The Figure in Progress

In response to Pivot Art + Culture's exhibit 'The Figure in Progress', I picked up Umberto's 'On Ugliness', the book that has sat on my shelf or in a box since college when I know I didn't read it well enough. The exhibition provided an excellent proximity to a variety of notions of figure. I stared into the eyes/glasses of a person as though displaced out of a film into a timeless moment. I scanned and lingered on a splattered field of checkered flag-towel bearing figures mounted by beaks and other bosch-like surrealisms with more natural (as I see nature) dissolution and less plastic subjecthood. I struck up against clever surface and surface that sought to provoke a look at something more than process.

We are all material.



In some moments we are reconciled, we are not split from this, it is simply reality. Psychological reality, not acceptance so much as peace.

Sometimes it tears away into us until we feel only anguish, even if tinged with hilarity, these moments have recourse only to a self perpetuating nightmare. It sears with its simple blinding reality: all is this way. A simulacrum of self exposed only to the falseness of itself. Recreated through impossible material.



Sometimes we are at peace but find ourselves victim to another's image. Intellectual acknowledgment becomes concession. We hold the bones of what we supposedly came from. What we did come from, we hold. Privately, indifferently, in offering, pride, or shame-- it is always there, in our bodies.



Our material is as glamorous as it is grotesque-- this is not superficial, it is a triumph. It is a triumph that belongs to no one in particular, and everyone with thin skin over fat layers that never dry and make our cracking inevitable-- every human. Celebration hopefully stems from more than an idea or ideal of beauty-- it blooms in response to reality at peace with it's insane tumultuous self. Reality which sees its own destruction, and not any less invested in life for it.



That's life.