Ian Francis - New Desert of the Surreal

Not to diminish the timelessness of the early surrealist masters but I doubt that the unconscious landscape of the 21C dreamer bares likeness to Dali's endless deserts or the marble columned corridors of De Chirico. I would suggest, instead, that if you took a snapshot of the contemporary unconscious the setting would resemble the brightly hued, leisure among the ruins of Chloe Early or the dark, deconstructed down to geometric grid, urban landscapes of Ian Francis.

Much of the work in Francis' New York solo debut, Fireland, inhabits an uneasy twilight areas between the unconscious and the urban street. In High Angle Deer Park (above), an urban park is stripped and flattened into a grid pattern forming an abstracted game board where a mysterious competition/ritual underway bathed with sexual tension and submerged violence.

In the striking Three People Lose Track of Time in the Financial District of San Francisco (below) the urban street is reduced to a series of streaked and tarnished geometric forms. What we can assume is a busy city street is depopulated leaving only the three narrative figures. The title places the scene in a specific location while the actual image is devoid of identifiable locative cues. Instead the figures inhabit a peculiar limbo, simultaneously in public and removed to a place of safety where internal life is free to manifest.

Again only a teasing suggestion of narrative is discernible. The viewer is positioned as an uninformed voyeur spying on a private emotional moment. The emotions are familiar but the specifics of the situation are a mystery. The figures appear familiar enough yet their forms are fantastic. They are more changeable composites than studied likenesses. Facial detail conveys raw emotion, the intimate confusion of the female figures, the anguish of the male figure carry a certain weight, however the figures are unstable, their faces extending in multiple, legs fading into the background. They are vaporous inhabitants of dreamspace where all things, even people, are shrouded in occult meaning but that meaning is fluid, uncertain and beyond concise explanation.

There is a connection to be made here between these urban landscapes, stripped down and re-mapped for unconscious exploration and the growing prevalence of augmented reality. However, I can not at this moment string the ideas together. It does seem, however, that there is insight to gleaned from the juxtaposition of the fantastic landscapes of Dali and De Chirico and these more contemporary abstracted urban scenes. Is it that the urban landscape has become so abstract, so removed from the "natural" world, so wiped clean through excess stimuli, that they are now the blank canvas for out waking dreams? On the other hand could it be that we have become so removed from any sense of uninfluenced imagination that our unconscious mind can no longer build the pristine deserts of surrealist fantasy? Instead we are left to simply augment the everyday world, creating just enough space to dream but perhaps not enough space to dream large. 

Ian Francis: Fireland is up at Joshua Liner Gallery until April 2.

Our Pr0n Stars are not Your Porn Stars

In 1995 superstar porn queen Traci Lords released 1000 Fires an album of disposable dance anthems. The LP's Juno Reactor produced high-gloss thump made a certain amount of sense as the backing track for Lords. There was a connection to be made between the bright lights in dark places hedonism or 90s dance floors and the over-lit trashy glamor of pornography from the same era. At the time both industries were seeing an influx of cash and begrudgingly ceded credibility. The two scenes were beginning to enter the wider culture, becoming household topics of conversations even if those conversations were still had in hushed tones.

Jump ahead fifteen years and you would be hard pressed to find two industries more drastically effected by the rise of technology and the accelerating effect it has had on pop culture than porno and pop music. Pornography is now omni-present and as acceptable a part of the larger culture as perhaps it is ever going to be. Its many starlets are not only wealthy but also pop icons. This money and visibility, along with advances in video technology, have lead to lavish production budgets for pornographic films that involve over the top plots, exotic locals and lavish sets.

However, our hyper-saturated media environment also allows easier access to mainstream porn's darkling sibling. Cheaply made films cast with skinny, tattooed twenty year olds (boys & girls, unlike mainstream pornography and hollywood's, massive age disparity) shot in grainy DV offer up a cracked mirror image to the bleach blond, and absurdly augmented starlets of mainstream smut. Where mainstream porn is increasingly hard to discern from major Hollywood movies, so-called alt porn is full of slap dash edits, cheap visual effects and at its most extreme, an Artuadian relationship to its audience. The hallmarks of the art/film school drop out cannot help appear absurd wrapped around what is still, at its gyrating heart, hardcore smut. However, this pretentious self awareness is no more bizarre than the glossy high budget aping of Hollywood the blockbuster found in more mainstream fair. Like most cultural forms, porn's cross-over into the larger culture comes at the expense of innovation and content. However, just like other cultural forms, a relational other forms to fill the subcultural void left in its wake.

Pop music is currently generating its own darkling other to mirror its very own high gloss stagnation. Signs of this growing dark-pop trend are most obvious in the blacker side of Lady Gaga's Night Porter meets Weimar Cabaret shtick. However, for the more adventurous listener a the peculiar sound has begun to coalesce around a number of insufficient names including Drag and Witchhouse. These new dark sounds often see pop sensibilities, R& B vocals, catchy synth melodies, submerged below a veneer of drone and feedback and merged with melodramatic analog synths that would be at home at the Bat Cave circa '95. The music often disseminates through word of net downloads or on strictly limited vinyl or cassette releases. A patina of the static and hiss of basement studio production sunk beneath lyrics laced with a dark sincerity is the final touch on obsidian mirror image to Bieber and Beyonce's glossy pop sheen.

One of the more respected forces enabling these new sounds germination, is Brooklyn's own Pendu label (d/l Pendu's Horror Scores for the Dance Floor). Along with White Ring and Chelsea Wolfe, Pendu also releases music by aTelicine, a band whose founding members include porn starlet Sasha Grey (see what I did there?). aTelecine's music is probably the most challenging of any act on the label or within the man/label's musical orbit. The songs are born of old-school tape loops and analog synths. They have a relationship to both the avant-drone metal of Sunn O))) and early 90s Industrial. On the Industrial side, aTelecine have a clearer connection to the early experimental sound of Throbbing Gristle or Current 93 than the grind and stomp of Ministry. Lyrics (by Ms. Grey?) are lost in layers of distortion sinking into to thick atmospheric haze that is constantly being chided and shifted by off kilter percussion. Hints and flashes of lullaby melody than work against the drone to create the gentlest sense of impending chaos, a timidly prodding unease.

The experiments don't always work, songs occasionally never manage to fully form but simply stagger on as stillborn noise for its own sake. However, more often the layers of dark blistering sound blend into something rich and fully formed. These songs lure you in while still managing to transcend mainstream pop's reflexive capitulation to sooth and comfort, to entertain. This is in the end not the music of large heaving breast, neatly tussled hair and well timed moans. It's more the music of sweat and spit. It slaps you around and bit and makes you feel dirty and just a bit uncomfortable. Which for some of us is exactly what we are looking for.

from aTelecine's A Cassette Tape Culture LP:


for the lulz: