Drawn and Quartered

Johnny's in the basement Mixing up the medicine

Common knowledge has it that a collection always reveals something deep, often spicy, about its collector(s). Talk of the unconscious and its detours begins to circulate. This is what whets the curiosity of the voyeur-visitor. It may also be the guilty pleasure that often spurs the collector to commission someone to organize and present his or her collection or some part of it. But do collections have their own "unconscious"? Do they signal things beyond all the intentions and drives of those who put them together? Do they ever articulate more than their components?

Surveying the psychological climate of collecting, Walter Benjamin reminds us that "Every passion borders on chaos..." A chaos, one hurries to add, beyond the disorganizations prompted by the unconscious and the drives, past some edge where things are unmoored, set aswirl in a self-generated "disorder" of heterogenous elements brought together. Time and changing tastes, new interests and unexpected finds, open the collection to possible discontinuities, to gathering ostensibly incompatible art works. But does this chaos have a way of structuring its own order? Do emergent properties appear, new qualities between the individual components? Do art objects begin to dialogue with each other, across incommensurable themes and divergent formal deployments? The language of objects dialoguing is of course metaphorical, but the result not so much, if indeed the individual artifacts contribute to the articulation of a meaning of the ensemble itself (the collection). A new unit of signification--a material and consequential fact--emerges.

I followed some of the themes in this collection. I gathered all the eerie architectural spaces whose modernity--whether in the coldness of the grid or the horizontal sprawl of the suburb--is identical with their desolation. Sadness is contagious, they teach. It trespasses on the super formal and rigorous. Softens it. Even Dan Graham's snapshots, so surefooted in their analytical coldness in art history books, seen live and flanked by other photographs, manage to somehow convey the forlornness of the teenagers who will one day crack the windows of those tract houses to let the bong smoke out. His images tell of--and perhaps quietly mourn--the coming emotional landscapes that are already coded in the seriality of suburban houses.

I put together all the images that proposed a fantasy architecture through scale and simulation--images that embody innocence, even if they often seem pregnant with a sense of menace or loss. They allude to the way abandoned dolls and dollhouses, forgotten toys and dog-eared notebooks, in a quick zoom in or through some other cinematic formula, can transcend the edges of the uncanny and register deep psychological disaster, unfathomable tragedies. They spiral us back to the dark suggestion of basement dungeons and other unseemly things we pretend are not happening behind the perfect siding and the perfect lawns of the Levittown model home.

I assembled all the images that seemed extracted from the crevices of a dark pop landscape structured mostly from (and against) movie and music video codes. Maybe vanishing album cover codes, too. The potential redemption nested at the core of this world is somehow embodied in glitter puddles and gothic bodies, in concert crowds and tragic pop princelings. These are the visual analogues of that vague magic that lines our favorite songs, that makes them indispensable. This is the landscape that the stoned teenagers in Graham's tract houses ingest and produce through their laptops and iPods. They know they have to flee the atmosphere of their single-family homes, and they do so by becoming junkies of the affective unravelings and restructurings that desire and fandom underwrite.

Finally, there is what functions as the dominant, if not foundational, line of the collection--the photographs of pubescent and prepubescent figures, mostly women, in vulnerable or ambiguous poses. It's a kind of inverted pre-Raphaelite portraiture for our turn of the century. Aristocratic ennui recoded as suburban fear or discomfort. The desire that young bodies elicit in 19th century paintings is here swapped from a strange fragility in teenagers that seems contiguous with the fragility of the narratives of normality that the suburb is built on and built to sustain.

So, one follows these themes, even attempts to organize micro-narratives within them. Anna Gaskell's children in the snow, next to Cindy Sherman's sad monster in a post-apocalyptic ice age, next to Jenny Gage's shot of a women in a car (that won't start?) in the middle of winter, next to a springtime photograph of Damien Ortega's buried VW bug. One hopes that the suggestions, milking a shared education in suspense thrillers, at least provide an entertaining thread.

In the end, despite these efforts to develop small narrative scenarios and larger thematic groups, to collect evidence on the drives and unconscious impulses that brought these works together, what ultimately mattered was overloading things until something caved. A critical threshold had to be crossed. The images, embedded in large clusters that stretch from the floor to the rafters, became so many points of narrative suspension. Together, they suggested "something other" than what each of them may be about. Drawn and Quartered is an essay on chasing down the meaning of the collection, on running down the synthetic orders of the suburban that seem subtly woven into everything, even when they are absent from particular works. It's a meaning that is inseparable from the accumulation of heterogenous parts, itself the result of chasing down that one perfect object that will complete things. An object that, of course, always gives us the slip. It's its very absence, its perennial elusiveness, that keeps things going, collections growing.

In seeking this impossible object, a collection, like a suburb, levels different things, slots them in its artificial order. Drawn and Quartered is, ultimately then, an essay on the meaning of accumulation, which cannot help but be inflected into an anxiety-ridden form by the pressures of the socioeconomic moment in which this collection, or at least its photographic facet, dispersed for years in museum shows, on the walls of the collectors' house and hidden in storage, finally comes to light as a complete unit. Drawn and Quartered marks the trajectory of a collection, probes for its meaning, teases out its subterranean connection to the synthetic ontology of the suburb, as much as it attests, in its ambivalent excess, to the way uncertainty is increasingly becoming the dominant mood of the times.

Gean Moreno is a Miami-based curator, artist and writer. He has recently been exhibited at the North Miami MoCA, Kunsthaus Palais Thum and Taxis in Bregenz, Miami Art Museum, Haifa Museum in Israel, Arndt & Partner in Zürich, and Invisible-Exports in New York. He has contributed texts to various magazines and catalogues. In 2008, he founded [NAME] Publications, a platform for book-based projects.