All Around And In Between
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Avi Saliman
Parsons School of Design
Thesis text for the completion of the the degree of Bachelors of Fine Arts, minor in Fashion Studies
2021
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For The Four Rings I Wear Every Day
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“The present, however, already stands to the recent past as the awakening stands to the dream”
-Walter Benjamin
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The more that we learn about materials, about symbols, about fabrication…. The more their spirit fades, the more they replicate, saturate, decay, the more meaningless they become, and the less we seem to care...
things that are overly mannered become contorted and stretched into formlessness...
Isn’t that funny? Isn’t that sad?
:) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :)
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Preface
In the coming pages I’ve collected thoughts, memories, meditations, theories, and philosophies, none of which can claim they’re more or less original than the others.
reading sequentially is not necessary, it can read as a flowing stream or as rocks skipped on still waters; I implore you to decipher the fragments of writing, drawing, sculpture, I want you to see their meaning, to understand their meaninglessness, to feel their sorrow & fear and humor & peace, to realize their interlooped cohesions, and I want you to ruminate on the maximality and the minimalism of it all, to be able to glimpse the magnitude of stories behind each mark on the page, each object in front of you, and to feel an empathy for that object, a connection to that moment, a memory of that symbol, a feeling of that texture…
Forward
My work is much less and more than the sum of its parts; it relies on many objects, be it for their surface texture or for their use as a sculptural element. I represent objects, but I also don’t. I want things that are in between and outside of what they are (and what they were made with). Even some objects that I use exist in a liminal space between themself and their function (themself, versus one’s interaction with them). Interfaces, screens, there is a separation from what you're using. In general, we’re all pretty blind to what most of our objects actually are, don’t you think? We don't know our objects and it makes us blind to them - to their actual form and structure, to their significance to us. We need to remember to be empathetic towards (and sometimes critical of) our stuff and all the stuff around us.
In my work the precise details of the exact relationships that I have to the objects (and the greater connotations the marks have as symbols, representations, literal marks, etc..) don’t necessarily have to be known by the viewer; I think it’s clear that exactness really isn’t my goal. Some viewers may recognize certain symbolism or recognizable objects, texts or numbers; however its very, very, very challenging (and pretty futile) to try to get all of them or to try to view the drawings as only one tableau; some of them may contain many different landscapes, a portrait, and many nearly perfect ‘representations’ and impressions of the stuff of the past. In most pieces, though, it’s possible for the viewer to identify one or some or all objects used in its formation; hidden behind a veil, be it of rubbings or wrappings, it’s not only immortalized in the viewers’ mind’s eyes, but in their personal memories’ too; as, of course, one’s subconscious will spawn any or all relevant memories associated with such things as soon as one recognizes the object...
Excavating the and indexing the details of the world around me and the crevices of my mind is to make physical the metaphysical and peep into the collective mind.
I see a triple link in my practice between the exploration of the personal, the reflection on the present & historical context, and the relationship to objects. The latter of which through an intrapersonal lens, as well as through one of the consumer/commodity relationship.
Broken pictures born from roughly replicated rubbings attempt a hint at decaying capitalism.
They’re somewhat indexical and familiar yet don’t make much sense, like a bricolage of all the ‘duds’ from a batch. The imperfect and overwhelming qualities are also attempted reflections of my psyche. Perhaps it’s this psyche but I’ve also always been drawn to researching the mystical, unexplainable, or unknowable things in the world. Influences from the Kabbalah, the tarot, and other mystical sources slither through my work from the physical, formal qualities to the corner-full-of-spiderwebs that is the conceptual.
The world feels incredibly chaotic. Rapid and constant cultural, and technological shifting has led to the flattening and subsequent exponential fracturing of time and space; it’s important to stay physical and stay tactile, to stay grounded if you may.
Digital art and mass manufacturing are all too infinite…
When an object bears no human touch, no truthful physicality,
one can never trust it,
but oftentimes we must tepidely cohere.
Introduction
Every surface around you has some marks of its status, its history. Maybe the surface is the exposed brick of your williamsburg walkup, it speaks through the cracks and the concrete patches in the mortar and the chipped off glazes and paints in the trendy colors of decades gone by; robins egg blue over white over mustard over olive green or teal over the original brick red. Maybe the surface that speaks to you is a gilded frame kept behind glass in a museum or in an old-money type mansion; it speaks through its sparkle in it’s personal lights, it tells you it's important with a veil of glass. If you look close enough though you can always find discrepancies and very thin dust creeping into its golden ridges.
A tombstone speaks to you directly and makes you sad, but do you get sad with all the tombstones?
They all say the same thing basically… tombs, monuments, memorials are all very explicit examples of how objects speak.
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The past and future are a monotonous thing, inaccessible, memories and premonitions creating what it is, and what it is, it isn’t; only the eternal present is.
All Around
The outside and inside, front and back, kiss in intricate and ornamental textures of the surface. They hold the surface and record on it the chronicled marks of history.
In Between
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Spirals
All motion is spiral
It may not look like it but all the pages and corners and lines and marks and tears and seams are all pointing the same way.
The earth is bound in its spiraling rotation around the sun, we say it’s another “lap” or “cycle” around the sun each year when we’re really traveling along a coil, the sun coiling around the milky way, and on and on until the cosmic filaments are exposed, twisting forever and creating infinity.
All motion is spiral
{I think the Fibonacci Spiral, or the Golden Ratio, known to appear in almost all forms in the natural world, is a geometric visualization of the natural flow of energy, the one constant of the universe.}
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The dimensions of bricks and leafs of paper roughly match the golden ratio.
Fantasy
When I was young I would have feelings towards specific objects that existed in the world but that I had never actually encountered, it’s like a fantasy of an object vs what an object is. Items like top hats and monocles and fur coats and cigars…..
