sjs
COVER. these colors don’t run. melted and pressed plastic, 43 x 65 cm
L.O.V.E. as List Of Vicarious Edges. Detail
stephen j shanabrook chasing
the
dragon
hibernating during fight with the devil. c-print from cotton candy performance. 1997
Katherine Carl. Inviting the Dragon to Tea. “Those who find ecstasy do so not by visiting the shrines of civilization but by trudging in the swamps of
human destitution and misery. Our literature of ecstasy recounts the dark nights of the soul and encounters with mystics in the slums and in the refugee camps of genocidal wars.” Alphonso Lingis ( Abuses)
“To worry or to smile, such is the choice when we are assailed by the strange; our deci-
sion depends on how familiar we are with our own ghosts.” Julia Kristeva ( Strangers to Ourselves)
Destruction can at times bear wondrous fruit if actively scouted and transformed. Shanabrook plung-
es into the depths of the abyss of destruction of objects, values and meanings, and through the arduous
process of dragging himself out he finds joy and beauty. The oblivion from which he emerges is a visual field strewn with, on one hand, the bizarre fetishes that society regards as normal and, on the other, the fundamental human biology and psychology that is considered repugnant or, at the very least, impolite.
This passage through destruction sprouts from confusion of identity, and thus causes a collapse of
expected boundaries. For his Melted Plastic series Shanabrook seeks out hard plastic objects from popular culture including action figures, plastic cd cases, bright colored lighters, ballpoint pens, toy guns, and
even telephones. Generally assumed to be throwaway objects, Shanabrook selected them particularly for their vivid color and durability. He subjects them to extensive repetitious heating, squashing, and cooling,
and through these acts of recycling and transformation expose the contradictions of the grotesque and the
beautiful. Destructive force is exchanged for delicate jewel-like fragility in the glittering guts of his suicide bomber plastic figures. Hurting is confused with healing as the medical is revealed as violent in the razor blades masquerading as band-aids in L.O.V.E. as a list of vicarious edges. The lugubrious is turned
edible as the bloodied arms of the artist turn out to be cotton candy bandages of sorts. However, this is no more mouth-watering than the chocolates molded from fatal wounds on bodies in a Russian morgue.
Working with, as he says, entropy based on daily reality, Shanabrook’s art is suffused with surrealism
while holding its own distinct vision at the core. Like the surrealists, Shanabrook starts with the premise that
everyday life always already carries sensations of fluid melting experiences because ultimately we cannot pin
down meaning or value and cannot locate or control these attributes. It is how we intervene and transform them, no matter how temporarily, that makes a difference.
Shanabrook manifests the uncontrollable process of decay viscerally in the jumbled mélange of images
in Memory Confetti and in his recent melted pieces. The cadavre exquis quality of collage is so much more
than chance activity, and for Shanabrook it is abundantly alchemical. Breton’s approach to chance through the
cadavre exquis in particular, intimates that access to the unconscious in the creative process can be as much about the return of the repressed as about eros.1 When Shanabrook melts chocolate or plastic he plucks out of these common materials of consumption their nefarious alter ego. With the right mix of patience and speed
Shanabrook performs the melting process, and likewise, the resulting forms do not freeze into an identity with simply one meaning. Furthermore, the poetics he employs to name his artworks maintains the fluidity of his visual meanings that invokes the double-sided nature of meaning that fully surpasses these binaries.
In an era of so much talk of fluidity of networks, Shanabrook takes a different approach by contrasting
gushing moistness with stiff parchedness as vehicles to explore dispersion and cohesion of identity and our associations with beauty and revulsion. The Morgue Chocolates and Bandaged reveal a fanciful desire turned
rancid. The edible materials of chocolate and flesh-colored cotton candy respectively, when no longer viscous or enticingly moist turn into a deadened craving. The artist’s performance The Measurable Loss of Water During
a Bird’s Flight in a dry field in Holland that had once been a lush swathe of land captures the forlorn sensation
of such dessication. We like our fluidity in just the right proportions. However, Sleeping with Chocolate and
Broken Spleen turn grotesque because their dripping excesses of chocolate are uncontained and excremental,
especially when the chocolate is pooled in a sleek cavity of the strange unsettling comfort of the hospital bed in the first, and oozes nearly imperceptibly yet uncontrollably out of the everyday orifice of an electric wall outlet.
These surfeits and remainders can be compared to Georges Bataille’s notion of the ‘accursed share,’
which is characterized as “a world or order governed by immoderation, excess and sacrifice, an economy of ex-
cremental proliferations, which expresses itself most ably in ‘unproductive expenditure: luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity.’ ”
2
Bataille
identifies the non-recuperable part of an economy as the accursed share. Excess energy is normal, and it is a
human necessity to waste this energy for luxurious, unproductive ends, resulting in pleasure or destruction. In short, the accursed share is this excess destined for waste.3
As part of Shanabrook’s recent Melted Plastic series, action figures of steroid-pumped wrestlers ac-
companied by lewd porn stars exemplify the gluttonous spectacle of the notion of the accursed share. The artist subjects this popular culture fodder to burning heat, liquefaction and mutilation to prod the potential of
gluttonous waste. His more recent works focus on the excessive wasteful energy of the United States’ war in Iraq. These Colors Don’t Run, the cover image of this catalogue, connects most dramatically our addiction to
disposable plastic bric-a-brac with the oil business. In a pressed plastic version of the United States flag, the usual red stripes are replaced with rows of small plastic discs of mournful black. Instead of the expected bold
stars, the upper left of the composition is invaded by a heaping pile of crushed spindly skeletons. In Water-
boarding, two businessmen douse a prostrated third pressed distorted figure with liquid gushing out of massive
coca-cola bottles. The surreal turns toward pop art with Last Words, an array of melted plastic toy guns that
recall Claes Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum: Ray Guns (1977). Discussing the role of detritus in his project The
Street (1960), Oldenburg says, “Dirt has depth and beauty. I love soot and scorching. From all this can come a
positive as well as a negative meaning.”
