Elegant Device: Art as Coping Mechanism?

When I visited Katie six months ago at her studio on Starr St. in Brooklyn, she greeted me in a lime bathing suit, her skin dotted with sequins, wielding a hammer she would abruptly use to destroy one of her glittering collages. She slammed it down hard into the work repeatedly, large chunks of debris flying side to side and sweat beads running down her brow as she spoke furiously, “This is the most constructive I’ve been in the studio for months! My frustration over the attention I’ve sought in New York and not found has reached extreme levels, I’ve been courting the institution for so long now I have internalized its oppressive hegemony, denying myself the permission to work freely - being here in my studio it is nearly impossible to fight the urge to destroy everything!”

Katie recalled to me pointedly the often pathological, compulsive urges she has acted on in the past concerning her studio practice and men. If you ask her, she will tell you that the Midwest, the Southwest, the South and a large section of New York know her as Jess, the name of her current boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend. She will tell you that for two years she has called her boyfriend Gavin, the name of someone who treated her very badly who she can only forget by remembering. Says Freud, “the artist, like the neurotic, withdraw[s] from an unsatisfying reality into [the] world of imagination…unlike the neurotic, she [knows] how to find a way back from it and once more get a firm foothold in reality.” The artist may have a fruitful career and possess adequate or above average social adeptness yet will continue to demonstrate the antisocial narcissistic principle of omnipotence of thought (1). Jess is a form of protective subterfuge. By going as Gav & Jess, the artists exercise their own power to name. Says Cercone, “We live in a culture which constantly attempts to define our desires for us, to insist that there are “correct” images and “correct” narratives. Every time I speak the name Gavin I am struck with the meaning of this game which is only ours.” Cercone made a similar maneuver in 2007 when she branded her back thigh with the word Boyfriend.

Her work is an exercise in identity scavenging - the theft and deployment of the master narrative and its codes (2) as they are authorized/(de)authorized by the Western social apparatus. The artist has reclaimed this term, “Boyfriend” as a rejoinder to the social reality that most women still determine their status based on their affiliations with men. A distinct flavor of self-indulgence cloaks the luster of her ideological warfare; her insignia provides multiple and shifting indices, each providing its own entry point – into victory, into vanity, into failure and into fear.

Freud defined art as a “fraudulent illusion of healing;” a mere “fortuitous pleasure” which is actually a “symptom of a maladaptation to reality” (1). Here we can address the solipsistic and self-revelatory nature of the artist in question and her very questionable need, or perhaps “desire” to be healed. Clearly – Cercone’s candy coated chicanery masquerading as art fills the expressive niche of a very privileged class of girl. One who pathologically challenges a system to which she remains wed “by an umbilical cord of gold” (3) In her latest work we see emerging a specific brand of infantile escapism involving ponies, stains, fake cakes and the artist singing Marquis de Sade over Lil’ Wayne like a child sinking sweetly into the oblivion of cooption. Although the gesture is smart and the faded ice cream cones, diamonds and Minnie paraphernalia she sews to used bed sheets are pleasing to look at Cercone treads on dangerous territory as she appropriates cultural material which is not her own. Can a young white female artist take on the misogyny of rap music, the racial colonial imperialism of Walt Disney and the topical consumption of the racial other she finds pleasure in through both all in one stroke – meanwhile having her cake and her booty-hop Minnie minstrel show and eating it too? Cercone resorts again and again to “metaphysical doubling, transcendental explosions, fabricated epiphanies of reconciliation,” at the very highest pitches of hypocrisy she regurgitates “desire[s] which seek to externalize [themselves] in social practice” exploring “a world which objectively exists as raw material for [wo]man’s appropriation” (4) We can trace this thread of her current work to a series of art as coping mechanism Cercone developed from 2005-7 titled “Heartbreak Diet.”

Cercone defines Diet as a system by which energy is redirected. It is a process which fosters the release of energetic potential from the dull cerebral trappings of obsession. It is “epiphany and apocalypse,” (1) or, the absorption and release of psychic pain. In 2007 Cercone recorded herself listening to Justin Timberlake’s hit single My Love, simultaneously disposing of the oppressive noise through her larynx, she explains: “Anxiety may be discharged through a physical Action. I caught myself over consuming the object fulfilling the false need and purging it rapidly: in ears →out throat.” A complete affront to the laws of efficiency produced by a homogenous society, her actions yield an excretion society cannot digest. A stain (her scream), is the residue of a heterogeneous threat on a public surface she entered and scared. Here “public surface” alludes to the use of a found mixed tape as canvas. Cercone explains by nature of its status as anachronism, the tape is a space left “unguarded and unsealed,” where she can secretly layer her subversive message, as if “sound were mattress.”

What I’d like to propose is that Cercone’s work is an elegant device; a deconstructive tool designed to carry one off into oblivion (the very darkest luxury of art) as much as it disrupts the paralysis of the master narrative, and subsequently, undermines it’s own usage. Her work is syrupy sweet, grotesque and packs a troubling socio-cultural critique that just barely makes sense.

Notes

1. Kuspit, Donald B. Artist Envy in Risotti, Howard. Psychoanalytical Criticism and Art. Postmodern Perspectives: Issues in Contemporary Art New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc. 1990
2. Tickner, Lisa. Sexuality and/in Representation in Risotti, Howard. Psychoanalytical Criticism and Art. Postmodern Perspectives: Issues in Contemporary Art New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc. 1990
3. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” Partisan Review 6 (Fall 1939) pp.34-49.
4. E. San Juan Toward a Peoples Literature E. San Juan Quezon City, Philippines: University of the Philippines Press, 1984