REVIEW: The Peripheral World: Lost and Wandering Thoughts Inspired by "Rubberneck" at Lorimoto Gallery
March 15, 2014 by The Living Gallery in Reviews and tagged art, bushwick, caroline larsen, conor o'brien, david livingston, exhibition, kenjiro kitade, lorimoto gallery, lost, rubberneck, thoughts, wandering | Leave a comment
Written by Conor O'Brien, Living Gallery
Images are taken from the "Rubberneck" exhibition at Lorimoto Gallery, featuring works by Caroline Larsen, David Livingston, and Kenjiro Kitade, on display until March 23rd. Larsen creates paintings of burning vehicles in a distinctive, pixelated style. Kitade makes ceramic sculptures of nightmarish, vaguely humanoid beings. Video documents Livingston's performance series "Big Dick," in which the artist wears cartoonishly engorged, fabric genitalia in various public settings.
Caroline Larsen
How much our experience is clamped into some form; how much we are directed down certain streets, in certain directions, toward certain destinations; how much even where we look, where we turn our gaze, toward what we focus our attention has been predetermined. Can we even fathom the extent of it? Great pains have been taken to ensure wandering is limited. Wandering in every sense: physical wandering and mental wandering are intimately connected. True wandering cannot and does not exist. At all times a person must be made to feel they are going somewhere, even (especially) if they have nowhere to go. For this reason, the brush is cleared, the wilderness is mowed down, the stars are read and from them new borders are woven westward, streets are painted with lines and arrows, stop signs, traffic lights, one way, do not cross, a blinking geometric mechanism that spins you in circles and makes certain you and your thoughts never stray far from its gravitational hold.
Kenjiro Kitade
A person must always be made to feel they are accomplishing something; in every task there must be the element of progress. From the moment we exit the dreamstate, all of our energy is expended in the expectation of some goal. To feel a release of energy, however slight, that is not leashed to purpose, which floats off directionless and dissolves into a void, is to feel lost. And feeling lost is forbidden, not just by some external force: it is forbidden to ourselves by ourselves. We cannot imagine a feeling more deeply horrible than that; it produces our most troubling nightmares. This feeling is poignant, of course, because we sense it at the core of every task we undertake: that everything we do is just a distraction, obscuring something horrifying yet purifying that we simultaneously avoid direct contact with and try to access by indirect means.
David Livingston
We can accept anything as long as it has some explanation, but we will not allow senselessness, pointlessness, or uselessness, at least not for too long. There is a grace period where the senseless thing captures our fascination (in this case, the usual response is laughter), but beyond that it is excruciating, and then there must be an attempt to return it to the horizon of our understanding, to obscure it with explanation. Everything that we can see, we are allowed to see. If there was anything we weren't allowed to see or weren't allowed to discover, then we wouldn't see it and we wouldn't discover it. Or there would at least be extensive damage control after it was discovered (though perhaps even this is merely theatrics). A new discovery is always brought back into an existing framework of thought; it is always explained in a way that reaffirms (again and again and again) an existing belief system. Again, this is not necessarily done by some oppressive outside being: once we internalize a belief, value, or moral system to the extent that it determines the purpose towards which we expend energy, we will be quick to explain to ourselves how everything exists within the context of these systems to never have the feeling of wasted energy/ being lost.
