How powerful is that illusion of a real presence, when a ramshackle and effaced effigy, an ugly or beautiful scarecrow clothed and stuffed with snips of film, contradictory statistics, detritus of consumer goods, notations from books read and transactions made, can be mistaken for a double of the artist?

Within a week of my first viewing of John O’Connor’s October 2013 exhibition at Pierogi Gallery, “The Machine and the Ghost”, I saw a special screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s rarely shown 1994 self-portrait film JLG/JLG.  The coincidence of the two triggered a recognition.  In both works, I saw an aggregation of parts that seemingly taps the yearning for contact with something intimate, an actual person.  In each case I found works that, seen clearly, leave that hallucination undone.

In JLG/JLG Godard’s figure and words materialize and disappear throughout the film. Images are overlaid with a shifting litany of onscreen texts and voiceover. JLG/JLG moves both toward and aside from the actual Godard via displacement, redirection, substitution—a simultaneous presentation and disintegration of the presence of the author and subject tracing paths around autobiography. There is a sequence concerning a blind film editor.  As the editor snips and rejoins sections of film according to the cryptic verbal instruction she is given by Godard, who is off screen, we witness a formal reordering of recorded data (captured images of the subject, of time, light, space, i.e., film). One system of sequence and incident is rearranged by being conjoined with another system. That other system is an arcane or maybe arbitrary numerical order injected from outside the frame, a re-encoding of the data, a shuffling of evidentiary exhibits.

In “The Ghost and the Machine”, as with his previous exhibitions, John O’Connor’s works track and re-organize information and events.  Pieces of evidence are delayed, mingled, organized, toyed with, compared, made graphically visible, made invisible as codes.

There is an additional, emergent sense of a persona in “Ghost and the Machine” that seems new.  I have observed people asking O’Connor if he is the Psychopath described in Portrait of a Psychopath, if his drug and binge cycle narrative Butterfly is a true story, if his “Dear John” exchange of emails with “Beyonce” in Love Letters (Diptych) is real. Use of the first person in such text-based works and the deployment of photos of himself for his sunspot series create the illusion of a reveal, an unmasking of the personal.

In a series of identically-scaled photographs titled by their dates, patches that resemble huge lesions or birthmarks blossom across O’Connor’s face, extreme and shocking.  He seems vulnerable and tenuous, maybe desperately ill.  But the marks are only photographic records of the sun’s activity, superimposed on the face, following a logical calendar-like system.  The personal image is divorced from intimacy in order to be fully engaged in the violent play of objective content.  Everything is factual, but the implications we might read are not true.

JohnO’Connor, Self Portrait with Sun Spots, May 2, 2013. Inkjet print, Ed. of 3, 17 x 14 in.

The artist has also certainly deployed phantoms in these works, in the form of chatbots, which converse in exchanges transcribed in text-based drawings.  Among these, and hovering over them, a phantom rises up in the guise of John O’Connor himself, just as for a long time now the knots of graphic information in his data-driven works have sometimes tended to suggest figurative apparitions, as in Kooky Yoga, 2005.  Before this exhibition, though, the personages or chimeras evoked did not particularly become him, nor did they usually tend to give rise to something existing off the paper, wanting to occupy real space. Interestingly this new development coincides with O’Connor’s very convincing deployment of fully three dimensional works, embodied as, in one example, a helical loop, made of epoxy, writhing in roughly the shape of an infinity sign, a snake of words, choking on its own tail (Strange Loop, 2012).

O’Connor seems quite alert to registering what are self-evidently problems of this historical moment (as is Godard in his later films), the same conditions noticed and tracked by science, in the media, by political structures, by the culture.  The spectrum of difficulties observed really pertains to O’Connor as an individual only in the sense that it is conditioned on the chance location in time (history), space (geography), culture, and genetic inheritance that the artist as observer happens to occupy.  We all now exist in an information reality that includes access to a radically expanded quantity of data points (facts but also an expanded field of lies and tricks). The works perhaps act out an attempt to deal with this with objectivity and a desire for a factual grasp, where confessions of personal emotional responsiveness and angst are not really the point, but are factors among many. They are disturbing and complicating factors, as they shade and distort a picture that’s already permanently unstable.  The point seems to be, at least partly, to locate accurately that constantly moving hairline juncture of banality and crisis: the present.

By Ken Weathersby

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–Jean-Luc Godard, “Changer d’image”

In a video commissioned for French television in 1982, whose narration is quoted above in translation, Godard wrestles with the question of whether and how images can resist commodification.  The exhibition that joins works by Linda Francis, John O’Connor, and Ken Weathersby similarly makes me think about how artists can have a critical relationship to the near-omnipresent forces of the commodity market, in a culture of capital that has expanded even further over the past few decades.  The artworks here provoke questions about the flow of capital exchange that seems to saturate every aspect of our lives.

