This animation was painstakingly assembled from over 5,000 individually scanned, color corrected, cropped, and assembled images collected from a variety of books. It is part of a larger installation of artworks created and exhibited at Autumn Space (Gallery) in Chicago, IL on June 18th, 2011. Copyright 2011 Travis Wyche

Speakeasy Road Box Speaker is built with premium pattern grade plywood, and coated with an ultra-durable polymeric finish. This industrial coating is virtually indestructible.
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I finally decided to toil my way through the frozen Chicago tundra to make my way to the Swimming Pool Project Space and catch a glance of their last exhibition before succeeding to an untimely death. The exhibition titled A Healthy Skepticism was curated by Josh Reames – a current graduate candidate at SAIC – and featured his incised canvases and “art ladders” (my quotes) along with the medium-scaled quasi-narrative landscape panels of Carl Baratta and the sly dick-in-cheek paintings of Joshua Abelow. The image on the postcard just so happened to be the same image confronting me as I walked through the door, an innocuously slathered store-bought canvas depicting what could be seen as a Dubuffet-esque figure donning a geometric rainbow parachute jumpsuit – implicative of an early 70’s Frank Stella with an ecstasy hangover – celebrating the artist’s epiphany spelled out in thick black letters that yes, in fact, “ART IS SO GAY.” While the painting did seem to flaunt a ‘diversity rainbow’ palette, the boorishness of the depiction and resonating memory of the show title led me away from the homosexual reference and back to the semantic coinage of being jovial, lively, ostentatious, and licentious. Perhaps this image could be seen as “happy,” but c’mon let’s not be coy, for we all know that “gay” is here being evoked in the school yard colloquial pejorative, as a general term of disparagement. “Art is so gay” like “homophobia is gay:” it’s a lame duck, a load of rubbish, a farce, a sick joke. In a word, it sucks.

As an artist myself I feel every creative fiber in my body contract and contort to this sentiment, and on numerous plateaus of consideration. Firstly, if this attitude is received as being in any way authentic or sincere in it’s sentiment permeating out into the ether, then it must be necessarily rejected as offensive and violent to the accolades upon which our culture is founded or at best as a moronically childish prod at the sophisticated mechanisms that lubricate the upper echelons of contemporary thought. This is of course assuming that the reader can acquiesce in recognizing a seriousness and diligence in the pursuits of objective truth and subjective becoming in our historico-philosophical continuum worth revisiting, analyzing, and assimilating rather than merely taking a shit upon. Secondly, if we consider this visual-textual-symbolic statement as merely a sardonic self-reflexivity of inherent frivolity or pettiness – an allegorical gesture representing the hallowed ruins of a quondam utopian idealism digesting itself from the inside out – then how does one maintain their motivation in continuing to contemplate it? Indeed, what is there to contemplate beyond this ironic deprecatory self-mutilation? Thirdly, you might be saying “well geez man, like, whoa that’s harsh bro, like, why don’t you just lighten up a bit, smoke a j, totes.” So maybe I should attempt to regain my sense of humor? Perhaps I’m taking this flippant pantomime of a painting a little too seriously for your taste? Well fuck that. Skepticism is serious, rooted in a philosophical tradition that goes back to the ancient Greek Pyrrhonists, and while they may have been obsessed with pitting one dogmatic epistemology against another in order to ultimately subvert event their own methodology, the foundation to their beliefs were still completely phenomenological much like these vacuous paintings on the wall; they rested upon the laurels of those that came before. Skepticism is the beginning of an indispensable ontology, the birth of a nagging and elemental epistemological legacy, and an important tool that yields a dubious power of influence and creative destruction. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