4
More expansively, Shanabrook describes his practice as “Chasing the Dragon,” explaining that it has a
“connection to opium in Asia; when one smokes heroin on foil, the powder is heated from underneath with a flame so it melts into a brown liquid that turns into smoke, which is inhaled. As it burns it runs across the foil
leaving a black trail in its wake—giving the name of the dragon.” His Moth and Lightning Bugs Collection is an
archival display of burnt foils and vials, the fetish objects of drug addiction that constantly threaten an Icarus-
like demise for the user. Furthermore he states, “I think it symbolizes my route to explore destruction and the beauty and sadness that lies therein; my work has always been about process, destruction, and the beauty and all that comes after.”
5
Shanabrook reinvests pop with critical value through abstracted autobiography and human commen-
tary with alchemy. The artist enhances the trait or particular moment in which meaning is destroyed and reconfigured never to be the same again. This does not aestheticize trash, but transforms opposites, holding them
in tension. Here detritus from the street is not elevated in value in order to be consumed, instead the commercial object is crushed, mutilated, castrated to be recuperated into a different kind of object with contested value, the art object.
Often, Shanabrook’s art objects are remnants of excessive behavior, sometimes performed by the artist
as he takes on the role of the “baroque foreigner.” Julia Kristeva has pointed out that “the foreigner is a Baroque person” because her speech is “deprived of any support in outside reality, since the foreigner is precisely kept out of it.”
6
The double, the projection outside of oneself, is a Baroque excess that the subject cannot hold.
Shanabrook conducted several performances in Holland involving urban peregrinations including Snowshoes,
in which his large snowshoes emitted tufts of white flour with each step, leaving a snowy trail of his journey.
His sculpture You See for Me and I’ll Hear for You: Self-portrait with Dried Goat Ears resembles a Roman death
mask, thus mingling his identity with the bestial and also this world with the next.
This type of leakage of one’s persona into another is taken to the extreme of breakdown in his most
recent work On the Road to Heaven the Highway to Hell. Scant remnants of a suicide bomber cast in chocolate obliterates any possibility of identification altogether. Through the process of making the cast and inviting a young man to walk in the bomber’s shoes in only the most removed representational and metaphorical sense,
yellow man explodes as his family sips tea. heated and pressed plastic. 30 x 30 x 1 cm, 2007
the artist makes clear how impossible it is to forge any human connection to this act and what futility it leaves in its wake. It is merely an assembly of a few leftover body parts strewn on the ground. Here pondering reflection is evacu-
ated and the gut takes over. Nothing can be made of this. It is pure waste borne of excess energy. Although it is a destruction that as Bataille asserted, is all too normal, it is a truly repugnant manifestation of the death drive.
For Alphonso Lingis, the notion of community is possible only when it includes strangers, the marginalized
and the outcast. A community is defined by being open to the stranger, with whom members have nothing in common.7 Shanabrook’s body of art is a community of leftovers and cast-offs, baroque foreigners that will never be settled
within everyday life, despite the fact that these objects and characters are a product of precisely this banal milieu. His objects specifically remind us of what we wish to forget about the world and about ourselves. Shanabrook’s leaking, melting, alchemical transformations recall Freud’s notion that we, ourselves, are disintegrated; our unconscious is the “improper facet of our impossible ‘own and proper.’
” This is what enables us to welcome uncanny strangeness in ourselves and provides a point of connection
with others.
8
As Lingis puts it,
Community forms when one exposes oneself to the naked one, the destitute one, the out cast, the dying one. One enters into community not by affirming oneself and one’s forces but by exposing oneself to expenditure at a loss, to sacrifice.
Community forms in a movement by which one exposes oneself to the other, to forces and powers outside oneself, to death and to the others who die.9
Rather than eliminate the strange, Shanabrook embraces it. The artist recognizes deep-seated human fears
and evokes them viscerally and sensuously. His oeuvre enacts what is referred to in Buddhist practice as “inviting the dragon to tea.” He invites in our most dreaded demons, providing a forum for rich exploration of their paradoxical
meanings, and though the dragon will never be tamed, the more we engage it in conversation the more keenly versatile our response to its horrors.
Notes: 1 Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 63. 2 Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 153. 3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Part_maudite 4 Bois and Krauss, 173. 5 Email correspondence with the artist, November 23, 2007. 6 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 21. 7 Grosz, 151. 8 Kristeva, 191-2. 9 Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 12.
Consumption alone has become the manner in which life is sustained. In this artificial state life’s processes cannot come full circle. These processes become upended in a single direction; movements both physical and psychological become stilted and reactionary. The chocolate molds were made from impressions collected at morgues in both Russia and America.
Through the hint of di-
gestion or thought of, these wounds structured superfluously in chocolate are temporarily removed for the living to process again, not to acquaint us with death per say, but to nourish life in the sense of our connection to. It goes without saying that barriers are relieved of their duties when one makes a connection between body temperature and the temperature of chocolate or associations with religious practices and biological orders. But laying a grid over chaos seems nonsensical; it chaos, seems better understood through the making of such generous connection.
s
j
s
evisceration of waited moments. american morgue chocolates. impressions from wounds cast in dark chocolate. 1994
making mold in moscow morgue. 1993
Franchesca Alfano Miglietti. excerpt from book Extreme Bodies. The Use and Abuse of the Body in Art.