Seeing only a representation of an object and then seeing the real object breaks the fantastical aura, replacing it with novelty, replacing that with banality.
One’s mimesis sends all it touches into the world of the banal, the mimetics of manufacturing sends all it touches into the world of kitsch.
the visual qualities of a textile don’t always match it’s feeling against your skin.
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Foxconn factory complexes, where tons and tons of iPhones are manufactured, has suicide nets hanging above the first floor of their dormitory buildings.
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Shrouded and wrapped up in cocooning and enveloping mysteries,
We experience the fantasy in our interfaces, screens, rounded rectangles. There is such a distance to what that object actually is. The processes that built that object, the reason it exists, its functionality, its cost….
We relate to something that we think we know but we can never know more than a surface level assumption of anything.
Value, Object Empathy, Historical Materialism
Where does instinct end and culture begin? Not at the creation of objects, think of non-human made objects such as wasp’s nests, dung beetle’s spheres, spider webs, objects that are in some way comparable in their use value to objects created by humans (these examples perhaps may be houses, refrigerator or baby’s cradle, fishing lines and nets). One could look at it like comparing a building to a bird's nest to a hermit crab shell - a shelter, house, home.
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the saucer is not active until the teacup either spills or overflows
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Aside from the various means of production that have sprung up and faded into obsoleteness throughout agricultural and industrial histories, I think what sets us apart at the core of our objects - and has since prehistory - is that we create objects of no apparent use value and which primarily intend to appeal to the psyche. Even transcending intellectual - yet still more primal - needs such as entertainment, humanity’s creation of artworks and ornament exemplify an empathetic, honorary, or curious relationship to objects. It proves a capacity for people to hold a feeling for an object without demanding a concrete reward to you in return, such as one's relation to money (you only love it if you got it). {yes, money is not really the object but the value it symbolizes, but doesnt that also bring other questions of value into play?} The will to adorn is an expectation that it will manifest in beauty and
Visual and material culture is made up of signs, symbols, and items that are appreciated and valued (take those terms how you will…) for their use value (primarily communication of a message for the visual) or for their aesthetics. It’s the objects that appear between the creases and around the margins of these fields, items valued either more-or-less equally for their aesthetic choices as for their intellectual communication, or objects valued for no apparent reason, that are often either or both the most obvious and/or the most perplexing targets of ones adoration.
Currently, however, the systems of capitalism having taken their toll on how and why the valuation of all things is decided upon, devotion is discouraged in favor of consumption. Such is the case that contemporary society has ripped further and further from tactility and the importance of the physical in an object’s subjecthood. Devotion is to the monetary over all else, proclaimed most blatantly in 2020 and 2021 when NFT’s boomed through the art market…….
I personally believe two systems of value that have potential to break from the capitalist superstructure are valuation based nonsensicality and valuation based on empathy.
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……]
S.A. replies with disbelief: What? Does that pay the bills??
A.S. responds: Fuck no! You asked me what I do for a living, not what pays the bills!
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To value an object in a nonsensical way is perhaps the most pure form of devotion to it.
To yourself be unsure of your own reasoning as to why you love an inanimate object must be incredibly rare, as humans seem far more interested in definite answers.
The practice of object empathy, as artist Diana Shpungin calls it, is the method of feeling for an object by learning - or imagining - its history, as if the events that it’s endured were being whispered to you by a trusting friend. To feel true empathy for the item one must take into account all about it, its physical properties, its intended use, its crafting or manufacturing...
Object empathy is an exercise crucial to challenging the decaying systems of capitalism and the methods of commodification it dictates. Walter Benjamin calls this mode of learning the past historical materialism. In his Theses on the Philosophy of History Benjamin contrasts this concept with the traditional method of historicism. He places historicism as always adherent to the victor. He writes:
“Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror.”
Memory
Memories are our minds evidence for all we know, yet all of them are delusions
We can’t be too sure which are real and which are not
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they pass by, fleeting into the ether without a tangible memento to cling to
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I sat from far away, my ear to a tin-can-phone, my eyes to opera goggles
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Entropy embraces everything
Absurdity, Nonsense
Ot flesruoy eb erusnu fo ruoy nwo gninosaer sa ot yhw uoy evol na etaminani tcejbo tsum eb ylbidercni erar, sa snamuh mees raf erom detseretni ni etinifed srewsna.
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drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip
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.ti ot noitoved fo mrof erup tsom eht spahrep si yaw lacisnesnon a ni tcejbo na eulav oT
.srewsna etinifed ni detseretni erom raf mees snamuh sa ,erar ylbidercni eb tsum tcejbo etaminani na evol uoy yhw ot sa gninosaer nwo ruoy fo erusnu eb flesruoy oT
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Absurdity is the most pure form of forms, it’s formless. , .
Zoning out is one of the great joys of life
Delusions of grandeur are an ‘artists’ best friend.
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Avi Saliman makes small talk with someone around.
S.A. asks: What do you do for a living?
A.S. responds: Do you want the short answer or the long answer?
S.A. wants the short answer.
A.S. says: I scribble! [……
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In 1938 Elsa Schiaparelli presented her Circus Collection to much acclaim. She describes it in her memoir as her “most riotous and swaggering collection”. Mikhail Bakhtin writes about the carnival as a place where social norms of all kinds are explicitly inverted. In the Circus Collection norms of dress and behavior were subverted. Schiaparelli expresses:
“Barnum, Bailey, Grock, and the Fratellinis got loose in a mad dance in the dignified showrooms, up and down the imposing staircase, in and out of the windows. … Balloons for bags, spats for gloves, ice-cream cones for hats, and trained vasling dogs and mischievous monkeys.”
Schiaparelli’s tactile elements of the carnivalesque comment on the context in which it was presented; both the Parisian fashion industry and the outbreak of World War Two. To the fashion industry, it was a shocking display of subversion…..
