Blaise
Larmee
By James D Bowman 3
INTRODUCTION
Life meets us between what we meant and what
we’ll mean. The practice of Blaise Larmee wavers between two poles: the harried
preoccupations of a sociopoliticized movement towards plurality in [“alternative”]
comics on the one hand, and the sensitive tonalities of poetic imagery on the
other. Between a vanished past and hidden future, Larmee arrives.
CHILDREN & PRETEENS
“An
object is capable of creating the place in which it is shown.”
– Roni Horn
Larmee’s works tend to reconstitute their
contexts to such a degree that their contexts seem to be generated by them.
This has, I feel, to do with the objects of Larmee’s aesthetic and ideational interests.
Children and preteens have persisted in Larmee’s work. They disclose many of
his central themes, such as the desire to live in a vitalized world and the
processes of cultural transformation. With children and preteens, Larmee dons
varied masks, manifests as varied avatars, and inhabits varied façades, all of
which imply both possibility and constraint. Children and preteens seem to be a
comfortable subject for Larmee, but reveal the nuances of life’s unease. They
signify a state of hesitance and tension. He seems (at times) to want to efface
himself somewhat; to become semi-anonymous in order to escape the congestion of
expectations pinning him into fixity. Blaise Larmee’s preteens embody an
alternately harsh and ethereal border between otherness and selfhood, between
the self and the world. Preteens tilt. Their social diagonality is blatant.
Life has been consistently misrepresented as a movement—back and forth—from
verticality to horizontality. The obvious diagonal nature of experience is
hidden, spoken of in hushed tones of reticence, in spite of the fact that awake
and aware cultural critics have recommended these modes of ideational and
experiential diagonality since eras immemorial.
“ALTERNATIVE” COMICS
So-called bohemian and countercultural movements
are too often marred by the most basic misjudgments (excessive and unprotected
sex, adherence to rigid ideological stances, lack of playfulness) and “enjoy” the
kind of hedonism that trades passionate, holistic pleasure for hollow kicks and
entertainments. Epicureanism seems, in other words, prone to disintegrate from
a rewarding investment of attention to pleasure into orgiastic, Dionysian
emptiness. Final answers w/r/t the conundrum posed by the mercurial nature of
Larmee and his aesthetic descendants might be ridiculous keys to search for,
but w/r/t this enterprise I’m uncharacteristically optimistic because—in the
breath-lit minutes since its inception—the movement in “comics” that Larmee
helped to instigate is the re-emergence of a repressed necessity: in the
neo-post-structural cartoonists’ works, a new world of immense inclusion and
relentless depth reaches the alive-but-in-its-death-throes old world of death,
division, and insignificance; holding it with murderous love, splitting it
open, and, in lacerating it, unleashing its millennia-worth of entrails as a
fresh frontier. Each “fascism”-battered brain faces this new place, which is
(seems to me) in a relaxed seated position in the middle of absolute
plurality’s headquarters: an old-dance-studio-like “church” of aesthetic
rebirth. In this context, Larmee’s recent work demarcates a pivotal point in
the semi-collective semi-subconscious of the U.S. where many hidden harmonies
split wide a battle hymn of wounded interactions. Larmee’s preteens embody the
harmony that rests moments ahead of comprehension, and the world of “comics” is
made to reckon with a coded-but-ultimately-public power. In
Larmee’s practice (which revolves as much around interviews, statements about
art, talks, and so on) ideas are not allowed to calcify into sources of
potential idol worship—and neither is his work. Instead, art pulls us toward
itself, so that, while we’re aware of particular pieces, there is also always a
kind of fuzzy background awareness of art as that which undergirds: something
greater than the sum of its parts (because its parts are parts precisely
because of the ways in which they relate to each other and to art as that set
of innumerable acts in, with, and under life. It is not that works of art are
hierophanies. This would imply that art is a “spiritual” “force” synonymous
with life and/or a “cosmic” “source” of avatar-like manifestations of itself.
Rather, art for Larmee seems to me to be the product (even the summation) of
material forces as well as those material forces’ sources: Möbius
strip teases well worth dedicating one’s life to.
A Beautiful Horizon
As Joseph Timko writes in “The Geometry of the
Beautiful Horizon,” the “Fabric of the World stretched smoothly across its
Frame plays evenly against the Air [and] were we somehow to make our Way past
the Edge of all this and to look back from the Outside, all the myriad
Coherences would dissolve and disappear from View; for this Path ushers us to
the other Sense of Without.” Art, for Larmee, seems to be conceived of as an
inter-/active horizon against which particular works of art arise and relate.