“ My relationship with chocolate in an autobiographical sense comes from when I worked in a candy store. Careful you don’t’ melt, candy man! they would say to me when I would go to take a shower after football practice. Later, at university, when I began to formulate my artistic language, I started using food as the temporal element of my pieces. Immediately after university, I completed my first installation, developed with chocolate in slaughterhouse. In general, my artwork consists of different works that use chocolate as a fundamental ingredient. Looking at and smelling the Morgue Chocolates, a spectator tries to distance pleasure from himself or herself. For me giving the spectator a complete vision of the artwork means making him or her work with all five senses”. Stephen j Shanabrook is an American artist, some of his early pieces were done with sugar and sweets, but it was with ‘ Unknown Resurrections’, using chocolate, that Shanabrook’s work became radical, aggressive, powerful. He intertwines and merges two metaphorical shadows that have nothing in common: chocolate and wounds. Two metaphorical shadows, of the metaphor of chocolate, joy without sin, and of the metaphor of death, sin without joy. The symbolic meaning of chocolate, linked to the imperative of pleasure, and the symbolic meaning of the wound linked to the dimension of pain, creates a sort of disorientation in Shanabrook’s work, an effect of nausea, waste, sabotage and excitement.
Sickeningly sweet remains that are in no way symbolic like the recognition of something which we
are incapable of understanding, like the very substance that sublimates fear and beauty, in which we find renewed emphasis of the paradigm that art is stronger than death. Chocolate casts that in aesthetic terms lose track and reference to the proportions of “good taste”, and which in ethical terms present themselves as an imperative of the ego that demands that we hold out to the very end, whatever it cost. For the American and Russian series, Unknown Resurrections, Shanabrook chose the bodies of the “different ones”, those whom society tries to repress or insult because they make us feel uneasy. These lives and the traumatic experiences they have undergone are the motifs of Shanabrook’s casts. A detailed description of body parts, living evidence of the end, impersonal parts of injured bodies, that have been shot, crushed, or stitched carelessly
back together, which can only be classified in accordance with the findings of forensic medicine. These casts, made in Moscow, look like so many chocolate bonbons laid out in a sampler box, a vision of violent death rendered peaceful and consumable by the decision to make the casts in chocolate. The bonbons of the Morgue Chocolates series are a symptomatic product of the artist’s vision of life and death in America: the remains of people who have been brutally murdered, bodies that could not be reassembled, constitute a “silent lament”. Gunshot wounds, protruding eyeballs, knife wounds stitched up with ordinary string, in his work become so many fragments of a horrible and everyday reality that hits us in the solar plexus through the precise little casts made of chocolate. This vision and this presence of violent death in “chocolate” frightens us and irritates us, much mote than the death that we witness daily in the pages of the morning newspaper and the evening television news: 32 casts of an eye in the box of Halcyon Nest seem to be covered, through the chocolate, by an inevitable death, a series of eyes open and sleepless that seem to want to affirm the refusal to die, an inability to resist and, at the same time, the suggestion that in the face of violent death we cannot close our eyes.
And once again art chooses the rejected, the unwatchable, the close-up. It is precisely the banality
of chocolate that renders the image so powerful, because the spectator is caught by surprise. The familiarity, the odor and the sensory stimulation of the pleasure that the chocolate provokes are the influential aspects of the Morgue series. A cloying and banal package of chocolate bonbons, which reproduce a case of gangrene, a gunshot wound, a suture of lacerated tissues, is seductive and stimulating, and until the horror takes over it is desirable. Even if we don’t admit it rationally, the desire is there and so, for the spectator, the conflict begins: the odor of the chocolate is so powerful that he cannot manage to face what he sees, even before he begins to ask himself exactly what he is seeing. . As Gilles Deleuze has written:” ... every man who suffers is flesh. Flesh is the common territory shared by man and beast, an indistinguishable territory, flesh is this ‘fact’, in which we identify with the objects of horror and compassion”. The sensation and the impact are powerful, clashing, disquieting and seductive. . We feel guilty, we feel the disagreeable sensation of wanting to eat the proof and outline of someone else’s pain. Shanabrook makes chocolate shapes that are apparently similar in their manufacturing and in their visual impact, to those ordinarily available on the market, and he uses as containers the “classic” gift packs: but the decorations on the chocolates themselves, customarily
“ unidentified�. russian morgue chocolates, installation view in information kiosk. moscow. 1993. photo Igor Mukhin
wedding favors. morgue chocolates. c-print. detail, 2006
signs of a roguish and popular romantism – little hearts, flowers and cameos – instead reproduce the signs of the abject within the superficial pleasure of the taste buds in order to provoke a complex imbalance: remembering life through the contact with death of another. “Consumption has become the way in which life sustains itself. In this moment the process of life does not close its circle. It goes in a single direction, the physical and psychological movement becomes reactionary and artificial”, states Shanabrook, who sees in chocolate a close relationship with the idea of blood, both fluids that have passed through history as offerings for the gods or as a simple remedy for inner melancholy. After his first performances and exhibitions, in which he utilized only his own body, the artist began to work on other identities and other anatomies, including dead bodies, always using food as a metaphor for the human condition; nonetheless, it was with the Morgue Chocolates, the artworks made of chocolate that contain signs of wounds, death, and those of the internal workings of the human body after death that Shanabrook begins to approach the limit, the place that is forbidden: the place of the artist. These pieces of chocolate represent the dichotomy that is always present between life and death: utilized both the sensory stimulations of taste and the “information” of disgust in the rational sphere, the spectator finds himself or herself trapped in that dimension in which things, sensations and attractions have no name and are nothing more than a sum total of opposites. “While I was working in the Moscow morgue, the idea of identity was not particularly important to me, because it was a morgue for unidentified people. In fact the title of those works was Unidentified, and this word or a derived word was usually written in green on a leg. Moreover, in Moscow, when I first exhibited these artworks, I presented them intentionally in an old information kiosk not far from Red Square. In this way, the identity of the corpses was replaced by the identity of the living people through their oral or visual participation”. One year after the presentation of Unidentified, Shanabrook exhibited Evisceration of Waited Moments, in which all of the images of death are “taken” from an American morgue. “ The situation there was quite different. I was extremely aware that I did not want to be involved in the past of these corpses. What I was doing was intended merely a as way of representing death in general, not in particular, not in any connection with a specific personal history. Concentrating on the narrative part would have been an unacceptable invasion of privacy and would have added only a component of shock has no value or purpose and undermines the work, taking it down to the level of a scandal rag. The pieces of chocolate are generic representations of death, and for
me they need to remain anonymous in order to preserve their universality and their cutting edge”.
