Towards an Object-Oriented Writing – or – How Anti-Formalism Helps Me Dream: Notes on an Idea (plus an announcement)

by Travis Jeppesen on October 13, 2011

For a while, it’s felt redundant to me, the way we write about art. I could say way(s), though I’m not even sure about that plurality anymore. The quest has been ongoing – and off-and-on – since Disorientations came out (and before, really): How to go about formulating this “poetics of art criticism” I keep talking about. I keep coming back to a phrase from my essay “On the Expulsion of the Friendless Warrior”: “the object and its mysterious anti-nature.”

This line of thinking led me to another, more vocational thought: Why is it that we review exhibitions rather than individual works? When I am asked to write about film, I am generally reviewing a single film. Same thing when it comes to books. In art reviewing, the individual work of art gets short shrift. It’s always a long shot of the orgy rather than a real probing of any of the participating entities.

What I propose, then, is a new way of writing about art. A hylozoic revivalism. In response to this feeling of being underwhelmed.

Object-oriented writing is a new form – neither poetic nor art-critical, yet retaining characteristics of both – that attempts to inhabit the object. That is, a writing that positions itself within the work of art, and also including all the necessary contradictions and impossibilities embedded within such an approach.

It could be suggested that the father of object-oriented writing is the Gertrude Stein of Tender Buttons, the mother the Roland Barthes of Mythologies. Though OOW is more likely their aborted fetus, having been revivified on a UFO by an extra-dimensional alien race that exists on a plane parallel to our own, and returned to this reality in order to contaminate it.

Traditional art criticism is largely predicated upon a two-tier approach – describing and judging. I’m not saying we should necessarily neglect these, but the field needs to be expanded. (In my own practice, I would like to bring judgment back to the table. You might have other goals.)

So, focus on a single work. Go inside it. Resist those urges that would reduce OOW to the status of mere exegetic response. Object-oriented writing is not a branch of criticism, but an art practice that allows the writer to collaborate with the art object. This allows a multiplicity of possible writings, ways, approaches, to flow forth; the poetic impulse of formlessness is the form. Everything is included, potentially, each element assuming equal value (let the reader decide what matters least): the historical = the formal = the philosophical = the poetic = the narrative = the critical. Etc. So one “historical” notation, in the same paragraph, might “illogically” follow a formal description and/or poetic eruption. You might spill your ink attempting to elucidate the reasons why the object willed itself into existence (if you believe it has.) Or proving that the object you see before you does not, in fact, exist. Or why it perhaps shouldn’t exist.

There are no rules governing this operation, nor should there be. For as long as I can remember, I have lived my life by trying to escape structures – the imposition of structures upon my being. Is object-oriented writing a crackpot semiotics? Maybe. Though I prefer the term “alien aesthetics.” I’m not so interested in language (I am), but in using language as an extension of my bodymind machine to inhabit the object. If you follow me there, you’ll find some interesting questions arise. Such as: Do we let the maker inside?

I’m really interested in exploring the site of no possibilities.

I acknowledge that object-oriented writing will always be, in its essence, an act of failed translation. But I am interested, as always, in the potentialities of a spectacular failure, rather than adding my murmur to the monotone that comprises today’s art critical chorus.

For now on, disorientations.com assumes a new focus. It will serve as a dedicated repository, a generative machine, for instances of object-oriented writing – all of which will vary in length and design. I will begin by posting, in the coming days, instances of object-oriented writing that I’ve done in the past – before this idea, which has been brewing for some time, arrived at its present articulation – many of which have been previously published. I will also use disorientations.com to occasionally clarify any issues that arise surrounding, or embedded within, object-oriented writing.

The Names

by Travis Jeppesen on October 9, 2011

The Names is a section from The Suiciders, a novel. Read it here.

Li Gang interviewed at Whitehot Magazine

by Travis Jeppesen on August 20, 2011

With a restless intellect and a rapidly developing oeuvre distinguished by surprising gestures that somehow manage to come across as both extremely logical and elusive at once, Li Gang ranks among the more intriguing members of the youngest generation of Chinese artists.

TransLife in Beijing

by Travis Jeppesen on August 19, 2011

I guess there’s not much left to say, at this point. After all, criticism stops as soon as the only question left to be asked is whether art is fulfilling its social responsibilities.

Wim Delvoye in Beijing

by Travis Jeppesen on June 27, 2011

The emergent church of Wim Delvoye is one that attempts to unearth the basest ethos of a tormented, corporeal Catholicism, while simultaneously debunking all that is considered holy in the secular world.

My review of Wim Delvoye’s show is now online at Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art.

I’m in China

by Travis Jeppesen on June 22, 2011

….in case you haven’t heard.

Will be until late July, it looks to be at the moment.

If you need to get in touch, the best way is through e-mail: travis.jeppesen@gmail.com.

Facebook don’t work.