The works of Josh Reames have a different execution of skepticism altogether. Two small paintings on the wall offer delicately incised and torn back canvas skins revealing nonobjective abstract surfaces of gray streaked sedimentation and thick gold impasto, respectively. These pictures seem to comment on the untrustworthy nature of the picture plane, of art objects in general, and the imagistic conventions of painting in particular. Like pajama-clad toddlers struggling to unbutton their butt flaps before a voyeuristic audience of parents drunk on the cuteness of their helpless progeny, the wall works appear laughably helpless in their attempt to defecate their gooey insides into the sterilized porcelain arena of the gallery. A utility ladder is presented with a fresh new coat of cosmic patina collaged into it’s crevices, leaned against a wall alongside a diagrammatic image describing it’s potential of unfolding. Reames’ work imbues a muted poeticism of concrete blankness with a tinge of futility, a potent metaphor that I would like to read as a reference to the empirical prodding’s of a tabula rasa psyche or perhaps as provisional landscapes depicting humanities vain attempts to understand the great nothingness lying “out there” somewhere. Still, the works also leave a mildly sour aftertaste of ontological violence ala Lucio Fontana and stomach-aching sterility in their slick presentation.

Carl Baratta’s panels are yet another beast of swirling voids and celestial nhilism, radiating a vivid orange glow from the opposing wall that sucks in my gaze like a tractor beam from the gravitational center of nowhere. While reminiscent of a mélange of Eastern manuscript paintings in their flattened perspective, the pristine sublime of the Hudson river school caught in a firestorm, or the darker psychologies of German expressionist painters like Munch or Nolde, those references are perhaps overly gratuitous when examing the insipid homogeneity of painted marks and surface or the nauseatingly reductive palate. The colorful squares are certainly a complex delight in visual textures and potent citations, though I wonder if they would have fared better through the languages of printmedia like screen or block prints. In contemplating their function in relation to the auspices of the show’s title, I found myself taking up the role of skeptic; I don’t believe the paintings to be without their own charm but are grossly out of their element in association with the artifice erected by Abelow and Reames. Any potential for poetic jouissance or charismatic paint handling is thrown out the window by the behemothic elephant in the room led in by the other artists, namely the questioning of the pedagogies of artistic practice and the suspended disbelief in the voyeuristic theatrics circumventing the edifice of contemporary painting.

For the ancient skeptics, the logical mode of argument was untenable, as it relied on propositions that could not be said to be either true or false without relying on further propositions. This state of infinite regress, whereby every proposition must rely on other propositions in order to maintain its validity, was thus an inadequate measure of truth and could create as many problems as it claimed to have solved. Truth was not, however, necessarily unobtainable, but rather an idea which did not yet exist in a pure form. Although skepticism was accused of denying the possibility of truth, in fact it appears to have mainly been a critical school proclaiming that logicians had not discovered truth. The artists presented in A Healthy Skepticism may have found a place within this ancestry of debunkers, but have made no headway in the amaranthine struggle to uncover a concrete conception of our being, nor do they seem to entertain any desire to do so. And why not I ask? For it is this reviewer’s humble belief that if anyone is capable of uncovering the maxims of the unfathomable nature of our reality it is the unencumbered, inquisitive, and zealous artist, and that it is even their responsibility to do so. But that’s another discussion…

Travis Wyche
1.3.11

Music for Mesmer is the newest installment of an ongoing metacontextual dialogue between psychotropic cinema dromologist Curtis James Tamm and intermedia phenomenological surgeon Travis Wyche, the much anticipated sophmore release in follow up the their previous Trepanation Constellation both released on Sanity Muffin limited cassettes. Etheric astral clouds and indeterminate intonation swirl and accelerate through contrapuntal miasmas of iridescent tundra sweeps and bubbling (gui)tar pits of geological flotsam as Tamm and Wyche wrestle with the demons of the spirit and diamonds of the cosmos: two minds morphing manifestations of neoteric ontologies within a probability cloud of rarified acoustic architectonics. A sneak preview of the composition can be found here, but make sure to order a copy of the cassette tape with resplendent topological packaging featuring paintings by Erin Washington.