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stalactite stalagmite stalactite stalagmite stalactite stalagmite stalactite stalagmite stalactite stalagmite stalactite stalagmite stalactite stalagmite stalactite stalagmite stalactite stalagmite stalactite stalagmite stalactite stalagmite stalactite stalagmite stalactite stalagmite stalactite stalagmite stalactite stalagmite
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Rubbing, Documenting, Index, Archive
Every conglomeration of rubbings represents an entire simulated reality made up of each moment on the page, each physical interaction.
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The real is the physical which, in action, creates the hyperreal & the metaphysical (communicated in the medium of drawing), which becomes layered with other physical action (bringing in multiple sets of the real, bound together by my reality), and sewn into a tapestry of visual and tactile fragments of reality combined in a simulated space between depiction and destruction..
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the simplicity of actions can have far greater effects than the sum of their parts.
an archive is a very important place.
A conglomeration of rubbings is at once memorial and iconoclasm
A lot of my drawings could be called an index of surfaces, but full indexicality is a faulty attribution to give to any of them. Rubbings are a very direct, 1-to-1 dance between the hand, the graphite, the paper, and the object - most importantly of all being the last - yet still can not replicate an object in actuality.
They do, however, serve as evidence of the small and often unnoticed objects populating the margins and peripheres of life, both the daily and extraordinary.
They remember an intimate exchange between the objects and I as they lend me their faces...
Ruins
“that nothing lasts forever is perhaps our favourite thing to forget. and forgetting is the ruin of memory, its collapse, decay, shattering and eventual fading away into nothingness”
-Rebecca Solnit
Adjectives attributed to the Ruin: crippled, enduring, wise, sad, stoic, pathetic, beautiful, decrepit, horrifying, empathetic………………..
Ruins are thought of like buildings with the absence of life when they're really only buildings with the absence of maintenance. Ruins are full of life as nature retakes a crumb of the built world. Rebecca Solnit writes that “A city - any city, every city - is the eradication, even the ruin of the landscape from which it rose.”
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One way I see much of my work is somewhat representing, somewhat being a component of, a Ruinscape. Impressions of past objects giving away their forms and morphing into a chaotic scene of pillars breaking, or of a tower collapsing, or into a scene of a city just after a fire has swept through.
In my drawings, particularly the ones sewn together, I see a representation of the ebb and flow of constant destruction and creation.
Possibly in a more literal sense, they are documentation of the ebb and flow of everyday life, memories, and personal histories.
The moments of the past, the clouded remembrance of interactions, is at times barely decipherable yet the knowledge that this place, this thing, has seen far before you and far after you, seen far more souls than you come and go (and go, and go, and go…); the ruin (as with the antique) holds stories of past and future just outside your reach, it is the meeting point - no - the tearing point between you and all that you will never know.
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Buildings slowly crumble back to the very spot of earth which they ruined in their construction.
Entropy kisses everything
Artifacts & Antiquities, Heirlooms
The same spectral beauties that encircle ruins are miniaturized in artifacts and antiques.
Years of moments thinly layered in their patinas, centuries in the palm of your hand.
Spaces hold the atmosphere of memories, objects hold the details.
Old shoes hold imprints from their owners.
They are called cultural treasures and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror.” (Benjamin, 254)
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An heirloom is an artifact of a genealogical and personal history. To own an heirloom it must be gifted to you, passed down by a person of significant relation to both you and the object.
The heirloom is of a more intimate and kind position than the artifact; it’s known history is oftentimes more specific and less conquested (which is not to say it’s necessarily less traumatic.)
An heirloom tells of your history and cements you in a chain of lives and events that are bound by their devotion to this object.
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In Jewish tradition the Hebrew script is seen {in my terms} as a manifestation of holiness in the form of a physical surface decoration. The traditional protection of Hebrew texts preserved both holy objects and other artifacts that would otherwise have been lost to history.
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The Cairo Geniza is a store room in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo in which around 400,000 Jewish manuscripts, document fragments, and administrative files from the Fatimid Caliphate were kept hidden and protected for centuries.
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Antiquities have Provenance, Heirlooms have Lineage.
exhibition value….
cult value….
market value….
heritage value
Cave Painting
Fire… an elemental force bringing both destruction and comfort, harnessing it launched humanity into another age no doubt, and as the archeological record reveals, fire became central in the formation of cultural work... This foundational form of technology provided our paleolithic predecessors with the luxury of illumination, enabling them to populate new places around caverns where they could create dazzling displays in earth-toned inks that danced in the flicker of the flames of their torches and their fires. Imagine the experience of seeing these works in situ, in both space and time. To stand surrounded by beautifully rendered bulls ornamentally leaping around the undulating walls and crevices of the cavern. Their forms made from protruding rocks, their figures focusing in and out of the dim, warm light of the flames. This is where art began, in the pursuit of the ritual and the phenomenological, as Benjamin puts it - in service to magic.
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The relative simplicity of cave paintings and their activation into kinetic, dancing, layered, vibrating imagery is endlessly inspiring. The mystery and temporal distance of their creation is daunting, frightening, and deeply deeply loving and empathetic, a connection to people so far distant yet who’s own hand created drawings and the chain of that tradition has tumbled down and down and down to me.
Surface, Skin, Layers
I’m somewhat paralyzed by the thought of what's beneath the surface, what's in between whatever the outer barriers are of any given solid object? Of course it's more of the same solid, but to think about being in there is terrifying. Surfaces protect us from the doom of all being compressed into all one solid.
But they’re a bit of a paradox because no matter what, there’s always a surface to a solid, every object must have a surface to be solid, right?
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many moments in thinly layered patinas, countless centuries in the palm of your hand.
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pavement is a tapestry of urban life; the sole of your shoe is a sketch of your own.
The Pavement May Be A Simulated Reality Of The Combination of Movement Decoration And Discardation Of Urban Citizens.