A later series involved the production of masks of young Russian poets done in chocolate, creating a
powerful emotional impact in their manufacturing simulating the form and the fixity of death masks. Once again the main theme of the artworks is the link between life and death; in place of chocolate surrounded by violence we find that it is poetry that now surrounds the chocolate. Restitution after the Meeting of Thirteen is an artwork executed with the co-operation of twelve Conceptual artists from Moscow: Shanabrook exactly reproduces the faces of each of twelve artists, and then all of them are given an exact copy of their face in chocolate and their index fingers in graphite. Each artist is given 24 hours to interact with the face as he thinks best, recording what happened on a piece of paper specially supplied, using his graphite finger as the main writing instrument. “ My role as antagonist ( the thirteen one) consisted of presenting the artist as a conflictive being, rendering his image desirable and digestible even if this meant in some cases inflicting a form of self-destruction, or taking revenge on one’s own ego. Given the quality of the chocolate I did not expect that I would have many remains to display, but to my great surprise that is not at all what happened: at least half of the artists chose not to take part in this act of virtual cannibalism...” The chocolate masks are conceptually very similar to the Morgue Chocolates: the invitation to take into consideration the meaning of what it is to look at one’s own death mask triggered various interventions, even though all the artists who took part in the project left on the masks clear signs of an inner conflict, a sort of restitution to their own funeral effigy of the most vital part of their own being. In Shanabrook’s vision, the use of chocolate takes on the value of a very powerful weapon, since because of its ordinary and desirable appearance nobody is afraid of chocolate, “ indeed, the first thing that comes to the mind of most people is to eat it, while in a second phase they discover the message that I meant to hide in it. And there they are, like fish on a hook”.
wedding favors. morgue chocolates. c-print. detail, 2006
wedding favors. morgue chocolate catalog, c-print, 240 x 200 cm, 2006
A bed is the private space made public through its transformation into hospital bed or autopsy table. Displaying this nighttime lesion opens a kind of wound, a dream that lays bare the soul through the show of chocolate. The bed contains a heart that enables the perpetual flow of passion permeated by death to be equated in life and forgo putrefaction. The chocolate oozes from the mattress’ surface to be purified by the air and light of the viewer. This space is also a sacrificial one, where virginity and life are lost for an unknown, yet hoped for higher good. Maybe this is a counterbalance to the ego and its creation of sexual fantasies; darkness etc. when normal life separates us too far from our true self. Chocolate and blood function at similar temperatures and as fluids they both have come down through history as offerings to the gods or at least as remedies for curing some inner melancholy. I remember reading an account of a field medic from the Vietnam War. He was explaining what he carried with him in his medic satchel, these bare necessities as he called them included: gauze, morphine, tape, comic books and M&Ms ( “ the candies that melt in your mouth not in your hand “). The candies were for the mortally wounded soldiers, the ones that would never make it to the field hospitals. For these soldiers the candy was a way to satisfy a simple desire, undoubtedly the desire was more to feel closer to home, (than to satisfy some unknown carnal pleasure for chocolate) before they slipped away into that unknown jungle.
sjs
sleeping with chocolate. pump, chocolate syrup, 1996
restitution after the meeting of thirteen. twelve conceptual Russian artists* were given their likeness in chocolate during 24-hours period. The result of the interaction with their masks were then exhibited along with a corresponding graphic work each artist did using a graphite cast of their finger as a pensil. 1996 * Nikita Alekseev, Ivan Chuikov, Vladimir Dubossarsky, Vadim Fishkin, Yuri Leiderman, Andrey Filippov, Igor Makarevich, Lev Rubinstein, Vasiliy Smirnov, Vladimir Sorokin, Dmitry Vrubel, Yuri Zlotnikov
war with cloud. mercury puddle on worker’s overall from chocolate factory. 2001
daily allowance. drug debris. 1997
the
dragon
( a slang phrase of Cantonese origin from Hong Kong) refers to inhaling the smoke from heated morphine or heroin. opium is referred to as a dragon in Asian cultures. the term evokes the similarity between the rippling smoke and a dragon’s tail
heroin
chasing
landfill. c-print of drug debris. 39 x 54 cm. 2001
heroin shroud. foils from heroin use, glass, colored foil, 1996
moth collection. debris from heroin and crack use, 22 x 33 cm . 2001
The Moth Collection uses a common entomology setting, to lay bare the debris of narcotic use. Using the shade of night the moth and the addict share their obsession of getting closer to the light, that light which can on occasion eradicate.
