Searching the Margins of the Frame

The Elliptical Art of Benny Profane

An imaginary exhibition curated by Donald Brackett

“Something is missing. If I knew what it was then it wouldn’t be so missing.”

William Gaddis, The Recognitions, 1955.

1. Exhibiting the Living Archive

One day after an especially long and arduous shift in the dream factory, the art critic arrived home to discover his mailbox stuffed with letters from artists, from painters and icon makers to be more exact, each one proposing a highly appealing yet physically impossible exhibition. They had the tone of epistles from an extinct race, and from a long ago time, each one lamenting their personal sentence to The Outpost. Comparisons between Kafka's "In The Penal Colony" would not at all be out of order here, for sure enough, each icon maker does in fact bear a personal tattoo identifying his or her affiliations in the hierarchy of art history: an extinct fever-dream trace. So it came to pass that either in their own media or in a different one unknown to them, they were choosing to express, albeit only metaphysically, since most of the concepts could never be realized by the earnest curator, their feelings as exiles from the mainstream of twenty-first-century culture, embodied in that traditional form of lamentation so richly played out in the classical period.

It then became clear that they were all “painters,” of course, because only painters, among all icon makers, have been awarded a fugitive status rare in aesthetics, and only because of the insistent glare of the present digital domain. Both the notion of the fugitive status and also the notion of the archive of collected artists’ musings on "impossible to realize" Utopian visual projects, emerged as a result of these ongoing triadic conversations among the art critic, the curator and the artist. In the shadow of the ghost of history, while pondering these relationships, it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps extinction is really only a reverie intermission, an cognitive interruption, or an exotic ellipsis between one stage of our cultural narrative and another. It was at this point that I became accidentally familiar with the seductive faux-archival work of one Benny Profane.

I was introduced to his tongue-in-cheek archival artworks by a mutual friend, the obtuse novelist Hal Incandenza, who insisted that Mr. Profane held the key to the kingdom of the future through his implementation of an emergency strategy designed to preserve the past and conserve the present. Mr. Incandenza can often be almost as persuasive as the mysterious kitsch embodiments of Mr. Profane himself. Since becoming familiar with what he refers to as his “future relics,” he has become for me an enigmatic emblem of this conceptual interruption and a personification of the aforementioned ellipsis: almost a veritable corporate logo of the intermission itself.

The art critic and curator initially suggested a project by artists who occupy a kind of historical hinterland (which is to say painters) and then the artist elaborated upon this seductive theme by fabricating a tantalizing format for absorbing the moisture of their dreams (which is to say the museum catalogue), the essence of which is to be sent as a kind of performative artwork, or social sculpture, to a public desperately in need of something to look at that does not contain flickering pixels. It thus subversively enters their own archival and library systems as a viral sort of contribution to the public dialogue which it has been designed to generate. Perhaps return to and extend would be better words: the future of the past, so to speak. The social sculpture notion clearly being a stubborn remnant of both Beuys and Fluxus.

Benny Profane / Future Relics: Image Object #1: “How to Want What You Already Have”(Cabinet interior view) Carpet, painting, poem, rulers, teacups, light bulb, coin, pocket watch, film canisters

The oblique report that follows is not offered as a summation on the curious fate of icons, even less of their potential future, if any, but rather as a replica of their voices calling out from the island of the banished: where their voices contain and convey their own projected fantasies of the art exhibition they would most like to see documented, if not ever actually materialized. Thus the catalogue, unlike the Benny Profane "exhibition" it documents, is the only actual physical evidence of the ruminations of these representatives of concrete reverie. While waiting for permission to return to the centre stage of the Olympian museum complex, which could take a few years, painters will continue to paint under the digital glare of numerical bulbs in secret meeting places, not unlike the heretical catacombs of olden days. One could almost say that they were “instructions” for paintings and photographs that may or may not be made, with photographs being a relatively youthful but aggressively creative medium toiling in the long poetic shadows of painting. But their suggestion is also their making.

Since, after all, it was photography’s genesis which provoked painting into its current fugitive posture in the outpost, but only after its long golden age as the mask of mirrors worn by a visual genius. Painting: a fugitive from the centre of civilization sent to its peripheries by technology? For like those heretical subterranean catacomb chambers, the salesmen of painted reverie conduct a form of alchemy which preserves the present moment in a strange and melancholic manner, and by incorporating nostalgia for the future into all their works through a sort of coded esoteric language, the exoteric and three-dimensional manifestation of which is the physical painting, but the actual "message" of which is a four-dimensional fabula, or story. Thus the mythical exhibition is a living archive.