Crevices are trustworthy signs, allowing the minute details of history to find a place in their cracks and spaces.
The dust that Walter Benjamin associated with kitsch, with a hazy dreamscape, with the discursive fear of the Victorians and their horror vacui interior spaces….
Every historical particle that settles on a surface is also a particle of mystery, for provenance or tradition or memory are not enough to reveal the truth of history.
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A skin of mystery clouds its details and its simple complexities.
Forgotten layers envelope the artifact
Sadness surrounds, yet it giggles in hazy nostalgia
For it holds secrets that no one has known.
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Wrapping, Suffocating, Preserving
Wrapping up with plastic is a protective and securing action used for shipping, a common practice of preserving freshness in kitchens around the world, a mode of asphyxiation too.
Saran Wrap conjures the barthesian quality of pastel-tinted fifties-ness in the American cultural memory.
It is emblematic of humanity’s catastrophic and portentous obsession with plastic waste.
It (with the repetitions of it on the market) touches layers of modernity/post-modernity from
micro
A kitchen drawer
To
macro
Shipping containers cruising across the seas
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Flattening the world
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Cotton fabrics are often preferred to synthetics to uniform soldiers in war zones because synthetic fibers melt together and fuse to themselves and the skin of their wearer, able to cause burns far beyond the direct touch of the flame; cotton fibers quickly burn into ash which floats away, in its carbonized purity, on the air and off the skin.
Aura, Authenticity
Walter Benjamin writes about the death of the Aura in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. The Aura is the atmosphere which surrounds particular objects of widespread fame, fascination, and admiration. I’ve noticed that it - and its destruction - is oftentimes exemplified by the Mona Lisa; when her Aura is fruitful people come from far and wide to glimpse her in person, an act which only occurs at that specific moment in space-time - this interaction is crucial for the Aura to thrive; when her Aura is withered away people who are near her are focused on capturing images of her, documenting the evidence of their 1-degree-of-separation through photographs.
People can see her (or at least a nearly exact representation of her) at any time, due to technology.
Now though, it feels as though the Aura has zombified and transformed. For Benjamin, photography and film were the technologies of reproduction of representation, due to the surpassing of photography and film by the digital, easily manipulated, non indexical media of today.
the new, overgrown Aura is saturated and birthed from it’s reproduction; it’s generated from its own destruction…
A way to exemplify this Aura could be in it’s objectification of humans in celebrities. Fame must have media to spill into or else it’s nothing. There’s a whole market for objects that celebrities have owned or used; they become precious, their Aura is gained based on their physical/temporal ties to their famous previous owner.
Aura relies on proximity because physical proximity to anything, a living being or an inanimate object, generates energy and an atmosphere surrounding the interaction.
Rubbing, Frottage
indexing
intimacy
empathy
damaging
cataloging
friction
capturing
memorializing
sensuality
representing
obsessing
replicating
meditating
Taking rubbings of surfaces forces deep attention to the object and offers a different perspective on it, like seeing an x-ray of your bones with the flesh still faintly visible, or like the vastly different ways an outfit looks when hung up, layed out, and put on.
Clothing and Buildings
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what we wear dictates what our bodies are allowed to do, how we are allowed to move and function, dress communicates messages on at least three sensory fronts.
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Clothing and buildings are both layers expanding outward from the self; skin, clothes, interior, building, borders of increasing sizes.
Animals, including humans, feel safe when things embrace us.
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Where does your skin end and your clothing begin?
Where does the human end and the item begin?
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..…In fact, Schiaparelli was known for her irreverent attitude toward the behavioral norms of French high society and repeatedly expressed it through her clothes. A similar ideology and methodology is echoed in Alexander McQueen’s Autumn/Winter 2001 and 2009 collections, titled
What a Merry-Go-Round and The Horn of Plenty
These two collections make similar critiques of French fashion as Schiaparelli’s and engage elements of the grotesque and the carnivalesque similarly. [imperfect repetitions] A/W 2001 references the Circus Collection almost directly. In A/W 2009 McQueen presented exaggerated couture silhouettes and accessories made of various trash objects such as broken umbrellas, hubcaps, and beer cans. Both of McQueen’s collections also reference the performer Leigh Bowery who is a prime example of activating, using, interacting with, seducing, and relating to clothing and objects to enact the grotesque carnival.
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As she begins to sing in the music video for Telephone (featuring Beyonce), Lady Gaga adorns her hair with curler-like empty cans of Diet Coke. These cans, as well as others of Gaga’s outfits such as the Meat Dress, show a campy revel in trash, an acid and rose tinted nihilistic response to capitalism’s decay. They exemplify the broken index of post-modernism and post-structuralism. Those cans (or at least their pseudo-perfect representations/signifiers) may be the most viewed individual coke cans ever.
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Two years after the Circus Collection France was invaded by Germany. Fascism in Europe had set up extreme social norms, thus to engage the carnivalesque in the years immediately preceding France’s surrender to the Nazi’s is a bold critique of such oppressive social and political entities. Schiaparelli further critiques the war with a chilling ensemble created in collaboration with fellow Surrealist Salvador Dali. The Tears Dress consists of an ivory gown with a trompe-l’oeil print of fleshy rips designed by Dali. It was worn with a matching ivory veil, but instead of a print the fabric was actually torn and underlaid with a purple reminiscent of bruising. Additionally, it was worn with a pair of peach-toned translucent evening gloves featuring a ruffle running up the length of the accessory. When worn, the ensemble takes on the grotesque body in it’s allusions to flayed skin. The opening of bodily borders is an important element of the grotesque body, and the allusion to violence and the corpse allows an entry point to the abject.
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Foxconn factory complexes, where tons and tons of iPhones are manufactured, has suicide nets hanging above the first floor of their dormitory buildings.
