The Brooklyn Rail

John O’Connor encrypts and encodes the complexity of our moment into ciphers of drawing. His exhibition Man Bites Dog Bites Man at L’Space in collaboration with Pierogi Gallery feels akin to listening to the radio on a late-night drive, like O’Connor’s practice is tuned to that space on the dial between radio towers, where the drift from one message cuts in across another as magnetic fields begin to shift. The dial is broken: it’s now a metaphysical receiver picking up the cascade of signals and all of the stray conclusions that intersect its trajectory, forming a paranoid vexing of communication, of signal and noise, where the artist wavers between recognizing something in its patterns and letting it through as abstract flow. It’s in this polyphonic space of overlapping frequencies that O’Connor operates.

O’Connor is drawn to systems and games. He builds and collapses associations between the slot machine and the chess board, the economy and politics. In Indeflation (2023), this is achieved through a twining boustrophedon, an effect that snakes the language around into a prismatic space, like a mandala, or an infinite knot of production, where causes and effects have no beginning or end. This winding up and unwinding of language is a recurring motif. For instance, in Car Crash (2023), O’Connor’s ideas about cars circle the drain at the center of the drawing like a spiraling Droste Effect. The artist often employs such a radial movement, in this case to form a dizzying and shifting encyclopedia of cars that gradually becomes more imagined and symbolic. Examples like the Batmobile or the Mystery Machine feature as you approach the center.

There are connections to be made between O’Connor and artists like Mark Lombardi and his drawings of financial fraud or Jonathan Borofsky and his counting project; or Paul Laffoley, Loren Munk, and Thomas Hirschhorn, who utilize languages of drawing and painting to interrogate language, history, and power. However, O’Connor’s works are rarely, if ever, polemical. They operate more like MONIAC’s; like color pencil analog computers that crunch the numbers of the virtual experience of the stock market along with the primary needs and anxieties of its inventor. O’Connor often repeats words until they sound un-word-like, and their connotations begin to break down—an intense fragmenting of form developed through hypergraphia and tautology. I would be remiss to not bring up Bart Simpson writing “I will not…” at the chalkboard but thinking of that as producing a kind of protest of meaning itself, or a kind of psychedelic epiphany, able to amplify noise and swarm to catch up to the accelerated speeds of meaning and thereby interrogate it. Rendering all of this data into graphic form makes it, at least in theory, decipherable. However, the message is a kind of production of the sublime, not our classical understanding of it but of its postmodern update: that everything is available, but nothing is truly knowable.

Ultimately, what distinguishes O’Connor’s work and generates its force is that his practice is an epistemological disarmament: Ok, I want to know everything, so where do I start? At times, it’s like O’Connor has been sent to understand the stock market and comes back having counted all of the tiles of the New York Stock Exchange; or maybe, to equate it more directly to art history, that O’Connor comes from a lineage of Dutch painters, who filled the floors and ground of their spaces with the taxonomical plethora of shells, insects, and plants to store a universe of knowledge in what are often unconsidered zones. There’s equivalence to be drawn to Don DeLillo or the Coen brothers as well, where the boundary between coincidence and significance are often thin and perplexing (and ultimately irrelevant). In Slot Machine Politics (2019), the artist collects the headlines that led up to the 2016 election, keeping count and noting both the words and the number of letters in each article about the race. It reveals an absurdist belief in the manic collecting of information itself, either stored for a form of analysis that hasn’t yet been invented or depicting the malfunctioning subroutines of a massive database.

O’Connor’s drawings aren’t an erosion of meaning but a density of message—where unrelated truths compete and overlap to produce a hesitant static. What truly allows O’Connor’s work to hold its center is his ability to shift the scale of this hesitancy from complex systems and the macro to the incalculably and mysterious personal. In the “Night” drawings, the artist asks a more poetic question. As he attempts to document the boundary between sleeping and waking life, he holds a pencil, leaving a mark as he falls asleep and lets the pencil go. This is a crucial inclusion in the exhibition that reveals the exhibition's larger question. Who are we, ultimately, within the world as it and all its meaning continues to accelerate? Like Jørgen Leth’s Perfect Human, the answer lies in the ordinary. Beauty lies insouciant within the rote task and repetition of the everyday.