinet in 2020, this book's timing couldn't be more perfect. Just take the title, Anti-Ligature Rooms: a room that's been suicide-proofed like the aforementioned jail cell & Wiley E Coyote of my youth — how many times did Wiley E find himself falling from those death valley cliffs to become a puff of smoke to then masochistically rise again to enter the same existential loop alamed by that skeleton jingling "BEEP BEEP." This glossy & lossy (look it up!) pink pill of a book is swallowed at the same time humanity jack's up & a good pharmaceutical empire is created, borne on the wave of a virus that just keeps giving & going & rabbiting on like Duracell Bunny Graham Harmen who told us to bet everything on objects. When this pink pill kicks in Road Runner's BEEP BEEP goes flatline, Barbie develops melanoma, the artworld looks like a dead zoo behind Marcel Broodthaers one-way glass, & the only peep show in town is Marx & Freud making a baby named “Anhedonia” (look it up!). 

Mercurial Richard Mosse

“The aesthetic problem is not at all about beauty. It is the experience of a common world, and who is able to share this experience. That is why, for me, politics is aesthetics before art. ”

— Jacques Ranciére, Interview, Yale

“Together these elements create an unsettling yet mesmerising experience that aims, in Mosse’s words, “to implicate the viewer within the work’s gaze, to force the viewer to confront their own participation on many levels”. ”

— Extract from Butler Gallery's press release for Richard Mosse exhibition

The Butler Gallery's use of the not-so derivative adjective “mesmerizing” for their Richard Mosse exhibition is perfectly poised. It follows their use of “unsettling” to describe Mosse's 52-minute video installation Incoming (2017) presented at the Butler’s new home at Evan's Home Kilkenny. Usually it's best to ignore such promotional adjectives for, of all things, contemporary art, which most of the time endeavors to flatten experience, not hyperbole it. That said, the word “mesmerizing” could not be a better conjunction to “unsettling” to describe Mosse's controversial and episodic redescription of social trauma that conflates politics with aesthetics in the heart of humanitarian darkness.

At Butler Gallery the majority of the space is blocked off – partly motivated by COVID-19 restrictions and presumably Mosse's insistence to only have front row seating – to create a one-way corridor that guides you to the double-height and triple-long room. There, momentarily adjusting to the deep darkness and the tonal strangeness playing out on the double-height screens that span the room, 1… 2… 3….. you find yourself in the cockpit of Mosse's mercurial vision, the plane spinning in a slow silver haze. The experience of these three screens up close is that you cannot pull all three together. It's experiential not contemplative; it's political not aesthetic. It has the oompfh, vibration and girth of a rock concert; “rock star” Mosse (as one newspaper journalist referred to the artist recently) is behind the camera, but still larger than life in the choices he has made to look at humanitarian crises from inside out.

Still frame from Incoming, 2014-2107, three-screen video installation, 52 mins 10 secs, with 7.1 surround sound. ©Richard Mosse

This time Mosse's lens is aimed penetratingly at the European refugee crisis – a long-lost memory before the temporal black hole of the pandemic – with the use of a military-grade thermal imaging camera made by a European multinational weapons company. The resulting image is monochrome grey and glacial in form, with a texture and pace that speaks the audio-visual language of contemporary art. The camera (or weapon) registers body heat, rendering the world transparent or reflective, ironically like a block of ice. When the same camera cannot render reality due to extreme heat or cold  (jet engine flames, camp fires, a lit cigarette, or the cold ocean that acts as both barricade and vehicle to another life for the refugees), violent fissures of pure white or droplets of jet black rend this alien world apart. It's a beautiful thing, a mesmeric thing that Moss has appropriated and repurposed. So beautiful and new that it almost eclipses the subject of the refugee crisis being documented. Frame by frame the subject moves beneath this space blanket like a latent trauma, both present and absent below its silver folds. Like through a sniper's lens, Mosse's camera crops and targets in a narrow field of vision that looks through rather than looks at, ending up in what some have described critically as the Irish artist's “aestheticisation of suffering”. 

And that is where unsettling enters and mesmerising exits to conjunctively contrast the political subjects of Mosse's work with the poetic objectification and obfuscation of that same subject. Simply put: the subjects of Mosse's photography and film are unsettling in terms of the contemplative, distant and passive aesthetic gaze in times of social suffering and political unrest. And all this plays out in a high-end presentation of that reality in the unreality of the gallery space for the consumption of the small artworld. Mosse’s film installation Incoming is both unsettling and mesmirising so you can suffer it – in what the artist describes repeatedly in interviews as the viewer's complicity – and enjoy it.

Still frame from Incoming, 2014-2107, three-screen video installation, 52 mins 10 secs, with 7.1 surround sound. ©Richard Mosse

The use of unsettling first and mesmerising second is interesting, in the way that unsettling has critical cachet whereas mesmerising is for your entertainment. What is being claimed for Mosse's work is that it is first and foremost critical, but it is also a feast for the eyes. It is this balance between the ethics of its criticality and the aesthetic spectacle of its ambitious delivery – most art institutions do not have the technical resources to present this new work – that some have called into question. Further, if you look deeper into the definition of mesmerise – to “bring into a mesmeric state, hypnotise” – you will discover that mesmerise relates to ‘mesmerism’, “the doctrine that one person can exercise influence over the will and nervous system” of another. It is through this hypnotic state that we have to confront and contend with our thinking, feeling and opinion about what is really playing out beneath the aesthetic gloss in front of us. 

The conceptual groundwork for Mosse's practice is revealed via his interviews (there’s several on YouTube for this work alone) wherein the artist openly discloses the how? and why? of his working method, which most to the time begins with the repurposing of military-grade technology, the very tools that keep war-torn countries under vigil and thumb. And you can imagine and understand Mosse’s glee, like every artist, when he comes across a medium that can direct his hand in the expression and motivations of his aesthetic needs, wants and ambitions. Of course, like every artist working in the language of contemporary art, Mosse tweaks and tinkers with the technology so it speaks with a tonality and pitch that is understood by the viewer of art. 

Guradian art critic Adrian Searle on hearing Richard Mosse being awarded the Deutsche Börse photography prize in 2014.

But rather than just release his film and photography into the world for the viewer to decide, Mosse ends up defending his practice to journalists who throw the obligatory and stray never-followed-up ethical question his way. The minute you defend your art as an artist you have lost the argument, especially when the questions lobbed are based in ethics – and especially when the artist in question is repurposing and lugging the same weaponry back to war-torn countries where this technology is used to keep “insurgents” in check, and all this with a mix of photojournalistic zeal and conceptual side-stepping. (Perhaps this is the reason behind Guradian art critic Adrian Searle’s critical and reductive Tweet in 2014 on the occasion of Mosse being awarded the Deutsche Börse photography prize – See picture above.)

Still frame from Incoming, 2014-2107, three-screen video installation, 52 mins 10 secs, with 7.1 surround sound. ©Richard Mosse

Neither an activist nor a “dry conceptual photographer” (his own words), Mosse's work “elevates” photojournalism beyond quotidian news media and cerebral contemporary art towards the empyrean where run-of-the-mill reportage is transformed into sublime feeling. There is something religiously perverse about this transformation that leads to an aestheticism and voyeurism that sheds the skin of reality to reveal its ghosts rather than its essence, an aesthetic ghost that haunts long after you have left the gallery – I still have magenta in my eyes a decade on from Mosse's film and photography of the Congo. Mosse might rightly respond to this aesthetic perversion and viewer possession as the very purpose of art, to unsettle and inject the viewer with feeling, even empathy, through the aestheticism of reality and the “distribution of the sensible” in a common world where complicity is a given. His work (in my experience and address here) does not instil empathy in the viewer, it seduces in its efforts to induce feeling. Its high-endness, its showmanship, its glossing over the brute pragmatism of the originary purpose of the technology with beauty and distance edited with instances of disgust does not squeeze a single tear from the eye. There is an implicit disinterestedness in the aesthetic that comes from the technology and the editing that reveals this as an aesthetic passion not a political project. Again, art that deals in politics within a wounded and vulnerable public sphere is bound to stir these feelings in the viewer, but to what end? What is the motivation? To bear witness?

Still frame from Incoming, 2014-2107, three-screen video installation, 52 mins 10 secs, with 7.1 surround sound. ©Richard Mosse

French philosopher Jacques Ranciére writes that bringing awareness to something is a form of inaction… what do we do with our awareness? Not to be glib but all we can do it seems these days is post our inaction virtually on social media. Experience is the motivator for action, whereas the introjection of an experience that is not ours in the first place is a type of masochism or ego filler. Is Mosse packaging suffering as art, or art as suffering? If the artist’s motivation is for the viewer to bear witness to human atrocities so they might feel something, where does that feeling go in a pragmatic sense? (I think here of the Quaker tradition of bearing witness to humanitarian crises in situ as a form of action/inaction.) If Mosse's motivation is for the viewer to bear witness at an aesthetic distance of contemplation in the safety of the gallery, then he has indeed elevated photojournalism to that of the nineteenth century idea of art (or today’s for that matter) when the passive inaction of men of taste in front of the artwork was/is a signifier of class.  Moreover, if art is an individual experience, how can mediated transformations of reality that lean towards sublime beauty end in the transformation of the individual? The highly aesthetisced experience of Mosse's art, fraught with pleasure (jouissance) can only compel dissociation not empathy, paralysis not action. It’s art after all, not activism.