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In season six finale of The Real Housewives of New York City, 2-season cast member Aviva Drescher defends herself against the other Housewives onslaught of critiques, performing a highly contrived act, stating: “The only thing that’s fake about me, is this!” to which she proceeds to pull her prosthetic leg from under the tablecloth and throws it across the manicured restaurant they’re gathered in.
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In 1999 Alexander McQueen told i-D Magazine:
“Let me not forget my own hands, that of a craftsman with eyes that reflect the technology around me”.
This aphorism perfectly encapsulates his thirteenth collection, aptly titled “No. 13”. The collection paid homage to the Arts and Crafts movement, a movement obsessed with the idea of the handmade object as a focal point.
They used natural motifs and arabesque designs that echoed romantic and folk styles of decoration from a pre-industrial age. The Arts and Crafts movement was fundamentally anti-industrial. McQueen used this movement as a surrogate to symbolize the natural world and humanity, juxtaposing this symbolism with that of technology and the industrial world.
Some people have analyzed No. 13 in a romantic way, saying it’s honoring the Arts and Crafts, others have analyzed it in a sexual way, saying the show is a build up to the metaphor of ejaculation. My interpretation of No. 13, though, is that it’s a bleak reflection on the threat of impending danger at the hands of technology. The collection stands as a testament to the tension between man and machine.
The now iconic finale is truly the crowning moment of the show, both aesthetically and thematically. McQueen was influenced by artist Rebecca Horn, especially her two works, Painting Machine (1988), in which a mechanical arm sprayed black paint against a wall and High Moon (1991), in which two guns shot blood red paint at one another. McQueen presented two robotic arms loaned from an auto body shop as a centerpiece for the in-the-round runway. While the arms laid dormant for most of the show, they sprung to life at the climax. Model Shalom Harlow stood on a spinning platform in between the arms as they danced around her and then proceeded to lunge at her, attacking yet decorating her with cans of paint…..{
Technology, Interfaces
“Electric circuitry is recreating in us the multi-dimensional space orientation of the ‘primitive’”
-Marshall McLuhan
Walter Benjamin’s basic idea on technological advancement is that human perception changes throughout history based on the technology of the time. He opens his seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction by calling to a time far before such an age and visits the probable first works of art, cave paintings, whose organically dictated shapes provide insight into one of the first steps on the long road to industrialization (and beyond), the harnessing of fire. [see: Fire, Smoke] [See: cave painting]
There’s no doubt that advanced technology is critically important to the operation of today’s society, from the micro scale of your daily life to the macro scale of say, international trade or something…
I have no doubt that it is critically important for the preservation of the spirit, both in you and in your belongings and surroundings, to resist the hand of technology trying to control every aspect of life.
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}.....The robotic arms mimicked the movements of cobras striking their prey. Shalom Harlow gave a frightened and defenseless performance to the soundtrack of The Dying Swan by Camille Saint-Saens at the hands of her robotic attackers. She recalls:
“[it was] almost like the mechanical robots were stretching and moving their parts after an extended period of slumber. And as they sort of gained consciousness they recognized that there was another presence among them and that was myself. At some point, the curiosity switched and it became slightly more aggressive and frenetic and engaged on their part, and an agenda became solidified somehow. And my relationship with them shifted at that moment because I started to lose control over my own experience and they were taking over. So they began to spray and paint and create the futuristic design on this very simple dress. And when they were finished, they sort of receded and I walked, almost staggered, up to the audience and splayed myself in front of them with complete abandon and surrender."
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Heavy graphite reflects light in softly distorted ways.
Uneven glossiness pokes the eye of the digital camera.
Touch screens sense your pressure
Pressure is always returned in equal quantities
Violence, Gentleness
In doing rubbings I realized that the most chaotic or violent looking marks on the page are actually the gentlest to the object beneath.
Chaos, Entropy
Peace can reside in chaos given the right conditions
The chaos of all things creates purity, perfection, harmony, eternal sameness through everlasting and constant change.
Repetition
Say your name into a mirror over and over again for 10 minutes straight, without stopping, without hesitation…
Is that still your name that you hear?
Write your name in small, capital text on a piece of paper over and over again, you may follow any path you like, but the entire page must be filled up and the text must not overlap.
the writing must be clear.
Is that still your name that you read?
Is the writing clear?
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“Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.”
― Jean Baudrillard
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Too much of something makes it powerful yet lose it’s identity,
a portrait repeated countless times obliterates its image with the tumultuous sublime of overwhelming repetitions
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A tombstone speaks to you directly, it makes you sad, but do you get sad with all the tombstones?
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If one grows up in a city, never leaving the grip of urban sprawl, then the first time they go to the middle of nowhere they’ll be struck and dumbfounded by the amount of stars in the sky. If one grows up in the middle of nowhere then the first time they go into a city they'll be struck by the absence of stars.
All we know, we know through repetition. The act of learning anything is based on mimesis, copying. Nature mimics itself and repeats patterns and geometries infinitely.
It’s a paradox, repetition creates all things yet is bound to repeat and often compound its faults as well.
Sameness
“The peeling away of the objects shell, the destruction of the Aura, is the signature of a perception who since of the sameness of things, where even the singular, the unique, is divested of its uniqueness by means of its reproduction”
-Walter Benjamin
It’s a paradox, repetition creates all things yet is bound to repeat and often compound its faults as well.
The Grotesque
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In pre-revolutionary France the dress practices of the (particularly female) nobility, - a process that preceded and influenced the traditions of haute couture - compressed, contorted, exaggerated, and ornamented the body into grotesque caricatures of itself; the corporeal curves of the classical figure became so overly-emphasized that the woman beneath the layered garments was stripped of her autonomy and ability to freely move throughout space.
A female courtesan of Versailles required French Doors to allow the flow of her Robe Battante through the palatial corridors.