sjs
moth and lightning bugs collection # 1. debris from heroin and crack use, foils from heroin smoking in the “ chasing the dragon “ style. 48 x 60 x 5 cm, 2007
devil’s fountain. drug debris. 1997
moth and lightning bugs collection # 2. remnants from heroin and crack use, foils from heroin smoking in the “ chasing the dragon “ style. 48 x 60 x 5 cm, 2007
melted
three graces. heated and pressed plastic. 40 x 50 cm framed + digital c-print from a direct scan of the sculpture 125 x 163 cm. 2006
plastic surgery
In the Melted Plastic Series plastic figures and pieces are put into a commercial oven, brought to their melting point and then pressed into a flat frozen eternity, in short an instant fossilized still life of contemporary cultural. Inherent in this process is a battle between chaos, control and chance, with each condition leaving its trace on the final outcome.
There is
a fine line between letting the plastic porn star dissolve into nonentity and stoping her in the last breath of beauty.
These pieces freez-
eframe the transition from liquid into solid, from figurative into abstract, they animate the stages of beauty on the threshold of death and disaster. Soft then hard again these deformed variations of toys transformed into their own monument, into gravestones of the culture that bore them. « ... but here the monument is not something commemorating a past, it is a bloc of present sensations ... The monument’s action is not memory but fabulation. It is not memory that is needed but complex material that is found not in memory but in words and sounds : « Memory, I hate you.»* Therefore I burn! Using the same process, of temperature and pressure, nature creates precisely such memorable monuments – oil, fossils, diamonds and carbon. While in my geology of expedited action, frozen plastic magma, these
last breakdance. before melting. 2007
“ useless” minerals ( which remind us of a page from comic books based on Dante’s adventures in hell ) are impressions of swiftness and shallowness of contemporary culture that create mass produced products. Hundreds of identical objects, which are dying, through their suffering of identicalization priced for the global market – none of these figures melt the same so in their death they achieve individuality. *Deleuze, Guattari « what is philosophy?»
sjs
Yuri Leiderman
The crumpled, flattened figurines – soccer players, girls and beasties – all of them turn to monsters. Meaning, any monster is only flattening of the world. Stripes on a undershirt have remained, the spread wide fingers have remained, the flesh was crumpled - and the monster is ready. As in that tale, that alledges they killed baldy in the cellar with an empty bag against his head - with flattened bag, a shortened anecdotical murder, crumpled in slicies world affairs. However, they’ve already been like this originally, which dictate dramaturgy of these sweetish murders – desired plastic vomit, plastic dung, all adults affairs are rejected. As the saying goes, we are as free as birds today. However, also probably and Demiurge looks at our world - on crumpled in slicies world affairs. Like a watermelon, like a steamroller, he looks at our world. Small buddhist monk by name Xuanzang ten years travelled to the West. Along the road were encounters with various monsters – princes with the Head of Bull, gigantic jade hares and seductive maidens, who let out cobweb from their navels. Then it proved to be, that these were the noble inhabitants of heaven who had rejected their celestial school and service, run away to the earth for the day. There they were flattened, have lost dao and de, became monsters. They are a day in the sky - year on the earth. Well, they are a lot of stories, a lot of different words – we say : “flattened”, “ compressed“, we say : “crushed”.. And here pilot Maresiev *, injured, he too crawled three months through the woods (to the East), on his crushed, twisted legs as if from plasticine, descending to the beast, an elk or a bear, to a baldy in a cellar. Clouds quizically looked at him from the heavens. Rural children in bewilderment looked at him from beyond bushes: “ Look, Vanjukha, that for a whangdoodle crawls - whether the German, whether a bear! “ So we crawl through life, to the West or to the East, on our twisted legs. Or not ! – on strong legs, but with the flattened heads, longing for babes and bling. Not knowing neither dao, nor de – Hey, pressed , we are pressed ! The Earth deprived of mountains. Instead of mountains – shoulders and jackets. Flat rings of Saturn, puddles, multicolored lakelets. But nevertheless the lustre of bling, the lustre of bravery, sparkle of banners - “ hey, I remember this thrust, this impact, this shot, this explosion, this night! “ This injection. So we go somewhere, colossuses on clay legs, being on a sharp, flattened needle, we crawl through the woods, the Demiurge himself in some bewilderment looks at us from the heavens : a flattened undershirt of soccer player, the flattened suit of business- activist, flattened panties of streetwalker, flattened muscles of the body builder, flattened hands and the foot of a suicide bomber ( flown away into the edge, into the flattened horizon), the flat snout of a pug doggie at our feet. And beauty, and beauty – “oh, how beautiful our planet is ! “ – says any Gagarin or Shepard, for the first time having seen the flattened Earth from a spaceship portal. And even crawling on his stumps through the woods Maresiev is ready to repeat it. A good fellow the sportsman – who’s bulk of the muscles to their flatness is equal, and intellectual - whose bulk of the brains to their flatness is equal, and also concerning the breast of a streetwalker – there already the devil himself wouldn’t sort out, but it is precisely known, that the flatness of the snout of a pug doggie to its pure breed is equal. And the flatness of our world, that to its own beauty is equal - always mischievous flatness in the growing tree leaf ! * Maresiev was a famous Russian fighter ace during the Second World War II. Despite being heavily injured after his own fighter was downed, Maresiev managed to return to the Soviet-controlled territory on his own. During his 18-day long journey, his injuries deteriorated so badly that both of his legs had to be amputated below the knee.
