MIC PORTER
THE SELFISH PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
10.09.21 ~ 17.09.21
With this body of work Porter uses alchemical processes to transform everyday readymade materials and elements. These materials, such as cardboard and fire are worked into new forms through the processes of reduction. Using lean and simple methodology in order to discard reason and create meaningless order, repetition and rhythm.
Obsession in human refuse, waste
Trying to recycle, reuse, repurpose
The artists concerns
The story of worry – anxiety about the world’s woes
An internal reflection on the ugly self – an investigation through portraiture of the multi-faceted depths of one’s meaningless internal logic, selfishness and
Using Obfuscation to mirror the purported depth of art – time wasting, useless
Sad and ugly
Used as a way to purge anger and frustration
Living in a void/vacuum of meaning
Decadent foolishness
Violence, turbulent emotions, the cusp of hating the questions – why do I do this????
Time
Shallow pursuit of happiness
- Ingrid
MIC PORTER’S MEANINGLESS ORDER
- A Scamander by Shannon Holopainen
We have no footing anywhere,
No rest, we topple,
Fall and suffer
Blindly from hour
To hour like water
Pitched from fall
To fall, year in,
Year out, headlong,
Ignorant
Holderlin, from Fate. Hyperion’s Song, 1799
Our world is becoming ever more tragicomic. Everyday the comedy writes itself across a planet-sized ouija board while the tragedy in turn creeps along behind the ouija’s heart-shaped planchette. We know it is gonna come. Yet nobody knows if the ouija divines of its own accord or whether some hidden or not so hidden hand - the one belonging to the market perhaps - gives the planchette a little disingenuous push. Increases the heat on the board. Coughs without a mask.
The tragic part once kept to the shadows for the shadows were real, admitted, not repressed. It is for this reason Nietzsche always emphasises the satyr’s light feet, its dance, full well knowing as satyr one remains half wild beast and that across abysses one must dance lightly.
Humans could not feign the kind of omniscience that scientism does today - or if they did, it was through a God as guarantor and words or math by itself would never quite do. Neither for Descartes nor Newton. Depths and damned circles remained present in the human psyche through the enlightenment and well into modernity, as Voltaire’s Candide and DeSade’s Justine, both whom initially optimistically entered ‘the best of all possible worlds’ with the belief that all that happens is, well, for the best, misfortunately discovered. Candide in the end affirmed the existential necessity of both light and shadow - one must be pragmatic and cultivate one’s garden. As for Justine, she finds behind each smiling mask of virtue only increasingly sadistic vices. So much so that de Sade himself was sent to the shadows of prison for the last lucky 13 years of his life while rounded-up copies of Justine were publically burnt. After which the Marquee nonetheless still cultivated his own dark fantasies, writing them down upon whatever found materials he could until gravity claimed his bones. His own son then, in a grand oedipal act, cultivated his own fire by burning all his ignominious father’s unpublished manuscripts. Did he glimpse the faces of his father’s characters amongst the burning scraps?
The Romantics in turn took this notion of cultivating one’s own garden seriously, exploring their psyches with opiates and hashish, discovering as their learning increased that a grand irony remained - their art was bound to spontaneous feeling and their feeling, rather than faltering in the manner described by Hegel’s Law of the Heart - taking their feelings for absolute truth in a farce of omniscience - gave birth to the immensity of non-knowledge, of the human being’s smallness in the maw of the sublime, of being abandoned by a God who once stood above all absolute knowledge… or having killed ‘him’.
The imperative to know thyself led to a knowledge, also disclosed by de Sade, that Kant’s noumenal outside of things unknowable in themself also applied to humanity and to our inner lives; to desires, to forgetting, to self-dissimulation and creation. The more one cultivates oneself and one’s knowledge, the more one learns that and what one does not and cannot know.
Today we can feel this in terms of an even grander sublime immensity of a universe consisting of billions of stars each in billions of galaxies across billions of years of time, the mystery of dark matter, of our very emergence, of holographic principles and Everettian multiverses. Science, oddly, has become its own best critic of the scientism that stands in many minds as apodictic truth. While Wordsworth describes this sense of the sublime as he approaches in his little boat unfathomable, rising cliffs and as Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner cries his loneliness into the responseless vastness of the open sea, the Jena Romantics wrote of a cosmic irony, of genius having little to do with a power as such of the individual - the atomistic, bourgeois genius is a later age’s fabrication - but of allowing spontaneity and chance to emerge and and to form, of making an allowance for the creative a to happen without forcing, thus echoing a sentiment noted by Plato in The Phaedrus -
If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses' madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.
