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The artist brings back from the chaos
varieties that no longer constitute a
reproduction of the sensory in the organ but
set up a being of the sensory, a being of sensation, on
an anorganic plane of composition that is able to
restore the infinite." Deleuze & Guattari,
"What is Philosophy?" (pp. 202-3).
In 1967 Sol LeWitt wrote in Artforum
that "In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most
important aspect of the work...the execution is a
perfunctory affair." |
I ask, why perfunctory and not voluptuously languid?
My art process now is a matter of visualizing aesthetic
sensations linked to technological and sexual concepts. It is
essentially a mental prosthetic for both the perfunctory
machinic and the luxurious corporal domain. Through the use of
computational power coupled with human delicacy, feelings of
ebullient exultation, deep grief, and spectral serenity are
conveyed.
Of late, I have been working more on the theme of
hermaphroditism in my art - in parallel with the viral. For me
the hermaphroditic sign serves as emblem of the variance that
characterizes virtualism. In an age of networked incredulity,
where hierarchies are put into crises by the digital, the
hermaphrodite becomes the harbinger of new creative
territories by flickering between static boundaries.
The function of my art is to create, by extenuation,
different technological-aesthetic percepts. More specifically,
my recent computer-robotic assisted paintings are an
investigation into the sphere of the pan sexual under the
conditions of what I call "viractuality" (occasions where the
virtual and the actual merge) - circumstances which are not
quite historically conditioned yet. To do this, my
computer-robotic assisted paintings focus on an interface
between the virtual and the actual (the viractual) by putting
the classical canvas in confrontation with informatics. But
why?
First, I very much like to work with the digital in its
predominant visual form, the immaterial abstract information
of pixels and I like very much the world wide transportable
dimension of the Internet, where the digital data stream
travels at the speed of light - but I also like to see a
large-scaled semblance just sitting still on an unchanging
canvas so I can silently reflect on it and move within the
work in natural light at my leisure with customary
unrestrictions to my bodily movements.
Secondly, with the increased augmentation of the self via
micro-electronics feasible today, the real may co exist with
the virtual and the organic fuse with the computer-robotic.
Consequently, I am interested in a new interlaced sense of
artistic viractuality which couples the biological with the
technological and the stable canvas with the ephemeral
digital.
The work's extensive ornate excess attempts to give to us
an expansive metaphor for our computational condition - our
state of digital-assisted being. In the rising and collapsing
of alternative sexual visualizations and unordered revelations
seen in the work, the circuits of the mind may find a
dexterity exactly congruent with the viractual’s
configuration.
As such, my viractual computer-robotic assisted paintings
strive for a depiction of an anti-essentiality of the
body-in-bits which allows no privileged sexual logos, but
insists, rather, on a displacement or deferral of meaning.
Here images of the flesh are further undone by viral
disturbances they cannot contain.
This viral-viractual-visual situation creates ribald
opportunities for transgressions of conventional erotic
limitations. In the work’s pan-sexual interlacement,
aphrodisiac thought detaches itself from the order and
authority of the old signs and topples down into the realm of
viractual reverie.
This pan-sexual viractual contemplation is certainly the
most erudite area of our unconsciousness - as it is the deep
down depth from which we beings emerged into our precarious,
but glittering, existence.
-- Joseph Nechvatal, http://www.nechvatal.net/ |