The Brooklyn Rail

What the hell does contemporary art think it is? The Thing? The alien creature in John Carpenter's movie. The threat today is “The Thing.” We know this creature absorbs and metabolizes everything it touches. What is being described here isn’t an art movement—it’s a sprawling atmosphere where sinister technology, foolery, and deliberate ordinariness overrun authenticity. Maybe this isn’t an open-ended period but the last one, as we drift toward the end of the world. In this chamber of hell, things get instantly assimilated into the undifferentiated present. That’s just one possibility.

Another interpretation: contemporary art is a never-ending episode of The Twilight Zone, where the absurd logistics of art fairs enslave humanity, overtaking everything as artists and collectors dissolve into insane text messages that art directors can no longer decipher. What we call canonization, a concept coming out of the Catholic church, disintegrates into ridiculous search engine results and guessing games as we sift through vast amounts of digital ruins from outdated institutional websites. Is the contemporary art world really just a sideshow in a dystopian cyberpunk reality? No wonder viewers are lining up outside museums to see medieval art from the fourteenth century.

In an attempt to bring some light into this strange world, a Philip K. Dick rant from The Exegesis comes to mind:

The ability to make time run backwards gets you out of your programmed groove (“groove tracking”) and renders you free. This ability and only this ability frees you from an airtight tyranny that dooms all mankind … when you start disrupting time you may be operating in the realm of a supratemporal composite discorporate mind … by affecting the past he would then find himself shifting across laterally in time … thus setting up alternative worlds.

According to Dick, we are enslaved DNA robots who need to channel a time-disrupting faculty to gain power over causality itself. This makes perfect sense.

Bob isn’t the only one who found excitement in old Sienese paintings and Tibetan mandalas while dealing with the contemporary impasse. Philip K. Dick became obsessed with Gnosticism, Christian mysticism, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead after getting hit with a psychedelic energy beam that gave him direct contact with transcendent intelligence in 1974—right around the time this contemporary art thing started. Of course, Dick didn’t have much to say about contemporary art, because the Roman Empire never truly ended. It still runs parallel to our present reality.

In fourteenth-century Sienese painting, divine and earthly reality exist in the same space. Viewers are confronted with layered and stacked compositions, skewed spaces, parallel possibilities, hieratic scaling, and continuous narrative scenes, where figures appear in multiple temporalities at once. At the same time, Tibetan mandalas—made around the same period—offer a map of true reality outside the Black Iron Prison of contemporary art. These works are instructions for navigating intermediate states, meditative tools for escaping the constraints of the never-ending Twilight Zone. What we’re dealing with here is time-loops and maps of enlightenment.

In the studio world, I often have conversations with ancient masters who exist in the half-life and we negotiate how best to move within a recursive glitch. My art history library is basically a cryogenic facility, with thousands of reproduced images frozen in time, detached from their original aura, trapped in an in-between state. Certain images become activated, slipping into a different kind of liminal space. The more perfect the digital reproduction, where we can crop the details, the more it drifts into a more obscure half-life, becoming closer to abstractions than the weak indirect encounters where the aura was diminished in the small reproductions from twentieth century books.

To put this in more simple terms, the way forward is going further backwards. Of course, there’s residual influence from the past few centuries, but resurrecting medieval illumination, ancient Egyptian art, or art of the Song dynasty throws off art of the now, which is usually just a recasting from a twentieth century recycling center or mere pastiche that doesn’t have enough transformation.

When we make multiple timelines spin backward through higher-dimensional activities that come out of controlled chaos, we get teleported to magical vistas inside the palm tree garden. If historical forms become dislocated from fixed points in linear time and start floating around in a dream-like state, spaces that were once continuous begin to fracture into the impossible. Renaissance backdrops, once stable, start to exist in uncertainty as the ancient masters from half-life inform the clouds of alterity to become the transitional vapor objects in broken spacetime.