#the series being ongoing is affecting me severely i hate being anxious

[homo-house]

stories should not be afraid to just end. methinks

[blessedrestlessness]

Radical Fictivity as a Desperate-Yet-Measured Plan of Attack in a Continual Fight Against Pervasive, Peer-Pressurized Modes of Ideological Consumption (Modes Obedient to the Status Quotient of Avaristic Disengagement from Humanistic and Ecological Efforts, Which Undergirds Empire’s Voracious Vampirism) as Expressed in Alternative Comix

By Wolfhart Polkinghorne

     The exploration of varied modalities of Fictivity is absolutely central to alternative comix’ entire corpus, where it is indissociable from those [varied modalities] of surreality (characterized, in recent series, like E. T. Weevil’s NOISE COMIX, as being “rooted in [an] orientation towards a harmony between the mythologizing of the “subjects/themes” harbored in primary structures on the one hand, and the realization—in every sense—of subjectivities’ objectives on the other”) and those in which Fictivity is as fundamental a feature in an aesthetic sense as in a “strictly” narrative sense. Generally, alternative comix’ visual production precedes our narrative/textual production, not infrequently generating the very mythopoeic literature that it retroactively comes to “illustrate”. The texts, though, are no less incomplete without the images that attend them than the images are before they reference the texts (which texts are their initial exegesis); so these pictures are more, of course, than illustrations, in much the same way that, say, images of Charlie Brown in PEANUTS comic strips aren’t “mere” illustrations of a comedic text, mere supplements that enhance the humor, but active components of [an otherwise solely linguistic] humor, which are essential, sometimes more so, to the “gags” as the punch lines themselves (which lines [of ink] may render the face of the belovèd blockhead more important than his words).  

     The intra-relational discursivity of our pseudonyms (which are neither meaningless nor governed by any predetermined internal system, game, logic, etc.) has much to do with the ways in which meanings generate themselves by means of ‘our’ kinetic kenosis. (It is ironic, of course, to call kenosis (i.e. “self-emptying”) our own, but such are the results of the limitedness of linguistic communication; results which attest to the necessity of, for example, non-textual philosophy, in forms such as contemporary “visual” art. The meaning of Félix González-Torres’s work, for instance, is not reducible to the language, however poetic or philosophical that language might be, that describes or evaluates it; his works’ aesthetic qualities, physical presence, participatory nature, evocative accord between eternal faux-stasis and endless mutability refer, quite precisely, to those aspects of being, phenomenological and nuanced, that only poetry-at-its-best could ever elevate language into conveying a still-quite-mediated hint of. Polkinghorne’s favorite contemporary artist, CF [Christopher Forgues] has long been involved in an ongoing reimagining of the parameters of the phenomenon on meaning’s self-exhaustion, lyrically borrowing from the highest of the “high” and the lowest of the “low” to inject a blended sensibility into the heart of an aesthetic sphere freshened by hybridity.

     The stark interrogation of what might be called “resurrection” in CF’s work has served as a galvanic actant that has fractionated a largely less-than-self-critical “secularism” (that less-than-robust critique of “the sacred” that long ago lapsed into precisely the kind of thoughtless its proponents intended it to curb) into secularisms, plural, highlighting the baseless presuppositions that undergird the limited and limiting set of stances that refuses to see itself as such (i.e. as a limited, limiting set). Fresh kinds of “sorcery”, revealed impressionistically, run through the work like the reniform “hearts” ever-present in Twombly’s oeuvre. There’s a sense in which CF’s work has been a kind of nondenominational semi-neo-pagan critique of Western secularisms’ cynical presuppositions as well. CF has been the supreme seeker and discoverer in the comix community: the crown of Comix History as a history of struggle. No artist was more instrumental than CF in the collapse of the anti-miscegenation laws that seemed second nature to comix thought in the 90s and earliest years of the 21st century (divided as comix were into a “mainstream” camp and an “indie” camp that were marketed as antithetical to one another). Comix Studies has necessitated a new interpretation of Art History, as it springs from the conviction that literature and visual art eloped in secret, long ago, in forms the hybridity of which was a kind of invisibility cloak (old eyes attuned as they were to segregative rather than integrative forms).