This body of work by Mosse arrived late on our shores; Incoming premiered in London at the Barbican Curve in 2017. And like Mosse's Venice Biennale contribution Enclave, which redescribed the war-torn traumas of green Congo in sweet magenta, this work resurrects the same tension between politics and aesthetics that critically bruised the reception of Enclave. For a decade in terms of artworld visibility, Mosse has continued to test the same tensions between politics and aesthetics in his film and photography, a body of work that the New Yorker coined – in a rather detached but perhaps very accurate phrase – “conceptual documentary”. The same antagonisms remain between the ethics of Mosse's gaze in the context of the humanitarian crises which he continues to pursue and peruse under the gaze of the market-led artworld. Mosse almost manifests the contradiction inherent in Ranciére's philosophy of aesthetics, which propounds the idea that aesthetics – not related to art but politics – is an emancipatory gesture in his theory of the “distribution of the sensible”; whereas aesthetics in relation to art is a relationship that speaks of passivity and inaction, disinterestedness and distance in relation to the social mores of inequality that humanity enacts in the name of politics, democracy or otherwise. Mosse has found a space wherein these political antagonisms, binaries and spaces of argument are almost vanished away by the beautiful gloss of his work. 

Still frame from Incoming, 2014-2107, three-screen video installation, 52 mins 10 secs, with 7.1 surround sound. ©Richard Mosse

It needs to be emphasised that “beautiful” is meant here in terms of something that disrupts, not only the subject that is being documented in a quasi-photojournalistic artistic way, but also the idea of beauty as something that arrests our attention and satisfies the senses, whether the magenta of Enclave or mercury of Incoming. The beauty that is being presented here is something that torments binaries. There are moments here that are dramatic and explicitly uncomfortable, moments that will offend and enrage, like the family who, on experiencing the moment when the surgeon cuts out the humerus bone of an unidentified body of a dead child for the purpose of DNA matching, left the gallery in moans of dismay and groans of anger. This may be a blockbuster, but best to leave the popcorn at home. 

These highly charged, visceral and emotional moments that Mosse edits into his film work have a spectacle about them that is invasive, insidious and questionable. Under the silver gaze of this weapon of a camera, some visceral moments are almost made tender. Like the soft, slow and white movement of the surgeon's hand as he brushes back the tarp to reveal a child’s skull followed by the piercing grind of the bone cutter, a sound that you feel in your bones like the winter cold that gets into your body after overexposure. Sitting here, watching the family led out of the gallery by a parent, I wonder if these moments are to be endured rather than experienced. You cannot empathise with moments like this because the imagination begins to colour in the silver sheen with horror. You are also trying to decipher what exactly is happening beneath the veils of absracted image and sound. You want to know but don't want to know. From the surgeon's perspective this is a routine operation; from the detached viewer's position vis-á-vis the cold gaze of Mosse's camera, routine is rendered gruesome. Hannah Arendt “banality” fights with Hollywood spectacle, and you question why the vacillating tones between what George W. Bush Junior exclaimed before America invaded Iraq, “shock and awe”.

Still frame from Incoming, 2014-2107, three-screen video installation, 52 mins 10 secs, with 7.1 surround sound. ©Richard Mosse

The awe is easy to recommend here. Many journalists have waxed lyrical about Mosse's aesthetic while at the same time apologising guiltily for being seduced, as if they have forgotten what has played out on the screen before them, like all of us four years on from the peak of the refugee crises in terms of news media coverage and social media cri de cœur. And when you go to a gallery, especially in this time of booking a time slot, you want to be seduced. And MOSSE seduces. This world, far, far away from his magenta Congo of boy soldiers, is a mercury moon with mercurial shifts in emotional and formal tones; a place where gravity, light, shade act differently; a place of white fire and grey ice, so sculptural that the forms will arrest the attention of those enamoured with such things as texture, form and light – such as artists, such as Mosse, such as me. The eyes dilate and contract as forms grow white hot and black cold, creating feelings of enrapture and estrangement. It's silly to say, but just how the thermal camera renders metal is seductive – there's a gloss that's Daft Punk incognito and fashionable. Then there's moments when bodies, rendered small on tiptop cliffs overlooking the blackboard ocean look like willow-thin drawings. It's difficult to describe this new image of the world Mosse has extracted from such an unromantic machine, a weapon that penetrates the world with the sole purpose of seeking, targeting  and destroying from ridiculous distances. Especially when the artist gets in close to a body that, in the end, is not resuscitated, which the sound of a beep-beep heart monitor drives home almost too literally. The sound plays its part here but most of the time it hides behind the images, a droning core rarely going off emotional course except for one upbeat moment when refugees find refuge in the conjoined play and limbering of their bodies in some tarmacadamed and fenced-off outdoor waiting room. Mosse has given us a new way of seeing the world. All that is left to do is to either consume it aesthetically, critically interrogate the motivations behind it, or find a middle ground where politics and aesthetics make sense.

So what are the ethical issues with regards to Mosse's growing filmic and photographic oeuvre. If we look at it theoretically and we think about Mosse as a political artist who is working with subjects that are vulnerable and periodically neglected by the full gaze of the news media until it is too late and humanitarian crises become entrenched and unmovable, and his relaying of this rare image of the world in a new form by repurposing the very weaponry that governments use to control its citizens, what we are left with is a double bind between the subject and the method in which the subject is being documented. The artworld is once removed from the world and twice, three, many times removed from the worlds where Mosse finds himself with weapons of mass surveillance. Whether in the Congo, Syria or the refugee camp in Lesbos, Mosse's work exists on the back of societal traumas, it is dependent on them and the very tools of control and surveillance that perpetuate these humanitarian crises, that hold them in place. What is being documented here is the refugee's transience, their homelessness, their waiting, their helplessness, their trauma, their deaths with the help of the weapon that helps to perpetuate it all.

Still frame from Incoming, 2014-2107, three-screen video installation, 52 mins 10 secs, with 7.1 surround sound. ©Richard Mosse

If the aesthetic is, in Ranciére’s terminology, not concerned with art appreciation or distance but rather a sharing of the sensible world with the implicit, critical and political question as to who can share that common world, a world without the entitlements of gods or kings, then where is the sharing in Mosse's work, wherein the distant eye of the camera and cameraman is not reciprocated by the subject (object) of the refugees? This unreciprocated watching plays out violently and voyeuristically in the scene which documents the warehousing of refugees in makeshift partitioned rooms with no ceilings. Mosse monitors on-high from an invisible distance. This scene, rather than the thermal theatre of rescue, resuscitation, death or exodus mark the mind, like the way night-dreaming redescribes the desires and images that we never notice registering during the day. We can grimace at the terrible beauty of the theatre and move on, but these scenes leave slow, residual traces like the snail from the night before. Art can be successful but also damaging in the same instance. The ethical contradictions within Mosse's practice are manifold, and perhaps unfairly mined from his interviews, where there is a dialectic at play between his formal ambitions and the emancipatory rhetoric of his social ambition to invert the passive gaze of the art viewer; and that somehow through the will of his aesthetic the viewer will recognise themselves, their own participation and complicity with what is unfolding in the world at every given moment, as Noam Chomsky has voiced time and again in his investigative research of the humanitarian crises in East Timor, Palestine and elsewhere.

Personally I don't recognise myself or my complicity when watching rescuers hauling children from sea to ship. Besides wishing it never happened, I wish for their parents to be there waiting so they could hold them tight with love rather than efficiency.  —James Merrigan

Through 29 August 2021

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Steve Bishop at Douglas Hyde Gallery

Down in that cubby hole they call Gallery 2 at Douglas Hyde Gallery, that adjunct contiguity, where small, supplementary art statements go to live or die, you'll find the lights out, except for two, that spot a resin-cast sculpture of a young German Shepherd on guard with its discarded chew toy & open cage. Crowned by a swirl of light & dust, “doggie” has been lobotomised & implanted with a projector. Joining the dots between the electrical cord that mouse's away from doggie's tail & under the gallery wall where a video projection plays Live CCTV & animated vignettes on a short loop, haunted -- now & then -- by excerpts of talk radio & song, I realise the dog's metaphorical brain is the thing that is being thrown from the blindspot nestled behind its ears onto the wall in a splat of staccato splices of life. “Doggie-vision,” down low, oblong & fish eye, is simple -- as you'd expect! It plays out like this: the elephant chew toy (let's call it “Nelly”) is doggie's companion & protagonist in life. When doggie awakes, Nelly is there, always, looking, unblinking, unnerving. Doggie throws Nelly around a bit, the rough & tumble that comes with adolescent dogs & boys. Nelly's stuffed body is still intact -- not yet the tortured transitional object of D Winnicott. Doggie's brain is on a quick cycle as it tumble dries memories of Nelly framed by the dog cage & the white blanket it remembers nuzzling into. Light is sometimes dappled, other times buzzing fluorescent; doggie's surveillance doubles as CCTV. This '90s mixtape of Mike Kelley's “uncanny” & Marc Augé's “non-place” waltzes to normalcy until normalcy becomes abnormal. Doggie's blindspot, evolved into a mind's eye, takes flight from its blanket & out through the cage, a Cartesian catapult from body to mind, dream to dream, to rotate drone-like around a slab of mince meat shaped like a brain plonked on a kitchen chopping board. I lean against the gallery wall, taking in the sights, charged with emotion & memory, remembering times lying in the hot grass looking at the blue sky, holding hands. Small art statements sometimes make the biggest art statements (let's leave it at that!).