John Miller in Cologne

by Travis Jeppesen on June 22, 2011

Miller’s work is always defined by a certain effortlessness at crossing the cerebral with the visual. In this, he is more motivated by his subject matter than any one particular mode of expression or conceptual framework. The result is that it’s never easy to recognize when we’re looking at a John Miller work; his free-ranging style includes both Duane Hanson-esque statues of heroes of consumerism (Now We’re Big Potatoes, 1992) and Dieter Roth-ian excess, as in his 1994 Topology for a Museum, six pedestals holding up pukelike mounds of sculpted grimy excess, with children’s toys and Pepsi cans occasionally emerging from the muck. It all depends on what idea he is captivated by at any given moment, and following those captivations becomes the adventure of following John Miller’s work.

My review of John Miller in Cologne, at Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art.

Thomas Struth in Duesseldorf

by Travis Jeppesen on June 11, 2011

Read the review on Whitehot.

Longitude’s Necklace

by Travis Jeppesen on June 4, 2011

“Her heart is boundless, bleeding. She is the porn star mother of us all, the whore, and she doesn’t even acknowledge her own presence once the forest threatens to overtake her human-style longing. She dresses in fur and feathers, leaves and twigs to make herself invisible. You can blend in with nature, which is nothing less than an extended series of disasters, all competing to annihilate us. We won’t let it. We will become like nature, and thus win this war, the war against the silence that bleeds in our mouths from afar. High up, the eagles squat over us on the tree branch. Those trees are higher than the sky’s own children. We can’t own the sky, but we can at least see which parts of the ground have evaded us the longest. Then we will know how to answer these questions. We will learn what it means to ask them. We will go inside the knife blades. We will speak the language of the worm.”

“Longitude’s Necklace,” a section from The Suiciders, appears in the new issue of VLAK.

Attila Richard Lukacs at Johnen Galerie, Berlin

by Travis Jeppesen on June 1, 2011

The resurgent emergence of the Polaroid photograph as a proper medium in and of itself throughout the last decade can, I believe, be attributed to a social anxiety surrounding the increasing digitalization of practically every vital sphere. The Polaroid inevitably calls to mind an earlier version of accessibility that seems quaint by today’s standards, and thus imbibes the viewer with a sense of nostalgia. There is also a deliberate artlessness native to the technology, a built-in problematic that gives the artist one chance and one chance only to get it right – and even when she does, it is doubtful that the results are going to look all that great. You really have to be both conscious of and content with the qualitative reality of the roughness that comes with the package.

Canadian artist Attila Richard Lukacs first made his name in the late 80s and early 90s with figurative paintings depicting skinheads and thugs in erotically charged portraits and scenes, utilizing classical chiaroscuro contrasts to imbue the images with a sense of timelessness. Occasionally the paintings halted just a few short feet away from kitsch’s front doorstep, and this was accomplished thanks to the not-so-subtle darkness of the content—racist skinheads shaving one another’s heads or wrestling. Some of the paintings were clearly made with the help of models—Caravaggio always comes to mind here, not just because of the chiaroscuro but because the backgrounds are often obscure, when not totally abstract—while in others, Lukacs gleefully allowed his imagination to take a detour beyond the perceptive limits of the real. His is always a seductive escapism, where equal attention has been paid to both the flesh of his subjects and the racy iconography they either flirt with or openly embrace.

There is a sense of loss and ambiguity that perennially haunts Lukacs’s early work, from whence it derives its power. And the city of Berlin—or, to be exact, West Berlin—played a formative role in these paintings, for most of them were created during the ten-year period he resided here, 1986 to 1996. It was a pivotal time of transition for the Cold War-scarred city, and Lukacs was on set in the middle of the action, churning out these beautiful images of Berlin’s disenfranchised young male denizens adrift in a concrete sea of uncertainty.

The current exhibition at Johnen Galerie features not the paintings, but the series of Polaroid photographs Lukacs took that inspired them. Lukacs appears to have taken several dozen Polaroids of each of his models, and they have been compiled on to boards and erected on the gallery walls, providing an interesting study of the period figure, as well as a bevy of clues for devoted fans of the artist. The question of how they rank in importance to the rest of Lukacs’s work, however, remains open. While they were undoubtedly an important part of Lukacs’s process (I use the past tense here because it seems that Lukacs has moved on to abstraction in more recent years), I found myself asking whether it was too much that that process was being revealed in front of me. In addition to hardcore Lukacs fans, the Polaroids might also pique the interest of those interested in Berlin’s recent history and devotees of gay male erotic photography. But otherwise, the aesthetic value of the Polaroids as works of art seems like it is, at best, beginning to fade in rhythm to the decay of the flimsy film on which they are imprinted. If anything, Lukacs’s exhibition points to the limitations of this particular revivalist trend, signaling analog’s sad defeat and indicating that the time has come to say goodbye.