Copyright 2011 Perpeteia

Curtis Tamm – Wurlitzer, Piano, Acoustic Guitar, Tapes, Field Recordings, Effects
Travis Wyche – Electric Guitar, Bass, Oscillators, Samples Effects
*Inspired by and dedicated to Franz Anton Mesmer and his theory of animal magnetism*
All material recorded, assembled, and mixed by Perpeteia through the long cold year of 2010 exclusively for Sanity Muffin
Cover Painting by Erin Washington

Music for Mesmer Side A

Music for Mesmer Side B

As one descends into the underbelly of the inconspicuous Logan Square apartment, one happens upon a faux-institutional display of the first stone tools sourced from eastern Africa 3.4 million years ago. A quick survey of the gallery reveals excavations of artifacts, analyses of data seeming to be collected from some disturbingly familiar recent past, the smell of societies dissolved and reconstituted through the temporality of prehistoric humanity. Studiedly written records can be found strewn about, technological anomalies and discoveries of metallurgy breaking from their Plexiglas display cases; the beginnings of religion and shrapnel of proto-agriculture. Yet these written records are revealing in their assumptions, cultural values and possible deceptions of an institutionalized scavenger hunt to appear as untrustworthy as a sole source, even if their material record is presented as a deceptively fair representation of society: the artwork is subject to its own biases.

As soon as one imagines having a firm grasp on the details of the artwork – an arrowhead, ceramic fossils, site plans of revealed subsoil in an abandoned excavation of an ancient ruin – it dissolves into the indeterminate and undifferentiated, so mediated is it. The truth of the artworks is not of their empirically fortified anthropological perspective turned upon the artist, but rather depends on whether they succeed at absorbing into their immanent necessity what is not identical with their concept, what is according to that concept accidental.  Traces of partially erased scrawled wall text of an absent authoritative voice recalls Rauschenberg’s erased DeKooning, looters insignia over sacred hieroglyphs inside of an ancient grave site, or graffiti on the museum’s exterior, though now presented as a theatrically staged and unsettlingly excessive gesture when viewed within the fixed authority of the gallery environment. The purposiveness of the wall texts and related drawings subtly discloses the inexorableness of the purposeless, with the result that their own consistency is predicated on the illusory; semblance is indeed their logic. Cueva’s work stages a contemporary problem faced by all artworks – how to begin and how to close – while proposing the possibility of a comprehensive and material theory of aesthetic form that would also need to treat the categories of continuity, contrast, transition, development, and the “knot,” as well as, finally, whether today everything must be equally near the midpoint or can have different densities.

Nick Cueva’s object-excavations dissolve the production in the product to put the process of production in the place of its results. This water-bogged and dank organic history appears dedicated to shaking off its illusoriness like an animal trying to shake off its antlers. As soon as the artwork fears for its purity so fanatically that it loses faith in its possibility and begins to display outwardly what cannot become art – gesso, earth, detritus, canvas and mere tones – it becomes its own enemy, the direct and false continuation of purposeful rationality.  The art becomes an unfolding of truth, the cardinal sin from which it cannot absolve itself, and posits the necessity to transcend its concept in order to fulfill it. Cueva’s artworks are beleaguered with inconsistencies, for the meaning of the artworks is at the same time the essence that conceals itself in the factual, a presentation of meaning that summons into appearance what appearance otherwise obstructs: meaning inheres even in the disavowal of meaning. The practically monochromatic classicistic white sculptures are endowed with sadness; grieving all the more completely their successful unification suggests meaning. Every artifact works against itself. The deteriorating archetypal white relics carve into their own forms a statement of expression as the suffering countenance of artworks, the antithesis of expressing something. The irrationality of the expressive element is for Cueva’s works the aim, of this particular viewing experience as well as in relation to aesthetic rationality in general. Natural Section works to divest itself, in opposition to all imposed order, both of hopeless natural necessity and chaotic contingency.

