Vacuum Paradoxicon

Pictured above is a solar powered wooden boom box as freshly landed spaceship.  It beckons the towns people out to sea for a closer inspection generating a baptismal ritual of sorts. Press the “Play” button on the audio applet above to hear it’s audio piece designed by fellow artist Brent Cox.  Vacuum Paradoxicon has something to do with the power of ritual invoked by architecture.

The buildings in Chicago are ethereal. Obscured by the haze of the upper atmosphere, they ascend with complete disregard for gravity. They were meant fly like ships, total units unto themselves, massive self contained systems within. With this I became fascinated by architecture as discrete ship-like element in its surroundings. This was perhaps opposite to the enveloping paradoxical architectural landscapes of Amanda Gehin.  Despite our differing conceptual approaches, the aesthetics overlapped perfectly. We called the body of work Vacuum Paradoxicon and  featured it at Charlotte Street Foundation’s Project Space.

When a modernist wants to see an object for what it is, they put it in a white box. The white box is a conceptually void zone that strips all cultural baggage and induces a state of ultimate objectivity, so they say. I always want to know what’s on the outside of the white box. Art galleries around the world have stripped cultural subjectivity by way of white-wall.  When I visit them I always have a pretty good sense that I’m in the middle of a city, in an art gallery, surrounded by upper middle class college educated folk. This is a pretty subjective place to be immersed in. So I guess the white walls are still contained within a world that isn’t fundamentally reducible to white walls. In fact it’s difficult to find a visual place that is not littered with recognizable objects that persistently tap on the language centers of the mind. To see an object for what it is, I picture it in the wilderness. One time I had a dream that furniture was breathed into existence by the dissonant voice of sirens. The furniture flew as vessel over the most raw nature. Mountains in heaven plunged into the deepest blue of dream water, sinking visibly into the sea with the passion of blood letting. A bush that burned without burning, in dark red fire. The bed frames, desks, and ark-like boxes rode on majestically through the sky.  Perfectly 2d ribbons bursting in and out of existence swirled off the bush and carried with them a message.

When you want to see an object in it’s truest state, place it in the wilderness. Anselm Kiefer knew this when he staged genocides in the foothills of German mountains. Grids of human paint-glob tick marks were blown down by a force that was invisible to the painting. Kiefer pictured a lone Nazi in the woods as farce. The tree’s disarm him with their indifference.  His stern glare is comical.  Nature might not be a blank-slate but it’s the final slate, a shell in which all things must be contained. If Kiefer put the Nazi in a white box he might retain some of his initial power, evoking fear and sadness from the onlookers as they examine history.  The white box is embedded deep in social construct and does not free your mind.  I’m always looking for a building that has the most accurate cross-section of the population.  The DMV might be close to representing most income groups, age groups, and ethnic groups, but what about the elementary school kids?  The park on a holiday is close too,  but then the people working retail won’t be there.  The census might paint a good picture of average America but it won’t document the transient people who avoid census workers.  Pepsi will give you a prize if you log onto their web site and fill out a survey, but they’re only collecting information from people with way too much time on their hands.  It hardly represents their customer base.  There’s always a chaotic element that makes isolated controlled experiments impossible.  The white box as a container for controlled experiments is inherently flawed.