Fluidity, flexibility: oft-cited keywords of the transnational corporate economy, which penetrates public space and institutions through privatization, and personal experience through digital information technology.  The mobile realm of production contracts labor wherever profit is greatest, while the deregulated financial industry increasingly speculates on the flow of symbolic capital itself.  Smooth operation is ostensibly the order of the day.

Placing high stakes, making hearts ache / He’s loved in seven languages / Diamond nights and ruby lights, high in the sky / Heaven help him, when he falls

–Sade, “Smooth Operator”

Linda Francis’s recent work is based on electron-microscope images of the surface of a failed heat shield of a 1990s space shuttle, images that she overlays repeatedly on the computer.  Her pieces present technological visualizations of physical structure—a structure designed, unsuccessfully, to harness resistance.  The artworks also incorporate into the imagery evidence of the media that produce them, such as pixelation.

Linda Francis, We Can Build You, 2013 Oil on wooden panel, 38 x 95 in.

In Interference, the crystalline components arrayed within the image suggest patterned organization while eluding it.  Yet across the multiple silkscreened prints assembled in the piece, repetition and alignment at the edges structure the image. Thus pattern recognition in Interference is both fugitive and precise.  Indeed a strong diagonal current crosses a literal gap to a separate, larger panel that leans on the floor against the wall.  Shifts in scale and near-repetitions are vertiginous.

Also patternlike but dizzyingly evasive, We Can Build You is a more physically factured, painted version of the image at greater magnification.  It resembles representations of biological code, and its title (taken from the Phillip K. Dick novel) evokes the manipulations of biotechnology, and more generally the way technological capitalism works on us.  Francis’s pieces invite contemplation of hypermediation and replication, as well as contingency, fissure, and friction, with a coolly observant gaze.

John O’Connor also indexes research material in his drawings, which underscore the imbrication of psychological experience with an information economy.  As the Surrealists channeled the illogical logic of the unconscious, O’Connor cultivates delirious overloads of information processing.  He produces drawings by using shifting, idiosyncratic codes: converting text into numbers, reversing letters, translating letters into colors by randomly devised systems, running garbled text through an electronic dictionary.

Turing (named for the computer scientist and his famous test of whether machines can think) presents an oval loop of linked bits of textual data.  The loop surrounds a set of inwardly folding, bunching shapes that evoke an organism introjecting and expelling.  O’Connor generated the incomprehensible data by a dialogue between his free associations, processed through multiple overcodings, and an electronic dictionary’s responses (one of which eerily speaks to Alan Turing’s persecution for his sexuality).  Characteristic of the artist’s work, the drawing appears both diagrammatic and indecipherable.

In SUSEJ, a drawing of intricately colored grids, O’Connor includes notations of his text-to-color coding at the paper’s edges.  The piece invites us to comprehend the design of the delicate arrangement of colors, but its structuring principles are opaque.  Similarly, the thin, almost weightless sculptures Future Rods are covered in blocky text concerning prediction, which resists deciphering.  Obtruding on the gallery floor, they evoke the forces of futures speculation that invest contemporary life.

O’Connor’s artistic practice mines the extra-aesthetic, representing processed information from the provinces of socioeconomics, politics, science, mass culture, and personal life.  His work does not so much assimilate these realms into absorbable images, but rather creates incongruity, discordance, uncanny disconcertment.

John O’Conner, SUSEJ, 2011. Colored pencil on graph paper, 43 x 25 in.

Ken Weathersby, 197 (dcch),
 2012. 
Acrylic & graphite, linen, wood
. 25 x 15 in.

In 198 (dc), paint is applied to a wood support, but that substrate is also image: it’s an elaborate grid of layered wood strips, which cutouts in the painted front surface reveal from the picture plane.  Meanwhile the painted image, an optically active grid of black and white squares, is a material slab of acrylic film directly glued to the wood.  The resemblance of the grids, and the equivocation of figure and ground at the level of image and physical material, confound distinctions between structure and surface.

In the freestanding 194 (z), another painted grid of tiny squares echoes a larger grid of wood strips that supports the painting.  In this piece, the wood strips enclose the painting, holding it within.  The structure is a delicate cage that partially obscures the painting, here in its conventional form of acrylic on a rectangle of fabric over stretcher bars.  Planar yet viewable in the round, the hybrid 194 (z) presents us with ambiguity about what is supportive structure and what is visual display.

Weathersby’s work foregrounds how the realms of visual image and material production are implicated with each other.  It is as though painting is posing questions about its constituent terms.  In 197 (dcch), what looks like a painting—a thin plane of an optically active grid of colors—is dissected to present a literal, physical interior that contains overlapping parts of other gridded paintings and wooden grids.  The piece highlights a sense of imbrication and conditionality.