last breakdance. heated and pressed plastic. 2007. detail
process of making Melted Plastic Series using oven and press. 2007
waterboarding. heated and pressed plastic. 50 x 45 x 1 cm, 2007
installation view. Charlotte Moser gallery, Geneva. 2008
night time split from neck to nipple. heated and pressed plastic. 42 x 45 x 1 cm, 2007
Renata Salecl.
Hell & Back.
Stephen Shanabrook’s new work of melted plastic touches two fascinating and at the same time traumatic obsessions of contemporary society: the status of celebrity and death. Shanabrook has for a while been keen observer of our society’s dealing with death, especially with the fact that the latter is more and more perceived as one of the prohibited issues today. If in the Victorian times, sex was taboo, in today’s society death is becoming one. Parents, for example, often do not allow children to attend funerals in order to protect them from the traumatic nature of death and dying. However, as we know from psychoanalysis, what is prohibited and denied often becomes more traumatic than what is allowed. Shanabrook’s work has already in the past exposed the traumatic nature of death. His new work, however, makes death part of the new type of obsession with celebrity culture. The latter have today replaced old authorities as points of people’s identification. This obsession with celebrity culture, on the one hand, creates an impression that everyone can become famous if he or she is able to sell his or her image in the right way, and, on the other hand, it has also created the perception that everyone can become attractive and eternally young, if only one works on one’s image. In this celebrity obsessed world there also seem to be no place for death and decay. What does it mean when Stephen Shanabrook burns celebrity dolls so that the plastic they are made of melts into horrifying squashed objects. First of all, Shanabrook shows what an object of attraction can easily turn into: from a sublime, inaccessible object of admiration or desire, it can become perceived as an abject, squashed object which provokes unease and anxiety. Melted figures Shanabrook is playing with illustrate very well the Freudian nature of the uncanny – the fascinating and at the same time horrifying nature of the object of desire. But when Shanabrook mixes new celebrities like Zidane, Bruce Willis or Tupac with old mythological figures he mockingly shows how mytholigization from today does not so much differ from that in the past. Both in their own way tried to offer a solution to subject’s problems with death and desire.
tupac & philomela. heated and pressed plastic. 40 x 50 cm framed + digital c-print from a direct scan of the sculpture 125 x 160 cm. 2006
paper surger
page # 54. c-print from crumbled magazine page. 90 x 96 cm, 2004 - 2006
page # 105. c-print from crumbled magazine page. 90 x 140 cm, 2004 - 2006
after Schiele. c-print from crumbled magazine page. 90 x 114 cm. 2004 - 2006
topographical study of a shotgun blast to the mouth. wallpaper perforated with shotgun. 175 x 400 cm. 2001
confetti memory The Memory Confetti Project is based on the notion of the human memory and its chaotic path. It is difficult to divide our own memories, while taking in the storm of images that envelops us on a daily basis. The working process of Memory Confetti begins by collecting and fabricating images into 35mm slides, which are then shredded in a food processor to certain state of “chaos” and then the pieces are filmed floating in oil. The resulting “moving memory”, i.e. film image turns into a kaleidoscopic representation of the collective memory, like shredded thought fragments colliding and overlapping in the ether of time. “ When anger sings shrapnel flies” is one of the first works from the Memory Confetti Series. A video of 137 shredded slides, floating images pertaining to the suicide bomber as a sjs messenger of twisted hope.
when anger sings shrapnel flies. dvd 42 min. 137 shredded slides filmed while floating in oil. video still 2006
David Balzer.
Eye Candy
Stephen Shanabrook’s video is of fragments from 35mm slides (he put them in a blender) moving slowly in a vat of oil. His piece is called “When Anger Sings Shrapnel Flies,” and is designed, first, to mirror the process of human memory, and, then, the aftermath of a terrorist bombing. The two things are not necessarily discrete; memory tends to want to make sense of the chaos it reads or is about to read – that is, life – just as the terrorist tends to want to make sense of the chaos he or she wreaks or is about to wreak. (The same may even be said of victims, especially of their respective nations.) It follows that the chaos wreaked by Shanabrook himself, as an artist, is beautiful, appealing because the slide shards are brightly coloured and because their once-distinguishable forms (including images of casualties of suicide bombings) have, in their tearing, become decontextualized, near-abstract shapes, falling in pleasing, if random, patterns. The slow-motion quality granted the shards by the oil only makes them prettier; in fact, the whole thing recalls that famous last scene in Zabriskie Point, in which Daria Halprin imagines a house, and all of its related consumer products, blown to smithereens. Some people’s dreams may be other people’s nightmares, but there’s a curious, constructive unity to both.
pain & mapping
out
narcotic
finger
movements.
