Accepting the Phantasmagorical
Jakub Julian Ziolkowski, The Mystery of Neocortex, 2009-2010
When I first saw an image of this painting by Jakub Julian Ziolowski in Artforum a few weeks ago, I had intended to write a piece about how I am “over” this kind of art. My first thought was that it was a “George Grosz rip-off,” and I wondered why I needed to see more art like this in my life. In other words, I dismissed it and had decided that while this type of image is something that definitely would have strongly appealed to me at one point in my life that I have moved on and no longer need such literal representations of sexual power and perversions that so darkly and savagely illustrate the economy of sex and power.
I have to say, however, that for a large part of my adult life this is exactly the type of art that most appealed to me. Mostly, however, I was much more interested in the expressionists and surrealists who depicted a world of sexualized power corruption and perversity. Inside that art work, I found expressions for my own life, and the Expressionists became the number one influence on my art. In regards to the painting depicted above, certainly if I were to put my early years into a painting, it would look much more like this painting by Jakub Julian Ziolkowski than, say, a Georgia O’Keefe painting of flowers..
In fact, I did put my early years into paintings. They’re not pretty to look at. When I first left the streets and began expressing myself in art, I can tell you that my paintings often depicted a kind of sexual hell. They are very nightmarish. Huge canvases that I thumb-tacked to the wall and then furiously painted a world of sexual commodification and nightmares that I pulled solely from my imagination. I have some photos of those paintings, but I can’t find them right now. I really want to show them to you, and I will when I find them. When I first started making art, it was always from my imagination, and none of it was very pretty. Sure, the colors were vibrant, almost sickeningly so, but the content was all about sex and power and the female body as object of consumption, abuse, and horror. It was intense painting and drawing these images because I had to dig entirely into myself to pull them out. It was a gruesome yet necessary process and an important part of my “recovery” to relive my hell through art. It was the first way that I processed my hardcore life - in art.
For now, all that work is boxed up in my garage. No way I’m going to hang it on my walls. After I gave birth to my daughter, I had to completely redirect my art. The days of processing my sexual body in art were over. Because I was a mother, I felt I had to find a new direction to express myself that wasn’t so graphically sexually horrific. Slowly I eased myself into being a little more representational through my pen noise projects, and I have inched my way forward into depicting a kind of dark angst into my art that my kid accepts, but showing it to her isn’t like exposing her to a nightmare world way beyond her innocent years. In other words, for the past 12 years, I have really had to modify my natural artistic inclination as a result of being a parent, and I just came to accept the fact that I no longer had a need to consume or create art that deploys sexual violence as its main thematic content.
I did let my imagination begin to rip open a few years ago, and my “core” vision started leaking into some of my art. This is stuff I just dug out of my head. It contained some of how I really see things when I let my art mind free, but I also held back enough to make the work acceptable for my kid to see. Here are a few little drawings that illustrate what came out when I let my imagination take over in its natural state a few years ago:
These were from about three years ago or so. But then for some reason, I decided to put the clamps down and put my imagination in check. I moved onto my Film Still work and re-contained myself in a “safe” format. And I’ve been busy refining my art skills, playing with the edge of darkness, but still keeping literal representations of sexual economy or the brutality of the world as I see it out of the picture. So a couple of weeks ago when I looked at this piece by Jakub Julian Ziolkowski, I decided I no longer had a place for this kind of vision in my life, that I much prefer more abstract representations of the economy of sex and how the body is in conflict with the economic world.
But then something happened. I went to the drawing studio the other night, and I met that model who was obviously dealing with some seriously hard times in his life, and suddenly I felt open to my “true” art in a way I haven’t felt in a long time. I felt connected to the model intensely, and I felt like I needed to carve out not just him as an individual but some kind of relationship to him within the world that is both phantasmagorical and humanly real. After drawing the other night, I have really felt compelled to return to my “darker” vision of the world in my art but also to inscribe a real humanity in my subjects. I really want my art to be more than just my vision of people who pose for me. I want to somehow connect their images to the political and economic landscape, if not literally than in emotion somehow. I realized that I am happiest making art when I am seeing the world as not a particularly nice or pretty place and when I see the tension between the individuals who occupy the world and the overall apocalyptic economic landscape in which we live. In other words, I have a tendency towards a very dark vision of things, but I also am enormously emotional and empathetic for people who are enduring hard times as a result of how fucked up things are. I guess that it should be no surprise that drawing the guy who obviously was fucked up but also trying to maintain a sense of integrity and strength would inspire me to open myself back up in my art.
