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Poking the Eye (slowly)
There is a morbidity that occupies my person. I cannot speak to where it’s origins lie, only that it has existed within me as a child and it continues to manifest itself in the projects that I create in various media as an adult. However, this morbidity is also joined by a curiosity that sometimes exacerbates, and other times, tempers it.
I can recall that as a child, I took a rather peculiar delight in damaging the fish that were available at the local food market. There was an open area to purchase fish that were held in individual styrofoam trays, covered with clear plastic stretched tight and thin, and displayed on ice. I remember staring at a fish, and when my mother or father were not looking, I would slowly plunge a finger through the plastic and into one of its exposed eyes, thereby smashing it. The eye seemed so inviting to me—wide open and staring through that plastic. I was always curious as to what would happen if it had collapsed under pressure. Was this abnormal, or simply an extension of that boyhood propensity for unchecked cruelty?
This natural inclination, this impulse to practice what I call the boyhood experiment, that is, the need to see just how far one can disrupt a thing until it breaks, seems to be a malicious process of learning. There is an inherent violence in such actions, of taking the so-called experiment too far and actually making something break or even hurting oneself (or someone else for that matter). However, that tension between knowing what one should not do and the compulsive desire to follow through nevertheless in the hope of yielding a new knowledge, was a discomfort that I took a great deal of pleasure in, and still do for that matter-- within the context of my work.
In the process of developing my projects, I seem to access that malicious imp, and approach image making in a similar state of fixation, bordering on the fetishistic. Guided by creatively hostile tendencies, I yearn to disturb, disrupt and dissect the fleshy minutiae of my environment. Such an action is followed, however, by a need to make sense of the original impulse. To stand back, after witnessing the result of the experiment, and mentally diagram the course of events—to fold them into a narrative that is a child’s attempt at some kind of spiritual order. The boy needs to make sense of the world, after he has done bad and witnessed the corruption of rationality. He has ventured outside the zone of comfort, and now it is time to go back home, to his room and place of order.
This is the ultimate split that gives form to my projects: an oscillation between the gross and the puerile--- to run amok and engage in spontaneous vulgarity and morbid curiosity, reveling in the absurd— and, on the other hand, the need for structure, to project reason, the harmonious cultivation of order. What I am left with is fundamentally an expression of the absurd—images that diagram the incongruities of a discordant world; that map the phenomenon of creative destruction.
This, and a lingering desire to poke the eye.
October 2009
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