The Jackette

Tagged: existentialism RSS

• on December 20, 2008 Permalink | Reply

  Existential exercise: the art of Heesco 

  “The task of painting is defined as the attempt to render visible forces that are invisible. This is evident. The force is closely related to sensation: it is enough that a force be exerted on a body, that is, on a specific point of the wave, for there to be sensation.” – Gilles Deleuze

  Pull up. The artist hangs as he lifts his body up. He carries his own weight. The force of his suspended weight, the pressure, is rendered visible on his face. His cheeks expand, his jaw clenches and his eyes and brow scrunch up. His body descends. He lifts himself back up. Tightening. Then releasing. The artist moves but remains static. Dangling there he lifts his head high for a moment before dropping down again.  He stays there in that same place. Struggling.
   

  

  Why does an artist paint a self-portrait?  I propose it is a form of resistance training. An artist creates, renders something visible, and that creation then exerts force upon the viewer. There is a sensation. An impact. But when the artist’s creation is an image of the artist themselves, the force of the artists own symbolic body impacts their physical body. The imagined self feedbacks onto the physical self. The act of painting self-portraits becomes an existential push up, or in Heesco’s case, a pull up. Heesco pushes his image away from himself , projects it on to paper, and then pulls his image back to himself, through the sensation of seeing his own projected image. The repetitive nature of Heesco’s series of self-portraits also enforces the idea that his painting is a form of existential exercise:

  I am / I show that I am / I see that I am / I am : 9 Repetitions

  It is evident from Heesco’s previous work that he considers existence as a choice. An exercise that one chooses to undertake.

  Heesco left Mongolia in controversy. He had self published a book with a friend that had the Mongolian press claiming as a guide to suicide. Only 150 copies were printed and were distributed mainly among friends and university students, but copies of the book found their way to government officials, and Internal Affairs, the equivalent to ASIO, started an investigation into Heesco.

  The book was called ‘Caffeine Deficiency’ and was a collection of short stories, poetry and illustrations about a group of teenagers coming to terms with a post-communist Mongolia. It reflected a disaffected and depressed generation that Heesco belonged to.

  “It didn’t say go and kill yourself really. It just portrayed our state of mind at the time, which was pretty bleak,” Heesco said.

  Francesca Alfano Miglietti writes that existence itself can be a form of artistic expression. The title of the series ‘Six Feet Over’ as opposed to ‘Six Feet Under’ demonstrates that Heesco views these works as representative of his survival, of not being pulled under. The works show the artist struggling against the weight of his own body, the weight of his own existence, dragging him under, into the darkness. An exit sign glows in this darkness, offering an escape, but the artist continues to hang. His face scrunches up and he lifts himself up. He continues with this exercise of existence.

  
  Tags: art (3), catalogue essay, existentialism, Francesca Alfano Miglietti, heesco, painting, weight training   

   

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• on September 29, 2008 Permalink | Reply

  The Floating Opera and the art of treading water 

  The morning of June 21st (or 22nd), 1937, Todd Andrews wakes with a solution. He is going to kill himself. He continues the idle routine of his day with the quiet resolve that this day will be his last.

  Todd Andrews is my name. You can spell it with one or two d’s; I get letters addressed either way. I almost warned you against the single-d spelling, for fear you’d say, ‘Tod is German for death: perhaps the name is symbolic.’ I myself use two d’s, partly in order to avoid that symbolism. But you see, I ended by not warning you at all, and that’s because it just occured to me that the double-d Todd is symbolic, too, and accurately so. Tod is death, and this book hasn’t much to do with death; Todd is almost Tod – that is, almost death – and this book, if it gets written, has very much to do with almost-death.

  John Barth’s The Floating Opera is a novel about ‘almost-death’ or more succinctly ‘life’. Todd Andrews is a young solicitor who suffers a condition of the heart where every beat could be his last. He adapts various systems of living to cope with this condition. The first being life as a rake in college where ‘the goal was to drink the most whisky, fornicate the most girls, get the least sleep, and make the highest grades’.

  Todd Andrew’s fast living soon fizzled out on a brothel floor with a swollen prostate and a broken glass bottle embedded in his leg. He countered that system of living with life as a saint. This involved sitting on window sills, sunk in shadows, speaking very little. Life as a saint succeeded for Todd Andrews until his best friend loaned him his wife after a nice day of sailing. The next system of living was life as a cynic. Cynicism survived until the morning of June 21st (or 22nd) when Todd Andrews despaired.

  The conclusion that swallowed me was this: There is no way to master the fact with which I live. Futility gripped me by the throat; my head was tight. The impulse to raise my arms and eyes to heaven was almost overpowering – but there was no one for me to raise them to. All I could do was clench my jaw, squint my arms, and shake my head from side to side. But every motion pierced me with its own futility, every new feeling with its private hopelessness, until a battery of little agonies attacked from all sides, each drawing its strength from the great agony within me.

  The novel is soaked in Sixties nihilism yet Todd Andrews’ calculated and measured manner of living resembles the very systematic and applied ‘life guides’ featured in the Noughties phenomena of life hacking.

  John Barth was only 24 when he wrote The Floating Opera. The novel involves that existential search for the solution to living that is prevalent in the early novels of writers of the period. This search for the solution to living is evident in the ‘life hack’ blogs of young writers Clay Collins and Scott H Young. Both bloggers are attempting to master the methods of living.

  This is how existential angst has surfaced and thrived in the electronica era. It has dissolved into some sort of quest to modify habits so that people can become more productive. If you’re not flapping your arms about filling up space then you’re failing to live. This would have been the fourth phase of Todd Andrews had he been able to log on to Wordpress and register a blog.

  Merlin Mann, who was right there at the beginning blogging about productivity hacks, has recently redefined the purpose of his site 43 folders. It is now a site about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work. It is a step out of the bleak black hole of life hacking in that it suggests that you should focus your attention more on what you are producing rather than the the act of producing itself. Swimming somewhere rather than attempting to perfect the art of treading water.

  This is the failure of the life-hacking community. A young intelligentsia skipping over existential crises so focused on finding the easiest way to do something that they forget to question what really should be done.

  Todd Andrews worked on his Inquiry. A never-ending project, much like a blog, that attempted to uncover ‘why things are’. There should be more blogs answering this Inquiry of Todd Andrews.

  
  Tags: blogging (3), book review (3), existentialism, john barth, lifehacks, merlin mann, the floating opera   

  Andrew Newman exits his studio on Monday, September 29, after having made art | Comings and Goings is discussing. Toggle Comments