  Installation view of Ellipsis: The Art of Benny Profane

This present approach allows the art criticism to emerge along with the art concurrently and to a degree collaboratively, which is indeed the whole objective of this project and program at the outset. As your documentary reporter on this seminal event, first of all, I am pleased to report that painterly inclinations are still with us, alive and well. As usual, to paraphrase the immortal Mark Twain, rumours of its death were greatly exaggerated. Those rumours seem to recur with clockwork frequency almost every ten years, they have been recurring ever since photography’s invention and rapid rise in popularity circa 1840 in France, and I suppose they always will.
However, in light of the work of art in the age of digital reproduction (pace Benjamin), it is best not to make sweeping statements about the evolution of the aura (especially since it has merely altered its basis rather than disappearing altogether) or the life of painting. Apart from this one: I predict that very soon into the second completed decade of the 21st century, analog paintings on textile, or on anything at all, will soon become the supreme fetish objects of our age. Hence this early-century report on the current state of painters and paintings, icons and objects which maintain their hold on our senses. Everything else is spiritual kitsch. And it is in the strangely charming intergalactic tourism centre welcoming visitors from abroad (far, far abroad, either from another galaxy or merely the distant future of our own), that the perspicacious Mr. Profane has culled his own personal museum of dream objects and is asking the following somewhat impertinent questions.

Benny Profane / Handmade bookbinding case with no opening containing analog items from the 20th century: vinyl recording of A Child’s Christmas in Wales read by the author; a melted doll’s head mold for a toy; a mass market paperback of Aleister Crowleys’s Moonchild; a super 8mm reel of a Tom Ewell film called Finders Keepers.

What if the wrong objects were accidentally preserved subsequent to the annihilation of our varied civilizations? In other words, if by chance, not the highest and mightiest samples of human achievement, but rather the lowest and most camp items of mass-produced fantasy, were salvaged? An odd irony has begun its reign over us. What Mr. Profane has done, in spades, is to elevate this irony to an even more enhanced and amplified degree by plunging his tongue deeper into his cheek and preserving for us items which we may or may not even want preserved. What if, for instance, the book which fate allowed to survive some future conflagration was not one by Shakespeare, or the first copy of the Gutenberg Bible from 1454, but rather the first edition of Mickey Spillane’s pulp novel, I, the Jury, from 1947? The profound opening line, “The guy was dead as hell,” would by sheer happenstance become as sacrosanct as the line, “In the beginning was the word,” as referenced in the Gutenberg printing. Whole monastic religious orders could be founded in order to interpret and create commentaries on the secret meanings to be revealed in the gospel according to Mickey. The idea fills me with a splendid, if tawdry, sensation of sublime wonderment.

2. Conserving the Archival Gaze

Variations on a Theme: The Imaginary Museum, The Profane Collection.

The primary formats available throughout art history are all being employed in this environmental theatre stage set, since it involves portrait, still life and landscape, as well as being a subtle media conversation among the arts of painting, photography and digital shadows as they playfully shake hands with the more ancient media of sculpture and interior architecture. Most importantly, perhaps, this installation celebrates what is known as the visual aura, which occurs when the images or objects being observed by us seem to return our gaze. In the end, the whole concept of the aura is that of emotional distance: a sensation so powerful before a work of art that no matter how close up to it we are, that distance remains a vast expanse saturated with the sublime, the vibration of which increases as it approaches what Benjamin called “the expressionless”, beyond which nothing can be asserted.

As we are all being tantalized deeper into our digital world, one where instant information is communicated in blurred fragments, the importance of visual art that remains true to our physical and psychic environment will become increasingly obvious. For many painters, working at the apparently archaic craft of staining textiles with coloured pigments, and with the digital technology of this young century breathing down their necks, it must sometimes seem like a losing battle. But we have cast our lot with the realm of the haptic. And it is a battle many of us want them to continue fighting, and to continue exploring the magic painted textile surface as a screen for transmitting thoughts and feelings. Tactile, visceral, demanding and cranky, painting is a form of expression that provides an antidote to the flickering screens and awkward extension cords of our ever shrinking world. Yet there still might be a happy outcome to this blind date between painting and printed images, between photographs and films, between digital computers and virtual headsets.

20th Century devices of unknown origin or function, thought to be for communication purposes, shown as they were discovered in a secret archaeopsychic dig from 1999. The Profane Collection.

The Cassandra-like warning of artists such as Benny Profane, however, as exemplified so deftly in this memorial exhibit of his works, one suitably entitled Ellipsis, is that camp and kitsch have just as much of a chance at being preserved as those other specimens of supposedly high culture and grand thematic schemes. Benny’s captivating exhibition could also have been just as aptly subtitled Letters from the Fugitive Outpost, suggesting a secure zone after our analog world has all but vanished before our eyes. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry has said, “What is essential is invisible to the eye and can only be seen with the heart.” The palpable desire of these images, and of their maker, to transcend our everyday assumptions is connected to their purity, simplicity, and near trance-like vitality. Here is an artist who offers a glimpse of a reality behind, beneath, beside, on top of, or hidden within the one we usually witness. His name is Profane.