What does the scene of a car crash reveal to us? What is the meaning of the phenomenon of "rubbernecking," so universal and seemingly necessary? When we approach the dissonance of a car wreck, we can not help ourselves: we have to look. As children we face the scene directly and with unashamed curiosity. As adults, it is usually indirect: in the peripheries of our vision where all manner of spectacle is secretly indulged. The car crash is an absolute absurdity to us: a violent waste of energy, an attack on the apparatus of sense to which we are harnessed. All the more so because it is "accidental," because there is no ideology attached to the violence. Why are we permitted to see something so dangerously contradictory? In some countries, there are efforts to hide car accidents from onlookers, yet this cannot be done all the time and most likely wouldn't be even if it were possible. It is necessary at times, for those who are concerned with such things, to let people witness the whole system in action. Immediately after the car crash, the system's invisible dimensions announce themselves and descend upon the contradictory, senseless thing in order to contextualize it, in other words restore order to the situation. Such states of emergency or transgression are necessary in order for these invisible dimensions to make themselves known, to flex themselves, and we are allowed to view the initial scene of senseless violence because we are then able to witness the system at work, the restoration of peace and safety. The car accident, which in itself has no purpose or ideology, is then implicitly recontextualized as a warning, a warning to anyone who would transgress the system. It is made to serve as a reminder of how much we depend on this system for our safety and comfort; a reminder that what lies beyond the system is chaos and violence, and woe to those who wish to wander (physically or mentally) outside it.
The bottom falls out and we feel lucidly that we are falling, in the suffocating grip of vertigo. We feel, more acutely than ever, the contraction of the muscles, the harmony of the organs, the rush of blood to the heart and brain, the electrical flare of the neurons and nerve-endings that produce thought, that create the world, the full orgasmic release of energy: but to what end? where does it go? The whole exhausted edifice has shrivelled up, flaccid, detumescent. We have sunk below the surface. We have wandered too far. Even the solid reliability of our own bodies has suddenly dissolved somewhere. But where? We are for the moment conscious of the costumes, the sets, the whole noisy, colorful theater that obscures our blindness. The unacknowledged world we quarantined to our peripheral vision has descended upon us without warning. Our cataracts have disappeared and we are now facing the Peripheral World fully for the first time since our birth. Pause for a moment and glimpse the horrifying boundlessness of experience. For once let us look the situation square in the face, before the lucidity abates and we are deposited back into the solid world. Now we have a chance to build up from scratch new forms, new societies, new systems. Newer and better. Not that they are "better" in any objective sense, but they are better simply because they are new, because they are different, because they necessitated the destruction of the old forms, old societies, old systems, because this whole process keeps the world in a state of perpetual momentum and upheaval and revolt.
All photos on this post are © Conor O'Brien 2014
Gallery Location: 1623 Hancock St.
Hours: Sat & Sun 1-6pm
Contact: info[at]lorimoto[dot]com
EVENTS: Bushwick 2020, A Historian's Perspective, Performance & Potluck! SUN. MARCH 9TH
March 5, 2014 by The Living Gallery in Updates | Leave a comment
FREE EVENT, MARCH 9TH AT 3PM
Join us and John Dereszewski, who served as Bushwick Community Board 4's first District Manager during the 1970's, for this interesting discussion!!!
Live Music by Jate Kate Mohanty
John will discuss his perspective of Bushwick 2020 based on his vast knowledge. Then he will open the discussion up to everyone!!
Feel free to bring some food, drinks, or just yourself!!
Since John's involvement on the Community Board he has been a part of numerous other community projects. As part of the 2007 Up From Flames exhibition at the Broooklyn Historic Society, John prepared an essay that summarized the events that lead to the crisis Bushwick experienced in 1977 as well as the steps that have been taken to bring the community back in the intervening years. He recently updated these notes to bring events to the present and speculate on how Bushwick will fare in the next few years. John has also lead number of historic walking tours of both Bushwick and the neighboring Williamsburg and Greenpoint communities.
REVIEW: Synthetic-Organic Delirium: Thoughts On and Around "For Thinkin' Long and Dark" at English Kills Gallery
March 3, 2014 by The Living Gallery in Events, Updates and tagged brent owens, bushwick, conor o'brien, English Kills gallery, exhibition, reviews, thinkin' | Leave a comment
Images taken from Brent Owens' show "For Thinkin' Long and Dark," at English Kills Gallery until March 30th
"For Thinkin' Long N' Dark"
In the shadow beneath everything there is this seething discomfort that pushes outward, forever toward the sun. The city relegates domains to nature, parks and sidewalks where grass and trees sprout seemingly from some organic core, but this is purely nostalgic. They are planted on top of the edifice, and while they bend theatrically toward sunlight beneath a shallow coat of soil, their stunted roots tickle numb pavement.
