CODING: beneath a different veil
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The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.
— Marcel Duchamp
The idea that the viewer contributes to a work of art doesn’t seem as visionary as it did in the early 20th century when the Berlin and New York schools of Dada were hammering out new ways of seeing and expressing. Yet, we still need to hear Duchamp’s statement in the same way one needs to hear about exercise and proper nutrition. Surprise! It’s good for you and you should probably be doing more of it.
The current show at the little portal into the pataphysical known as Ubu Studio features the work of pseudonym superstars Gaylord Pasternak and Gary Manners. Mr. Manners’s identity remains a mystery, but rumor has it Gaylord might be one and the same as Anti-Friend-Hut friend Kyle Purinton. The room is filled with a joyous creativity due to the artists’ individual attitudes as they poke and prod at cultural norms as well as the collaborative effort of presenting their work.
Pasternak’s “The Duchamp Code” is a narrow collage recalling “The Last Supper” fresco by Da Vinci. The most dramatically posed characters from classic blue-sky Bible illustrations for kids are subjected to the X-acto knife and repositioned in an epic gathering of, well, Biblical proportions. The piece is certainly aesthetically pleasing, but the most effective artistic device is the title of the piece, which sets the viewer off on an individual train of thought.
“The Duchamp Code” implies there is something to be unraveled, a puzzle to solve in the manner told in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code so relished by popular culture. The order of knights in that story had a secret, and from that secret derives power, or more accurately, the potential to diffuse the power of a social institution.
At first glance, the brutish responses of the Dadaist tradition may seem juvenile compared to the golden order of Renaissance and Enlightenment masters. Take a gander at “L.H.O.O.Q.”, Duchamp’s version of “The Mona Lisa,” in which he contributes a goatee and mustache along with the aforementioned acronym that, when pronounced, speaks in French of a dirty pun describing ol’ Mona as a cocktease. What good does this do other than turning heads? The validity of the Dadaist quip, a stroke of violent interruption, takes the form of a yang to Da Vinci’s sacred yin. The need to interrupt current modes of seeing is just as imperative as it was 100 years ago.
Consider “Almost” by Gary Manners. Nodding to the German Dadaist tradition, the artist creates his piece based on a play of the printed word. A 4x6 matrix of individual words shielded by signature broken-glass frames settle into a grid of blue. The piece begs of you to create meaning, to construct sentences out of the grid or attach the title to each single word. “ALMOST there” “ALMOST myself”. The broken glass, however, suggests that these are nothing but not-quite-signs whose signification only ALMOST means something.
A philosophical parallel is found in Jean Baudrillard’s rejection of the principles posited by Michel Foucault. Foucault organizes the ages into successive systems of empirical knowledge and discourse from which power is derived. Enter Dan Brown’s Big-Brother-style Catholic Church. In contrast, Baudrillard suggests a contemporary climate of excessive meaning. Technological hyper-communication pushes all information to a transparent forefront, abandoning a very necessary and human symbolic logic. Go on, Google Baudrillard and you’ll be proving the point.
"Art Brutes" is an extremely insightful show about this decisive blow originating with the Dadaists at the high noon of modernism. The artistic necessity has perhaps only increased in our current hyperreal existence so as to break through our multitudinous veils of existence. Pieces like Manners’s “An Original Van Gogh” and Pasternak’s “Memoirs of R” are also simply a joy to observe and lead the eye through beautiful eddies of texture and planes of color while still maintaining absurdist mandates.
"The Duchamp Code" is part of a multi-tiered response to a century-long development of technology, globalization and breaking down of the sacred systems of the human psyche. Nevermind the Da Vinci Code, leave it to the Dadaists to shake you out of your sweatshop-shoes and notice there are other modes of existence.
ART BRUTES | works by Gaylord Pasternak + Gary Manners | through July 29 | at Ubu Studio, 316A Congress St, Portland | 207.699.2550
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Ian Paige: ianpaige@gmail.com