     The increasing relevance of such practitioners of interdisciplinary aesthetic philosophy as CF and Blaise Larmee points to, highlights, and double-underlines the need for a raging inversion (via aesthetic praxis) of human beings’ spiritual humiliation; the humiliation of being reduced in/to a medical number, a legal name, one cog—mere and replaceable—in the machine of an international military industrial makeover of the planet (i.e. the Anthropocene) without, for instance, the Zen rejection of static identity in its entirety; the incessant insistence within social structures that identity is real (an anti-Zen, anti-Advaita Vedanta stance) but generated by the post-humanistic conditions of industry rather than the humane conditions of liberty, conscientious citizenship, religious faith, etc. (which are increasingly seen as ill-equipped to contend with the systemic violence that’s an inevitable byproduct of a free market now rabid, dribbling its mouth froth all o’er our Earth). Human beings’ spiritual humiliation at the bloodied hands of a market now UNJUSTIFIABLY free (given its lethal rabidity) is a theme CF has taken up in ways less Neo-Marxist than “Neo-Masochist”; interested in humiliation’s ALCHEMICAL transformation into a kind of transcendence rather than in the utopic, pipe-dreamy cessation of those psychological states that are (but needn’t necessarily be) construed as “debasement”.

     If CF’s practice is ABOUT surrealism rather than [“merely”?] an example of surrealism, mightn’t this shed some [new?] light on the work of an older artist like Kai Althoff as well? In HIJIME (2011), Kai Althoff satirized some of the rote conventions of contemporary art publication, using ARTFORUM as the semi-self-deprecating pad from which his hermeneutic launched, while simultaneously situating an audience (as it typical of him) before an otherness toward which the adventurous may orient themselves (an orientation the promise of which is [at least] an enigmatic encounter). From the press-release-like text accompanying HIJIME: “Well, I do not want to hate what at least incorporates the faintest hope, that it may derive from this otherworldliness, meaning what I am to be reflecting in this current state, or what reflects me.” CF’s is a practice of passionate (if non-dogmatic) proclamation, in which he pledges his allegiance to the project of comix (without fetishizing or deifying the context), and to his fellow artists. He is not disinterested in his “cartooning” contemporaries, but he is justifiably critical of the presuppositions that have undergirded discussion of comix in [at least] the United States for [at least] the last sixty years. He isn’t alone in his rejection of the strained semi-tender semi-rebel account of comix—an account that pits “underground” comix against mainstream comics on the one hand and the art world on the other in a painfully affected way. (Two semi-likeminded paragons of this resistance are Art Spiegelman and Blaise Larmee). But there’s a sense in which CF’s practice is more probing, a more thorough critique of [“Western”] [“secular”] art historical presuppositions IN GENERAL—a playful-but-severe analysis of the status quo-preserving narrative that has neatly cradled the history of art’s progression. The apprehension and comprehension of the best recent art, CF suggests, has stagnated for decades in the anxious liminal space between Surrealism’s contentious development and the inability of criticism to prehend it. As Mike Kelley said: “Dali’s whole late career was basically Jeff Koons, and so by erasing his late history, it makes Koons a star. That’s the New York prerogative. […] To stop Dali’s career in 1939 and keep him a Freudian Surrealist is to escape the fact that pop culture was already in full throttle production by the ’40s. Dali was already there, doing that. They have to erase his late work to create artists that the New York art world could not recognize until the fuckin ’80s. […] Without Dali there would be no Jeff Koons and without Dali there would be no Warhol, and by erasing Dali’s late career and making him a hack, it just makes those New York-oriented stars ‘stars’, because the New York art world is based on a phony star system.”

     Kelley understood, as does CF, that Surrealism never “ended”, and is nowhere near “over” or “passé”, that, despite a voracious market’s need to generate [seemingly] new ideologies that necessitate the invention of [seemingly] new goods (i.e. the manifestation of these ideologies’ key hypotheses, the material expression of a public’s assent to “The New”), we’ve never moved beyond the glittering discourse around the Surreal: the exegesis of surrealism that the advent and presence of surrealism demands.

     In an interview at Floating World Comics with Brian Chippendale and Matt Fraction (2010), CF mentioned Marvel artist Jack Kirby as an [unlikely?] inspiration. In WINTER: FIVE WINDOWS ON THE SEASON Adam Gopnik writes: “The biting strings and breathless beauty of Vivaldi’s ‘Winter,’ from his FOUR SEASONS of 1725, is a place to begin—although the more knowing of you probably cringe and grimace a little when you hear that name. Could anything be more inexorably middlebrow than this? Yet sometimes repetition can dull us to true greatness. (I suspect that if Vivaldi’s SEASONS were dug out of a chest today and performed by a suitably sniffy German original-instruments group on a suitably obscure European label, it might be more easily recognized as the masterpiece it is.)”