Steve Bishop at Douglas Hyde Dublin.

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THE COMPANY (2020-21)

MADDER LAKE EDITIONS (2017-2021)

Ciara Roche: Mother's Tankstation Limited, Dublin

“Perhaps I would have liked to own a coffee machine, but as soon as I made the painting, I no longer felt the desire. Perhaps I never really had the desire at all, and I might be a little annoyed at the world for tricking me into thinking that I did. ”

— from Mother's Tankstation press release – "Extracted from emailed practice notes from the artist.")

“My position is that ideology is fashion anyway, and for the last two centuries most of our bloody global comedies have begun with our inability to distinguish our desires from our tastes. It’s hard to sort them out, but we know when they are not in tune. ”

— From Dave Hickey's "Pirates and Farmers" 2013)

CIARA ROCHE, MOTHER’S TANKSTATION LIMITED, DUBLIN.

“It's picture postcard perfect!” says the person who grew up in the rural idyll, but somehow escaped to tell the hell of the not so “picture postcard” tale. The phrase itself denotes prettiness or perfection. Why is it holiday makers standing in the tourist gift shop, flipping through the postcards like vinyl records, already lost in nostalgia before the holiday is over, end up choosing the picture postcard to… what? It's superficiality is as super thin as the card it is printed on. Does it represent their holidays? The rolling green fields… the thatched cottages… the blue skies… the white picket-fences… the salmon-filled rivers… the unmarked leaping lambs as they really are? Or is it rather the ideal they want to project outward rather than inward, an ideal image that is a tad greener, bluer, whiter, fluffier than the landscape they are presently standing and shitting in? 

CIARA ROCHE, (L-R) HOME STUDY 12 | 11, oil on paper, 15 X 21cm, 2020.

“Picture postcard” is a criticism wrapped in a term of endearment. It describes a reality that lacks criticism, lacks truth, lacks fault, lacks lack. If you are one of those observers who want critique, truth, fault, or lack embedded somewhere in your images of the world, like artists do, then you are going to hate what the picture postcard represents: an aesthetic lie. It intimates perfection without the rigour – it just is. Those of us who grew up in rural idylls (like me) use this term of endearment savagely, because they (like me) know the truth that lies behind, beneath and beyond the picture postcard. Those who escaped the picture-postcard's white-picket-fence smile and green, green grass welcome mat are those who finally acknowledged the severed finger hiding in the manicured lawn. 

Ciara Roche paints small and detailed but not at the expense of paint, which she mops around, wet and thick on the floors, walls, and delineations of furniture, foliage and lingerie of peopleless interiors at Dublin's Mother's Tankstation. They come across as studies for bigger, more ambitious and complete things down the line. They are small paintings with big dreams and desires, paintings that you might walk past if contextually framed by the very interiors that Ciara paints: café and shop interiors, garden centres, or a stray service station, somewhere, nowhere. But here, at Mother's Tankstation, they make their presence felt, hanging from paper tabs nailed to the gallery wall. Hanging low and explicitly from those dot-punched paper tabs, one after another, side-by-side, Ciara’s paintings are breezy vehicles that catch the light and colour of objects with a tip-toeing brush. Painted full, edge to edge, they are hemmed in by paint, doors, plants, mannequin busts and butts, pulling us this way and that way by brush strokes rather than the gloss of pictorial illusion. Predominantly on primed card, they are not lazy paintings; they restlessly fill the field, buckled corner to buckled corner, stroke by stroke. The paint sits opaque or translucent in their inchoate reality that, in successive instances, is signed by consumer desire – “Very Sexy” – which whispers in cursive script beside tight lingerie hiked up on Boxing Helena mannequins. Paint squirrels around everyday and luxurious objects, décolletaged by desire like Cinderella sweeping up dust before the dance.

BOXING HELENA (1993), directed by Jennifer Lynch – “A rich surgeon (Julian Sands) operates on the object of his obsession, his disfigured and aloof neighbour (Sherilyn Fenn). “

Time ticks in these paintings too, when light creeps up a wall full with clocks. But it is the pin-pricking impasto of artificial light found in the brake lights of the jauntily parked Jag under the sweeping grey/green service station canopy – AbEx in illusory scale – that makes these paintings glow with an unsettling imperfection. The same light that Ciara paints is also present today in the gallery, found creeping up and across her paintings, meta in too many ways to mention. The pitched gallery roof with its exposed rafters and skylights from which the sunny June day shatters the gallery in white and yellow, almost makes this feel like Maine, New England… the exemplar of the picture postcard. The forever 8-foot high gallery partitions that divide private from public look different with Clara's paintings pinned to them – thinner somehow. This is significant: art subjugating the gallery space rather than the other way around. The veneered wall behind the black gallery stove and pipe, the slick chest of drawers, the garage door, the cubby holes that peek and crop this world in its two-faced origami of private and public, institution and domestic, create a relationship with Ciara's paintings that is almost… perfect. Picture postcard? How can we transform “picture postcard” – as Ciara has in paint – into something that is a less offensive descriptor in terms of serious art? Or do we have to? I think we do. The picture postcard, although political in its ideology, is too on the side of its denial of truth and the fantasy that denial perpetuates. Art is a tell tale tattler that rattles reality. It upsets the applecart, overturning Wayne Thiebaud's just desserts.  

WAYNE THIEBAUD, PIE COUNTER, 1963. (WHITNEY)

We can split painters into three groups: painters who digest; painters who desire; and painters who do both. Contra popular opinion, Wayne Thiebaud paints both (that's another story). Ciara paints both too. The lingerie displays, the makeup and appliance stands, the Winter garden centre, Ikea, and the rooms from which Ciara's own desires are dreamt up, questioned and painted in the light of day, her home – it's all here. Not to forget the obvious desire realised in this show, an artist exhibiting for the first time, solo, at the most desired gallery in Dublin, Mother's Tankstation. Desire is all around, which puts desire firmly in the eyes and the gut of the person that knows that fact. But where is the digestive tract? The waste? The severed finger? 

CIARA ROCHE, WINTER SERVICE STATION, oil on canvas, 18 X 24, 2020.

The thing that turns the gut here is the compositional stress and slant that Ciara places on what would be otherwise picture postcards. There is an asymmetry to her compositions, like real life. Her paintings could be mistaken for picture postcards because they are paintings after all, ideological representations of the world that should – in the popular view, like the best selling art postcard, Monet’s Water Lilies – aspire to beauty (not Dave Hickey's definition of beauty which starts with Helen and ends in the Trojan War). There is what I can only describe as a turn in Ciara's paintings, which creates a turn in the eye, like Cézanne did to us all those years ago when he desired to see every side of a plate of oranges in one painting. Ikea displays are not really odd in real life, but an Ikea display – cut from its context – as a subject to paint is odd. The same with a Winter garden centre with a solitary knocked-over plant pot, or a service station from a peculiar angle with a Jag parked off square, brake lights on, somehow transforming this inanimate luxury item into the personification of aloofness or loneliness, like Dash Snow's night photograph of a SHELL gas station missing its S. 

DASH SNOW, UNTITLED (HELL), digital c-print, 50.8 by 50.8 cm. 2005.

Ciara is also doing that Warholian thing of the multiple in her studies of shop displays of appliances which, like service stations and garden centres, always seem destitute in their segregated sameness.

Here we have the radios! The toasters are over there! And not to forget the SMEG line back over there.

Misery may love company but so do appliances – the multiple is the factory of desire. Warhol's multiples ended up being desired because there are many not few. The same goes for SMEG toasters, lingerie, Thiebaud's cakes. We see them in the store, multiplied and coloured for your individual taste, creating a desire that, when we return home with just one, is somehow lacking. Warhol loaded the dice with Marilyns to satisfy the lack that just one Marilyn would bring upon the consumer. Heart maybe, but 'home' is not where desire is found – what a welcome mat that would make!

CIARA ROCHE, IKEA STUDY 3, 15 X 21cm, 2020.

Ciara Roche’s idée fixe (like every painter) may be the light, colour and forms these inanimate objects and stages proffer her small paint brush, but what this viewer is left with is both paint (the heavy impasto'd skirting board and door jam that cuts the brown home interior) and the artist’s alternating full and empty interiors that turn gut and eye with the help of a conveyor belt curation.

Through 3rd July 2021.

—James Merrigan

Cut.

