The Phantom: John O’Connor’s “Ghost and the Machine”
Ken Weathersby
How persistent is the wish to somehow find a human face in whatever
kind of art—to see a real presence there that invites us to know its secrets
and enjoy its troubles?
How powerful is that illusion of a real presence, when a
ramshackle and effaced effigy, an ugly or beautiful scarecrow clothed and stuffed
with snips of film, contradictory statistics, detritus of consumer goods, notations
from books read and transactions made, can be mistaken for a double of the
artist?
Within a week of my first viewing of John O’Connor’s October
2013 exhibition at Pierogi Gallery, “The Machine and the Ghost”, I saw a
special screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s rarely shown 1994 self-portrait film
“JLG/JLG”. The coincidence of the two
triggered a recognition. In both works, I
saw an aggregation of parts that seemingly taps the yearning for contact with something
intimate, an actual person. In each case
I found works that, seen clearly, leave that hallucination undone.
In “JLG/JLG” Godard’s figure and words materialize and disappear
throughout the film. Images are overlaid with a shifting litany of onscreen
texts and voiceover. “JLG/JLG” moves both toward and aside from the actual
Godard via displacement, redirection, substitution – a simultaneous
presentation and disintegration of the presence of the author and subject
tracing paths around autobiography. There is a sequence concerning a blind film
editor. As the editor snips and rejoins
sections of film according to the cryptic verbal instruction she is given by
Godard, who is off screen, we witness a
formal reordering of recorded data (captured images of the subject, of time,
light, space, i.e., film). One system of
sequence and incident is rearranged by being conjoined with another
system. That other system is an arcane
or maybe arbitrary numerical order injected from outside the frame, a
re-encoding of the data, a shuffling of evidentiary exhibits.
In “The Ghost and the Machine”, as with his previous
exhibitions, John O’Connor’s works track and re-organize information and events. Pieces of evidence are delayed, mingled,
organized, toyed with, compared, made graphically visible, made invisible as
codes.
There is an additional, emergent sense of a persona in “Ghost
and the Machine” that seems new. I have
observed people asking O’Connor if he is the Psychopath described in “Portrait
of a Psychopath”, if his drug and binge cycle narrative “Butterfly” is a true
story, if his “Dear John” exchange of emails with “Beyonce” in “Love Letters
(Diptych)” is real. Use of the first
person in such text-based works and the deployment of photos of himself for his
sunspot series create the illusion of a reveal, an unmasking of the personal.
In a series of identically-scaled photographs titled by
their dates, patches that resemble huge lesions or birthmarks blossom across
O’Connor’s face, extreme and shocking.
He seems vulnerable and tenuous, maybe desperately ill. But the marks are only photographic records
of the sun’s activity, superimposed on the face, following a logical
calendar-like system. The personal image
is divorced from intimacy in order to be fully engaged in the violent play of
objective content. Everything is
factual, but the implications we might read are not true.
The artist has also certainly deployed phantoms in these
works, in the form of chatbots, which converse in exchanges transcribed in
text-based drawings. Among these, and
hovering over them, a phantom rises up in the guise of John O’Connor himself,
just as for a long time now the knots of graphic information in his data-driven
works have sometimes tended to suggest figurative apparitions, as in “Kooky
Yoga”, 2005. Before this exhibition,
though, the personages or chimeras evoked did not particularly become him, nor
did they usually tend to give rise to something existing off the paper, wanting
to occupy real space. Interestingly this
new development coincides with O’Connor’s very convincing deployment of fully
three dimensional works, embodied as, in one example, a helical loop, made of
epoxy, writhing in roughly the shape of an infinity sign, a snake of words, choking
on its own tail (“Strange Loop”, 2012).
O’Connor seems quite alert to registering what are
self-evidently problems of this historical moment (as is Godard in his later
films), the same conditions noticed and tracked by science, in the media, by
political structures, by the culture. The
spectrum of difficulties observed really pertains to O’Connor as an individual
only in the sense that it is conditioned on the chance location in time
(history), space (geography), culture, and genetic inheritance that the artist
as observer happens to occupy. We all
now exist in an information reality that includes access to a radically
expanded quantity of data points (facts but also an expanded field of lies and
tricks). The works perhaps act out an
attempt to deal with this with objectivity and a desire for a factual grasp,
where confessions of personal emotional responsiveness and angst are not really
the point, but are factors among many. They are disturbing and complicating factors,
as they shade and distort a picture that’s already permanently unstable. The point seems to be, at least partly, to
locate accurately that constantly moving hairline juncture of banality and
crisis, the present.
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