The Shortcomings of the Living World’s Experiences
vs. The
Infinite Potentialities of The Universe
A DEATH CATHARSIS PARADIGM
The thrill of the Cyclone is
an old thrill. Bull Fights. …Aztecs… Standing in line under the aged wooden
roller coaster on
Tension builds as the crowd
salmons through the slots into fate-chosen cars. The platform shakes deep and
heavy, connecting to an unseen force. To wait in line, to watch, to anticipate
– is to participate. Anticipation is part of the experience. When your moment
comes, you step into the car. And the larger than life force of the mechanism
catches you up and hurls you over a precipice. The pure natural force of
gravity slips you terrifyingly up out of your seat, as the machine drags you
even faster against it: down. Two jealous gods do battle over your mortal body.
To ride the Cyclone is to be swept up in the center of the narrative. Ulyssian
adventures of life and death are in action upon you. In the end, through the
dark, the car rushes home and is impressively and abruptly stopped. The firm
hand of force is finished with you, done. The door is rudely shown to all. “Get
out.” It is over. You walk out on wobbly newborn legs a changed man – giddy –
full of life.
Thrilling or nauseating the
rollercoaster is built to have a physical effect. What is this about? Why take
fate in hand for fun? Interacting with elemental bodily fear, and transforming
that fear into a feat, changes your relation to the world.
Surprising your autonomic
functions, scaring the hell out of your reptilian brain, is fun.
For once you are the older
brother of the autonomic, you know more than it does, you alone are privy to
the knowledge of your fate. Why not fake it out, give it a shock, silence it for a while?
For once, you can override its chronic, nagging suspicions of doom. Why
not discharge your automatic brain so it doesn’t run you. So you run it.
It is a primal bodily
catharsis to throw yourself onto the Cyclone. You take
the tension of fear and combust it, convert it out
into the universe. The pressure is released. Ritual is a very old reset button.
The function of all ritual is catharsis.
Catharsis:1. A purgation of the bowels 2. A purging of
audiences emotions through a work of art.
The Aztecs had the
functionality of ritual down. High-templed, high-minded purists, they kept
their interest in catharsis very close to the first definition of the word, the
flaying of the bowels. No iffy pansy bull jumping – they were going for heavy
transformation, thousands of human sacrifices set in massive stone. Aztec
civilization had the death machine so geared up that death seemed to be on
their clock not on its own.
Orchestrating large
ritualized spectacles of human sacrifice, ripping out piles of still-beating
hearts, and drinking vats of human blood, the Aztecs had their Eucharist writ
large. They went so far as to actually wear the skin of their victims, crawling
inside death, getting up in there. Now that
is owning death. That’s massive stone Aztec balls
for you. They took unpredictable fate head on. They owned their fears, their
own mortality . They mastered the unknown through mass
human sacrifices. The Aztecs got death going on a dependable schedule, to
appease the larger gods in themselves.
As civilization develops
from nomadic to agrarian to larger nations the antisocial behavior of human
sacrifice becomes untenable for the newer forms of culture.
As the price of death in the
history of human religion is substituted, removed over time, edged out of the
ritual by lesser and lesser godly pay – first with the substitution of the
animal in place of human sacrifice, then symbols or effigies – our literal
physically implicated inclusion/exorcism becomes remote. Today we burn a candle
to the gods instead of ourselves. The blood and body of the salvation we
consume has become wine and a wafer. We
might lose some bread to the gods at worst. And then in
Primal Catharsis is largely
lost in today’s secular, technology-buffered world. We live in a technological
hermetic. We kick butt through video game ‘joy sticks’, decapitate with
buttons, and drop bombs on villages with flicks of wrists. In stadium lazy-boy
seating, from behind bags of popcorn we witness massive motion picture car
crashes in technology’s remove. Today we are 6-degrees separated from our own
experience.
Boundaries are good, clear
rules set down by adults. Technology with its lack of equitable cause and
effect, presents unclear parables, corollaries that are frayed. Bankruptcy,
statutes of limitations, the unborn, technicalities, gray fulfillments of life
and death contracts, and put life into tension. Without catharsis, without a
release, into suspension, into purgatory we go.
Like junk food, technology
often has a fundamental substitution at its core; a phantom, hollow calories, a
hollow catharsis. Today we live in a transformative deficit. We are heavily
leveraged against death when it comes these
days. Birth control pills, life support machines, when death comes now we sue
our doctors. No longer in the realm of gods, death has become a mistake of the
human will.