A wound? gash? accident? on an otherwise bespoke piece of gallery furniture, Tanad Aaron's DEAR X, a platform? stage? sculpture? flaps open like an envelope, territorially stretching its brown breadth to leave a gutter between its exactitude and the Complex's crumbling tolerance. It suns its leathery terrain beneath Mark Swords' paintings, Mediterranean ruins in fantasy and flirtation, more Pompeii and Herculaneum than grey fruit-market Dublin. Tanad Aaron's wound? gash? accident? – and I mean those nouns in the personal (artist) and impersonal (artwork) – does that thing that Shakespeare wrote about in that catchy line from Hamlet, catch the conscience of the King – the “King” being the outwardly passive and uniform ruler of the people's exposed and unruly conscience. Up to noticing Tanad Aaron's cut, Mark Swords' paintings were arbours to dreaming and desiring with their don't-touch-only-look relationship with the viewer, whereas Tanad Aaron's platform underfoot carried you through the space by the toes. Except for that negative slice in the fabric of Tanad Aaron's uniform skin, a skin flayed of the excesses of mind, body, and music like Greek Marsyas was, Mark Swords' paintings are noise to Tanad Aaron's whispering, excess to negation. And it is negation that Tanad Aaron uses for this isolated cut, what a painter might call ‘mark making’ or philosopher ‘subjectivity’. Like the ironic need to substitute ‘excessive’ with ‘superfluous’ we can criticise this wound? gash? accident? as being just that; as if the artist were not comfortable in his own skin, or became increasingly frustrated with the closed and uniform canvas of his medium of lacquered and sandpaper-massaged MDF, and responded in kind with cruelty, like Lucio Fontana did when he stabbed his own paintings, or Edvard Munch when he whipped them. This gash disturbs the surface of Tanad Aaron's cheap luxury, a tanned pauper in King's garb, like Holbein did in his otherwise boring Ambassadors with its anamorphic skull, another symbol of negation. Tanad Aaron's cut disturbs the flow, the foot traffic, the imagination. Subjectivity is best found in the folds of normalcy, like desire in absence, or the fetish where love is not. The cut opens up a narrative that, up to discovering it, slid up, across and down the artwork’s mellow back like water or light. It is strange to think of excess as negation but Tanad Aaron, with a circular saw and held breath, has transformed excess into just that, negation. Perhaps, under the influence of Mark Swords, kneeling under vs standing over, an artist who shouts loudest here in his fretwork and patchwork of visual metaphor and material metonymy, Tanad Aaron felt the need to open his closed form and place a light inside that peeks through with intent and individuality (minus previous collaborators Tom Watt and Andreas Kindler von Knobloch and present collaborator? Mark Swords in tow). An addition that works in subtraction, the platform now breathes whereas before it suffocated under the collage and raw excesses of Mark Swords' dissected skins and smoke rings. Is this where the collaboration begins, in the last act of a circular saw? It does for me. Because there is so much difference here that the glibness of “opposites attract” just doesn't cut… anything. Walls and floors, vertical and horizontal, collaborator and painter, Tanad Aaron and Mark Swords abut each other but don't bully beyond their own solipsism. There is a distance between these two artists, one messy, the other neat, one proffering, the other in retreat, illustrated in the delineation and demarcation of their differing enterprises. They may have conversed over the last two years but those shared words hang in speech bubbles at the Complex. Here the two artists breathe their own air and swallow their own spit. One Mark Swords seems to sit on Tanad Aaron but it is an illusion; while another Mark Swords is propped on a stack of tiles balanced on the floor proper, not Tanad Aaron proper. Yes, they have collaborated on a screen at the entrance, something that seems excessive in its literalness, wherein Mark Swords brings the found fruit-sack skin and Tanad Aaron the institutional framing to the gang bang, but it feels like an obligatory, excessive, superfluous statement, an artist statement that spoils the gap between art's glorious abstraction and the artist's need to communicate? I am using a volley of question marks that may straighten and stab or spring with possibility because this exhibition is curious in a time of strange sociability, when and where gaps define our existence. Perhaps the present climate in more ways than one (or two) is akin to the gap in this two-person show, an exhibition that day dreams while treadmilling our transformed sociability?

Go.

Through 28 May.

Grey Wall

What if the 'everyday' looked back at us? How would we feel? That once passive dependency, that aesthetic justification, staring right back at us, through us. Would we become the everyday in turn, recede into the background, waiting to be attended to by another artist? Thing is, it is almost a tautology to theorise about art in terms of the everyday. Art is the everyday, it has just been rearranged in colour, form and narrative to make it less unnoticeable. The worst fear for the artist is that the grey wall of the everyday hasn't been transformed enough, grey brick by grey brick. For the last two weeks -- screen-printing the artist Emma Roche's preparatory drawings -- I have been meeting the gaze of the everyday head on, day in and day out. Working in zine-scale (A4++) and large-scale (200×150cm) I have gotten to feel Emma's work (better than my words could ever know) from the ground up via her graph-paper pencil drawings which she generously sent originals by post. Devoid of colour and physicality in respect to her knitted acrylic and oil paintings, but filled with studio noise and notation, they are the literal building blocks of the everyday. They have an altogether different mood to the artist's paintings, from her soulful She-Wolf to soulless Darth Vader in their frieze-like profiles and Seurat hum. They are fugitive drawings that think painting but don't do painting. They are the architecture, the archetypes, the sad viaducts and empty vestibules of her Autumn studio, waiting for physical and chroma consolation, things to be leafed through, wither, recede. If Emma's painting can be analogised with the 8-bit Atari game DIG DUG pulsing beneath the wooly throw upon the couch before the warm fire, Emma's drawings are out in the cold of everyday essence, receding beyond the fold of attention. The silkscreen versions are even more pared back, reusing the routine, rigid and repetitive graph pattern to emphasise the everyday from which they are borne and born. They are, in essence, the dust mite's memory of the physical painting. They are the grey wall which art aspires to.

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Small Night Zine launch/exhibition at Catalyst Arts Belfast & Garter Lane Waterford late 2021/ early 2022.

9 minutes.

The speed bag flutters, history stings.

9 perfect minutes of film. It's 1964. Miami. Night. 9 years since Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat; 1 year before Malcolm X is shot dead; 55 years before America's first black president. Muhammad Ali runs. He is a night runner, floating through surveillance and silhouettes. White traffic. White lights. White hoodie. White credits. White noise. White moon. White reticence. Sam Cooke sings, “Don't fight it! We gonna feel it!” The women in the audience answer: “Gotta feel it!” Ali keeps running, to blue music and from blue cops. Sirens on, patrol cops ask (knowing the answer), “What you running from, boy.” Half-indignant beneath his huddie, Ali keeps running – 67 years of running before patrol cop Derek Chauvin is found guilty of the murder of George Floyd. Sam Cooke sings in a Miami club. “How you doin'?” Drums roll. Saxophones unsheath. Audience vibrates. Speed bag flutters, history stings. EVERLAST. BRYLCREEM. FLASH CAMERAS. Feet dance on brown and bloodied canvas. White, blonde, blue-eyed Jesus mural being touched up in a black ministry. A black boy's questions never answered. Sonny Liston whispers low and street, “Gonna fuck you up. Gonna beat you like I's your daddy…” Fist to face, black v black for the white parade. Ali, as a boy, walks down the bus aisle to the “COLOREDS ONLY” section. The headline on the newspaper reads NATION SHOCKED AT LYNCHING OF CHICAGO YOUTH. The boy's name? Emmet Till. Tortured and killed for winking at a white girl in Alabama, the same year Rosa Parks didn't stand up. He was 14. There on the newspaper is the photograph of the open casket, 61 years before Dana Shutz would paint the same open casket for the Whitney Biennial as an empathetic mother, not a black woman. Right? Wrong? Black? White? Enter Malcolm X: “...and those of you who think you came here to hear us tell you, like these Negro leaders do, that times will get better and we shall overcome someday, I tell you: you came to the wrong place. Cause your times will never get better until you make them better. And any of you who think you came here to hear us tell you to turn the other cheek to the brutality of the white man and the established system of injustice in this country, to beg for your place at their lunch counter, I say again! You came to the wrong place. Cause we don't teach you to turn the other cheek. We don't teach you to turn the other cheek in the South. We don't teach you to turn the other cheek in the North. The Honourable Elijah Muhammad teaches you, instead, to obey the law. To carry yourselves in a respectable way. And a proud Afro-American way. But at the same time...we teach you...that anyone who puts his hand on you? Do your BEST...to see he doesn't PUT HIS HAND on any...body…else…AGAIN.”

The speed bag stops fluttering, history keeps stinging.

9 minutes.

"TIME!"

Peter Fischli, David Weiss, The Way Things Go, 1987(in words)

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READY… SET…. the strung-up black plastic sack – Santa-Claus big & full – rotates & descends just above the standing tyre set in the ad hoc starting-block placed on the timber sheet with the mellow incline in the warehouse in Zurich in 1987/ 

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The black sack Goes... to make contact with the tyre's bulky threads; first a rub, then a slice, then another to make the tyre Go/ 𝘐𝘵 𝘎𝘰𝘦𝘴… down the ramp & under the scaffold-ladder that creates the bridge, the table, the prop under which the rolling tyre limbos/

///

The tyre bumps into the plastic drum – the beer-gut undercarriage of the plank cantilevered by the scaffold ladder & the concrete stub – that sets the rig of plank, drum, tyre & stub in a cartwheel of circles that bump, roll, smack, collapse & kick to Go, go again, roll again/ 

///

The tyre 𝘎𝘰𝘦𝘴... to rest & lean on the plank, supine on its horizontal edge, to stand domino-poised with the upright strut that dominos into the brick then the ramp-bound rig with the tall, timber stepladder & the inflated tyre tube under its armpit/

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The rig 𝘎𝘰𝘦𝘴… peer-pressured by the cuff of rusted metal that hamster wheels the elongated dumbbell & offsets the rolling & bullying descent of the stepladder down the ramp by the contagion of timber & the tyres left leaning out of the frame/

///

The stepladder, hedged in by the timber rails, Goes to shimmy down the ramp into the maw of the tractor tyre from which the ramp says “AHHH!” like the doctor said “AHHH!” to the kid before the doctor administered the tongue spatula & the doctor & the kid said “AAHHHHHH!” in sympatico/ 