Art works are art’s work, then, more than their artists’ works. The artist, as
much as the artist’s utensils, acts as an apparatus of art itself, and should
therefore be free of ego. The artist does what s/he must because it needs
to be done for Art’s sake, not the sake of the artist’s “moral” “worth” or
sense of self. The artist’s mastermindful naivety doesn’t preclude rumination.
New truths reveal themselves and are absorbed into the arena of art—perfect in
its eternal incompleteness. As with science, there is no (and can be no) creed,
because there is no end in sight, and because the present and the future (and
the insights and epiphanies that arise out of each) are never seen as the mere
effects or results or workings-out of a more “sacred” past. In a strange way,
cancel themselves not OUT but IN: into the non-all system of Art’s own
evolution-via-revolution. Devotion is undertaken in actual time and material
space, in actual and material inter-/actions. By refusing to let normativity
(the lackluster shadow cast by the collective consciousness’s saturation in
outmoded ideological systems) interfere with the ways in which one assists Art
in the ongoing revelation of itself can the artist seize upon the delightful
horizon: such seizures maintain a nearness to as well as a distance from Art.
An Aesthetic Representative
In his role as an aesthetic representative of the
new world of immense inclusion and relentless depth, Larmee wears masks that
make him more himself than ever: less a particular self than an ultimate,
unrealized one. (A “Self” we all share, we all are, perhaps? Rendered in a
quintessentially present—if “mass” mediated—way?) In this role, Larmee reshapes
the negative space of shared legacies of pain into a place of awake sacred
relations: a Promised Land-like realm of plurality-consciousness that contains
massive laughter as well as vast sadness. In this sense, at least, he has
intersected horizontally, from well within the conventions of (“alternative”)
“comics”. I suspect that the phallus paintings of the “divine
madman” Drukpa Kunley were (at least at first) as inappropriate in his era and
area as Jonathan Meese’s swastikas have been in t/his, in ours. It was an
enlightenment that allowed for openness to taboos in Kunley’s case. The
unmoored, fear-haunted secularism that now runs the show sorely lacks that.
Despite (and due to) his provocations, Drukpa Kunley was a teacher
whose advice was heeded in his time and a sage esteemed to this day. We no
longer heed the advice of those who are smart enough to break through the shit
systems of oppression that lacerate the imagination and imprison the mind. Is
it anything more than our collective sense of ennui and world-weariness that
has allowed an artist like Jonathan Meese his success? If so, why hasn’t his
contribution to contemporary thought been taken as seriously as it should be?
Authentic devotion to Art is marked by a resolute orientation towards the
materiality of our corporeal condition. While ideological conceptions (and thus
presentations) of oneself are sentimental and pathetic—as people try to think
themselves into or out of morality or greatness with the minds of others—devotional
conceptions (and thus presentations) of oneself are mastermindful (and naïve in
the best sense).
“Intermission” / “Related Content” –
Hauntological Manifestations of Repressed Public Trauma in Personal Expressions
of Civic Experiences: an Assessment of the Recent Past as a Kind of Gentle
Percolation of Ghosts (in the Derridean Sense) in the Aesthetics of the
Non-Rhetoricized Fashions of Jeopardized Essence
“The man who consciously pays no heed to fashion
accepts its form just as much as the dandy does, only he embodies it in another
category, the former in that of exaggeration, the latter in that of negation.
Indeed, it occasionally happens that it becomes fashionable in whole bodies of
a large class to depart altogether from the standards set by fashion.”
– Georg Simmel
“Minimalism has become
the unofficial language of contemporary commemoration.”
– Erika Doss
If
all the fashions of the semi-apocalyptic present moment were to be combined
into some odd but bland aesthetic “item” (as denim was the pre-semi-apocalyptic
item-of-items) and the location of immense phenomenological potential—as a
parameter pounded into the material with the chisel of participation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG8tqEUTlvs), what would our item
of items be? It may not be possible to know, but it is impossible for me even
to guess, for the aesthetic blessing of this moment in cultural history—since
the linearity of history has everything to do with the civic experience of a
present “moment” or series of moments—is the passionate semi-embrace of the
radical (albeit safe) “other” in forms that seem (at first) somewhat bizarre,
but are, in fact, not inventive but merely innovative, not fresh or new but a
trick in which old aesthetics and ideals are made into new-seeming but
ultimately unhelpful assemblages of staleness. This passionate semi-embrace is incomplete
because—and one can feel this if one’s antennae are healthy and honed—there is
a deeper terror on the inside of the ostensibly “new” “tolerance”—by the
masses—of the quirky, the weird, the bizarre, and the rebellious in fashion,
music, art, and so on. It is not as radical an embrace as it could/should be, and
has never been. If, say, massive images of fleas were to be plastered in eerie,
photorealistic detail on t-shirts across these United States, this ennui-ridden
latest phase in the maturation of history—this feeling of being at/in the “end”
of history—would have its cluster of nameless mascots. Out culture’s interests
are not new. Underlying statements about future fashions is the possibility of
vast plurality and a pouring out of repressed “insanities”: headspaces
that—compared to our more common neuroses, which hide and deny those inherent
“insanities” behind “real” “life”—would shine with an unparalleled loveliness.