Being itself was ironic comedy, but for the Romantic human, dwarfed amongst a sublime non-knowledge, riddled with addictions, writ in Werther’s unrequited love and suicide or the poems Holderlin wrote to his beloved ‘Diotima’ before his subsequent madness - to name but a few - it is perhaps Percy Shelley’s words that best summarise the tragic sentiment of the Romantic age; words Mary Shelley brought to life in her own works of art: We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Be that as it may, Candide’s Professor Panglossian’s optimism today seems to have once again become the chant of, to name but one group of many, self-appointed life-coaches who resist gravity for short periods daily in gyms across the world and then display the self-anointed, apparently existential wisdom gathered therein alongside the fitness of muscular bodies flaunted in filter-illuminated social media posts, always smothered with a reflux of entrepreneurial slogans in a kind of simulated mise en abyme of overcoming overcoming overcoming = success. It would seem the fit human body, become symbolic value in the eyes and the follows of social media scrolls, has also become identical with a mask of financial success, a symbol of capitalistic ambition’s myth that every he, she and they can make it if only they give one more effort! Truth as such, or rather the kind of self-cultivation that seeks truth, no longer matters as long as a series of positively affirmed deferments are in place: tragedy happens, but it is for the best in the struggle for self development in the best of all possible world to come - if only you PUT IN THE WORK!
In the Watchmen graphic comic series, where Nixon remains president in the first and actor Robert Redford is president in the second, we have a US superhero mercenary named The Comedian who embodies the dictum that the one who laughs loudest also laughs last, a phrase that has taken many forms. In the Watchmen sequel The Comedian even meets The Joker and The Bat. Zaruthustra’s words ‘Not by wrath does one kill but by laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity,’ apply equally to both characters, each Dionysian in their own manner, creatures of Romantic Irony.
It is no mistake that recent cinematic depictions of The Joker have become popular in this age of masks and simulation where every value and every heterogeneous thing has come to be subordinated to a singular value: exchange value. Success measured as money, the medium in which Capital counts itself and by which, in combination with the reiterable, mass-producible commodity form, every qualitatively different thing as such is flattened into something that can be moved, that can be owned and that can be exchanged. For it is movement itself that amplifies capital, just like the repetitive clonus of sets and reps on a bench press that build the arms and grows the chest that gain the social media followers and, according to misogynistic incel (involuntary celibate) culture, maketh the perfect, successful Chad that winneth the beauteous Stacy. Mostly, however, the gym is a place where people go to forget the world - the spirit of gravity - oddly by being caught in this clonic, reiterative set of movements with gravity become weights.
Exchange-value today is the Chad and Stacy of values. Higher, more noble, more human values exist. Aesthetic values and ethical values. The value of doing justice to existence. Honour. Yet Chad and Stacy demand that all qualitative values be measured in their quantitative, monetary form. For the health of the economy, we are told by our evangelical Chad Minister Scott Morrison (are Rapture believing, climate change denying evangelicals today’s real accelerationists?) and his ilk that we must shed a few vulnerable people - the ones amongst us who are not Chads and Stacys.
Hearing such statements increasingly gain traction in the media, one may feel justified donning the makeup that itself is a creation of the cinematic culture industry and that has become, on the faces of disaffected youth and disaffected adult men, many of whom are self-identifying incels, a sign of differential freedom and system-bucking - the paint of The Joker, turning oneself in many cases into memetic material. Poking one’s fingers into each corner mouth. Painfully forcing the painted face into a smiling mask, a simulation of a simulation that has become a sign of a freedom belonging to those who feel themselves to be outsiders.
Then, as a living simulacrum, through laughter, gazing into a mirror, one could yell the philosophical category of the thing has come to be replaced by the category of the commodity… nothing is true, everything is…
But that is for another essay. Today the self-identifying Joker fan who feels themself to be an outsider is likely to be a conspiracy theorist or a person strangely protesting for a return to the everyday capitalism we knew two years ago. A return without masks or ‘face nappies’. Truth here is not even inverted; it has been shaken, stabbed, scorched and beaten. What remains true, however, is that today everything has its price, a mask and measure of exchangeability. Including especially the most unique creations that humans have produced that to this day are still endlessly written about… I do not mean incels in joker make-up youtubing conspiracy videos, but the event in the world that we name by the word art.
Given the present global covid pandemic, amongst whose strangely repetitive, self-enclosed days Michael Porter has brought into this world his Meaningless Order, it is interesting to think back to the fate of the oil portrait that Vincent VanGogh painted of his doctor, who today would be a front line worker. The doctor, upon being gifted this painting by his patient, used the painting to cover a hole in a chicken coop, keeping his flock of hens in and keeping foxes out.
Today, capital, in the form of exchange-value, throws itself by the millions at this very painting - or wall of a chicken coop, almost a kind of reverse found object - as though it is desperate to subordinate something in such works of art, something often referred to as ‘the priceless’. Yet this piece of chicken coop upon which a doctor was painted in a strangely impassioned manner, the strokes intermingling with chance and time as they were formed, an object found on a chicken coop and found to be a painting that was at its moment of creation far from the preferred tastes and aesthetic values that defined the successful of the prevailing milieu and that guided the opinions of art experts and collectors, nonetheless at last becomes a commodity… an amount of exchange-value deemed somehow adequate submits the art work to an exchange. The work itself becomes masked.
