the nieghborhood
Here come clowns with stuck-on smiles and imperfect circles for eyes that might flash the look of the martyr. Some have a third. They eat dinner, go to school, make deals, get high, play games, document each other, marvel at the sky, fight, pray, and cut themselves open to blood-let or sacrifice an organ. Sound familiar? Some are urban planners, others pass through portals; surroundings change, everything is a ritual.
Clocks and crosses hang on walls. Skulls are sprinkled around, sitting atop shelves and tables, a la old Dutch master paintings. And though we rarely see them being used, bongs are so omnipresent they become totemic. The winged, snake-wrapped staff of Hermes pops up, as does the protective Eye of Horus, inscribed on an apple that one student hands another, with subtle ceremony, in a classroom scene. Witches abound and occasionally a townsperson is dressed, unassumingly, as a jack-o-lantern. Most citizens wear Adidas yet a few are clad in the rival brand of Nike, a near-homophone of the artist’s own name; everything is a symbol.
Classic, cosmic, and comic come together. In one drawing, a groundhog extends its paw towards a murdered king. Perhaps it is Punxsutawney Phil, shadowless this year, opening up time and playing a prophet other than himself: has Punxsutawney Phil in fact become Tiresias— summoned to reveal the killer of King Laius? Signs point to yes: an eternal black line traces the path of the bullet. Also present, to guide the clairvoyant marmot, is a kneeling, barefoot attendant with endless hair. And finally, hovering next to the throne is the most puzzling figure of all, a cloud with eyes, or possibly a reserved, mouthless relative of Spongebob. Be he conspirator, confidante, or Arbiter of Elegance to the dead ruler, the character might even exist as bong smoke personified. Who knows?
The most direct art historical quotation, in any case, arrives in another image, The Last Pupper, where Christ’s meal has been replaced with Niki’s own black poodle, and the apostles share some drugs. Behind them, where two opposing tapestry-dressed walls stood in Leonardo’s version, now loom two open squares of darkness. From this darkness at the edge, hordes of hands reach into the scene. Some are grabby and desirous, while others simply make peace signs.
Black lines, like the one that tracks the course of the assassinating bullet, appear often. For instance, while a roly poly child in suspenders lies draped over the knee of another (sportier) kid, looking like a pieta from The Far Side, several other figures huddle over the pair, long straight lines connecting their eyes to the chest of the suspendered sufferer. The dynamic is ambiguous: Is the group inflicting or healing an injury? Is the very glimpse of a wound transforming them? And are such lines comic book-style representations of laser-beams or do they simply diagram lines of sight? What are the rules of this world?
At another gathering, two men’s eyes are connected by black lines, flaccid and tangled on the table between them. And in a scene where several tranced-out fellows sit in a truck bed, fully clothed yet waist deep in some bubbling substance, a few straight lines intervene, entering the frame from outside at various angles, crossing through and among the figures in a way that feels both representationally mysterious and formally pleasing, as it both adds to and emphasizes the rhythm of the overall image. Elsewhere, bold lines jut out of foreheads, or form a few loops across the picture plane, like a signature being practiced.
Maybe such gestures provide The Drawn Line an opportunity to advertise itself for a just moment, to showboat, to take a turn at being a symbol— just like the woods, crosses and cul-de-sacs, smiles and smileys, identical houses, rooms so empty they stand for themselves, and all other diverse bits of iconography, archetypal imagery, and named things it so doggedly represents throughout the series. Brecht said art should be a hammer rather than a mirror, but here sits a family in front of a TV that endlessly reflects them: a family watching a family watching a family watching… A reference to the way corporate entertainment and American life often reflect one another in an increasingly reductive way, creating a feedback loop of familiarity? Or to our oft-announced confirmation-bias-gone-wild age, in which an ongoing multifurcation of attention and information sources has driven people into increasingly divergent and irreconcilable reality-camps?