SLOW
MOTION CAR CRASH
Hermetically sealed in our
noiseless cars, smooth rides, and soundless interiors, we occupy a mental space
not impacted by reality. Inside the car, waves of symphonies flood our ears.
Driving our Infinity’s, sealed in our Kubrickian vehicles, floating over roads
in our reality suspension systems, we live in a hyperbole of speed, rushing
along in our death avoidance devices, lost in translation.
We stop and look at a car
wreck to reacquaint ourselves with the lost velocity,
to reconnect with cause and effect. For we live
increasingly in a world without effect, without impact.
Speed changes meaning,
changes the effects of catharsis.
Because of the reduced
velocity of the event, the motion of the cars is undetectable, invisible to the
naked eye. The speed has been distilled out of the piece. While speed has been
removed, it
sits like an erased De Kooning, ever present in the work. The crash implies it, leaving a relic of its transformative
power.
If there is no speed, when
is the act of death implied? We are watching for it. In our
galleries, in our cars, as we slow down to look. Where is the point of
transformation?
By reducing a crash to its
Newtonian elements, by compartmentalizing the components, can we isolate the
moment of transformation, box it back in, recapture it? If we slow things down
can we catch death by the tail?
The futility of the pursuit
is central in Schipper’s work. The mystery unveiled under the microscope always
seems to reveal smaller components of mystery, drawing us around an Escher
staircase.
A therapist once said you
can never really know trauma, its inequities. Nevertheless people are still
compelled to return to the scene of a trauma, to look for resolution to the
inequities. To answer the mystery of why. The
therapist spends her life reconciling people to their fates.
Lucky for the Met, artists
don’t listen well to therapists.
OPPOSITION
Jonathan describes a seminal
experience from his early childhood. He remembers daydreaming at the age of
three or four, imagining himself transforming into a line, into its simple
formal element. He recalls becoming that line fully, in all its experience,
inhabiting it wholly. He was then able to transform into any form of line. He
felt the entirety of what it was to be the round curly line, then the sharp
jagged line. But he found his favorite in the fuzzy line.
In the fuzzy line he grayed
himself out to no definition, to become everything. It seemed the most
expansive experience, a peak experience he recalls in a heightened state of
reverie.
Primal and primary seem very
close. Becoming all and nothing at all, becoming one with the Universe. A
child’s experience of expansive possibilities, a child so close still to
non-being, so close to the cellular world of the womb, who wishes to be a part
of a larger whole by being unformed. The elemental becoming
everything.
Artists and alchemists are
always searching for the prima material. They are trying to get at the core of
things, their essence, their truth, always looking back to the original matter.
Searching for our Whitmanian essence. Our knowledge of
it is in there, in our being, calling us toward it.
“I see ‘opposition’ as a figurative
sculpture. But instead of traditional figurative sculpture where you’re carving
a person out of stone,
I am doing the inverse. I am trying to
take a person and turn them into a thing.”
Opposition
means to break down the body elementally, to shake loose your hold on
technology, shake you out of your identity and reinstate your physicality as a
thing. The machine functions like someone repeating a word over and over until
the meaning becomes lost, a form of self-brainwashing, of hypnotizing oneself
out of meaning. It shakes the body out of meaning into original meaning, into
prima material, alchemy. Where words are reduced back to
blurred sounds. Backward to onomatopoeia.
Sifting the body from the history of
its figurative tradition, down through Picasso, through Pollack, down to
Islamic art, Opposition is a time
machine that takes us back to the elemental, back to the body, then back
through the body to the pre-womb. Blurring out our bodies,
into the fuzzy line of the child’s primal daydream, back before definition.
‘I just want to shake her,
wake her up, get it through her head.’ Shaking baby
syndrome…shook my foundation…rocked my world. Using shaking’s violent futility, the machine forcefully re-contextualizes our
bodily element. Enacting the physiological catharsis of the roller coaster, Opposition is a control paradox, a kind
of mechanical dominatrix, it imprisons you to set you
free.
What makes life real? What
shakes us anymore? What shakes us into now, into the present, into presence,
when now is always in a state of inaction? When technology is meant to remove
some of the labor from us, but leaves us sitting in the stroller, in school, at
the computer, at work, in the car? We have become too hermetic, too close to
ourselves to even see ourselves. We can’t understand why we are gaining weight,
can’t see our own inaction, our own hermetics. We modern Aztecs, void of
physical rituals to shake us into our place.