"Flamin' Dogs"
A city park is a great potted plant, a safe expression of that groaning core muted under countless leagues of steel and hollowed earth, muted but not subdued. The city is humanity's indulgence in confusion manifest. The impotent desire to escape nature and the body that ends only in a synthetic recreation of the body, and nostalgic oases of nature.
"A Tourist Everywhere I Go"
The buildings we filter through, where we live and conduct our daily rituals, are an expression of corporeality cast in brick, rubber, and steel; abstract and geometric, but still distinctly bodily. And in the hollow spaces, the tunnels, the pores, the moist and dark pockets of the city, organisms sprout and spawn.
"Pale Blue Finger"
This constant, intimate interaction of live flesh on blind stone produces a masochistic delirium: the desire to be split open and spilled over sunheated cement; to release upon rock and brick that throbbing pink core, inverted and all nerve-endings; to fill every dead crevice and corner with living, fertile material; absolute sensory pressed against absolute numbness, synthetic-organic fused: this is the experience of city life.
"Flesh Wreath
This urban pastiche of materials organic and synthetic comes through in Brent Owen's work. All of Owen's sculptures use wood as their base material: stumps, driftwood, branches form the core of each piece.
The synthetic-organic interplay comes through by various means: in some pieces the wood is carved and painted to resemble neon lights, and a neon effect is recreated by shining an outside light-source on the sculpture;
Several pieces resemble large tapestries, one even extending past the wall and curving onto the floor in the manner of fabric;
"Nightbird"
Other pieces, while retaining the original shape of the stump or tree branch, are painted and decorated with various objects (eagle decals, hawaiian leis, toy eyeballs, jewelery, etc.) in such a way that the forms enter the realm of the surreal.
"Out of the Sky"
Even when the objects are not expressly representing the body or human figure as in the case of "Flamin' Dogs" and "Flesh Wreath," even when they remain abstract or free associative there is still something vaguely corporeal about them, with their wrinkled, veiny exteriors, protruding limbs, and gaping orifices. "Out of the Sky" resembles a giant heart or stomach; "Mystery Cave," while resembling a normal tree stump on the outside, has a fleshy, pink, and bejeweled interior.
"Mystery Cave"
The mixture of (usually dead) organic material with synthetic material is present in most kinds of art, but in Owen's work, this association has been foregrounded. The dead organic material is given a new corporeality, a revived organic form, in part by being brought into contact with inorganic material, especially those which are associated with the body, as in wreaths, jewelry, piercings, tattoos.
"The Misfit"
Piercings and tattoos are significant in Owen's work partly because they call to mind an everyday microcosm of a larger synthetic-organic co-evolution: to fill skin and veins with ink, a synthetic blood; to open and expose the skin with metal jewelry.
"Beiber Loaf"
When one pierces oneself, the skin first reacts negatively, becomes irritated, and retreats from the alien object. Then the skin heals and (unsuccessfully) attempts to fuse with the object, to adopt the object into its physiology.
"Wizard Stick 1, 2, and 3"
The injection of new technology into daily life follows this path: the eyes grow fond of artificial light; the lungs acclimate to exhaust-laced air, the stomach, to digesting mass-produced chemicals; the spine contorts to fit the harsh geometry of its environment; the body, the blood is kept alive on electricity and synthetic medicine. In that great laboratory, the city, these newer, stranger permutations of the human form are spawned generation after generation; and the old generations, like Dr. Frankensteins, look with horror upon the unrecognizable creations they've reared into being: pierced with metal, filled with ink, and speaking a strange tongue, their brains throbbing with ideas fearless and unholy.
Gallery Location: 114 Forrest St.
Contact: info(at)englishkillsartgallery(dot)com