Yet what is it that makes such works desirable, works that often were in the history of modernity formerly the refuse of their age? Could it be that there is something in such work that, indeed, refuses, that resists easy reproduction, resists illustration and translation into any other form than the uniqueness that it is?
So too writers, like capital, have thrown again and again words and concepts and ideas at these strange emanations from human history. There is something radically heterogeneous in art - when it is art and not illustration - a something that, upon each turning toward the work and upon each returning, refreshes, a hint of mint one can’t quite place that adds a different kind of seeing to this world. I do not just mean of the visual kind. It is in Holderlin’s poetry, in the great poems that Osip Mandelstam wrote when he knew for certain that he would die - his wife, Nadezhda, named her biography of him Hope Against Hope. These poems in turn inspired the great Paul Celan to continue writing poetry after his family and many he loved were incinerated during the last time truth no longer mattered for a populist movement and when anti-intellectualism, a blood-memory essentialism, conspiracy theories and an anti-enlightenment, affective mass infantilism took political power, following an angry man who when young tried, but could not create art so wrote an awful book about his life.
We have it on good word from Donald Trump’s first wife that, for a time, the President who never loses kept a copy of Hitler’s speeches on his bedside table. Trump, the celebrity president of the orange mask who could well have been president in The Watchmen comic series. Trump, the laughable buffoon behind which tragedy not very subtly lurks - mass fear of outsiders, of strangers, of China and a virus that emanated from there. Denial of anthropogenic global warming. Only several days ago I read a reddit post by a Floridian man who blamed the high numbers of covid infections in his state upon Mexicans supposedly illegally crossing his border; despite the easily findable fact that total covid infections in Florida alone quite outnumbered the totality of infections in Mexico.
The fox always comes from outside, from amongst the rubbish bins, rummaging through the garbage, the refuse. Perhaps it is time we admire the fox and learn to fear the ones who always blame him.
Not that we can, amongst waves of a virus that itself could present as sadistic performance art, in these locked-down days spend much time outside ourselves - legally, at least. But, of course, it is not this corporeal outside that I mean. The outside that I intend is an outside that breaks in, like a crowbar jimmied between door and frame or, in Michael Porter’s case, wielded against the materiality of a reappropriated, once domestic metal object. A wok, a symbol of every Chinese home, the first homes to succumb to the virus. An outside that breaks into the homely, the heimlich, the familiar and convivial. That smashes against all that we believe we comfortably know - the cardboard that protects commodities in movement between warehouse and sale, an outside that pokes holes through this and scorches them from beneath, destroying the world of reiterative symbols that allow us to feel safe beside the hearth of a sociocultural, historical universe of symbolically wrought fantasies, of beliefs bereft of self-reflexive hubris where we can still claim that we are masters and even polymaths - online today, everyone is a polymath except those who happen to be actual experts in a field such as, say, epidemiology - all while the more self-consciously or incidentally Socratic amongst us, admitting at least that we know that we do not know, have understood that such shams of control have always historically existed as a kind of plug against the outside’s excess, as myths and simulacra that sublimate and stop that sidling satyr, the fox, from entering the chicken coop and disrupting the good bourgeois doctor’s world of order and his morning crop of eggs. The best definition of ideology is that those spaces, places and practices that most claim to be natural, normal and given - that claim to be free of ideology - are always the most ideological. This the fox, comfortable amongst others’ refuse, sniffs out. Perhaps it is good to remove the plug and allow the excess of the outside in and the excess of the inside out, to not reiteratively, conceptually know what and why we are are doing or creating what we do - is that not the difference between art and illustration, be it illustrative realism or illustration of concepts? Maybe art is the fox, the outside that is within us, as the Romantics believed - remove the painting that plugs up the gap, let the fox chase the chickens and hang the found painting on a wall! Gaze upon the excess that exceeds logocentrism - afterall, Lacan’s lack is only a lack in language. What causes this lack of speech, of clear understanding, is something excessive and greater than ourselves. Urge and impulsion we do not quite understand. A compulsion and a doing that is as an act its own form of comprehension, never walking easy with words yet understanding on its own unique terms something that can never be repeated: that every moment is chance, the thermodynamics of flame through air across cardboard, the abject drips of paint that cannot be reproduced or exactly forged, resistant to reproductive repetition. Time itself is non-identity. Like dance improvised in gravity or the hammering of iron crowbar upon steel that draws from a domestic object, a common commodity, a startling rictus, a smiling or gasping mask in an age of masks. Time itself as the facticity of Michael’s unique embodied being bound to a trace of a present lost that rises anew in the grimace or mad laughter of each chance formed face.
…
Here, when the danger to his will is greatest, art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live: these are the sublime as the artistic taming of the horrible, and the comic as the artistic discharge of the nausea of absurdity. The satyr chorus of the dithyramb is the saving deed of Greek art; faced with the intermediary world of these Dionysian companions, the feelings described here exhausted themselves. (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy)