Returning briefly to Matias Faldbakken's Kubrick-inspired Dumb Object (>post#2) I'm reminded of John McCracken’s Silver 2006 or Column 1986, objects which McCracken also associated with Kubrick’s monolith. Dumb Object is also comparable to Ad Reinhardt’s M, 1955 in the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Reinhardt’s practice operated from a position of negation. His modus operandi “stay with the negative all the time” has been significant to the development of Faldbakken's practice. In 1967, commenting on his satirical cartoons which negated claims to meaning in abstract expressionism and surrealism, he resigned to the fact that the art world was “no longer satirizable.” Faldbakken's practice reactivates Reinhardt’s satire via a parody of negation. Like the black monochrome, parody is capable of making “a negated absence in to a visible presence” a "playing" that collides the avant-garde's negating strategies with popular entertainment.
Play and collision are related to the situationist’s
strategy of détournement (>post#1) as is the detourned title, Dumb
Object, which denotes the absence of speech or the annunciation of a
qualitative judgment – the opposite of logic. In this sense Faldbakken’s
Dumb Object encompasses the notions of misology and misanthropy–the
hatred of enlightenment and knowledge–ideas explored in Faldbakken's
novel trilogy, Scandinavian Misanthropy as well as the project, A
Hideous Disease, presented at ‘Statements’, Art Basel 38 in 2006. The
latter referencing Socrates’ prediction of the death of logos at the
hands of Misology and Misanthropy – "a hideous disease.”
Faldbakken’s title
designates the “object” as “dumb.” And specifically “dumb” or “mute” as
opposed to the German “dumm” meaning stupid. This titular doubling
places Dumb Object into Faldbakken’s problematizaiton of the
antithetical character of modernism. The same dumbness activates the
body of work “Nothing Doing” – scanned and enlarged images of blank
advertising spaces and the margins of newspapers. Dumbness also appears
in Faldbakken’s artist book, Black Screen Book, 2005, in which a double
page spread bears the text, “Dumb Surface,” referencing Laurence
Sterne's famous muting of the page in Tristram Shandy. The central image
of Black Screen Book is the ultimate non-representational site, the
black anarchist flag, a negativism that asserts that absolute
explanations can only be produce negatively, “the only way of explaining
what something is, is by saying what it is not.” >Stay with the
negative all the time.< In this way the black flag is a mockery of
all other flags, a representation that refuses to represent.
In the related video Black
Screen, this flag fills the entire screen, simultaneously becoming the
censor square, and a paradox that expresses the absence of
representation. The same use of space occurs in Guy Debord’s, Hurlements
1952, in which the screen shifts monochromatically from black to white,
white to black repeatedly for over an hour, remaining completely black
when the audio track is silent. Agamben writes that black and white are
like voids. Each is a surface upon which the image is so present that
it becomes unseen but retains its potency. Like Debord’s "constructed
situation" – the uniqueness of a situation allows it to be repeated
again from the start. An idea recalling Faldbakken’s unique but
multiple, Dumb Object.
Hurlements en faveur de Sade - 1952
