p e r f o r a t i o n s 16

TOXIC ART : ALLEGORY AND OBSCENE INTIMACY

co-editors: Robert Cheatham and Monika Weiss

zeug@pd.org, monika@pd.org

"...a thing may be conquered absolutely, cutting off all possibility of revenge , only when that thing is placed inside the body and annihilated there--only when the thing is devoured."

Gordon Teskey in "Allegory and Violence"

Perhaps the most common theme of toxic art would be the representation of the body, as if there was some toxicity in the FLESHINESS itself or rather in the state of seeing the flesh. Perhaps the image of the body is always proving (promising) its determined decay and death, without redemption, infatuating the viewer and inviting him to it's own space - a space of a Thing, an object, that Freud emphasizes as a 'cry'. Perhaps, what makes the image of a body toxic, is a trace of the presence, the semiotic of Being that reminds of its OB-SCENE context - " a dark, insolent, and senseless eternal power, to which everything is subordinated, and which controls you in spite of yourself." (Julia Kristeva)

The representation pulls away from any notions of primacy, fixating 'subject' and 'object' in double-delineated allegorical space. The body itself as 'primary' reference becomes a function of those 'dark, insolent' forces which ooze their way through the porous interstices and 'inter-faces' of technical infrastructures...but now given an intimacy which is truly ob-scene (always the 'un-' of the scene, the shadow of the visible, now illuminated with the dark light of technicity). The 'landscape' of technicity collapses notions of destruction and re-construction perhaps leaving us 'moderns' under a perpetual veil of de-construction, itself double-veined, pharmakonological and chiasmatic.

And so on one side, there are those scurrying for cover from various forms of 'toxicity'...which is busily being produced by the other side. Aesthetic enterprises are perhaps only the most visible of these obscenely intimate collapses / eruptions.

Perhaps the only toxic art would be the allegorical one, as if there was some toxicity in the anamorphic reflection in the mirror of art, orin the state of paradoxical MEDITATION on the sublime of the META-flesh, the toxic meditation on the only abject 'morphe' - BEYOND.