She was held in place like a mannequin with an armature of crisscrossing laces and cage crinolines. Such is the power of clothes, what we wear dictates what our bodies are allowed to do, how we are allowed to move and function, they communicate messages on at least three sensory fronts.
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In Modern Art and The Grotesque Frances S. Conelly identifies three types of grotesques:
“Images gathered under the grotesque rubric include those that combine unlike things in order to challenge established realities or construct new ones; those that deform or decompose things; and those that are metamorphic.”
She goes on to state:
“Grotesque also describes the aberration from ideal form or from accepted convention to create the misshapen, ugly, exaggerated, or even formless.”
Image or Icon as Identity, Avatar
Walter Benjamin proclaims painting as the precursor to photography serving as the dominant form of specified image communication. Because of the high cost, lengthy process, and need for a highly trained artist, for a large swath of history only the ruling class or aristocracy had the means of commissioning works. Thus the reality for most people who’ve grown and lived and died on this planet in the past few millenia was to have no right to one's own likeness and no privilege of controlling one's icon. In this respect, we can greatly thank the technologies of the 19th through 21st centuries for progressively liberating the image from the bounds of money and skill and allowing many common people to harness not only their avatars, but the process of image creation and communication on an everyday and massive scale...
Liminality
I’m fascinated with (and attempt to create) objects that fall outside-of or in-between opposing concepts.
Preservation and decay, imagination and reality, soft and hard, violence and gentleness, humor and fear, joy and sorrow, representation and abstraction, natural and synthetic, movement and static
Fire, Smoke
The scene of what’s left after a fire is an indescribable representation of the constant change that feeds the resilient phoenix of natural life. A deep hot breath of cleansing soothing smoke that generates massive growth and life from the ashy carbon left behind.
charcoal is left behind, it gets squeezed into graphite, and then squeezed further into diamond.
Smoke envelops sensual interactions with objects, actions breeding stimulation of the psyche; stimulating the lips, throat, lungs.
Apotropaic Objects
I had a lucky charm for a large section of my life and I lost it just recently in 2021. It was a small metal Ace of Spades that I found on the floor of Circus Circus in Las Vegas when I was a child.
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The Ottoman Sultan Murad III wore talismanic shirts into battle, adorned with apotropaic scripture, encircling and protecting the ruler.
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In Mesopotamia the gods were idolized and worshiped in the temples of cities, while at home one would worship the idol of a personal deity: viewed more as a holy parental figure, a god that doesn't hold an immense amount of power but who is there nonetheless for one's aid and protection. In Mesopotamian mythology the gods paid little attention to humans, thus their definitions of many concepts like prayer and possession were quite different from how we know them now. Magic, as we’ve come to know it, in Mesopotamia was of great importance and was the primary method of problem solving. Miriam Said, a researcher in the Ancient Near East department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, points out the agency and power believed to be held in ritual objects.
“In addition to texts and ritual practices, there were objects that worked alongside, or independently of, textual traditions. Images were believed to have been enlivened and capable of acting of their own independent wills. Hence, objects were also used to magically avert many crises.”
Many mesopotamian amulets incorporate cuneiform scripture of incantations to trap or disarm the target, mostly carved into the back or in the top or bottom registers. Amulets against the powerful demoness, Lamashtu, in particular frequently had text on the face of the piece creating a sealed rectangle around the icon. This was thought to trap the demon’s presence in the amulet. Many amulets, though, were completely devoid of text, or even had pseudo-characters meant to replicate the cuneiform (and later greek or aramaic) script that had become a staple for demonic talismans. The reliance on the meaning of the text for these amulets activation is thus deemed less important, denoting that they were made with the intended audience being illiterate. Literacy in this time was an extreme privilege and was very rare even amongst the nobility and ruling class. Thus, the reliance on visual communication through symbolism was the key mode of communication. This reliance on pictorial communication was a very different experience than how one would interpret visual symbolism now. Iconography was incredibly important in Mesopotamian society and religion because of the perceived truthfulness of the image; the Mesopotamian religion once again emphasized the principle of substitution. This belief shows the perceived reality of the proxy; for them the natural objects, animals, and phenomena from which they drew their symbolism were a physical imbuement of their symbolic attribute(s). Divinity, kings, and temples were attributed with melammu, a divine presence or aura which connected the divine subject with its proximal object, space, or biological form. Representations then, whether it be of humans, demons, gods, or animals, functioned parallel to their subject; an image of Lamashutu was not only an image of her but was so linked with her that by crafting and displaying it, one was able to invoke the demon herself, and thus her power could be harnessed or cast out through manipulations of the object like destroying the image, circling it with flour, inscribing incantations, or simply keeping the image of her in your home or on your person.
There are many examples of vernacular amulets made from clay and more affluent ones made from limestone or precious and semi precious stones. It seems the attention to detail in the portrait of Lamashtu was of cardinal importance, specifically on stone, metal, or clay amulets, possibly because the material itself had no inherent properties which would activate the power to invoke her. Other materials, though, were associated with power in themselves and required less human intervention to activate. There was an exorcism practice for Lamashtu in which obsidian, a black volcanic glass material, was used to create similar amulets in intaglio. These amulets may have favored the translucent property of obsidian as it was able to clearly define the engraving as well as to obliterate the image of the demon using a light source behind the piece. Additionally, obsidian is a material made in the aftermath of volcanoes and thus could’ve been associated with the netherworld; Lamashtu’s desired post-exorcism destination. Miriam Said, who’s done the most extensive research of obsidian Lamashtu amulets, hypothesizes that the use of translucence supplied these amulets with their power through the iconoclastic dissolving of the demon’s image. Many of the obsidian Lamashtu amulets are of a similar scale to this one, suggesting they too would’ve been worn, probably so as to easily hold it to a flame or to the sun. Many, especially older ones from the late bronze age, also have much more crude intaglio depictions of Lamashtu than on the more finely carved obsidian pieces. Perhaps the crudness in her icon was unimportant in these, though, as the material was of cardinal importance. This is reinforced by the similarly crude pseudo-inscriptions on the backs of many of these. The combination of lines and triangles most likely was meant to imitate written text of which the crafter was unfamiliar.