The haunted fashions of this moment both highlight repressed public trauma and
put it into perspective repressed public traumas’ impact: the odd, auratic
nature of dark but numinous incidents, post-rhetoricization—perforations in the
makeup of material realities. An understanding of presentation as a paramount
horizon upon which sits the possibility of inclusive communion in the seismic
impishness of heartaches and blisses immense and perspectives rooted in grief
both belong and do not belong to the half-hidden signifiers who light the
inside of what was impossible before it was strewn into the newness of a real
space’s particularities. These horizons are representatives of an unknown
“beyond”. In today’s modes of self-presentation, there can be heard very little
in the way of meaningful innovation. We have borrowed overmuch from the past.
Fashion—the most recognizable extension and expression of how we are now
situated between aesthetic and ideological horizons (the “west/sunset” and
“east/sunrise” of phenomenological possibility)—is made to contend with its
seemingly irreconcilable roles. Some adopt “their” fashion as a kind of
shorthand for authenticity, hoping to convey both truths and lies about
themselves to shape (as best they can) how others read them, as texts. The more
extreme the statement, the more controlled the reading, so that most of us opt
for less extreme statements that are thus more open-ended. (Most of us do not
rely on fashion in anything like an exclusive way communicatively, but tailor
others’ perceptions of us via conversational and action-based methods as well, of
course.)
Fashion
also allows for acting, however, and not merely on some ghettoized stage (as an
obvious performance) but in daily life. It can do as much—if not more—to hide
those who wish to conceal themselves as to reveal those who wish to express their
“authentic” public personalities. In the aesthetic realities of traumatized
sites and symbols—in which some kind of persecution has been internalized—we
witness, over and over, a present moment that, enduring abuse, performs a kind
of self-emptying in which bits of histories (distressing and/or welcome) are
invited in, and manifest as modes that not infrequently celebrate marginalized,
repressed, and persecuted existential possibilities and positions: awed silence
before scarred perfection. Over and over, we meet the open arms of a panenangelic personal experience and refuse,
for the pettiest of reasons, such a boundless embrace. Because of this (and, of
course, other reasons) loveliness tends to point, in the realm of nuanced and
non-rhetoricized immediacy, not to itself, but to the more recognizable public
traumas that a culture (as a personalized whole) undergoes. In so-called
renaissance after so-called renaissance, humankind has tended to trade vertical
for horizontal modes of motion w/r/t the ideals of production and the
production of ideals, and thus the perception of realities—and possibilities. Passionate
dances enter, permeate, and exit the mind, but the laceration of the possible
(i.e. the human psyche as an arena, or an origin, of endless potential
interactions between endless and able-to-be-realized potentials) is an immense
laceration, in length and in depth. This incision stretches from horizon to
horizon. The cut (v.) occurs in one traumatic moment and then the cut (n.)
oozes traumas from the past into our minds. These traumas enter and permeate,
as passions do, but must be kicked out.
Ideological phantoms,
specters, etc. are more alive now than ever before. Now—between the past and
the revolution that will be brought about by advents in neuroscience—is a time
more haunted by ideological phantoms than ever before. The advents in
neuroscience will alter our understanding of what it means to be human, and
likely eliminate some, if not most, of the hauntological pathogens of pathos
that infect the present with memories of the past, ideologies from the past,
and ideas (all incomplete if not incorrect) about the future. It will be more
marvelous and more extreme than most of us will be prepared for. How do we
revitalize the present? For starters, by living in it. Many have perfected the
art of presentness psychologically, and have touched lives. The effect has yet
to reach beyond the realm of the psychological and (at most) interpersonal into
the realm of the social and impersonally political in a major way. Politics is
far too tied to all that is elsewhere in time, haunted by the ideologies and
traumatic calamities of the past and haunted by the suspicion that the same
kinds of traumatic calamities will happen in the future if not curbed by the
same kinds of tired and outdated ideologies: literally a self-defeating system
in which the same note is played o’er n’ o’er. Presentness is generally thought
of (as I’ve thought of it thus far) in terms of time, but spatial concerns are
no less important. It would seems we’re as situated in space as in time, but
our spatial situation is actually just as incalculably nuanced, if not more
nuanced. It has, I feel, to do with how connected we are, as parts, to the
whole of life. A human with a canine sense of smell would be nowhere locked
alone in a room with nothing smell. Most of us would prefer a less intense
sense of smell that in a world of aromas to a perfect—but useless—olfactory
sense in a context in which it has no use. This calls attention to how we are,
for all intents and purposes, “one with” so much. Each bleeds into more bleeds
into much bleeds back, funnel-like, into some and—once more—one. Not only are
we connected to each other and “nature” in the pastoral, pre-Industrial
Revolution sense, but to nature as that vast whole made up of toxic waste,
nuclear weapons, plastic, disease, and technological innovation just as much as
animals, vegetables, minerals, and other “natural” facets of nature. In a
speech titled “Powers of the Hoard: Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant
Matter”, Jane Bennett says, “In Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of
Transient Mental Illness, Ian Hacking makes a persuasive argument that some
forms of mental illness arise “only at certain times and places,” and are semantically
located between a virtue celebrated in the culture and its accompanying vice.
