Turning the Viral Tempest
Tournant de la tempte virale
74, rue de Turenne 75003
Paris
September 3rd
October 22nd, 2022
Orlando
Manifestation in Passing (2022) 96x96cm
An
invisible circulating virus has humbled our powers of perception. Its
human-to-human transmission essentially steers culture towards a heightened
sense of connectivity, delicacy and vulnerability. Joseph Nechvatal
In the first gallery of the Turning the Viral Tempest exhibition,
four 2022 Orlando Manifesting
paintings are hung; one on each wall. This hanging suggests a turning circular
dynamic within the room that parallels the physical turning of my The Viral Tempest double LP record when being played. The Viral Tempest record has recently been
released by Pentiments.
I also connect this circular turning
dynamic to my memory of seeing Quad,
a 1981 television play by Samuel Beckett where four hunched hooded asexual
figures in robes turn around and around a stage in set patterns.
The second gallery of the Turning the Viral Tempest exhibition is
hung with a straight line of smaller canvases from my 2020 Galerie
Richard show Orlando et la tempte. Taken together, the Turning
the Viral Tempest exhibition indirectly addresses issues of gender
plasticity within our tempestuous viral and social-political times by imagining
nonexistent mythic scenes from the flippant 1928 novel Orlando by Virginia Woolf (the story of an aristocratic young male
poet who transforms into a woman overnight and lives for 300 years).
Turning the Viral Tempest treats the fantastical and voluble story of Woolfs Orlando with corresponding puckish flippancy. But this playful flippancy
is achieved by what I think of as the responsibility of long lookinga shift into a non-binary visual noise field where viewers can re-appropriate their
capacity to visualize on a personal basis.
Storms have no gender and mean full-blow fluidity. In Turning the Viral Tempest, my ambiguous Orlando avatar (a
regenerated Lazarus) is embedded into just such noisy chaotic grounds to the
extent that normal figure/ground relationships more-or-less merge, playing elusively with what is seen, what is
suggested, what is repressed, and what is desired. The starring pansexual Orlando avatar plays hide-and-seek with the tempestuous,
viral-whipped, environment, that, in the end, is meant to suggests carnal
mystic queries.
Long term influences on my pangender
interests have been key works of Marcel Duchamp and Genesis Breyer P-Orridges term (from the mid-80s) panthropology: a transhumanist
multi-spectrum poly-androgynous concept that transcends gender labels. In 2000
I exhibited Computer Virus Project II artworks (with artists statements) investigating
virtual hermaphrodite complexity in my ec-satyricOn 2000 exhibition,
and again in my 2002 show vOluptuary: an algorithic hermaphornology. I
have continued to use viral, androgynous, and trans-forms in my work, since. Indeed,
in 2018, I penned a pansexual art theory paper entitled Before and Beyond the Bachelor Machine that was published
in Arts.
As meticulously articulated in my book Immersion Into Noise, Turning the Viral Tempest utilizes aesthetic
visual noise that puts representation and abstraction into interactive play by flipping the common
figure/ground emphasis (to some extent) so that the eye must navigate and unpack the phantasmagorical pandemonium
presented. This entails an intimate act of seeing and imaging on the part of
the viewer, which the paintings rather modest size encourages. As such, Turning the Viral Tempest dips
under the surface of the turbulently shredding atmospherics of today to convey and
encourage intimate and fluid visualizations that resist conventional social
constraints.
Gender here is viewed as an act of becoming that fails to
sustain sex oppression by ceasing to draw the boundaries of the Other. As such
it is a provocation not only to male/female constructions of heterosexuality,
but also to homosexual constructions of identity. This critique of
representation in the aesthetic sense is part of a critique of
representation in the political sense (and vice versa).
The paintings in
the Turning the Viral Tempest exhibition
are created with custom C++ artificial-life
software modeled as a virus (made in collaboration
with the French programmer Stphane Sikora) and
archival inkjet painted on Hahnemhle Daguerre
canvas. The black node graph panels in some of the small diptychs and
triptychs were made in a manner similar to Markov chains, tracking the
word virus in William S.
Burroughs 1970 essay The
Electronic Revolution. In that essay,
Burroughs draws attention to the subversive influence of the word virus on
humans and the dangers of using the human voice as a weapon. A script
was written to analyze the text, where, for every transition from the
word virus to another word virus, a link was drawn
between the nodes corresponding to that recurring word. Then Graphviz, an open source graph visualization software, was
used to generate the graph, which I then aesthetically treated.
works in the show
gallery 1
Orlando Manifestation in Circulation
(2022) 96x96cm
Orlando Manifestation in Travesty
(2022) 96x96cm
Orlando Manifestation in Passing
(2022) 96x96cm
Orlando Manifestation in Bifurcated Transference
(2022) 96x96cm
gallery 2
Sashaying Orlando on the Moonlight
Mile (2018) 30x60cm diptych
Noisy Orlando and the Need (2018) 30x60cm diptych
Plagued Orlando of Non-Binary
Instability (2019)
30x90cm triptych
Orlando the Oracle of Thorns (2020) 30x60cm diptych
Heroic Orlando as Trophonios (2020) 30x60cm diptych
Decadent Orlando in the Viral Maelstrom (2018) 30x90cm triptych
Dissipating Orlando and the Blue
Blizzard (2020) 30x60cm
diptych
Plagued Orlando Tracking the Viral
Storm (2020)
30x60cm diptych
Stormy Orlando and the Golden Plum
Field (2019)
30x60cm diptych
Surveyed Orlando in the Thicket of
Shreds (2019)
30x90cm triptych
gallery 3
The
Viral Tempest double LP record (open cover) published by Pentiments