REAL FICTIONS

Text by Jan Tumlir

“May you live in interesting times”—so goes a Chinese saying, which, most agree is a Western fabrication. The pseudo-Confucian spirit that guides it turns on the idea of interest as a problem. Monotony is better, or at least more agreeable, those words suggest. Curiosity is piqued by what seems egregious, remiss: fractures in the otherwise smooth field of the normal. We analyze, interpret, and ruminate over things we do not readily understand, and these are plentiful in our times. What is perhaps most perplexing about them stems from the steady confluence of once very different orders of experience—namely, those that pertain to fiction and reality. The title of this exhibition proposes that we can now greet them as one and the same: Real Fictions. The artists assembled here all blur the lines between the virtual and actual realms. One could say that this is what artists have always done, but perhaps more casually in the past, or not as the main event of their practice. Equally, one could say that we, as audiences, have grown increasingly attuned to this two-faced aspect of art. Either way, it is here thrown into sharp relief—within individual works as much as between them.

At first glance, this is a jarringly discontinuous presentation. For instance, the almost atavistically handmade objects of Charles Long could not be further away from the pristine façades of Jeffrey Stuker’s digitally rendered prints. In the latter, we see no trace of the hand, and yet they too have been made “from scratch.” Taken together, these works evince a whole series of disconcerting echoes between otherwise incompatible cultural categories: in anthropological terms, the raw and the cooked. The archaic aura that emanates from the ceiling-hung tablets of Long’s …Like, Emanated Apparitions might prompt us to reflect on the origins of writing. They are the “book-matched” halves of a single, thick slab of clay, transversally sliced, folded open, inscribed with sigils, and then molded and cast in gypsum sprinkled with aluminum powder. Stuker’s diptych Inachus V (From a Defoliated Monograph) relates to ancient script as well—in this case, to a page from a lost a play by Sophocles that was found wrapped around the head of an Egyptian mummy. But this textual fragment from the fifth century BCE now confronts us as a message underwritten by computer code, the largely illegible language of the Monte Carlo equation. What is it that connects these various allusions to pre- and post-literacy? The answer is: everything. To begin with, there is the indisputable fact that both works are contemporary. It is strictly as resemblance that these point to historical artifacts; they are present-day chimeras through and through.

Jump-cut alternations between our technological moment and times immemorial can also be observed on the surface of Tom LaDuke’s painting T-minus. Here, references to the film Star Wars, The Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin, and LaDuke’s own childhood press together into a delirious temporal whorl. The blurry figures of Obi-Wan Kenobi and C-3PO appear to either side of the composition as if through the reflective glare of a TV monitor. This is the scene where Princess Leia is summoned in-between them as a hologram, but right where this happens, meticulously rendered figural form unfurls into an abstraction of stand-alone brushstrokes. Here, then, the self-evidencing materialism of “painting the paint” comes in answer to the science fiction announcement of a three-dimensional image, a precision-tooled mirage. Floating precariously nearby is a tiny family snapshot of the artist-to-be, taken at an age when this special effects-laden epic might well have been encountered as no less otherworldly than Böcklin’s somber Symbolist seascape.

Despite their material and stylistic discrepancies, the works in Real Fictions converge on this point of collapse between empirical observation and fantastic projection. Another paradox: optical media furnish us with all-seeing eyes into which we vanish. When images undergo omni-directional extension into space, then space reciprocally constricts into a kind of sinkhole—or so it would seem in Inès Kivimäki’s contributions to the exhibition. Main Character and True Lies are comprised of the same footage shot in the gallery one day before the opening. The device employed is a 360-degree camera that scans every wall of the space, as well as its floor and ceiling, to produce an image file that may be roughly grasped as a sphere. In the first work, a circumferential band of data is extracted from this file and distributed across seven curved monitors arranged on the floor in a circle, their fronts pointing inward. In the second, the whole file is presented compressed on a small circular screen affixed to the wall. Both exert a convulsive effect on the viewer, for in this place where one is, one also is not. The technical explanation—time delay—does not quite subdue the felt crisis. The fully exposed environment portends subjective eclipse.

Of course, we have always existed outside our representations, but it is quite another thing to vanish into those that now surround us. The centuries-long reign of the perspectival regime might be giving way to anamorphosis. We disappear into the wrap-around image by default, but when we do so intentionally, as a function of art, it is also to make manifest the invisible as such. The camouflaging butterflies featured on Stuker’s Transparencies could serve as our avatars in this process. And no less so, the faceless figurines that cluster around Long’s spell-bearing tablets. What is interesting—read: disquieting—about all of this is the impossibility of prying the science apart from the magic

Jan Tumlir