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Images, even abstract images, or maybe especially abstract images, take on added resonance from their surrounding cultural and political settings. Matt Chansky's Who's Afraid, 2001 (color image below, or click here for a larger version), created in the aftermath of the WTC disaster, might have a had a different reading a year ago--assuming the piece could travel back in time and be divorced from the moment it was produced, which is admittedly a big assumption. The little arrow to the left might have been described as a "cursor," the balloon of static an "information haze." That reading is complicated, of course, because the cursor has the archaic, incandescent feel of a carnival barker's arrow and the corpuscular "haze" belongs more to the bio-lab than cyberspace. But forget all that art-critical quibbling: at this particular moment the arrow can only be an airplane and the "static" a fireball. Put most of the TV-watching world on the psychiatrist's couch and that's what they'd see.

My painting Visceratecture (click here to view) similarly dovetails with the moment in inevitably political ways. What might have been a proud symbol of modernity 80 years ago, when Joseph Stella painted his headlong, high-speed view through the Brooklyn Bridge, has acquired an edge of surgical, Japanimation creepiness. To paraphrase a somewhat ghoulish quote from Survival Research Laboratories' founder Mark Pauline, "The perfect marriage of technology and the human form is death." The struts and girders of our idealized modern Architecture become intertwined with disconnected gobbets of flesh, while dead center, the womb becomes a techno-totemic figure yielding blankness and annihilation.

Much more uncanny, however, is Claire Corey's 2b5a, (click here to view) which was painted a few days before the sky fell here in New York. In an email dated September 5, I described the painting as "a cyber-rendition of Franz Marc's Fighting Forms with one form being the grid." Now it's difficult to see it as anything but a skyscaper with acrid, toxic smoke hemorrhaging out the side. Even the bold, intoxicating baby blues and purples fail to soften this image of collapsing, fragmenting modernity. Like Nostradamus (minus a few centuries), Corey saw the future, a reminder that artists are, as Ezra Pound observed, "the antennae of the race." Maybe we are, but with all the impact of a pair of foil-wrapped bunny ears.

- tom moody 9-18-2001 6:27 am [link] [2 comments]