I
don't need to tell you that life is complicated. The amount of data
we pull in over the course of a year is staggering. Reflection is
more of a guessing game than a science. Still, some things linger,
events gain significance in hindsight, and the prick of a moment can
fester or bloom. Here's 5 moments from 2014 that left an impression.
---
Stumbling
Into the World of Theo Ellsworth
There's
that weird moment when you stumble upon a work of art that just grabs
you by your thought senses and tumbles you into that gelatinous place
where you lose contact with the person you thought you were only
moments before. It becomes even weirder when you start pursuing other
works from that artist and all of it seems to be specifically talking
to you – directly – face to face, over drinks at your kitchen
table.
Such
was my experience “finding” the work of Theo Ellsworth late
in 2014.
And
I can't even tell you how it happened. Somehow I ended up with
Ellsworth's book Capacity #8 in
my ever expanding “To Read” pile a few months ago. I don't
remember buying it. I don't remember it getting sent to me in the
mail. It was just there, having made its own way to me – because it
was what I needed without even knowing it.
Trying
to talk about an Ellsworth comic is almost impossible as our
available lexicon breaks down quickly. It's like what James Ryerson
wrote in his introduction to David
Foster Wallace: Fate, Time, and Language about
Wittgenstein's response to solipsism,
“language
is seen as a messy human phenomenon, part of social reality – a
rich variety of everyday practices that you figure out the way a
child does.”
When you encounter something so wildly outside of that “social
reality”
then, by their very nature, words fail.
And
so it is with Ellsworth's art. There is a direct address therein; the
artist speaks to the reader under no uncertain terms. The expectation
is that regardless how alien the words and images are, the reader has
the capacity to understand. Ellsworth works under the assumption that
since his book is in your hands, it gives him access to your brain.
He operates in a command center located near the pineal gland in your
epithalamus, apt as Descartes declared it the “principle
seat of the soul.”
Structured
logic comes unglued quickly in Ellsworth's art, and it's not fully
replaced with a primal or visceral understanding either. Rather, it
demands a different way of interacting with the material. You have to
step outside your skull, listen for Ellsworth's directions with both
your eye holes and your ears, and then proceed blissfully drunk on
the trust inherent in being led by someone who knows you better than
you know yourself.
This
way you get to go places you never even imagined existed. Those
places are wonderful.
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