     Similarly, Kirby’s work would seem as fresh in the milieu that has arisen in the wake of Fort Thunder-possessed post-Panterism, as have the masterful interjections of Blaise Larmee.

     If CF’s POWR MASTRS was/is a reaction against the high-minded (and hive-minded) pretentions of the anti-mainstream/anti-sci-fi stance in contemporary [“alternative”] comix, Larmee’s oeuvre (especially 3 BOOKS) can be read as a response to the other central pretension of contemporary [“alternative”] comix, the other unwritten rule under which the so many “alternative” cartoonists labor: the precious and almost-pathological aversion to contemporary art (as a “culture”, i.e. “The Art World”), which is written into the self-pitying history of comix as a history of systemic oppression in which the doggedly underdog revolt. Blurring all divergence (“V”) into a haze that can be made, by means of manipulative rhetoric, to some consistent sum (“U”?), a naïve, paint-by-number approach to the reality of non-duality is appropriated by discursively lackluster alliances that profit from aesthetic passivity.

     Not unlike fallen-yet-still-green breeze-blown leaves prettifying a beheaded mutant Slowpoke’s face (its muzzle agape) [FIGURE 1] Larmee’s aesthetic interjections both obfuscate and bedazzle the visage/façade (a bulletin board of rosy motifs rooted in ill-interrogated presuppositions) of the metanarrative presumptions of the [prevailing] hermeneutic circle-jerk of alternative comix “criticism” the supposèd authoritativeness of which perpetuates a kind of collective headspace one socio-kinetic element of which is the hauntological reverberation of the historical predominance of many subjectivities’ exclusion (an exclusion the auratic signature of which was and is the baseless condemnation of alterity).

FIGURE 1

     In particular, Larmee offers a minimalistic “disk” of dissonance and revision in the form of a renegotiated (label-soakèd, etc.) philosophy of the photoset: a kind of “torture chamber” for status quo notions of the ego’s dissolution-via-bare-humility: a critique, in other words, of the comfortable ways that phenomenological innovations (Zen, for example) are incorporated into (and thus sterilized by) the market. Larmee provides a web of amiable postponement. He realizes more than any other “cartoonist” working in/with contemporary art how the bubbling cauldrons of mutable modalities can come to have a certain sedativity about them; how we can come to take for granted the narratives that frame our comfy presumptions; the belief, for instance, that all vital conduits of possibility cannot but remain, like a remnant of necessary thespians, immortal in the width of violent night. We can come to trust, all-too-easily, in the gilded lie by means of which one meaningful stance stands for or is conflated with another, until unique subjectivities become cards in a deck, their widths lengths hacked unto an identicality the innocuous “sameness” of which leads to a view of interpersonal relationality that banishes the miraculous and refuses the numinous a room in its inn; a view of interpersonal relationality that ultimately fails us, as we’re led into a set of headspaces that discourage us from addressing that which could (and would, most likely, otherwise) be most immutably vivid within us. No robust critique of clear-cut non-duality, Larmee reminds us, can evade the bristle of the antagonism it inevitably generates. Embittered retorts unite into an animate confederacy of negation.

     As the now-instinctively-integrative “consciousness” of pseudo-post-neoliberal cultural capital accoutrement-production (a refreshing and generative yet lamentably limited and increasingly less-than-relevant arena of discourse adjacent to Art-as-such [in the Venn Diagrammatological intersection of “highbrow” entertainment and semi-prosaicentric academicism]) makes a surprisingly ever more successful attempt to contend with the legacy of varied surrealisms’ cacophonous clash’s claim on the pedestrian self-portrait of our disorientation, artists like Althoff, Forgues and Larmee will, I hypothesize, continue to loom large in any honest assessment of the evolution of interdisciplinary contemporary art in the age of the post-post-medium condition.

     Despite the introspective profundity of so much late- [20th] century art criticism, its presumptions have been mercifully superannuated as art criticism has taken hybridity into account more and more since the “advent” of a postmodernism now nearing its end (or else already ended and haunting the nomadic assemblage of subjectivities that has replaced postmodernity by assassinating it in secret and adopting much of its structure).