Andrew J, long-crowned the
enfant terrible of the art world, has, through his latest ontological
BS13, transformed our so-called familiar landscape of Talk Photography into something self-referential, stochastic, and yet at the same time mundane. One recalls the Dadaists and the soup cans of Andy Warhol, and one reflects on the normative paradigmatic shift of our hermeneutical age. There are those who will view
BS13 as a didactic polemic, little more than a bete noire, still others who will see it as replete with a fertile esthetic, and others will want to burn themselves into a fiery crisp on national television, imitating (perhaps) the Buddhist monks of yesteryear, whose saffron-colored robes
BS13 echo, in all their evanescent autarky.
The question remains:
BS13: a simple
recherche into the lost
carts de jeunesse, a Dumbo's feather that lets the viewer soar back to the lost folly of youth? Or a sine qua non of postmodern folly?
If we know anything, we know this: Art is neither object nor subject, but the phenomenological intertwining of both so that 'appreciation' (in all its varied and multi- meanings) is born from the simple realization of perception. This recognition allows for art that is neither here nor there, but everywhere. And nowhere.
Andrew J's animism is at the heart of his challenge to the verity of truth, insofar as it rectifies the humanism of our spatial modality. 'BS13' purports to effect a
nouveau realisme in which the actual is unrealised into a cathartic emanence of the whole.
The dialectic of Andrew J's "BS13" is a reflection of the post-Marcel
zeitgeist, absent the
schadenfreude qua nervousness that has gripped the Talk Photography populace in this world of "now-more-than-ever." The semiotics of the saffron (en)robes serves an ontological function in re-animating and re-introducing the humanity of Talk Photography to their perceptions of the orange joy of being - the being you felt as a child, vis a vis a pinata. The Gestalt bespeaks a Foucauldian Weltschmerz, a sumptuous feast of post-Derridian brio-cum-angst. It's in this context that "BS13" covers, even metastasises, over Talk Photography like a vast dollop of neo-maternalistic, neo-Marxian mayonnaise.
Is that enough critique?