I have often wondered about the heart being the source of our feelings, and what happens to people when they have a heart transplant. The effect these procedures have on the mind body relationship, could I think be fruitful in a metaphorical sense. There is emptiness between the body and mind like that between words in sentence. It is these black holes between thought and gesture that I am referring. Normally these pauses go unnoticed when each action or thought melts into the next. But when these synapses like junctions don’t meld properly it causes an existential breath to be emitted. Creating a narcotic like state when life proceeds without the timbre of connected conclusions. This piece is about grasping what cannot be grasped, what and why within. The surgery video suggests to the viewer how the inner body can be distant and foreign in utter contradiction to its proximity. The body an apparently hermetic system is but an alias for one in constant interaction with the outer universe, i.e. environment. A visual depiction of the opened body exposing the innards ( in particular the chest / heart region ) is a metaphor for both a violation and exploration, though not in a literal sense, but still one that exposes us to disease and misfortune. The object is then a search on a bio-metaphysics level, rather than one of actual mechanics. Sciences have eroded the soul enough with its answers to the workings of things. Now the surgeon searches through the darkness for his learned boundaries as I for my mental ones. As stated earlier this piece is about grasping what cannot be grasped. The machine from the Luna Park becomes the metaphor for the hands that plunge into the dark; those that struggle to pick up water. The body like a hollowed out canoe, the carcass becomes the boat used going down the river of inner exploration. sjs
confection
mapping out narcotic finger movements. arcade crane turned into surgeon’s hands periodically grabbing through water at video loop of open-heart surgery. 1997
i scream you scream. stretcher, ice-cream cones. 1995
bandaged. performance with cotton candy machine. San Ygnacio, Texas 1995
bandaged is a performance in the metaphorical sense about the discontinuity in living portrayed through an action of pure experience with its aesthetic roots in childhood. Bandaging a wound is the first step in the recognition of, and the commitment to, hope and a step forward.
After the bandage is removed the wounds’ memory stays
with us in the form of a scar, which becomes a permanent reminder. The cotton-candy machine comes from the celebrative and festive times of the formative years, the dog days of pure experience. By wrapping my hands in cotton-candy (sugar) that consequently is liquefied by the sun I propose an opening to past pure experiences. The sugar sticky syrup like blood eventually becomes crusty, a scab that forms giving way to the scar. This action searches at the points where reality exchanges with the events and ideas of the past, thus are negating the action to the point where it ceases to be relevant. The event begins when the hands of the Boxer are wrapped, it ends when he has fallen to the ground, in the bright lights he holds his position until the gloves melt away gradually with the regaining of consciousness. Inherent in this action is a simple directness that leaves open a mind path for the viewer, giving their ideas a space to ferment.
sjs
boxer. c-print from “ bandaged� - cotton candy performance. 1997
back side The L.O.V.E as a List of Vicarious Edges – these bandages are not healing the wounds, but instead conceal the source of pain i.e. the weapons (blades, needles, shards of glass etc.). This collection of bandages and blades makes a flag that reveals a territory of hidden pain. sjs
L.O.V.E. as List Of Vicarious Edges. scalpel blades, pins, razors, needles, bandages, acetate. 150 x 150 cm. 2007. front side
heart of darkness. splayed and dried carcass, wood, aluminium. 70x15 cm. 1998-2007
you see for me and I’ll hear for you. self-portrait with dried goat ears
self-portrait with goat. plaster, 1999
the listener. self-portrait with goat fetuses. plaster, 1999
Stephen j Shanabrook traverses the taboo terrains of desire and violence to explore their paradoxical common ground. He specifically focuses on the material qualities of these states to conjure a transformation that makes a surprise out of tangibility. He has, for a example, spent time in a morgue in Moscow, making casts of fatal wounds and then creating chocolates from resulting shapes – bonbons, as it were, of mortality – and he has perforated wallpaper with gunshots to produce even more beautiful patents. In Memory Confetti Series (2006), he applies an alchemical approach by shredding drawings made on acetate and then jumbling them in a viscous emulsion to make colorful projected kaleidoscopes. In earlier artwork, Shanabrook often made traces with indeterminate fluids, such as melted chocolate, that are mistakable for blood or oil, an effect that is as scerally potent as it is politically resonant. These playful works of vanitas subject materialist obsessions to processes of chance in a pungent comment on both consumption and the materialist discourses of communism and socialism. Shanabrook does not predetermine his marks, which are sometimes made as part of a performance. He uses dusty surfaces of chalk, flour, and graphite, all of which can be scattered or smudged. In his “walking works,” Shanabrook plots traveling routes, sometimes through public spaces and other times within a small confined square of material in the gallery. He has walked through the streets of Amsterdam in snowshoes, extruding wisps of flour, and he used a cane to tap out his path in the streets of Moscow, leaving phosphorescent marks to help him to find his way back. In a gallery space he has walked with Dutch shoes covered in felt on a square of graphite. Like children’s fairy tales, these works tell the magical story of life’s long journeys and fleeting moments.
walking Shanabrook marks territory to trace and delineate his own life crossing, its expansion throughout time and space. He makes his own path visible, and for those who are quick he leaves cues of recognition to welcome fellow travelers.
showshoes. ongoing performance. showshoes fitted with canvas bag that emits a wisp of flour with each step
Katherine Carl. Common Destination.
showshoes. Moscow, 1993. photo Igor Mukhin
showshoes. Seattle, 1990
landscape with incident. the walker moves across the space on bronze soled shoes heated on stove. 1992
repeated blows eventully drives all animals to pasture. performance 1992
polka dot leg. ongoing performance. cane with mechanism that releases a dot of green chalk with each step. Moscow 1993
the measurable loss of water during a bird’s flight. performance Flevoland Holland 1994 This action on dehydrated land, on fields of winter wheat and sea shells, seeks to converse with the language of loss... The text offered up by means of a helium balloon is concerned with the idea of water loss through language. The body as the sea here before is water, so it is by speech or the movements of words that our fluid steps proceed. Moving through time the body looses water literally and spiritually like the turning of relationships and conversation. All of human history is tainted with this notion of keeping oneself moist or fluid.