Even Halloween has been
grave-robbed of its meanings, turned from the cathartic powers of staring death
in its face, to a ritual of self-empowered transformation. We perform feats of
capitalistic transformation, becoming for a day our wildest fantasies of
self-will; the opposite sex, jokers who participate, super heroes of eternal
life. We become the gods who create our destinies. Unacknowledged death, how
will we greet him when he comes?
It would be nice if we
always controlled our destinies. But how will we know how to negotiate with
fate when tragedy arrives? Facing death, and elemental
forces – natural forces – ultimately means facing god and being shaken back to
an elemental. For what is god but that which is enacting upon us without our
command? Without our command. How do we reconcile
ourselves with god?
Once,
while art examined and expressed the universe, the larger explanations of these
examinations were supplied by religion. Religion, aided by art and ritual, gave
us cathartic experiences that allow us to face death. While catharsis enacted its transformation,
religion provided us with life and death’s larger meanings, with universal
understanding, so that we could enter into the unknown more reassured.
Art is a mirror of our
world, a mirror that gives parameters and containable meanings. Making an emulation, a symbol, a substitution is a way to arrest
life, to hold it up and examine it. To understand what it is and what may be
unseen and possible. Art is a mechanism of understanding.
Jonathan works in a space
not far out from the body. A space that you can never really
get away from or close enough to. His machines take measurements,
calibrate limitations, trying to confront with a cold eye where we stand. He
looks down the crevasse, the River Styx that stands between the outside world
and ourselves, dropping his plumb, measuring out the
distances, the limitations of the bodily experience. Art in the service of
catharsis contains and enunciates. It is the ritual hold, art moves death out
of reality into ritual so we may meditate on its meanings.
Technology is supposed to
extend you, but the reverse always seems to happen. We are absorbed today by
technology. We have become an extension
of the machine, a tool of technology, a button pusher, a word processor. The
body caught in this paradox, becomes part of the machine, and here a component
of a work of art.
In Opposition the bodies flop around like dead things, their functions
taken over by the machine. What does it mean that the body is a component of
the machine? What does it mean to have the body as a limb of sculpture? The
body becomes a living metaphor for technology’s deadening abilities.
At its core, the function of
the mechanism has a larger question: What is technology missing? What is
technology missing in experience? What are we missing in the experience?
Jonathan makes mechanical
paradoxes. Opposition strives to
reverse technology’s hold on us, to shake you out of its grasps, back into the
body. It is meant to enact anti-progress upon you, to entropy its own effects.
Its motto is anti-technology. More reconciled than Tinguely’s self destroying
machine, it is a machine of contrition, working to erase its wrongs.
There is an absurdity to
something so overtly complicated bring us back to the elemental. And something funny about it happening through an inarticulate
expression of frustration – shaking someone.
Frustration of expression,
frustration with technology, frustration with disjointedness,
Jonathan’s machines are
elaborately conceived
failing fledglings, they are futile things, built on the
realization that you can never really go back to nothing. To
merge seamlessly to the other, the universe. They are parables.
SPECTACLE
There is a diaristic tone in
much of Jonathan’s work. Often the space is intimate, naked. Figures confront
themselves and their bodies while answering to a larger history in the crowd.
Similar to the act of writing out one’s thoughts, it is a private publicized
experience, like praying in church.
What does it mean to have an
intimate experience in public? To meet one’s maker in a
crowd? What does that intimacy mean? How does the group substantiate our
catharsis? What is spectacle?
The crowd is reoccurring in
ritual. The hypnotic falling back into the will of the mass,
a giving into force, going with the flow, becoming one with the universe.
Relinquishing control to the point that you face fate effortlessly, letting the
roller coaster sweep you home. Becoming one with the
uncontrollable instead of being in conflict with it.
Substantiating one’s
existence in the secular world, knowing one is alive – feeling it – seeing it.
This is a by-product of ritual, art, and religion.
Jonathan uses the gallery to
reconfigure the mass by reassembling the audience, event, and sacrifice. All
the components of the ritual are here now rudely crowding into the gallery
space, into our new
Through the looking glass we
come. From our self-conscious evaluation space, our forum for breaking down the
spectacle, our laboratory of the known object, into the Roman Forum we step. In
Halloween costumes we come, as cowboys and Indians, as Aztecs, Romans, and
Christian slayers, dragging with us, into the
Kelly King 2005