Orlando and the Tempest : Artist’s Statement
Artist’s Statement
Joseph Nechvatal
Orlando and the Tempest
121 Orchard Street, New York City
April 8 – May 9, 2020
Opening April 8th from 6 - 8 pm
Orlando and the Tempest is a series of artificial life paintings that I created between the years 2018 and 2020 that indirectly addresses issues of gender plasticity within our tempestuous social-political times by imagining nonexistent scenes from the flippant 1928 novel Orlando by Virginia Woolf (the story of an aristocratic young male poet who transforms into a woman overnight and lives for 300 years).
Orlando and the Tempest treats the fantastical and voluble story of Woolf’s Orlando with corresponding puckish flippancy. But this playful flippancy is achieved by what I think of as the responsibility of long looking—a shift into a non-binary visual noise field where viewers can re-appropriate their capacity to visualize on a personal basis.
Storms have no gender and mean full-blow fluidity. In Orlando and the Tempest, an ambiguous Orlando figure is embedded into just such noisy chaotic grounds to the extent that normal figure/ground relationships more-or-less merge, playing elusively with what is seen, what is suggested, what is repressed, and what is desired. The starring Orlando figure, who may project multiple pansexual identities, plays painful hide-and-seek with the tempestuous whipping environment, that, in the end, suggests carnal mystic sorrows.
Though the issue of gender fluidity is culturally and politically topical, the pangender subject is nothing new to my work. Long term influences on my pansexual interests have been key works of Marcel Duchamp and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s term (from the mid-80s) panthropology: a transhumanist multi-spectrum poly-androgynous concept that transcends gender labels. In 2000 I exhibited artworks (with artist’s statements) investigating virtual hermaphrodite complexity in my ec-satyricOn 2000 exhibition, and again in my 2002 show vOluptuary: an algorithic hermaphornology. I have continued to use androgynous and trans forms in my work, since. In 2018, I penned a pansexual art theory paper entitled Before and Beyond the Bachelor Machine that was published in Arts.
As meticulously articulated in my book Immersion Into Noise, Orlando and the Tempest utilizes aesthetic visual noise that puts representation and abstraction into interactive play by flipping the common figure/ground emphasis (to some extent) so that the eye must navigate and unpack the phantasmagorical pandemonium presented. This entails an intimate act of seeing and imaging on the part of the viewer, which the paintings’ modest size encourages. As such, Orlando and the Tempest dips under the surface of the turbulently shredding atmospherics of today to convey and encourage intimate fluid visualizations that resist social constraints.
Gender here is viewed as an act of becoming that fails to sustain sex oppression by ceasing to draw the boundaries of the Other. As such it is a provocation not only to male/female constructions of heterosexuality, but also to homosexual constructions of identity. This critique of ‘representation’ in the aesthetic sense is part of a critique of ‘representation’ in the political sense (and vice versa).
The pictures in the exhibition were created with custom C++ artificial life software, acrylic paint, and archival inkjet on Hahnemühle Daguerre canvas.
Joseph Nechvatal 2/2/2020
One must have chaos within oneself, to give birth to a dancing star. -Nietzsche