sjs
biography born in 1965, Cleveland USA lives and works in New York & Moscow Education 1990-92 Stichting Ateliers 63, Haarlem, The Netherlands 1984-87 Syracuse University USA, B.F.A., Syracuse, New York 1986-87 Syracuse University, Florence, Italy 1987 Skowhegan School of Painting/Sculpture, Maine Solo Exhibitions 2008 2006 2003 2002 2001 1997 1996
melting point The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg devil’s necklace Orel Art Gallery, Paris licking your wounds Daneyal Mahmood Gallery, New York autopsy of the moment and other flat jestures Charlotte Moser Gallery, Geneva Hell & Back XL Projects , Moscow Hell & Back Artstrelka Projects, Moscow Automat Kubometer Gallery, Moscow Stephen j Shanabrook De Schone Kunsten Gallery, Haarlem being wet 31 Grand Gallery , New York topographical study of the human brain after a gunshot blast to the mouth De Schone Kunsten Gallery, Haarlem Wild East Wild West. two person show with Ronald Ophuis, De Praktijk Gallery, Amsterdam Mapping Out Narcotic Finger Movements , Festival a/d Werf, Utrecht Stephen j Shanabrook De Schone Kunsten Gallery, Haarlem Deformed Faces Club De Schone Kunsten Gallery, Haarlem Sleeping with Chocolate Festival a/d Werf, Utrecht Unknown Resurrections Galerija Kapelica, Ljubljana Restitution after the meeting of 13 New Planet Gallery, St. Petersburg More ( Than) Chocolate. two person show with Olga Chernysheva, L-Gallery, Moscow
Group Exhibitions 2007
East/ West Orel Art, Paris It’s Not a Food Era Foundation Museum, Moscow Love is in The Air EXPRMNTL Galerie, Toulouse Toutes les couleurs sont autorisées à condition que cela n’empêche pas le commerce Atelier 340 Muzeum, Brussels Images Festival Wynick/Tuck Gallery, Toronto Red Shift Festival Anthology Film Archives, New York
2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995
Common Destination The Drawing Center, New York Rembrandt: Death, Dissection & Doctors Lloyd Hotel, Amsterdam Blessed are the Merciful Feigen Contemporary ,New York Artists and Arms LAZNIA Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdansk Oracle of Truth Aeroplastics Contemporary, Brussels Artists and Arms Contemporary Art Center MARS, Moscow Boost in the Shell De Bond, Bruges Accomplices The State Tretyakov Gallery, 1st Moscow Biennale Art on Wheels ArtStrelka, 1st Moscow Biennale Flipside. collaboration with Jury Leiderman & Vadim Fishkin, Artists Space, New York Should I Stay or Should I Go? De Schone Kunsten Galerie, Haarlem Art Kljasma Contemporary Art Festival, Moscow Artists and Arms National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Nizhny Tagil/ Kaliningrad, Russia Art Moscow Kubometer Gallery, Moscow Eat It! Kampnagel, Hamburg Art Kljasma Contemporary Art Festival, Moscow Gun and Wound White Box, New York plek voor blanco De Schone Kunsten Galerie, Haarlem 100% of Vision Regina Gallery, Moscow Melioration Contemporary Art Festival, Moscow Dead or Alive Zavod K6/4, Ljubljana Unpacked no. 4 New York Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now Low Gallery, Los Angeles Sweets New York Workspheres Museum of Modern Art, collaboration with Veronika Georgieva, New York Dining Haul : Truck Set for Twelve New York White Lights Contemporary Art Festival, Haarlem Downtown Arts Festival New York Stations Contemporary Art Festival, Nieuwe Markt, Amsterdam Art Concern De Schone Kunsten Galerie, Haarlem Paradise 8 Exit Art, New York Chocolate Sotheby’s Mezzanine Gallery, London Chocolate Rochdale Museum , Scotland Chocolate Summerlee Heritage Centre, Coatbridge Scotland Chocolate Collins Gallery, Glasgow A Natural Selection Z Gallery, New York “Wat af is, is niet gemaakt” De Utrechtse School, Utrecht Proud Flesh De Vishal, Haarlem The Invisible Purpose Wax Museum, Moscow Chocolate! The Swiss Institute, New York Northern Voices: N-Brow Traveling Medicine Show AS 220, Providence Rhode Island
1994 1993
Culture, Water and Money - the Passion of the Frontier SanYgnacio Texas Unbelievable Rex Cinema, Belgrade Exchange/Datsja Amsterdam Consuming Passions: Food, Art, Culture Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo Artists’ Congress Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams Exchange Moscow Russia
Grants and Awards 2004 1992-1998 1995 1993
Travelling Bullet Project. commission from CEC International , USA Stichting Fonds Voor Beeldende Kunsten, The Netherlands ArtsLink Grant for Moscow, Russia. Citizen Exchange Council, USA Stichting Fonds Voor Beeldende Kunsten, presentation grant for Moscow Russia
Permanent Public Installations 2001 1999
The Orbitor’s Chair, BovenIj Ziekenhuis, Amsterdam The Netherlands The Spoken Word Through Water & Time, Dr. Sarphatihuis Hospital, Amsterdam The Netherlands
www.stephenshanabrook.com
chasing
sjs
the
dragon