After all, in these shifty times, not only is one woman’s hoax another’s holy text, but the corporate media, that senile propagandist, may one day label a certain hypothesis— around the origins of a raging virus, for instance— an outlandish conspiracy, then turns around to pronounce it a viable possibility the next. A reliable narrator is harder to find than a good man. So fanaticism, delirium, and suspicion reign. And in some online arenas, conspiracy theories about world leaders and the opaque and possibly ominous agendas of the elite dovetail into an elaborate proposition that extraterrestrials established human civilization, and that we are living in a reality of their concoction.
Recent years have been characterized by anxiety about the unseen forces that govern us, politically, but also cosmically, physically, ontologically: the conspiracy of reality. Are we products of an elaborate computer simulation? Are we not only pawns of the wealthy, but also a game for advanced aliens who reside in another time and place?
How are we being played?
Full of codes that can’t be deciphered, seemingly random imagery, and frequent threats and acts of violence, this series captures a sense of that anxiety, as well as the abstraction social fracture has brought about. It also captures the strange festivity of our time: when the rules of our world are up in the air, there’s a dark invitation to party, perhaps maenad-style. Lurking everywhere in these drawings is the possibility of entering an altered state, of being transfixed and transformed. We are reminded almost relentlessly of altered states, by depictions of individuals being lifted up or destroyed in a saint-like fashion, by the bewitched look of most community members as they move unknowingly through their days, by the ubiquity of drugs— shrooms and DMT, the prized experience of which is called a breakthrough, after all— and by the stonery talismans of yin-yangs and peace symbols, as well as the recurring smiley face that inevitably twists into a squiggle of ambivalence.
In another classroom scene several students smile the usual clownish smiles, whereas the two reading The History of Man textbooks now frown. A nearby poster spells out, plainly, the question on their minds, and at the heart of this body of work. Looming above a mischievous dancing monkey, the poster’s caption asks: what am i?
Joseph Keckler, Dresden, 2022
An entity I saw reminded me I was evil perhaps irredeamabley so
There is a midwestern town where many get high and ask their friends to draw blood
In september they fan their daughters with Ford’s sunflowers green eyes peer through auburn hair everyone is obsessed with urban planning
Everyone gets high Some offer blood
They work to order to preserve the lifestyle of a class of people who’s sole purpose is to grow their hair long they do this to measure time folicle length is what they use to sync their clocks •••
In october they shave one member to the scalp they declare them ruler
The ruler has ritual nightmares about being bald without their ability to measure their hair they lose all track of time
but hair grows back eight years into a second term i am stepping down
60 years later
i am still hot and worshipping rocks
most of us start our familys in our ninehundreth year we watch a lot of television to get to know each other •••
around our two thousandth year our eyeballs are removed
without our eyeballs we are actually able to see better but we no longer want to watch tv as a family
could sisyphus’ boulder be one’s mind locked outside of god
once a young man had a wild vision after eating an apple which was engraved with an eyeball
he controlled everything but noticed he had no real friends infact his heart was as cold as stone •••
after that vision he felt he owed everything to everyone he began to spill over the top
a bunch of the town began to worship him like a god
so they killed him like one
back in school in eight hour shifts they continued to teach the history of man
most of their lessons were in the placement of vinyl siding
at five o’clock we socialize we let loose
at eight o’clock we socialize we design the next phase
in our lifespan we see perhaps one thousand comets
in our lifespan we see perhaps one hundred large scale wars
everybody loves to shoot
with every death a window opens
some walk through walls to get to seperate rooms but are often never seen again
they are suspected of becoming fractal
at eight o’clock we gather we socialize we plan for the future
we get away we align our cycles
performing a revolution goes off with a bang in the name of enlightenment
once we control the world we will show all the youth how we are going to save it
the press absolutely adores all the chaos we are creating
we will kill you if you are in our way
after ten thousandyears everyone wonders will we ever pass the torch
total control gets a bit boring
much like saturn we devour our youngest
our artists either live in caves or work in advertising
out of our minds on chemicals we contort our bodies to call out to god
never are we sure whether we are enlightened or about to fall into the great fracture
one bullet can change the course of history
our state has the legal right to violence it washes over us all
every fence is an opportunity to climb or dig ok?
as the sassy world of evil burns a brand through your athleisure wear the garden city will grow
damn near everybody gonna get on down
gonna grow their hair and worship the son