Thus, Wwhat if, instead of Raphael, Michelangelo or Leonardo, the zillions of paintings by 1960’s kitsch queen Margaret Keane were preserved for posterity? Benny Profane manages to make it his mission to display the marvelous as well as the murky, often side by side in order to accentuate their illicit and incestuous relationship before the altars of good and bad taste. Such an artist, whose role as an archivist of morbid curiosity itself assumes the shape of a new art form altogether, is a reverie-witness to a world which can neither be confirmed nor denied, and therefore his works are a gentle gesture toward the inexplicable (the location where Wallace Stevens suggested that poetry resides). This kind of post-objective-painting, and its odd array of image-objects, the kind that attempt to portray the ineffable or essential, like the poetry it sometimes makes manifest, is simply always a relentless search for the intangible and its wayward cousin the inexplicable. The artist and curator therefore both want to confirm and affirm their mutual compulsions: they want to share with us what it means to be a human being in the second decade of the 21st century.

Double Draw by Margaret Keane, 1963. The Profane Collection

In a sense, the true curatorial subject of this book/exhibition/project is the voracious appetite for the New and the Unknown which often takes the form of an avant-garde, a conceptual means of colonizing the void, but which also takes the shape of many other diverse desires for “newness” and “never-before-ness” in our culture besides that of visual art. In other words: cultural jamais vu. In the world of visual culture it conjures up that uneasy feeling of encountering objects that feel like art and smell like art, but don’t resemble anything you’ve ever seen before, precisely because they try to show us something we can’t always see. That invisible but palpable realm where all contradictions cease to be in opposition. The realm at the very edge of history, a haptic edge: the cozy hometown of the ineffable. Our shared installation of sculptural image-objects is the slow archaeological and archaeopsychic dig into the ruins of the last century. We must cherish all such ruins, and the map of their terrifying territory cautions us to do so, whether they be books, albums, films or fetishes.

Perhaps the art object has always been a dialectical dance of sorts, between the aura and its objective expression, a tango on a four-dimensional stage set, shifting in and out of focus as quickly as artists are capable of engaging in the reverie required to make art in the first place. And in this case study of “perhaps,” the exhibition should have the misty contours of a conscious dream, becoming more and more concrete until almost but not quite physical, until we forget the names of the things we see in front of us. The open-eyed dream. One prevailing attitude will also permeate this ongoing fluxus-like project: the awareness that we might now be passing through a historical period as significant as the transition from orality to literacy, from the spoken to the written word, and thence from literacy to the digital. Few would argue with the notion that computers and the internet might be as revolutionary as Gutenberg’s printing press. This time it is the upcoming transition from the literal to the virtual.

Future Relic: an untitled piece by Konrad Klapheck. The Profane Collection.

In a sense, this exhibition is also a guidebook of sorts, especially since there may in fact be no physical manifestation of it apart from its documentation: it is a guidebook to a place whose exact parameters can never be fully verified. But only if there is a future. Yet what it lacks in reliability, this blueprint for a location never visualized makes up for in the audacity of its sentimental journey through the tattered remnants of another almost-vanished 19th-century phenomena, that of the Sublime. In the future, even a fragment of a celluloid film, or the burnt pages of a pulp novel, will be considered a magical relic of the great Golden Age. Ours. Ironically, Plato condemned writing because it removed ideas from where they “belonged,” remembered in the mind, shifting them to the outside world. Now, ideas are returning from the physical world back to a blank cyber-space, back to the immaterial realm of the mind, to a digital Plato’s Cave. But now the shadows on the cave walls are constructed of pixels. By plunging so rapidly forward into technology’s open arms, we have also gone back, perhaps, back to a place as ritually ineffable as the fourth dimension, or back to a pure realm of mythical thought. Welcome home. Welcome to the World of Future Relics.

Unknown Future Relic, from The Profane Collection.

One of the principal conceptual conceits of this Profane art project, both its book/catalogue documenting the pieces and the theoretical exhibition on which the book is based, is that we are conducting an anastylosis exercise not to an ancient monument from the past but to the modernist industrial culture of the 20th century. The premise is to imagine items of obscure meaning from the perspective of either our distant descendants in a future drastically different from our present, or from the vantage point of aliens visiting the earth, beings who would have little or no reference points with which to interpret what we have left behind for them to either find, discover and decipher. In order to further facilitate this encounter with future descendants or alien visitors, the artist and curator are pleased to present a useful app they have developed for the purposes of developing procedures for a well-timed ending. This handy-dandy pocket-sized device is highly recommended as a means for conducting ourselves accordingly and managing to choreograph an orderly apocalypse. Because here at Kitschen Synch Incorporated, we cater your dreams.