///

The stepladder Goes to stop in the maw of the tyre to neck – with the antenna that stick out of the tyre tube held in the stepladder's armpit – the custard-yellow plastic bottle with the red cap of the Fairy washing-liquid kind that stands on the office desk with the aluminium legs/

///

The bottle Goes to fall forward away from the edge of the desk that stands on the sheet propped by the leggy fulcrum that fails to counterbalance the weight of the bottle that slaps upon the desk, to pivot & create the avalanche of the desk, the timber & the dolly-on-rails & ejects et al from the potential pileup to shove the concrete lintel – supine upon the sleeper – & the upright post into the standing-tall yellow/green inflatable raft labelled SAMOA/

///

In the sleepy fall that suddenly picks up pace the lumbering inflatable smacks off the warehouse floor to lever-launch the bagged & tied weight that perches upon the upright metal pole/

///

The bagged weight maypole swings in an orbiting descent to topple the stick preventing the strung-up black plastic sack – Santa-Claus big & full – from rotating & descending just above the standing tyre set in the ad hoc starting-block placed on the timber sheet with the mellow incline in the warehouse in Zurich in 1987/

///

The black sack rotates, crackling like the contented fire in the heart of hearths, clipping then slicing across the upright tyre to make 𝘐𝘵 𝘎𝘰/

///

The tyre Goes …. down the ramp to run headlong into the timber stilt that stands erect against the table & checks the red-capped green bottle of alcohol solution, bound by the metal cuff, to fall & make the rolling arc down & under the bath of grey foam that silkily undulates like a massaged body/

///

The liquid Goes to pour into the bottomless plastic bottle bridging the bath of foam with the topless plastic container to vaporise & bubble over, down the acutely angled ramp where, the tyre strapped with the grey-green watering can & wedged between the two resting tyres, turns over like a clock dial pointing to 3A.M/

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The grey-green watering can erupts in a Murakami Manga-jizz of foam to geezer towards the large metal tray where the liquid – melted-marshmallow consistency – spreads shallow & (s)low to pool & overflow on the treble-tiered trays scarred by the marbled residue of countless experiments/

///

The lit candles flambés the primordial marshmallow to the sound of the genesis that resounds deep & hollow within the apparatus like a distant fireworks display/

///

The piggy-tailed fuse – attached to the cannon propped towards its target by the lip of the metal basin… 𝘎𝘰𝘦𝘴 – fizzing & climbing like the roller coaster that erases its own track/

///

Like the muffled pop of a tennis-ball launcher the ammunition Goes off in a puff of smoke, tipping over the erect bottle and its solution into the limp white balloon, bottle-mouth to balloon-lip/

///

The white balloon 𝘣𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘯𝘴… a fluid-filled lung, inhaling the gap to chest-bump the water drum found pivoting on its hip with diamond ambition/

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The water drum tips over -- will over gravity -- to right & relieve itself in the basin where, the chair, donkey-kicks from the chamber pot before Archimedes can shout "Eureka!"/

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The chair -- wet shinned & yoking weight -- tilts forward to crash into the jug that falls upon the plate to create the ghostly vapour with a hollow cry/

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From the pouring mist the upright post topples to tip the rolled-up runner rug from its starting-block/ It 𝘎𝘰𝘦𝘴… down the long, mellow incline to whip, with its unfurling, the green bottle – the fulcrum for which the plank seesaws & balances the oscillating desk to dislodge the white styrofoam cup that begins the goading pendulum swing & crackle, downward/

///

The styrofoam cup 𝘎𝘰𝘦𝘴…. to clip the teeterboard that lever-launches the lit candle -- a severed vampire's finger -- that touches the tantalising fuse in whoosh & flame/

///

Cue the silver bucket filled with explosives – BOOM! – & the resulting plume of dust, smoke & snap of the tethered black-balloon bicep, flexed tight by the cuff & the Iron-Jaw trapeze-act spin-out that deflates, then releases the cuff in a last whoopee of air/

///

The fallen halo tips the balance gently towards the tray with the charcoal foam creating the overflow into the bottomless & topless plastic bottle linked to the viaduct whereupon the wood chassis with the lit candle is propelled forward by the overflow that drenches the track in black/

///

𝘐𝘵 𝘎𝘰𝘦𝘴… diagonally, then across to reach its destination & the candle's terminus to set alight the Mad Max sun roof that goes up in flames to light the fuse attached to the chassis & the rocket that propels it on rails. 

///

The chassis Goes... to butt the nozzle & deflate the small, marbled beach ball tugging the tethered slip of timber clothesline-crucifixiing the plastic bottle/ 

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The metronomic hand releases the flammable catalyst in the saucepan to flambés the flyswatter pivoting on the mouth of the bottle counterbalanced by the cradled weight dropped into the cardboard conduit & released onto the chain of topsy-turvy timber seesaws that pivot & lever the black steel drum to bump & rotate the tireless car wheel strapped with the bottle that glug-glugs into the saucepan to weigh upon the timber lever curved like a bow under the growing weight of the saucepan & the chair that tip-toes before the A-frame held in check by the weight of the sweeping brush – like a pizza peel – shooting forward dry ice onto the hot plate that sizzles & melts while the work light with naked bulb turns on/

///

The tape -- the burning tether between the light bulb & the standing tyre on the table --  flairs brightly to snap & free the tyre to go… 𝘐𝘵 𝘎𝘰𝘦𝘴, from table to table to rumble-rung the supine stepladder, then bumble into the tyre bumped from its starting block, down & up the ramp to launch the tyre onto the dolly with the extra-small wheels that, on leaving the ramp, cause the dolly to nosedive & throw the tyre forward over the rags & through the timber bulwark with the tinsy fire torches that, on falling, set fire to the newspaper where the tyre rests/

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Armed with petrol-doused fuses & motion-motivated by firework pulses the tyre inchmeals forward onto the lever tied to the skinny dumbbell that pivots on the vice-gripped post held in check by the handsaw found limbering on the table/

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The handsaw flaps its silver blade like the last gasp of the dying fish, to lash the seesaw lever & free the roll… it 𝘎𝘰𝘦𝘴… to treble T (Tip, Tin-can, Tipple) liquid from the bottle into the cup & candle seesaw, that lifts & lights the fused alien antenna sprouting from the boxy paint brush wherein, its handle, fireworks flare/

///

The tyre 𝘎𝘰𝘦𝘴… to range down the ramp & across the warehouse floor in Zurich, where one seesaw leads the tyre to another to 𝘎𝘰 through & through the stepladder & mount the ramp tied hither-thither to cut the legs from under the stepladder & launch the tyre drunkenly towards the black steel drum/

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The chassis with candle pops its perch to race down the ramp & across the floor to the terminus with the firework that sprays its sparks far-far away from the debris & destruction into the empty & the dark & timeless warehouse in Zurich/

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The slick 𝘎𝘰𝘦𝘴… fire to fuse, fuse to floor, onwards towards the tower of blocks & timber that wedge & tension the handsaw by the nose of the blade that ignites & releases the whistling blade to catapult the projectile at the petrol-doused rag found roosting on the tall pole/

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Engulfed in flame, the roosted rag maypole swings – like the sunken ghost ship that still burns in the depths – to enkindle the slicked ground and timber arm sent pivoting through the oily breath of the Zurich warehouse like a protest flag/

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Like a one-way metronome the timber arm lays the flame on the bed of hay where the fuse emerges to light the raft-borne firework that jets across the shallow crust-bound reservoir (the shape of an ear) & into the rusted metal shack with the farmer's skylight/

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The fuse 𝘎𝘰𝘦𝘴… to rise up-up-up & ignite the ring-of-fire firework that propels forward on wheels & rail -- a devil's sprinkler -- amidst the junkyard vista of debris & destruction to puncture the rubber lips of the tyre onwards to plop into the steel bucket that cauldron smoulders/ 

///

𝘋𝘰𝘶𝘣𝘭𝘦, 𝘥𝘰𝘶𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘵𝘰𝘪𝘭 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘣𝘭𝘦; 𝘍𝘪𝘳𝘦 𝘣𝘶𝘳𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘥𝘳𝘰𝘯 𝘣𝘶𝘣𝘣𝘭𝘦 – shotgun to jam jar the firework screams to seesaw the metal nugget, 𝘎𝘰.../

///

Coast to cuff, fuse to fizz -- the limp balloon kisses the tube to come alive & hump the seesaw & dump the nugget onto the table where the fairground of rusted powder sparkles to black/

///

The tin cans rocket-orbit round the plastic bottles, & the voodoo figure -- alive under the spell & justice of two criss-crossed knives & hanging weights -- walks the plank to fall & activate Vincent's shoes propelled forward by the cuff of metal, the skinny dumbbell pedal, & madness/

///

Down the ramp the possessed shoes 𝘎𝘰 to kick the steel drum & free the cable reel that bumps & rolls the tyres that form a causal chain of water-swapping plastic containers & tacky masking tape rings that miraculously move up the ladder rungs & the ramps to set in motion the hollowed-out steel drum – internally filled with the mouth-to-ass plastic containers that cartwheel the drum forward – to squash the plastic container & evacuate the water via the tubular tap atop the tower of tyres into the tin can/

///

The tin can, filled to the brim, slides down the slick-backed table top to knock the pane of glass that nudges forward the chassis bearing the two knives & the acid dispenser that dissolves the styrofoam sheet on contact, a slow, serial, ritual contact, like skin under the peeling sun/ 