Artworks are said to be smart or foolish according to their procedures, not according to the thoughts their author has about them. Cueva’s scatological works simulate an interest in ancient objects and the people in search of them as beacons to apprehending their own historical roots in the world, withholding from any specific critique of the archiving mechanism of culture per say. If lesser artworks are marked by an immanent stupidity, to which modernism’s ideal of maturity was a polemical reaction, these works can be seen to emulate a retroactive contemplation of a pre-rational nomadic hoard of “immature” non-subjects and their spirit-infused objects – saturated by a cosmological essence of absolute truth within the materials – now merely stockpiled and archived by a modern art-manufacturing cultural edifice. Empirically it has been confirmed that inhibited, conventional, and aggressive-reactionary individuals tend to reject “intraception” – self-awareness – in any form, and along with it expression as such, as being all too human; an “intolerance to ambiguity.” Yet Cueva’s works rigorously assert a mindfulness of their context, indeed rely upon the viewers recognition of the anthropological metaphor as such in order to question the precise historical location (and the timeline in it’s entirety) of the self-becoming aware. Is the maker-as-subject being presented as an embodied proto-human of a dusty antediluvian past, the modern museum archivist, or a disenchanted artist staking a claim to the task of uncovering the procession of historicophilosophical meaning fabrication? Above all, it is offered that only the autonomous self is able to turn critically against itself and break through illusory imprisonment.

The works in Natural Section are apriori polemical; they are the unconscious schemata of the world’s transformation as accounted for through the empirical gaze of anthropology, monstrous athenaeum of art history, and hygienic objectifications of philosophy; a collection of emphatic claims that are still yet prepared to throw themselves away. Foreignness to the world is just as much an element of this art: Whoever perceives it other than as foreign fails to perceive it at all, for each artwork is a system of irreconcilables.  What is essential to Cueva’s self-reflexive faux-artifacts is that which in them is not the case, that which is incommensurable with the empirical measure of all things, including the compulsion to think through this empirical incommensurability. To the extent that Natural Section fabricates the familiar presentation of a natural history museum diorama or displaced excavation site, it offers itself as the world once over, as like it as it is unlike it.

Throughout the musty basement lingers the disturbing stench of immanent death from each dissonant painting surface, the gangrene rot of internally decomposing organs from each gesso-slathered sculpture, the deafening funeral dirge of self-destructive picture planes and cancerous absence.  Yet the art seems to seek refuge in its own negation, hoping to survive through its own death, or perhaps serve itself up as a martyr for future generations to lay their foundations upon. The more ruthlessly the artwork draws upon the consequences of the contemporary condition of consciousness, the more closely it approximates meaninglessness, relapsing into fetishism and becoming a blind end in itself, revealing itself as untruth and a collective delusion. Yet it is only through such fetishism, the blinding of the artwork vis-à-vis the reality of which it is part, that the artwork transcends the spell of the reality principle as something spiritual.

The content of Natural Section cannot simply be art, unless it is to be reduced to an indifferent tautology. Contemplation that limits itself to the milky white surfaces and crystalline mineral fragments – neglecting the context of forgotten spirit and ravenous society – fails it. Its inner construction requires, in however mediated a fashion, what is itself not art, namely a transcendental philosophy as the thinking comportment that does not stop short in obedience to the prescriptions stipulated by the division of labor found within the art world. Cueva’s grave stone eulogies and primitive language tablets must not exist as the putative lived experience of the subject who encounters them as tabula rasa but can only reveal the perfume of their untimely putrefaction within an already developed language of art; their truth is to be sought in their conflict. That no artist knows with certainty whether anything will come of what he does, his happiness and his anxiety, subjectively registers something objective: the vulnerability of all art. The aesthetics asserted by Natural Section would be the self-consciousness of the truth content of what is radically temporal. Every artwork is in itself the nexus of a problem and as such it participates in history and thus oversteps its own uniqueness. Ultimately it is the multifaceted dimensions of history and Brownian motion of its cycles that the individual artifact-objects and their concept communicates.

Travis Wyche 11152010