Matt Jones - Planetary (at Bleecker Street Arts Club)

Brooklyn artist Matt Jones has an all acrylics on canvas show running for the rest of the summer, and it does an effective job of conveying a lot of unnerving things about deep outer space and the native weirdness of our own chunk of space.

The paintings represent the enormity of outer space in a way that conveys its vastness in a unique sense--an enormity that creeps, a creeping enormity, a vastness that is sentient. That is the most unsettling thing about space--not its vastness, but the idea that there's some logic to it that has nothing to do with us. The images and use of color suggest menace, but unconscious menace. We aren't frightened of large earthly vistas really--we respect their scope and grandeur, but don't feel disquieted. Space is far more vast, but this isn't why its eerie--its vastness seems alive, and our idea of vastness usually goes together with dumbness, blankness. Seeing some kind of operative logic, or even suggestion of it, on such a vast scale, is unnerving.

Some of the pieces are more geological than cosmological or galactic, and they convey a similar sense of swirling chaos, but with more familiar, less alien colors and patterns.

 

 

 

There are two interesting pieces continuing the swirlingly chaotic theme, but in a somehow simpler, more peaceful aspect:

The neon vitality of the piece suggests a solar burst--this is the sun, or any star, or any formative energy concentration, which act as the catalyst for all of the universe. Sun, heat, simplicity--stars are the root of it all, but are somehow innocent in their patterns and unforbidding. Simplicity and innocence begetting complexity and terror.

On Natural versus Human Beauty

“We love what is great in nature, and we have discovered this—because in our heads great human beings are lacking. It was the other way around with the Greeks: their feeling for nature was different from ours.” –La Gaya Scienza, aph. 155

-The urge to go to nature to find what is missing in the human community—Into the Wild, of course, but even something like Spring Breakers, where provided-for teens feel some ‘necessity’ of going to a wild land of suspended consciousness and contrary values (St. Pete’s, what what!) to regain some lost sense of fullness (the incentive behind festi-hopping too)—is perhaps a newer thing. This is a very interesting suggestion—a real idea, a genuine idea. What if a human being were able to embody everything that could be conceived of as surpassingly desirable? This would be the more civilized, dignified way of behaving, culturally—how brutish, how pessimistic, really, to imbue photosynthetic organisms, however grandiose and sprawling, with the utmost ideals of what being might and should aspire toward. We’re transferring our hopes and dreams for what the singular form of being in the known universe, human life, human consciousness, may potentially encapsulate and express, onto a load of inanimation. How pessimistic and vile is this?

What has made us collectively so defeatist to have more hope in nature than in human greatness? The Greeks placed their wildest and best dreams in the idea of a great human being—we do so in nature. Why are “great human beings lacking” in our minds? Can a great human being encapsulate everything that can ever be? Are we capable of formulating, conceiving of, or even feeling something greater than the greatest human being can embody, express, evince, emit? What is behind the urge to escape human potentiality and oddly stride toward nature, hoping that nature can fill some kind of gap in our being? What can staring at a striking vista do for us that the infinite excitations of our synapses cannot? Do we not realize that these alluring vistas are only powerful because we are there to view them? The majesty and sublimity of the most compelling natural phenomenon is only thus because we are there to imbue it thusly.

What was the Greek conception of nature? Was it expressed in their view of the gods, just a forbidding matrix of wrath, chance, and cruelty? Nature was a compendium of inhumanity, and this was seen as a bad thing. For us, nature’s inhumanity is seen as its promise of salvation—it is wise and good because it is contra-human, not terrifying, as it was for the Greeks. We are more at home in the inhuman than in the human. The concept of the human has lost its allure and promise and even its interest for us. No longer is it a realm of infinite possibility—it’s a dead end, a lack, a frustration.

White Snow at the Park Avenue Armory

Most will be familiar with the theme of this much buzzed about installation--the story of Snow White is taken as a jumping off point for a variety of films played on huge screens around the massive installation space of the seven dwarves pouring whisky in "Walt Disney" (played by McCarthy)'s mouth, and peeing in his mouth, and eventually murdering him by shoving a very long wooden pole through his ass and out the front of his face.