So I looked at the painting by Jakub Julian Ziolkowski the other night with the intention of writing something about how I have moved on from this kind of vision, but then suddenly I realized that I have not moved on. I have actually just been censoring myself from seeing things this way because I want to protect my child. I read a few articles and found some descriptions of his work. As horrific as they sound, I realized that if I really let myself go and stopped putting on the censors that I probably would see things bery similarly but through my own unique vision. That’s just the truth.
[Ziolkowski’s paintings] depict a phantasmagoric world of disembodied limbs and breasts, squirting capillaries, vomiting mutants and coiled snakes. Look closely at one of his busy landscapes and you might see a tiny image of a rape in progress, or Ziolkowski himself, in the form of a skeleton, greeting the viewer with a creepy wave. The works swirl with conflicting narratives and present a compulsively cataloged vision of inhumanity.
“I just believe that people are really bad,” he says at one point. “We think we are clever, but we are very, very primitive.”
He never paints from life or photographs, relying entirely on his imagination, and his technique on canvas is fast and feverish-“chaotic and intuitional,” as he puts it. People who have seen his work sometimes ask if he takes hallucinogens for inspiration. “Never,” he says. “I don’t know what might happen if I did. Maybe I would paint very classically.”
I can relate to every single thing mentioned here. The truth is that I don’t see the world or people as particularly attractive. My life experiences have led me to not have much faith in humanity. I do link sexual exploitation with economic corruption, and when I look deep down inside of myself and pull out what’s in there from my imagination, I don’t see pretty things. I see a phantasmagorical vortex of a body and mind in conflict with the political economy of the world I live in. Likewise, I don’t need any hallucinogens to produce hallucinogenic visions of the world. I don’t need drugs to make things look nightmarishly hallucinatory. Even my life studies drawings I’ve been doing recently all have a nightmarish quality, and they’re TAME. That’s how I see things all on my own.
The truth of the matter is that as much as I thought I was “over it,” I do see the world as Ziolkowski depicts it in this painting:
Jakub Julian Ziolkowski, Untitled (Into the Hole), 2010
I am constantly at battle with “The Hole.” The truth of the matter is that I have to hold back from completely succumbing to “the hole” in my life and in my art because I am a mother, and there is no way in the world that I am going to impose “the hole” on my daughter. Nevertheless, I do feel that it is time to give my art what I have always been best at giving it. An expressionist darkness that sings the stories of individuals and their place in a political economy that is far from pretty, but I will tell the stories in pretty colors. I’ve always liked to intersect a riot of color with a riot of darkness, putting the beauty of the colors at odds with the dark vision of the content. The model Tyrone who I drew the other night opened that back up inside me. I’ll still do the film work because film is a huge part of my life too, but I want to remember what it is that I have always liked to do in my art - instill it with something that connects to people enduring Real Life Shit. That’s why I always pick the most desperate shots to draw from my film stills. I’m all about capturing desperation, anger but also an intense humanity and integrity. I’m thinking of different ways that I can accomplish this in new work. I have some ideas.
So I’ve realized that it’s okay to let myself see things the way I see them. It’s just managing the continuing conundrum I face as a mother - giving myself artistic freedom to do what it is I do best and I like doing best but also protecting my child from the truly nightmarish vision that lurks inside me.
Oh, also speaking of letting myself see things the way I see them, I also found this other artist --Gregory Jacobson (a.k.a. Fatty Jubbo) - whose work is also phantasmagorically horrific but I decided I like it anyway. He’s like Bosch meets Balthus meets Crumb.
Three by Gregory Jackson:
This is not to say that this is the only kind of art that I like or will paint/draw. It’s to say that I have been investing a lot of energy in censoring myself for the past 12 years, and art which I thought had become obsolete in my current life was actually just being blocked from my vision by my own self-imposed barriers. I still like other art too. LOTS AND LOTS OF OTHER ART. Promise. I just wanted to acknowledge that this is twice in the past month (the first time with the new Arcade Fire album) that I thought I didn’t like something that I actually really liked. Now I just need to dig out photos of those old paintings to show you.