JUSTIN MATHERLY
Let other people observe you happy, and they will rush to happiness by the same road you have traced for them.

Artissima / Present Future
Nov 6-9 2008

Artist’s Statement:

      This work stems from an initial interest in devices used in an “aesthetics of security”, such as planters designed to impede one’s movement in or around a building, street, or space in general.  Desire creates its own blockades, blockades are put in place to quell desire; one’s space must be defended at all costs, then it becomes a question of how one defends his or her own space.

      There is a will to create from zero, of going beyond appearances (beyond significance) to create a bastard community of the sick and frail (a future form).  It is a matter of occupying or taking up space-time in order to invent new space-times.  Mutant centers of subjectivation, not based on fear but on the production of joyful encounters that increase our capacity to act in the world; supports for a disinterested ethics, the most ethical.

The crux of these supports is the borromean knot, which for Lacan signified the real, symbolic, and the imaginary.  When one link is broken the rest of the links follow, leading, of course to psychosis.  Whereupon the introduction of a fourth term [the sinthome/symptom] acts to cement together the other three terms.  But the sinthome is beyond representation, or in terms of analysis: un-analysable; it is beyond meaning. If we take the sinthome as un-analysable this seems to point toward a freedom of creativity, toward a welcoming of what is to come.  Of course this takes an adjustment, a re-orientation, this is precisely a starting from zero, a will mobilized toward the creation of a new subjectivity.