Interestingly, the container is also a key figure in contemporary economics; the container ship is pivotal to global exchange, as it’s designed to make the supply chain as smooth as possible.  Indeed, as the forces of transnational capitalism are ever more pervasive, they operate largely below the threshold of perceptibility.  The artwork of Weathersby, Francis, and O’Connor each raises issues of imbrication, of congruence and incongruity.  It resonates keenly with the extra-artistic socioeconomic situation, and its discontents.

by Michele Alpern

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The musical gesture is certainly a cliché, but I listened; a cluster of chords form a simple, blocky, repeated figure. The fully cranked electric guitar and amp pump out a sound soaked in a humming spectrum of overtone distortion. All other instruments drop out during the break and let it hang excitingly in the air. The aural space around it for that moment is vast.

The brief rhythmic guitar break is a statement of the drive that’s layered up and elaborated throughout the entire song – but here it is stripped down for a minute, right to the heart of the matter. Its a sonic emotional mission statement by the long-haired, red-eyed stoner at the center of it all. He soars for a moment through an inner space of pure feeling, whipping out an energy in this riff that majestically trumps all that boring “corporate ladder” and “competition” crap.
The fully cranked electric guitar and amp pump out a sound soaked in a humming spectrum of overtone distortion. All other instruments drop out during the break and let it hang excitingly in the air. The aural space around it for that moment is vast.

As I listened, the emotional freight carried by this guitar riff called to mind something of what I encountered later in life in the loaded brush marks of Neo-Expressionist paintings. I spontaneously visualized big German pictures from the 1970s and 1980s. I first actually saw such canvases at the Toledo Museum of Art in 1988, in the traveling exhibition “Painting Refigured”. That show, organized by the Guggenheim Museum and Williams College Museum of Art, took stock of German painting between 1960 and 1988, with an emphasis on the return of figuration, but also a high concentration of the heavy-duty use of oil paint on enormous canvases. Artists in the show included Baselitz, Kiefer, Lupertz, and Polke.

I remembered standing in the museum taking in the way a particular painting featured a massive stroke from a paint-loaded brush that seemed to have been the size of a broom. The colors were mixed right on the canvas, inside the smeared mark, to make unexpected contrasts and crazy marbled streaks. Countless bleeds and clots could be found within an individual swipe of paint. This memory, as it was focused in my mind’s eye, was of a huge painting made with a single monumental mark. It read as abstraction and at the same time as an indirect representation of the presence of a giant, a towering artist who might have created this work in a flash, with a single dab. After locating and consulting the exhibition catalog for “Refigured Painting”, I couldn’t find a record of this particular painting anywhere. I realized that my memory of this piece was closely associated with a couple of untitled paintings from 1985, by Dieter Krieg. Looking at the reproductions now, I see that they are neither fully abstract nor composed of a single stroke.

One represents what looks like a chicken leg and a thermometer, and the other one depicts a huge fish hook piercing a scrap of paper with the word “idiot” scrawled on it. Looking at these in the “Refigured Painting” catalog, I realized that my recollection of a monumental single-stroke painting was a false memory, essentially an invention of my own. It didn’t exist, but was maybe accurate as an involuntary distillation of part of my impression of the show at the time. The Krieg paintings certainly were composed of the kind of heavy, fraught marks I thought of hearing that Boston song.

The macho (almost all were men) German painters whose photos appeared in the back of the catalogs (I pulled out and consulted another catalog of a similar show, “Expressions: New Art from Germany”, which included many of the same artists and toured US museums earlier in the ‘80s) were dressed and styled as tough rebels, attempting rock star glamour. Though maybe more punk rock than arena rock, from out of their black leather jackets, five o’clock-shadowed chins bore hardened scowls. A 1981 painting in “Refigured Painting” by Helmut Middendorf called “Singer” is dominated by a hunched, skinny figure holding a microphone stand, which was clearly directly copied from a photo of guitarist smashing his instrument on the stage from the cover of the Clash’s “London Calling”(1979).

As there is something signaling excess, even hinting at chaos in an overdriven distorted guitar on the edge of feedback, so there is in the touch of a gigantic brush dripping with a giant blob of mottled oil color. Each contains potential worlds within itself– and each can present a virtuosic dishing out of monumental forms, fat floating slabs for the ears or the eyes. In both cases the expression is a presumption of intensity and power deployed. In both cases the awareness of the touch of a creating hand invites one to identify and emulate by miming a swinging gesture of a brush, or a thrash at an air guitar. It’s a seductive image of mastery, full of grandiosity.

The implication of a controlling agent behind these expressions, able to propel and direct such potent stuff, suggests to me now that the appeal of these forms and the identification they offered promised compensation for adolescent male anxiety, a fulfilling of lack, an allaying of fear. It went without saying that all my male high school friends liked that guitar sound (it was beyond assumed), just as my colleagues in art school were excited about those big German smears of paint. It was a feeling. It was more than a feeling.

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