October 01, 2004
New Eyes On ISCILLATION
ISCILLATION, 2003, colored pencil on Arches paper, 18 x 60 inches.
by Jerome du Bois
I stopped making art indefinitely at the end of last year. I've stacked my collages and drawings in corners in other rooms, not even hanging them on the walls. I've put away my tools, my wood, my special papers, my rubber stamp alphabet, my paints and colored pencils and my templates; my black idea book, filled with ideas and festooned with bits of folded papers peeking from its leaves, sits on the bookshelf. My fingers itch, but my heart's not in it right now.
ISCILLATION is the last piece I made before I downed tools. I haven't looked at it for nine months. But I took it out and I've been looking at it all week. We have, I should say, Catherine and I, and we saw a new interpretation of the piece which seemed glaringly obvious in retrospect, but it made us sick to see; it made us want to go back, to erase the knowledge, because it's horrible. I'm going to tell you about what we discovered.
I'm an idea man. I make art with words and graphic patterns, holding as many ideas forward as possible without overwhelming the viewer. The patterns hold the viewers' attention while I go to work on their hearts and minds with the words. This piece, like most others with most artists, had many influences and motivations, such as these:
I wanted to make a piece with the shortest English word I know: I, and what it means to me.
I thought about how one's perception of oneself risks blinding oneself to the truth: to see better, thin yourself out.
Also, I wanted to draw eyes. Eyes are holy to me because Light made them, and because Life and Nature used them as the greatest ladders to get us to where we are now -- and without knowing it; but now, we know.
I knew the background would be busy, but stabilized by both bilateral and quadrilateral symmetry. Bright colors would make the pattern pop.
I knew I wanted to bend the I, remembering my own saying, "Death bends your life's bow to make it useful."
I remembered hearing from someone when I was a kid, and I'm still working it out: "Accept yourself, forget yourself, and get into something bigger than yourself." And all the Jesus talk I was soaked in, too; some of that's in there.
Oscillation: the regular movement of an impulse from a maximum to a minimum about a central pole or origin.
And because I'm so influenced by Camille Paglia and Sexual Personae:
My personae are not strategies of irony or social adaptations but cinematic visualizations, products of an archaic process of picture-thought. The brain is the neurological repository of the human past, and personae are the hidden masks of our ancestors and heirs. Man is not merely the sum of his masks. Behind the shifting face of personality is a hard nugget of self, a genetic gift. I believe only some master principle of heredity, defyng liberal theories of environmentalism, can account for the profusion of human types, often manifested within a single family. The self is malleable but elastic, snapping back to its original shape like a rubber band. Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae.
Then there's Julian Jaynes's outrageous notion, embodied in the title of his singular book: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. (Everybody used to be a little schizoid, way back in the day.)
But most importantly, I rely on Daniel Dennett's evolutionary exposition of the Self as the sum, the I atop the pyramid of a jillion jostling semi-stupid Darwin machines, each with its own agenda, arrayed and stacked in coalitions, the sum worked out by such marvelous processes as pandemonium contention scheduling.
I am never alone; I am always with my selves and subselves; there is no isolation.
The little ovals? Those are the Darwin machines. The ones on strings hold the core together, while the dynamic ones dance, collide, and learn. So then I can say that the third eye -- in the center of the drawing -- gives birth to a big new idea, sending questions and claims shooting out into the world, through me; but to really see its truth I need to strain -- to even split myself -- to empty out and open up and try to embrace its significance.
Notice, though, as the energy expands, the I-form deforms in the opposite direction of the physics of expansion, as if consciously resisting it while still being carried outward and bent around oneself.
Notice that as the Self splits, it splits into two wholes, not halves. They reach out to embrace the new perception, the new lesson, and then bounce back to the center, wiser; until the next idea blooms forth, and the iscillation begins again.
So I made it, eighteen inches by five feet, grinding the colors into the Arches paper, saturating as much as I could, and keeping it neat. I made the left and right eyes separately -- big baby blues -- and embedded them in cutouts.
And we enjoyed it for awhile. Then the world turned ugly in ways I don't have to go into; what I call rebarbarization dominates our culture for now and the foreseeable future. I didn't want my work out there with that work. So we put it all away until this week. And we saw, with dismay, that ISCILLATION could fit right into the Rebarb.
That hot pink circle in the very center of the piece?
Imagine it's the button on a suicide bomber's belt . . . Deformation indeed, and the pretty fuschia ovals become bits of flesh, the other ovals BBs or bolts . . .
Or the central I is an I-beam in the World Trade Center and the hot pink circle is the nose of a 747 turning everything to exploding hell . . .
No. No. This isn't what I made! But as we talked, looking at the thing, we reached an obvious and ugly conclusion:
It's a freeze-frame of human annihilation.
Horrible. Now what, rename it KABOOM? I had created the piece in the intifada and the Iraqi War's aftermath, and not once did I, or Catherine, make the violent connection, though we keep the TV on (picture anyway) most of the time in our workspace. Of course, it still retains its earlier interpretation, and others, but now there's this new horrifying overlay that I have to confront every time I look at it. Will that wear down over time?
I made another piece before this one, in 2002, called The Oracle Board: Thirty-Six Triplets. I put that one away, too. At the center of that piece I transcribed four triplets I created in the three days, sitting before the TV, after the terror:
Never Write Bullshit.
Every Word Flesh.
Invest In Black.
Shoot Through Tears.
Maybe I need to get more of my work out again.
[Comments are open for this post, at least until the first ugly one. Then slammo again.]
Posted by Jerome at October 1, 2004 06:00 AM | TrackBack