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

The post The Phantom: John O’Connor’s “Machine and the Ghost” appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Ironically, what Mandelbrot saw that day merely confirmed his notion that chaos and order are two sides of the same coin. Similarly, artist John O’Connor, whose latest show recently opened at Pierogi Gallery, seems aware that his quasi-scientific works are imbued with a hidden pattern.

By approaching everyday phenomena like the lottery; meta-dieting, computer-generated conversations and psychopathic traits, the artist has managed to unlock something of a veiled thread that shows humans to be simultaneously rational, superstitious, and abundantly absurd. Moreover, The Machine and the Ghost evokes a deep sense of alienation at O’Connor’s core.

Works in this show fit neither traditional science nor machine-like concision, but rather a hand-made aesthetic that is imprecise, but never sloppy. The artist begins each composition with an equation entirely of his own making, charting coordinates based in point, line, shape and color. When fully mapped out, they generate strange optical patterns which seem to confirm a secret knowledge at the heart of the mundane.

Take Self Portrait with Sunspots for example. The composite features a series of nine framed pictures of the artist’s face with photonegative captures of the sun’s daily spots superimposed over his skin. A subtle politic might be that the sunspots look like legions in this context. Though more interesting, perhaps, is the raw emotional content behind O’Connor’s various hairstyles here. A mussed tousle one day, an almost violently-shaved stubble the next, and a complete cover-up with ski cap by the end. It is as if the artist’s identity crisis somehow coheres with the ecstasy and agony of the sun’s harsh unpredictability.

The Shape of War, one of three sculptures in the show, operates less like traditional sculpture and more like a diorama that one could imagine Copernicus constructing in his laboratory as a means of measuring some new hypothesis. The hand-drawn texts and jagged shapes here are merely plotted based on a system set up long before the aesthetics emerge. Any onerous thoughts concerning the topic of war practically disappear, as the suspended sculpture’s framework appears both impersonal and utterly weightless.

Monster, 1992-2002 is a large-scale facial photograph collaged over with what looks like a rainbow-colored spider web masking the artist’s face. Basing the color and pattern on a pre-set equation where a sub-70°F day is plotted red and a plus-85° day is green, the work clearly acknowledges the human subservience of mood-to-weather conditions. Yet, never obvious, the Kafka-esque monstrosity that O’Connor’s face metamorphoses into becomes strangely moving, its beauty a kind of impassioned loneliness that easily disturbs.

Conversely, Portrait of a Psychopath, the show’s largest composition, is sobering to its very core. In the center, a psychedelic green, pink, and yellow mountain emerges from the plotted coordinates that match lists of figures like Odysseus, Pol Pot, and Ronald Reagan on the right, against a series of phrases to the left side such as, “Warlike courage far above norm” and, “Skill at faking emotions including love, sincerity, and regret.” The sheer verticality of the mountain gives it a monumental feel amidst the rest of the show, and a neo-liberal interpretation may be fully in line with its op-art construct. Yet there remains a shocking element here that defies politics. For surely one could expect a contemporary work based in war and corruption to have something of a mannerist irrationality. Yet, the way the composition remains resolutely composed is perhaps its most disturbing and lasting quality. Instead of pointing fingers, O’Connor seems to suggest that given the same power, each of us could become such a monster.

A 75”x60” work titled Butterfly is almost too much to grasp in one viewing. It is a text painting, but not the usual spatial affair the genre seems to imply. O’Connor instead stacks a dizzying array of hand-drawn sentences punctuated by brand logos which he employs in the telling of a single day begun by chasing an Ambien capsule with a bottle of Budweiser.

The narrator (whom we assume is O’Connor) then heads off to the Truth Gentleman’s Club where, in an extreme burst of physical and mental energy, there are several fast-food pit-stops, more prescription drug intake (Prozac, Ativan), an attempted mugging and finally, overwhelmingly, a great crash unto sleep. The viewer is left to wonder whether any of it really happened or if it was entirely dreamed. As such, the yarn becomes something of a waking nightmare, whose surrealist tropes blend uneasily with the barrage of consumer products to create a composite that is unapologetically neurotic.

In the end, the great strength of The Machine and the Ghost remains its utter lack of artificiality, despite the detached nature of its equations and the strange biomorphic patterns they produce. That such visual chaos can be both breathtakingly beautiful and endlessly hypnotic makes a very solid argument for the most basic act of stepping back from life’s messy details as a means of reinstating order and civility.

By Brian Chidester

The post The Machine and the Ghost: John O’Connor at Pierogi Gallery appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.