There's a plastic "lifecast" of Walt Paul Disney thusly impaled, face in a bin filled with water and apples, flecks of shit generously strewn about his dead asscheeks, etc. (We do see, in extreme closeup, a dwarf taking his penis out and peeing in Mr. McCarthy's mouth in one of the films. Apparently this really happened--how profound!).

There was one film playing in a separate room called "The Prince Comes" which was just that, and was easily the funniest thing in the installation. One would have to imagine that laughter is more or less the only thing the artist was going for--who can really hope to 'shock' anyone anymore, when twelve year olds are weaned on goetse, tubgirl, Mr. Hands, and countless other Internet classics? I confess to having chuckled a bit when a dwarf (the lack of character development precludes me from saying which one, they all seemed to blend together in a morass of lame partying) pulled his wrinkly cock out and placed it in McCarthy's mouth and peed and peed.

But the funniest thing, by far, was "The Prince Comes," in which a professional porn actor happens upon a plastic sex doll on its back in the legitimately creepy plastic forest McCarthy constructed and begins methodically lathering his penis up into a champion erection before fucking the doll for a very long time. Prince Charming kept pulling out to jack himself off before putting it back in (I guess the doll's vagina wasn't doing the job), so it was quite a while before he finally came--and there was a fair bit of suspense built up as we all waited for our Prince to cum: where was he going to cum, inside the doll or on her stomach or somewhere else? Or was he not going to cum?

The walk-through viewing room collected about five viewers, all male, oddly enough, and there was a palpable tension in the room as we waited for the money shot. Unfortunately, it seemed like it/he would never come, so I popped out to check on another screen, and when I came back the Prince was walking away in triumph, presumably after having plopped a big load inside of plastic vaginal floor. But my question was answered--McCarthy didn't even go all the way and have him cum on her face. Also--why missionary sex only? Oh, but the humor, right--the Prince was wearing a hilarious, Rod Blagovich/Lego person-esque jet black hair helmet. That was the punch line, and it worked really well--I couldn't stop laughing for almost a minute. He banked on the fact that no one had ever filmed a Lego person-haired porn actor fucking a plastic doll in a plastic forest before, and that people would only be able to process it by laughing hysterically.

The rest of the installation was much less inspired. There was a tedious film on another screen of White Snow (and really, that was the name he settled on?) wearing uncooked pastry dough on her face while Walt Paul Disney photographed her and traipsed around the kitchen being creepy. It went on and on and communicated little, beyond I suppose a remark about the folly of wanting to be impossibly, inhumanly sweet, blending oneself with pastry goods to become as saccharinely perfect as fairy tale heroines.

Here's the point though--fairy tales, get this, I hope you're sitting down, aren't true to life, and real human beings have sex drives! Sorry everyone who thought that human beings didn't enjoy cumming or drinking or have to piss and shit--they totally do!

It might be an alright thing if subtlety in art were celebrated as loudly as the most unsubtle works were, or if more focus were put on what a work proved and communicated than the audacity of its imagery or the iconoclasm of its themes. The single best thing about WS, aside from the hilarious "The Prince Comes," were the Good Humor ice cream coolers tucked discreetly off to the side of the main installation, filled with dirt and moldy old plastic covered pizzas and other signs of disregard. There was something truly creepy and insightful about this minor bit of the detritus attending entertainment spectacles being shoved off in the corner. If the artist had incorporated this kind of subtlety into the rest of the installation...well, that's not a good suggestion, because if that much subtlety had been involved, the 'piece' wouldn't exist.

Art like WS seems to assume that our daily lives are orthodox, conservative, and intellectual, when they very much are not. Such art works on the basis of assuming that jolting us out of our comfortable, conservative lives is an important task. In reality, we see horrid things every day (especially in New York, where we see, smell, and hear things nearly as bad as anything in WS all the time), and there are few norms, regulations, expectations, or rules to any of our interactions with anyone, or with the patterns of our own thoughts. Neither do we receive clear communication on an intellectual basis--of course we receive emotional, rhetorical, or just gossipy messages from most people we interact with.

Our lives are filled with ghastly, shocking images, a lack of defined boundaries, and muddled messages--exactly the kind of thing WS offers us. What would be truly radical, even shocking, would be something subtle, mannered, and clearly communicative. Art with something to say, rather than art that scoffs at the idea of saying anything, or even of hearing anything that could possibly be said. Nothing is more boring than art that tries to shock.