The Everson Biennial
By Matthew Friday
Postmodernism is one of the worst descriptive terms used in art criticism. By
now its position as a synonym for pluralism has become increasingly complicated
by the integration of poststructuralist theory. The sublime is perhaps one of
the most criticized aspects of Modern art. The combination of awe and aesthetic
appreciation, favored as a descriptive term by the modernist critic Clemant
Greenberg, has been cast out of the vocabulary of art-criticism in favor of
discourse sensitive phrases that avoid any overarching formalist narratives.
To experience the sublime one must be driven out-side oneself by both terror
and beauty, into a moment of pure perception unburdened by the weight of subjective
awareness. Modern art finds it impetus in the logic of the sublime. In his famous
essay, "The Sublime is Now" Barnett Newman describes the quest for
sublimity as manifesting in, "Man's natural desire in the arts to express
his relation to the Absolute." (1) Newman reiterates Greenberg's appropriation
of the Kantian perspective. The sublime must register the absolute in such a
way as to cause the imagination to fail to perform the image. Modern art attempts
to present the fact that the unpresentable exists. Postmodernism in its simplest
form as dialectical opposition to modernism can be viewed as a negative articulation
of the sublime. Modernity strives to free itself from the sentiment of taste
and escape the boundaries of allegory; postmodernity attempts to avoid the nostalgia
for totality, by grounding itself in the ephemerality of representation (2)
. The postmodern sublime is a register of tension; an impossible longing; the
transcendence of the mundane; a catchy title and a good place to begin a discussion
of the Everson Biennial 2000.
A photograph attempts to, "fix the transitory, the ephemeral, in a stable
and stabilizing image."(3) The photographs in the Everson Biennial offer
us a fragmentary text through which we read overlapping discourses. The ephemeral
and contingent nature of photography revels in the effluvium of the nominal
world and it is through these discarded moments of history that we can bear
witness to the intersection of desire and failure. Maria Alos' Come and Play
No.3 enframes the overproduction of desire created by a society haunted by the
spectacular drive of commodification. This simply constructed triptych bears
glossy duratrans images that radiate a cold neon light from within their antiseptic
plexiglas boxes. Two Monster Mouth Candy Tongues © thrust forward and threaten
to penetrate the banal central image of a frosted cookie in the shape of a garishly
dressed girl. The Monster Mouth Candy Tongues © are the postmodern bastardization
of the lollipop, now fully present and transparent as an oral fetish. The plastic
heads of these containers bear exposed brains and slick musculature suggesting
the shattered visage of a traffic accident victim, from this ruin protrudes
the glistening surface of a tumescent candy coated tongue / phallus. Alos' photographs
trace the paths of repressive desublimation and in doing so reveals the failure
of that desire to procure the object of its original intent in a capitalist
system. The commodification of the abject attempts to contain the dissolution
of boundaries, be they physical, sexual or psychological, for packaging and
sale.
If the sublime exists as a state of desirelessness, then it can only be represented
as an absence. These absences are captured with an elegant gesture in Jane Marsching's
Pareidolia, or Making Something out of Nothing . The spinning photographs of
meson transmissions provide evidence of the invisible, while they themselves
register as only a flickering ephemerality. Desire and failure are immanent
in Melissa Friedling's Mercedes P+II film stills. Disturbingly organic telephones
and electrical cables share space with Bladerunnerish women wearing excessive
hats. Like Alos' tongues, Friedling's hats transgress the boundaries of organic
and inorganic, negotiating the hybrid space where the abject flowers. This territory
is enscribed in the work of Jodi Benedict and another piece by Maria Alos. Both
works threaten to rupture the divisions between external and internal. Benedict's
Fortress evokes the moments of fear and safety experienced by children. Fortress
consists of several found wood slats hanging from the ceiling recalling the
comfortable territory of the tree house or backyard fort. Around the bottom
of each slat grows a thick cluster of wasps' nests. The piece swings gently
in the eddies caused by passing viewers, threatening immediate harm if one were
to stray to close and brush up against the fragile geometry of the nests. Jacques
Lacan described the uncanny as that which defies or unsettles the confines of
descriptive stability. The sting of wasps are not simply a threat of injury,
they represent a moment where the thin membrane which divides self from other
is ruptured, allowing an instant where neither can be mapped. The colored saliva
contained in Maria Alos' Come and Play No. 2 is the abject contained, but with
the possibility of immediate contagion. This beautiful work consists of several
sweating jars of colored saliva and lollipop sticks, back-lit by a neon light.
Within these fragile containers, bacterial colonies breed soft milky clusters,
reminiscent of internal organs. If bodily fluids are found at the apertures
of trauma and / or desire then this work certainly reflects an overproduction
of both.
Melissa Sarat's hallucinogenic Father God, Momma and the H.G. transfigures the
mundane in an attempt to reconstruct the absolute. This sensuous oil painting
reels with glittering oversaturated colors, which while portraying the mythic,
threatens to divide and pixilate, revealing a more mundane world. With the surrealistic
intensity of a fever dream or bad trip Sarat's painting of translucent frogs,
sumptuous feasts, and hidden embryos navigates the tension at the heart of this
show. From the left hand side of this painting the face of Sarat's dying mother
burns forward with a warm intensity; her apotheosis is constructed not from
absence and feigned totality, but as an allegorical measure of contingent fragments
rushing forward as if predetermined.
Craig Owen's landmark article The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism
maps the structure of need as represented in contemporary art. He describes
allegorical imagery as being, "appropriated imagery; the allegorist does
not invent images but confiscates them. He / she lays claim to the culturally
significant, poses as its interpreter. And in his / her hands it becomes something
other."(4) The artists in Everson Biennial 2000 allegorize the intersections
of an appetite for, and loss of sublimity. We are left with ephemeral traces
to construct our own narratives. We must do this knowing that while there are
many meanings there is no more Meaning.
Endnotes:
1. Newman, Barnett. "The Sublime is Now." Art in Theory 1900-1990
. Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. 572-574.
2. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. "What Is Postmodernism?" Art in Theory
1900-1990 . Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. 1008-1015.
3. Owens, Craig. "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism"
October 12 (1980) : 67 - 87.
4. Ibid. 69.