In later centuries Babylonian Jews developed a distinct tradition of incantation bowls; bowls with spiraling hebrew or aramaic script on the interior, to be placed upside down over an area to ‘trap’ the evil beneath the holy spiral of calligraphy.
Numbers, Numerology
5
18
3
333
There’s much said about these numbers and numerological sequences, here I only intend to point your attention to such sequences in my work; they’re informed by the golden ratio, kabbalistic numerology, my own lucky sequences, etc.
Music, Noise, Sound
Sounds have slight physical feelings and visual stimuli if you pay enough attention…right?
The tangibility of sound is similar to the tangibility of a mark on the page, it's somewhat always there yet always so distant and not what it really is.
Meaning
Beside the many billions of words and photos and sounds and videos and everything shared around social media/the internet, the more deliberate Art and the media released and created through pop culture today seems to be a hoard of scavengers. That's not necessarily an insult either, just an observation…
scavengers are vital pieces of all ecosystems… without them the world would only be a pile of dead flesh, never decaying, rigor mortised forever with no growth, no change, no life. Creators (a word whose own definition is shaky) now may be playing that crucial role of recycled creativity regurgitated onto itself in various forms. These pop culture scavengers seem to be falling into two sides in their methods. On one hand, there's replication of genres from the past (or at least a rose [or acid green or cyber-lilac] tinted version of them) and on the other hand I see a destruction of genre through its oversaturation and repetition and distortion of tropes; mashing it up in one smash. Mimicry and Repetition rule them both.
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In Baudrillard’s prescient vision of a (post-)post-modern, late-stage capitalist society, identity is manufactured by the objects (which act as signs as well as symbols) bought by the consumer.
The language needed to understand the meaning of these signs and symbols of personality/values/status is taught through media.
Marshall Mcluhan states that “Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.”
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Many amulets were completely devoid of text, or even had pseudo-characters meant to replicate the cuneiform (and later greek or aramaic) script that had become a staple for demonic talismans. The reliance on the meaning of the text for these amulets activation is thus deemed less important, denoting that they were made with the intended audience being illiterate.
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In the 2013 video game Grand Theft Auto V, one of three main playable characters, Michael - an ex bank robber living under a false identity in Los Santos (a synthesized and simulated Los Angeles) - lectures to another of the playable characters, Trevor - an unhinged and unfiltered criminal living in the deserts of San Andreas (digi-fornia) - an act in itself exemplary of a simulated post-post-modern (copy of a copy of a copy) world with verging-on-transcorporeal agency allotted to the player - on the nature of the latter’s identity.
“ [Michael]: You know, I’ve been thinking about you, Trevor. Your lifestyle … People always try to label you. You know, maniac, psycho-
[Trevor]: Friend, industry leader-
[Michael]: In some ways you defy categorization. But then…
[Trevor]: What?
[Michael]: Think about it. Where you live.
[Trevor]: Sandy Shores, you precious ass. I’m sorry there ain’t a place nearby to get your colonics.
[Michael]: Right. But why are you out here?
[Trevor]: It’s off the grid! We’re away from it all. It’s somewhere real and authentic. This is America! And real people ain’t been priced out yet.
[Michael]: Yeah well what if it gets gentrified?
[Trevor]: Then I’ll fucking move.
[Michael]: Okay, what about the way you dress?
[Trevor]: What about it? I don’t give a shit what I wear
[Michael]: No, no. No. If you don’t give a shit, you wear clean clothes that fit. See, yours are all a little out there. A little wacky.
[Trevor] : Whatever’s in the shop, is what I get. Jesus, what is this?
[Michael]: It’s not an absence of taste, T, it’s the opposite of taste.
[Trevor]: You should be a stylist.
[Michael]: And then there’s the tattoos, the hair, the weird music, the funny toys, the niche drugs, the everything.
[Trevor]: What the fuck are we talking about!?
[Michael]: You… are a hipster!
… [arguing] …
[Michael]: You're gentrifying. Soon, the skinny jeans will show up, then the skinny lattes, and then the bankers. And you'll be somewhere else starting the cycle all over again. Maybe you're not a classic garden variety hipster, but you're what the hipsters aspire to be. You, Trevor, are the proto-hipster.”
[The nature of this conversation also exemplifies the singular nature of this simulation. The idea of a hipster, while canonically may still be present, has morphed and fractalized already so quickly - a matter of less than a decade - that the image it conjures is already dated, cementing (along with the advancements in technological simulation since the release of GTA V) the game in the 2010’s; while still being a ‘sandbox’ game, the nature of the simulation remains singular; while spectacular agency is given, ‘free will’ is still greatly restricted for the player.] [this is not necessarily a failure of technology as it’s more of a digital blemish, a watermark tying the supposedly-infinite-and-spectacular-simulation to the past,
a blemish that a rubbing not only has, but relies and thrives on. The tying to the past via the physical is an honorific memorialization, a connection of moments strung or smashed together, mesmerizing and meaningful albeit somewhat haunting and daunting.]
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Another crisis of genre came with the advent of photography when art wasn’t the best communicator of representation anymore, so it writhed around and turned and coiled into itself and fumbled around for years through phases of colors and forms and abstraction and conceptualism and now no one can even really define art…. This is a grand scale example of how something can lose its meaning...
Shí, Pressure
In The Art of War, Sun Tzu introduces the concept of Shí, meaning the arrangement of forces. Shí is the forces surrounding and encompassing an action (originally a battle; to have Shí would be to have mastery of all the forces at play, not only militarily but the greater context of the event). The arrangements of forces, transfers of energies, may allow a battle to be won without a single casualty or even a scratch on the soldiers.
