Excess in the Techno-Mediacratic Society.
Joseph Nechvatal.
Mass media saturation offers art today the chance to bring the hidden, overwhelmed,
internal life of the mind to light, to overflow our records of experience,
and to reconstruct our sensations.
The result can be an inexactitude which can be infectious.
Let me trace a certain lineage in which my art follows
(as I see it) :
Sade, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Jarry,
The Surrealists and Dadaists, Bataille,
Artaud, Genet, Pollack, Rauschenberg, Leary,
Virilio, Gauttari and Deleuze.
The debt to the French culture is apparent.
What, for me, unites these intellectual works is an imaginative excess in
defiance of the limits of ordinary perception and representation. It is
very much about the opposition between the daily work day and the transgressive
or ecstatic moment. In a sense they attempt to set up a stable form of transgression,
where one can go back and forth at will.
It is no accident I start charting this lineage with Sade as he is writing
"120 Days of Sodom" while prisoner in the Bastille during the
start of the French Revolution, for he was he not really writting in response
to the beginning of the rise of industrialism, just as visual artists today
are responding to the rise of postindustrial cyberism.
This excess, as was Sade's,
creates emotional scatalogical works of art
in which the expelled and repressed are given their due.
This principle of loss and dissimulation, this breaking of restraints,
and the exposing of the commonplace is what interests me most in this idea
of excess.
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