///

Momentarily slowed in a drift of gnawing styrofoam, the knife-wielding chassis 𝘎𝘰𝘦𝘴… to race down the ramp & headlong into the water balloons that explode to flood the tiered trays whereupon the jug filled with combustible liquid jumps, followed by friend flame/

///

The fire 𝘎𝘰𝘦𝘴…, carried along by its liquid accelerant to reach the kettle close to boiling from the blowtorch that curls under its carriage to propel forward, with extreme velocity & whistle, to crash inside the hay-strewn timber pylon that 𝘎𝘰𝘦𝘴 up in flames in the warehouse in Zurich in 1987/

///

The kettle with the sharp projectile piercing its spout, roosts till boiled, to harpoon the black water balloon above the tray of white foam that sizzles & feeds the tray down into the encrusted reservoir, lagooning/ 

///

The foam 𝘎𝘰𝘦𝘴 Head & Shoulders down the viaduct to surround the white column that gives way so the once supported jetty – upon which the big cookie-wheeled chassis armed with the corked bottle of liquid is parked – collapses to form the ramp for the big wheels to 𝘎𝘰/

///

𝘐𝘵 𝘎𝘰𝘦𝘴, down the ramp to butt the timber barricade where its front big wheels dissolve & sink, lowering the angle of the corked bottle that chemically churns to pop its cork off the ramp-bound knob of metal ribbed with rope hitched to a vice-gripped spray bottle -- head held high & red like a cockerel -- that hiss-spits its load upon the suspended balloon to burst & release the reactant in the tray of foam below/

///

The tray overflows with foam & pools around the beam that supports the sloped board upon which the black teardrop nestles in burlap/

///

The prop collapses & the teardrop swings in an ever-expanding arc to tip over the pint glass of solution that ignites into the field of flame on the metal table top to drip fire down below on the warehouse floor in Zurich in 1987/

///

The flame snakes along the slicked warehouse floor to inflame the sliced steel drum that tips its liquid load & the vaporous smokescreen from which emerges a ghostly Scooby Doo jetty where the oblong white balloon braces on wheels until the tin can topples into the vapour to tug at the lip of the balloon that 𝘎𝘰𝘦𝘴/ 

///

The albino balloon expels its lungs its first & last breath, to Moby Dick the dowel that barrels downhill to pivot upon the seesaw where the sticky back surface -- like insect tape -- slows the dowel to an inchmeal tug, roll, depress, unfurl, extend & slap of the inflatable raft to make the three cardboard cuffs 𝘎𝘰 from their starting block/ 

///

Like man-made tumbleweeds in the Warehouse in Zurich, one cardboard rim after another rim-riots the floor & rumble-rungs the aluminium ladder to nuzzle 1… 2… 3… 4… 5… 6… successive rims before finally tipping the board with the round bottomed flask & the blue liquid that pours into the bottomless silver funnel & gives birth to the white balloon that flounces & bungles into the tray of foam/ 

///

The foam flows & overflows beneath the towering sheet of timber -- TIMBER!! --  a gust of air propels the empty cardboard box on the dolly forward to nose the cable reel & kick the can down the ramp & tip its liquid load into the moat that encircles the pristine white tower/

///

The tower, tied to the towering plank cantilevered by the upright sleeper & the chunky metal dowel, is released to plod the plank & nudge the burlap from its roost, throwing the edifice & the T-square trigger forward under the Scrappy Doo hi-to-low jinks of the sleeper, stepladder, burlap & tractor tyre – all to the demolition's applause – knocking the bucket & its liquid load upon the tray under the A-frame balancing the big, soft sack that bundles over, lodging in the tyre to lever the metal cuff, double-back & unhook the tether tied to the timber A-frame, & release the dolly-borne plank that bullseyes the bucket & tips its last load into the container to form the vapour that drifts in concentric circles into the warehouse in Zurich in 1987 -- 30-minutes that stitched night & day & forever with smoke rings that hula hoop & release from the tongue & out beyond, way beyond, the wet lips of the lucidly bored/ calm/ credits■ 

Daddy Dancer Redux

““Dance you shall,” said he, “dance in your red shoes till you are pale and cold, till your skin shrivels up and you are a skeleton! Dance you shall, from door to door, and where proud and wicked children live you shall knock, so that they may hear you and fear you! Dance you shall, dance—!””

— The Red Shoes/ H. C. Andersen/ 1845

“Let’s dance
Put on your red shoes and dance the blues
Let’s dance
To the song they’re playin’ on the radio
Let’s sway
While colour lights up your face
Let’s sway
Sway through the crowd to an empty space”

— Let’s Dance/ David Bowie/’83

YOU call the performer ‘daddy dancer’ because it is easier that way. Daddy dancer calls his performance ‘Dance alone’, which is a little on the money for the times we live in. That’s why you have invoked a family to watch daddy dancer, a son and daughter mortified by their daddy dancing in a gallery for all to see. You don’t find it mortifying at all, daddy dancer’s dance; not like the way you have found performance art that was a little more self-conscious or masochistic mortifying. You are at peace with daddy dancer’s dance. It is entertaining. It is on point. A dance with a little more umph would have been too much; a dance with a little less umph would have not been enough. The planetary bodies of private and public orbit this Silverilocks in a universe that’s all wrong, rabid with anxiety and heartache. And here is daddy dancing in a gallery, with no invites, no VIPs, just a window – a large window – floor to ceiling, dancing under a spotlight, across the road from Centra during the 5pm rush, which is more of a creep these days. No dramatics. No knee slides. No triple twists. Just a body dancing, mind elsewhere, feet on the ground, head in the sky. A daddy dancer swallowed whole by his ears, down an eyeless chamber where a vacuum fills with music that daddy dancer bops to. What makes daddy dancer dance? Music? Mood? Exhibitionism? Company? A moment? You yourself either can’t or cannot dance; the distinction is hard to tell or accept. Daddy dancer can dance. You envy him that. Daddy dancer has music. You have nothing; no  inanimate art objects to discern or distract from the body moving in sync with the music, the mood, the moment… company? That’s why you have imagined more, invented more, a narrative that includes... company. Without company what do you have?

As Tom Waits soulfully croaked, it’s “Closing Time.” A middle-aged man dances in a galley as the 2021 workday staggers to a 5 PM halt. Shirt, jeans, red runners, headphones, bristled from grey jaw to grey crest, the dancer dances unselfconsciously, a pale king in a white room. With no company or artist statement, we are free to pretend this dancer has children. Let’s name them Audrey and Leland for good reason. As daddy dancer dances he makes Audrey and Leland curl into ringlets of shame, like the daddy jokes he performed around their friends or the hopefully more. Shame! “Is he trying to impress them? Why does he have to speak, exist, dance!?” Audrey blushes while Leland nods in embarrassment. Daddy dancer moves; he sure does! He is not trying to impress with his moves, he is trying to feel, or turn inward to escape from the straightjacket of thinking or, he’s just dancing in a world of pretend, scheduled and awaiting an audience. Daddy dancer is in a gallery where pretend pretends to be true. The art objects are beside the point and pivot of daddy dancer’s fantasy. THIS IS NOT REAL! This is after hours, when screens oppress as black rectangles, powered off so the body can turn on. The dancer turns on his heel. The dance is a daddy dance. It is a dance of one when the couple is just a memory. Everyone looks on. No big show, just shuffles and taps and the clicking of fingers, something Audrey and Leland love most of all. When the dancer giddies up after a click of his fingers he almost takes off. Almost. But the floor is this dancer’s stim. He is a sweeping brush brushing on the spot, marking a spot, religiously not venturing beyond the mime closet of his masturbation. He dances; erect; alone. This is a pretend private dance gone public. The public watch from the gallery window – window shopping for a connection. They get sweet and sad and that thing the Greeks called pathos. Daddy dancer is wired up. Not wirelessly wired! Shame! He wears red All Stars. Shame again!! After 30-minutes of dancing his phone rings. The fantasy stops. He acknowledges the audience in a gesture of soft modesty that breaks hard on WALL No. 4. 

Retired from NCAD, artist Kevin Atherton always danced performance art light-footed, like Houdini minus the endurance and chains. As a lecturer who talked and talked, openly and generously and provocatively, Atherton always gave off the impression that he believed that performance should always aim to project outward not inward. No more cradling of the self in the masochistic vice of the fetal position. He never said this explicitly, it was just his reaction to other students’ work that implied that belief. His work gave off that impression too. He always projected outwards, admittedly most of the time to a double of himself. But still, you always felt comfortably sandwiched between him and his double: you felt invited. Ciaran O’Keeffe’s performance at NCAD Gallery invokes Atherton’s attitude without the double. Intravenously fed by music that daddy dancer can only hear, you subsitute mute with a glitchy jukebox, a history of listening, of switching channels, of feeling, of hating, of loving, of fucking, of dancing (drunk or sober) that shuffles without finding the right track that can possibly dub over daddy dancer’s moves. He slips in and out of reverie; a dance-off taking place between the butchered mixtape in your head and the body that dances out of step with them. Out of sync, you step on his and your toes. You smile. There’s something light about daddy dancer’s jitterbug, and dark about its motivation. 30-minutes is a long time to dance; 15-minutes more than Instagram allows on a mobile device. Daddy dancer is verging on endurance; how long can you go rather than how long is needed to attract the eye and arouse the body. The positive and negative valence is bent up or down according to duration. Why it is easier to watch than to do; to mime rather than choreograph; to let go and let the body fall into itself. Free.