The myth of Atlantis was an attempt to answer the question “why do all neolythic cultures, operating in geographical isolation, produce similar mound structures”? Atlantis was surprisingly the most mundane answer, presuming they all descended from the same culture.  Evidence in mitochondrial DNA has revealed human migration patterns as we ran away from the ice age.  I think Australia was the only unglaciated land mass so we stayed there till things got warmer.  That’s a sort of Atlantis but I don’t see how our ancestors would have retained a common culture while dispersing across the globe when the glaciers receded.  Atlantis was debunked but the question was never answered. Why did they all love mounds, pyramids, ziggurats, etc.  The mound could be an artifact of the first nature/human cultural interfacing.  Perhaps it was the ancestral memory dispersed through the DNA of the surrounding ecologies that indoctrinated the human mind.  An irrational mechanism that undoubtedly stores something, but could be as untraceable and mysterious as dreams.  The silver foxes didn’t evolve new traits through random mutation as text book Darwinism teaches us.  Environmental stimuli conjured a coherent amalgam of meta-level genetic code.  Human DNA might have been encoded and dispersed strangely(like in a single drive of a RAID5 array) before our bodies manifested from the code.  The morph had to be catalyzed by the environment.  If the basic elements of consciousness can be reduced to simple biochemical exchanges across a synapse, then I propose we definitionally extend this synapse to the broader ecology.  The FDA defines food and drug as roughly the same thing: something you ingest to alter your biochemistry.  Nature invented the diet program of proto-human through its synergistic churnings. Poking and prodding at the narrow synapse of the primordial brain (DNA), it evoked new form through this mechanism as we later simulated in the silver fox.  Sorry about the tangent.  I’m interested in how the first human made visual language before there was any reference point to pre-existing culture.  What forces impact the chosen stylings and why are they so similar across the ancient world.

I wanted a wall hanging picture but ended up spending much more time making the box, the frame, the furniture vessel, the ascending building, the capsule object.  I guess the modern man makes art while picturing the final piece in a white box.  I made these frames outside and I pictured them flying over mountains like ships.  Ancient Future is the best description I’ve heard for this work.  The aesthetic resembles work of the ancients when there was no word for art.  Art was Magik.  A historic farmer walked to Prague and for one glorious moment saw the precise shape of the smitten virgin in stone.  This must have had immense power over him.  This  alone could change one’s religion as there was no word for religion either.  People were apt to follow what appeared to be the highest form of Magik. The American Indian’s were happy to hear tales of the awesome power of our white god.

With image reproduction technology at its peak, the art magik has been dispersed as gray heat into the crowd. The television-protectorate knows it.  When the graffitists caught on to the brute-force image technology, Street-Art, they were arrested.  Lascaux was Street-Art, back when human and deer formed trails through the forest in unison. Lascaux was Trail-Art rather.  When the Czech farmer travels to India does he change religions?  This, to the right, is not a building.  This is an attempt to change the world forever.  This is the extended practice  of mound building.  This aesthetic emerges from nature.  Buckminster Fuller, in Synergetics, claims that isometry is the framework by which plants expand their memory, or their information storage mechanism (DNA), into dimensionality.  The Phi ratio is commonly used as it ergonomically fills out 3d space with DNA assimilated matter.  If language is the priming element for human subjectivity, then math is the language of nature.  If nature was the first culture then our temples were the grand interface to this cosmic assimilation and bear The Image, filling out 3d space with their own sacred numerological programs.  This is the Ancient Future.

Corn was a vessel.  We coalesced with proto-corn 10,000 years ago, accidentally discovering genetic engineering through selective breeding processes.  It morphed to meet on this plane, as did we.  It grew lush and became the color of sun.  We imagined it as god.  Nazi occultists believed humans could ascend to the height of gods through genetic engineering.  This isn’t too far off from the Mayan’s dealings in corn.  Now the molecular composition of our bodies has been filtered through the corn because it’s in almost everything we eat.  Present day politicians gripe about appeasing the corn gods of the Midwest to garner votes.  We turn it to sugar, fuel, food, etc.  Corn Vessel, seen above, is a means of equating the various vessels employed in our history.  Corn genetics carried us in the same way the Apollo space craft carried us.  All were named after gods, all of the sun, and some synchronous element lies with in.  All were temples and capsules, if not literally, then figuratively.

Vacuum Paridoxicon entered the psychic temple where Euclidian geometry breaks down as Gehin has portrayed in the gauche painting of impossible-triangle adorned chairs below.  Her work focuses on paradoxical visual motif’s pulled from optical illusion books.  A cube becomes a hexagon when collapsed on a 2d plane for example.  One painting features a garner-faced rabbit in an impossibly shaped cage like an ant on a Mobius strip.  She is a Mesoamerican Escher.