Pseudocides
Since 1995, Liesbeth Bik and Jos Van der Pol have teemed together as Bik Van der Pol. Although this seemingly innocent decision is nothing more than just a nominal arrangement, it incites my imagination to firmly establish a Frankensteinian reality, one that invites us to step into a kind of radical and fragmented subjectivity with all the political implications attached to it. Listen carefully. «Loompanics», the publishing lighthouse that for 30 years had filled our bookshelves with the most extreme list of titles, went out of business at the beginning of 2006. «How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found» by Doug Richmond was on the list, and claimed to be a guide to endow oneself with a new identity after committing «pseudocide». Beautiful, no? In Bik Van der Pol’s «Disappearance Piece», the artists print 1000 copies of the scanned and personalized pages of one of the original editions, and the contents are openly available to an in site lecture. Wanna melt in?
«The Disappearance Piece» at The Kitchen, New York.
Registered®
Sometimes a literal approach is a more profitable generator of meaning. This is specially true when the most popular meaning of a word is subjected to the definitions of the law, and it is submitted to the guidance of a proper usage. Sometimes, in addition, the meaning might be a compounder of endless tautologies. Once you write these words, you can’t escape their redundancy. Bravo! Here’s where figurative use melts finally with its background.
«Registered Blackboard», an exercice in tautology
Wearing Type
Actually, this is not mere coincidence. I suspect that branding, at its best, does just that. M is for “Macula”, for stain, blemish. In short, M is for evidencing an error, an accident. I’m featuring a scene of Fritz Lang’s “M” because there is a relationship with type that awakens a profound fear, one that we’ve learned somehow to trivialize. Wearing this grammatical layer can leave no one neutral. I guess that is because, under these circumstances, one always stands out.
Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang's "M", and a trendy peepingMonster t-shirt.
Image of Ambiguity
When Jasper Johns told us that we “…cannot paint an image of the number seven” that we “…can only paint a number seven”, I was happy to have inherited a certain amount of discursive stability. Frankly, at the moment, I couldn’t agree more. Having bypassed somehow all those conflicts of representation, I had to agree that, indeed, the conventions of the sign seemed to introduce a tangible opportunity to better exploit certain ways of communication.
"One can only print ambiguity". Colección Actual. Plataforma Editorial, Barcelona.