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There is a transfer of energy as well as a meeting point of force between my hand holding the graphite and the object under the page.
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Epilogue
The future is a lightning storm above us, the present is the tower we live in that shoots to the sky, and the past is the thunder that comes to warn us, but always just too late.
Afterword
Oh, to eat, chew, swallow, sip, drink, smoke, pull, touch, grip, bite, twist, fold, roll, hold, to sit, lay, wear, tie, grasp, use… what spectacularly mundane beauty is everywhere!
Post-Script
Enshrined here is my attempt to preserve interlooping relationships, tensions, fears, and memories which in turn creates the umbrella of tension between preservation and decay that underscores nearly all my work. Fragility & strength, softness & hardness, representation & abstraction, drawing & sculpture, are all examples of tensions I’ve attempted to reconcile…….or maybe not to reconcile, but to even further jumble.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the people whos conversation greatly aided me in the creation of this project; Andrea Geyer, Marc Andre Robinson, Thomas Donovan, Diana Shpungin, Sarah Graff, Francesca Granata, Margaret Samu, among others.
Thank you and congratulations to this graduating class, especially the 18 some of us that did online art school for 12 months
Thank you to Walter Benjamin for cementing for me that making sense is not straightforward.
Thank you to all my things, especially my graphite sticks, sketchbooks, sewing machine and all surfaces that engaged with my frottage in this process.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Baudrillard, Jean, and Sheila Faria Glaser. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2020.
Baudrillard presents his concept of the simulation.
Benjamin, Walter, Hannah Arendt, and Harry Zorn. Illuminations. London: The Bodley Head Ltd, 2015. Collection of writings including Theses on the Philosophy of History
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McGlaughlin. Belknap Press, 1999
The culmination of years of cultural criticism surrounding subjects in which Benjamin saw significance or symbolism, specifically in Paris at the turn-of, and start-of, the 20th century, such as fashion or the arcades (passages) of which the work gets its name.
Conelly, Frances S. Modern Art and The Grotesque. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Traces and analyzes the history of the aesthetic concept of the Grotesque in Modern Art.
Dillon, Bryan. Ruins. Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011.
An anthology of selected works surrounding ruins in contemporary art. Whitechapel Gallery: “This anthology offers a guided tour of the modern ruin as a portal onto what is of vital interest to artists in the culture and politics of the recent past…. Ruins is one of a series documenting major themes and ideas in contemporary art.”
Evans, Caroline. “Masks, Mirrors and Mannequins: Elsa Schiaparelli and the Decentered Subject.” Fashion Theory3, no. 1 (1999): 3–31. This article examines the work of designer Elsa Schiaparelli, specifically from 1936-1939. It looks at her intersection between Parisian high society and her involvment with the Surrealist movement. Her work is looked at through the writings of Judith Butler and Joan Rivière’s essay on masquerade.
Felek, Özgen. “Fears, Hopes, and Dreams: The Talismanic Shirts of Murād III.” Arabica 64, no. 3-4 (2017): 647–72. Felek studies in depth the talismanic garments worn by Ottoman sultans, generals, warriors, etc; especially when going into battle. Special attention is paid to the decadent apotropaic wardrobe of Murād III. The traditions of incantation or scripture are prevalent - the Islamic Ottoman style being iconoclastic - and has traces back to the amuletic traditions of Mesopotamia.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich and Knox, Thomas Malcolm, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art: The Symbolic Form of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
Hegel discusses his first stage of civilized art; the Symbolic form. Ancient monumental architecture and sculpture, primarily from Egypt, is analyzed as is Hegel’s definitions of sign vs symbol.
Simmel, Georg. The Metropolis and Mental Life. Rome: Europaconcorsi, 2017. Simmel introduces his theory of the overstimulation of urban life leading to the attitude of the Blasé
Howard-Carter, Theresa. “An Interpretation of the Sculptural Decoration of the Second Millennium Temple at Tell Al-Rimah.” Iraq 45, no. 1 (1983): 64. Howard-Carter analyzes the reliefs and other sculptural elements, multiple of which depict the demon Humbaba, which were unearthed at the Tell Al-Rimah archeological site near the ancient city of Nineveh, or modern day Mosul, Iraq.
Hunter, Erica C. D. "Incantation Bowls: A Mesopotamian Phenomenon?" Orientalia, NOVA SERIES, 65, no. 3 (1996): 220-33.
Hunter describes and analyzes the mysterious incantation bowl amulets of the ancient Jews of Babylon. She explains the relationship of their form and function, including the formal quality of text and its importance as a sign or a symbol; many of the incantation bowls contain cuneiform, aramaic, or hebrew pseudo-text and/or pseudo-scripture. There is also attention paid to the cultural influence of these particular bowls and the buried histories they help to expose; histories such as those of the presence of diasporic-Jewish mystics and artisans in the Persian court.
Jones, Owen. The Grammar of Ornament. Delhi, india: Kalpaz, 2017. Source book for the study of architectural ornament, includes plates and analysis of traditional ornament from multiple cultures and times.
Koda, Harold, Andrew Bolton, and Judith Thurman. Schiaparelli & Prada: Impossible Conversations. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012. Exhibition catalogue comparing the work of Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada
Sony Computer Entertainment, Rockstar North, and Rockstar Games. 2014. Grand theft auto V. The fifth installment in the GTA series, an open-world game following three criminals (Michael, Trevor, and Franklin) in the fictionalized-LA city of Los Santos.
The Real Housewives of New York City Ep. 101, n.d. In this episode Aviva throws her leg.
Watt, Judith, and Daphne Guinness. Alexander McQueen: the Life and the Legacy. New York: Harper design, 2012
A biography of the designer Alexander Mcqueen, it details and recounts most of his career.