Why do David Lynch’s characters break into aberrant slow dances? Never liberated by alcohol – more hyped up on caffeine, or some secret trauma they need to shake off their skin – they slink away into themselves, into their bodies, into the music, as if their friends or family are not looking on, a joyful mourning that upsets the routine and familiar. In interviews David Lynch has a tendency – or twitch – to air-piano with his fingers when responding to interviewers’ questions concerning the aberrant abstractions in his filmmaking that break the familiarity of coffee and donuts, as if he is using his body to cast a spell on the uninitiated. Fire walk with me… dance with me… Lynch says he “hated” college, and learnt more from “slow-dance parties”. You can feel the tingle up their spine as his characters undress the stuff that is borne of thinking too much, wallowing in the stuff that makes us pause, look out the window, and give up. The juncture between the dream and the dance is made manifest in Lynch’s characters’ need to shake free from thinking too much. Verbosity is not dancing. His dancers are not showoffs (LOOK AT ME DANCE!). They are vulnerable to the effects of thinking too much, feeling too much. That’s why they dance. Dance is an escape from empathy or possession by the other in love or trauma. DON’T TALK!   DON’T THINK! DONT LOVE! DANCE! Lynch’s characters dance around the hole, the sink, the roundabout sinkhole. 

Some twenty years ago I came across the term “objet petit a” invented by Jacques Lacan. I didn’t get it. I read a few papers. I didn’t get it. I left it for a few years until Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek explained it to me through some popular cultural references. I didn’t get it. I looked up the blunt definition “object cause of desire” and thought I got it. I didn’t. Retrospectively the objet petit a had become my objet petit a, the very obstacle to my desire for meaning, an obstacle I was unconsciously enjoying, dancing around. Enter David Lynch. Last night I watched Part 15 of Twin Peaks: The Return, which revisits the original series televised and set 25-years previous, a series I watched on some snowy channel in my adolescence, an adolescence spent in a village with a hotel situated by a waterfall, surrounded by woodlands and a village sign with a population listed less than the original 5,201 of Twin Peaks (the producers inflated the Twin Peaks population to 51,201 for fear of a viewership not being interested in the premise of a small-town drama.) During those school days I gazed, listless, out the school bus window with Twin Peaks’ tender theme song and its abject abstractions imprinted on my squishy teenage brain, especially the dances that uncannily erupt into the bodies of the characters. I was Haunted. Still am. The best episode so far, Part 15, blends the old Twin Peaks (innocence amidst the possibility of terror) with the new Twin Peaks (terror amidst the possibility of innocence). Diner owner Norma and gas station owner Ed—the couple who never became official but dance the precipice of its possibility for two lifetimes in TV hours – finally overcome the ultimate pretext and obstacle to their desire, their objet petit a: “Nadine”. Let me explain. Ed is married to patch-eyed and mentally disturbed Nadine. For a brief interlude in the original series Ed and Norma get together when thirty-something Nadine loses her memory to regress into a teenager in the possession of superhuman strength. Everyone is ‘happy’ until Nadine’s memory returns in the concluding episode. In The Return, Nadine confronts Ed at his gas station with a golden shovel (long story) and releases him from his marital obligations. A gawky Ed rushes to the diner, waves and strides towards Norma to tell her in his country and western timbre that he is free – they are free. Norma snubs him momentarily by continuing with a business appointment in a booth at the far end of the diner with a man that Ed suspects is also a love interest. Ed – a still reed in a storm – orders a coffee, takes a seat at the counter after a few sidelong glances with Norma that reciprocate disappointment, to then slip into a thousand-yard stare. Closing his eyes to inhale and hold the seconds, Ed braces against the suspended moment when Norma will either reject or accept him. “Same again Sam!” The objet petit a is not the object of desire (Norma or Ed) but the delay or suspension of attaining the object of desire. They are entangled, desire and its obstacles, fusing as surplus enjoyment. Ed’s freedom from Nadine immediately finds its substitute in another ad hoc objet petit a – anything to prolong the obstacle and object cause of their desire, a desire that will become void alone. This scene, although it has the elements of what could turn into the dogma of a Hollywood embrace overseen by the cheers of an overenthusiastic crowd, is anything but. Norma and Ed finally seal the union with a kiss, somewhat ironically to Ottis Redding’s I’ve Been Loving You Too Long after dancing too long to Jim Morrison’s lyric I’ve got this girl beside me, but she’s out of reach. I give them 6-months. Tops. 

Yesteryear daddy dancer’s dance would have been a quirk; today it is a quirk and more, stepping in tempo with the mood and moment that will become indelible when the need to dance will be replaced with want once again. Daddy dance is a glitch in a glitch, a meta moment that looks at itself looking at itself, dancing with itself, within it-self, it and self entangled in the pandemic abstractions that are impossible to verbalise. Dancing is the best you can do, all you can do. Minus the ‘daddy’ – but not the dance – you are left with a dancer dancing alone, swaying through the crowd to an empty space (David Bowie). Empathy turns to empty as the emotional oxymoron between dance and alone clashes, leaving us to imagine a dancer, in a bedroom, just out of the shower, where he wallowed in water and whiskey, to end up dancing with the memory of someone else. To dance is to dance, tout court. However “dance” accompanied by “alone” can only mean one thing, not two! 

Daddy dancer.

As Tom Waits soulfully croaked, it's “Closing Time.” A middle-aged man dances in a galley as the 2021 workday staggers to a 5 P.M. halt. Shirt, jeans, red runners, headphones, the dancer dances unselfconsciously, a spot-lit quiddity in a white room. No intro: let's pretend this dancer has kids. Let's name them Audrey & Leland for good reason. As daddy dancer dances he makes Audrey & Leland curl into ringlets of shame, like the daddy jokes he performed around friends or the hopefully more. Shame! “Is he trying to impress them? Why does he have to speak, exist, dance!?” Daddy dancer moves; he sure does! He's not trying to impress with his moves, he's trying to feel, or turn inward to escape from the straightjacket of thinking or, he's just dancing in a world of pretend, scheduled & awaiting an audience. Daddy dancer is in a gallery where pretend pretends to be true. The art objects are beside the point & pivot of daddy dancer's fantasy. THIS IS NOT REAL! This is after hours, when screens are black rectangles, powered off so the body can turn on--turn you on. The dancer turns on his heel. The dance is a daddy dance. It's a dance of one when the couple is just a memory. Everyone looks on. No big show, just shuffles & taps & the clicking of fingers, something Audrey & Leland love most of all. When the dancer giddies up after a click of his fingers he almost takes off. Almost. But the floor is this dancer's stim. He is a sweeping brush brushing on the spot, marking a spot, religiously, not venturing beyond the mime closet of his masturbation. He dances; erect; alone. This is a pretend private dance gone public. The public watch from the gallery window--window shopping for a connection. They get sweet & sad & that thing they call pathos. Daddy dancer is wired! Not wirelessly wired! Shame! Shame again!! He wears red All Stars. His phone rings. The fantasy stops. He acknowledges the audience in a gesture of soft modesty that breaks hard on WALL No. 4. Retired from NCAD, artist Kevin Atherton dances performance art light-footed, like Houdini minus the endurance & chains. This is it!

Lynchian Love

Some twenty years ago I came across the term “objet petit a” invented by Jacques Lacan. I didn't get it. I read a few papers. I didn't get it. I left it for a few years until Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek explained it to me through some popular cultural references. I didn't get it. I looked up the blunt definition “object cause of desire” & thought I got it. I didn’t. Retrospectively the objet petit a had become my objet petit a, the very obstacle to my desire for meaning, an obstacle I was unconsciously enjoying. Enter David Lynch. Last night I watched Part 15 of Twin Peaks: The Return, which revisits the original series televised & set 25 years previous, a series I watched on some snowy channel in my adolescence, an adolescence spent in a village with a hotel situated by a waterfall, surrounded by woodlands & a village sign with a population listed less than the original 5,201 of Twin Peaks. During those school days I gazed, listless, out the school bus window with Twin Peaks' tender theme song & its abject abstractions imprinted on my squishy teenage brain. I was Haunted. Still am. The best episode so far, Part 15, blends the old Twin Peaks (innocence amidst the possibility of terror) with the new Twin Peaks (terror amidst the possibility of innocence). Diner owner Norma & gas station owner Ed—the couple who never became official but edge the precipice of its possibility for two lifetimes in TV hours—finally overcome the ultimate pretext & obstacle to their desire, their objet petit a: Nadine. Let me explain. Ed is married to patch-eyed & mentally disturbed Nadine. For a brief interlude in the original series Ed & Norma get together when thirty-something Nadine loses her memory to regress into a teenager in the possession of superhuman strength. Everyone is ‘happy’ until Nadine's memory returns in the concluding episode. In The Return, Nadine confronts Ed at his gas station with a golden shovel (long story) & releases him from his marital obligations. A gawky Ed rushes to the diner, waves & strides towards Norma to tell her in his country & western timbre that he is free, they are free. Norma snubs him momentarily by continuing with a business appointment in a booth at the far end of the diner with a man that Ed suspects is also a love interest. Ed— a still reed in a storm—orders a coffee, takes a seat at the counter after a few sidelong glances with Norma that reciprocate disappointment, to then slip into a thousand yard stare. Closing his eyes to inhale & hold the seconds, Ed braces against the suspended moment when Norma will either reject or accept him. Same again Sam. The objet petit a is not the object of desire (Norma or Ed) but the delay & suspension of attaining the object of desire. They are entangled, desire & its obstacle, fusing as surplus enjoyment. Ed's freedom from Nadine immediately finds its substitute in another ad hoc objet petit a—anything to prolong the obstacle & object cause of their desire, a desire that will become void alone. This scene, although it has the elements of what could turn into the dogma of a Hollywood embrace overseen by the cheers of an overenthusiastic crowd, is anything but. Norma & Ed finally seal the union with a kiss, somewhat ironically to Ottis Redding’s I've Been Loving You Too Long after dancing too long to Jim Morrison's lyric I've got this girl beside me, but she's out of reach. I give them 6-months. Tops. 