Hacking examines the strange epidemic of fugueurs (compulsive walkers) in 1887
in France and shows how it arose in the space between the culture’s celebration
of traveling abroad and its pathologization of vagrancy. What this particular
virtue-vice pair expressed was the thematization of physical mobility as an
area of ethical and political concern. If the fugueur was the madman for his
time and place, as hysteria has been called the prototypical psychopathology of
Victorian England, then perhaps hoarding is the madness appropriate to a
political economy devoted to over-consumption, planned obsolescence […] and
vast mountains of disavowed waste.” Bennett asked, “What counts as the material
of vital materialism? Is it only human labor and the socio-economic entities
made by men using raw materials? Or is materiality more potent than that? How
can political theory do a better job of recognizing the active participation of
nonhuman forces in every event and every stabilization? Is there a form of
theory that can acknowledge a certain ‘thing-power,’ that is, the
irreducibility of objects to the human meanings or agendas they also embody?”
and in her talk said the hoarders on the TV show HOARDERS recognized a taboo
against animistic thinking. So if history exists in space as well as time (as
it does) and if a certain amount of existential horror is the father of fashion
(as it is) and if repressed public trauma bleeds out of us, Gethsemane-sweat-like,
into private and (ultimately) public life (as it must) how much does
humiliation (or the fear of it) factor into the trauma-haunted minimalism that
percolates (a “ghost”) at the heart of contemporary mainstream fashion. If
human bodies (and faces) are non-blank non-slates (as, of course, they are) the
impact of this fact on fashion—and therefore self-expression in nonverbal and
inactive ways; ways that rely on ostensibly “chosen” signifiers—is immense, and
leads to a certain inevitable, market-driven dearth of expressive potentials.
In painting, an artist can count on the blankness of her canvas. Fashion has no
such reliable sameness as a starting point, and is, therefore, inevitably
imbued with a certain amount of what might be called “compositional cynicism”
from the get go; which could, I hereby hypothesize, have negative interpersonal
(and even sociopolitical) effects. The lackluster state of contemporary fashion
(and the culture of carelessness that has arisen around this famine of flamboyance)
should garner more attention than it does.
2001
The screen becomes a luminous
canvas that buzzes like a bumblebee; rain-bathed not infrequently in small gods’
tears, eroticized proximity feels itself to be a violence creative: explosive
motions’ encounters with slick surfaces. This piece, passed to the public in
the relay race of aestheticized ideation, pitches another visual hymn of
post-industrial passion into astral orbit—violet bulbs of adolescence that
bloom like karate wounds. As David Foster Wallace wrote: “the sad way the street
smelled at twilight, when all of the houses became the same color and all of
their porch lights came on like bulwarks against something without name. His
eyes when he turned from the door didn’t scare me, but the feeling was somehow
related to being scared.”
3
BOOKS / Conclusion
In 3 BOOKS,
Larmee analyzes with dazzling scrupulosity the voluminous, inevitable
melancholia of aesthetics-in-time. Filled with secret hopes and fears, full of
the dance of vibrant matter, instilled with both the felicities of nuanced expression
and the bombast of comics’ avant-garde, 3 BOOKS erupts as a set of auratic
eruptions of psychic dissonance into the yet-to-be arbitrated context of the
contemporary condition. If the work as a whole forms a fever dream, the
divisions between each third marks a moment for us to weep ourselves awake. And
if passion lattices the laughter that rises as loaves of cozy bread between
dull dreams, snowcapped summits of rushed recitations rise like steeples in the
breeze of Larmee’s incalculable influence.