Artists are optimists.

"Artists are optimists!" you said. Naturally I agreed with you. Under withering Christmas lights your statement dimmed against the neon shadows of COVID signage. En route home I repeated "artists are optimists" as if repetition would turn to revelation like the mantra of Hail Mary's & Our Father's I unwittingly murmured in the turned-sod graveyards of my adolescence. Pessimism had always been my friend. Raw, cut, wet clay is a beautiful thing up close & on your knees; especially topped by green shoots of life stomped by freshly polished black shoes. My personal experience of being an artist & being with artists is crushing pessimism; selves embossed by the depths of a narcissism indelibly engraved by the past--pessimism being a symptom of the past, of experience, of gravely want & woe, body upon body upon body, Amen. Optimism is pessimism amen-ded. Popular culture's dependency on binaries tells us we are either this or that. Choose or die! Such binaries don't exist. Does that make me a pessimist or optimist? It's strange how we balance the scales of difference on either/or when one extreme begets another: left & right, night & day; friend & enemy; love & hate; fact & fiction. A corrective to such binary rivalry is needed. The seeds of pessimism come from the highest, redest, ripest apple that falls from the tallest, thinnest tree to plummet past the waxy green & polished blacks that hedge the clay rectangle of our deepest fate. There, beneath the beneath, the apple cracks on impact. Seeds disperse & fruitful despair blossoms. Beautifully dark & deep in colour & grip, pessimism is a baroque bouquet that entangles the feet of the fallen & risen. Falling & climbing, climbing & falling, the optimist falls from fantasy to meet the pessimist, halfway, climbing from reality. 

Jeff Wall, The Flooded Grave, 1998-2000, transparency in lightbox, 90 x 111 in.

Chess

THERE is a scene in the limited series The Queen's Gambit on Netflix when the main protagonists meet in a university lecture theatre in Ohio in 1967 to play in the American National Chess Competition. Boy/Girl—the asexuallised foreplay & horseplay has been long & jumpy between these two characters up to this scene, including two meetings spanning as many years, both flirting for a position under the other's gaze like the game of chess itself, getting to know one another through small columns in small chess magazines, and on the small competition circuit where whispers nudge & smudge in the hush of competition. The boy & girl are enigmatic to one another, squares & diagonals, even though the width of a chessboard separates them in this small world, this black & white & flat world which hangs on the edge of a move seen coming by the winner three steps before the loser. In chess it was over before it was over. The boy & girl met before: the girl (the up & comer) caught midway up an art deco staircase & ad hoc adolescence, throwing a bird glance at the boy who sits under the brim of a too cool hat & cooler demeanor amidst the adulation of a coterie of boy chess nerds. The boy & girl played each other before too. The boy won. Here, in Ohio, under the warmth of unexpectant beginnings they find themselves in the middle of nowhere & everything. A flat world that couldn't be more round in complexity. Chess is a clique that no one wants to be part of, but the wants of its players are the same as the wants of the popular. The boy tells the girl that in Russia chess is important & played in important places. They end up in the student union playing speed chess for money, drunk. The girl loses. The boy loses. Russia & importance is on the horizon but here, in Ohio, in a second rate university & greasy spoon student union, things are just right♟

*part of a longer text I am working on that digs into community, cliques & the individual in the art scene.

THE NARCISSIST.

The narcissist is always thirsty. Caravaggio's painting of Narcissus by water's edge is the best portrayal of narcissism ever imagined in painting or anything else. Narcissus, shirtsleeves up, gazes down into his reflection. A lake? A pond? A waterhole? A dream? The source of everything without ending?--its width & depths secrets beyond the picture frame. No room for anyone else, Narcissus the object is found finding narcissus the subject, a half boy longingly & hauntingly wanting to be whole again, straddling the bank, crab-like. Is it heaven? hell? limbo? Narcissus angles his angel body to fit within a glass box of his own imagining. No condensation or buzzing insects blemish the glass, just impenetrable dark as stillness fills his world of halves. Some time ago Narcissus, thirsty, faltered across his image, an image that never reaches the rim. Now he crouches, like a table, eagerly craning his neck to get a closer, better, badder look. One hand planted on the shore, the other caressing the depths, already lost, drinking the empty. This lost caress under a body without purchase puts pressure on a naked knee that monstrously muscles onto the shore, a deformed body part that aches under the weight of longing, about to burst before Narcissus is dragged in a downward dive. Like the optical deformity in Holbein's The Ambassadors, the knee divides our attention & obscures our want for symmetry, for balance, for wholeness. But the knee will hold; it has held for years, bulking up as Narcissus drinks forever the image that he loves more than himself. Always thirsty. 

TRUMP.

PUBLISHED in October 2016 in anticipation of the American presidential election of either Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump, this cover image by Barbara Kruger for N.Y. Mag is one that testifies that art is always to come as we retrospectively & anachronistically reread it today, tomorrow, forever. Today, four years on following four years of Trump the parodic reality of which Saturday Night Live failed to parody during his term, a magazine cover became art the day Trump was elected president. Susan Sontag's theory that parody is immune to interpretation is made manifest. At the time N.Y. Mag editors wrote "how we’re drawn to it, in part, for the three ways in which it could be interpreted: as Trump speaking (single word epithets being his specialty); as a description of Trump; and as a call on the election result. The editors amended their three to four ways by concluding that "an important point is spelled out in the headline we appended to the bottom corner: Trump has already changed America, not much for the better. Which adds a fourth meaning: in that sense we are all losers too." By adding this fourth meaning, the editors, not the artist, intimate Trump's defeat by writing "And what he's already won." It suggests, in that defeatist way, that Trump has won even if he doesn't win. There is hope in the editors' tag. Clinton's election night party was held at New York Javits Center, a building made mostly of glass. Clinton had talked about glass ceilings, "the highest & hardest glass ceiling" repeatedly vs Trump & vs Obama 8 years previous when other ceilings were broken: a black president. There's defeat in glass ceiling talk too. Kruger's Trump is cropped of his hair & complexion—those pumpkin innards splat on his head & that tangerine dream skin. Without his defining caricature Trump's identity hangs on a word, LOSER. Black, white & red all over, LOSER is a word that has been redefined by TRUMP's presidency. Dead troops are LOSERS, China will be a LOSER, we are losers, even if we win. Barbara Kruger's timeliness becomes timeless, not in a gallery, but a kiosk with a newsstand & the sight & smell of hotdog vapours spiralling up our noses. Achoo!

THE L.A. UNCONSCIOUS.

“In the beginning was the Word” said the many from the empyrean pulpit. “The unconscious is structured like a language” said Jacques Lacan from the primordial black cellar. You might infer from all this that words form our very being. And you would be partly correct. We adopted language very early on. Like the Big Bang, words just happened. Before that, like before the Big Bang, there was everything & nothing over there. Words were a way in which to redefine our relationship with the unthinking world & thinking other over there. Words pushed back, separated, individuated & speculated on the distance that had just been put between you & the world due to words. Words begot words begot words. We learned to live with words, communicate with words, lie with words, become defined by words in name & vocation. Put simply: We became words. Words, words, words. So many words that we dreamt up places that did not think, that did not have words, like the unconscious, a place of thought that does not think (Jacques Rancière). Picture this: American artist Ed Ruscha cruising around L.A.—the billboard-thin backdrop to his text paintings & photography—listening to the radio tuned in to two stations, anticipating the expected & familiar pothole he has stopped avoiding over the years & grown to want, to need, to love as a “spiritual hotspot”. This all plays out in a short film that traces Ruscha's journey from L.A. home to L.A. studio. Never did you think L.A. would be the place where the unconscious would come forth in your consciousness, your definition, L.A. being a place that wears surface as history. But that's just it, the unconscious is not to be found in a dimly lit cellar where Freud's agents of id., ego & superego hide in a windowless three-cornered room with a swinging light bulb lighting up their uncanny personalities one by one. No. The unconscious is Ed Ruscha on a bright & blue L.A. day enroute to his studio, tweaking the radio dial so that two channels bunk together, dream together; the stock markets on top, country & western music underneath. Freud called the unconscious a double inscription; Ruscha's radio is a double inscription. In the 1960s the French psychoanalyst Serge Leclaire, a disciple of Lacan, proffered the analogy of a radio tuned in to two stations to describe the unconscious, except Leclaire's genre was jazz not country & western. Jazz is a little in tune as an analogy for the unconscious; country & western is a little off tune, like the visual drone of David Lynch's Lost Highway, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, inferring that America & its levels of thin is more in tune with the enigmatic surface of the unconscious.