NICK PRIMO

Oriented Strand Board

Follow up to the Nakashima post

In as short amount of time as possible for two career beleaguered adults, we just completed season 1 of D A R K on Netflix. It was fantastic; I wasn’t crazy about the ending, but whatevs. For fear of giving away plot details I won’t get into it, but I would definitely recommend it. Needless to say, the withdrawals from the binge-worthy time travel murder mystery are now setting in. Completely unrelated and out of sheer curiosity, I picked up an anthology of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels and attempted to fill the void internet television had left behind.

Doyle’s first Holmes’ novel A Study in Scarlett, first appeared in the Beeton Christmas Annual (1887). Other stories and novels followed due to popular appeal and thus began the serialized publication of Doyle’s works by The Strand magazine. Sherlock Holmes’ successive mysteries are probably a close 19th century analogue to a Netflix induced bout of tv watching, but in comparison to D A R K, a minor digression - no time travel, or 80’s music, and no steely faced laconic Germans. Fine. At least its taking the edge off. The novels are certainly entertaining. Short with good pacing, and to my surprise only mildly sexist and racist -so just a minor fuck you to Doyle. At least collected in anthology form, the novels fit the binge-worthy prerequisite. If you are unfamiliar with Sherlock Holmes, he’s a brilliant bi-polar cocaine addict who derives pleasure and purpose only from intellectual problems, and so, works as a private consultant lending his expertise in crime scene investigation to the police. And to be clear about his cocaine usage, he only indulges when there is no game afoot. He is mentally ill prepared for the doldrum pace of ordinary life. A happy Sisyphus with a rock always to push is his preferred state. In addition to dope for recreation, he keeps a chemistry practice, and publishes monographs on many uninteresting obscure topics such as tobacco ash and footprints. Seemingly dull fields of study, but as Holmes suggests, essential to the intellectual arsenal of an investigator.  With foot prints, I can see the relevancy, and because everyone seems to smoke in these books - men, women, children, pets, there are methods to his madness.

While Holmes’ powers of deduction have been the most over dramatized in popular fiction, they are what implore the reader to embark on the adventure. His ability to observe is uncanny and at times described as supernatural. The reader, the characters in the stories, and especially as well as most famously Dr Watson, all want to know what Holmes sees. I include myself in this group of eager few. In fact, its Holme’s fixation on observations and deductions that appeals to me as a visual artist. Specifically its his ability to see what was once there but no longer. By means of an intense study of surface, it is the missing, implied, removed, and absent material that is then employed to solve the problem. “In the Presence of Absence” an editorial by Elisa Adami for an online magazine called mnemoscape, Adami describes absence as being present. “We know, a photograph taken off the wall leaves a mark behind: a white square on a white background. A person steps out the room and the half-opened door turns into the spatial marker of a temporal threshold, the caesura between an ante-absence and an after presence. A page ripped off the book persist in the ragged paper filaments hanging on the bundle of sheets, in the stuttering gap interrupting the flow of words and the numerical sequence of folios.” What Holmes observes in a crime scene, Adami might characterize as an “inventory of traces”. She articulates in her essay that the “Absences are present. We can feel, perceive, sense them quite distinctively.” I discovered Adami in the supplemental literature for a current @hirshhorn Exhibition entitled, What Absence is Made Of . Their exhibit encompasses a host of artists from their permanent collection addressing the supporting theme: What does absence look like? Go check it out; there’s a link below.

Sherlock Holmes, Alyssa Adami, and the @hirshhorn’s exhibition have been mashing themselves in my head. 7 years ago I was transfixed and perplexed by overly sculptural qualities found in hi-design, which led me to create a series of sculptures and drawings exploring the nature of purpose in daily objects. My artworks, pregnant with a sense of function, were purposefully denied their implied utility through their form and construction. It wasn’t until I saw Adami’s writing on the wall at the @hirshhorn, “Absences are Present”, that I realized it was the absence of their functionality that gave them their intellectual weight! [Patting myself on the back, “Good show! Mr. Primo”, “Well it was elementary my dear Watson”.] Today I’m still working through that initial investigation. Suspension of function, denied purpose, and implied meaning continue to coalesce in an ether of absence. The fundamentals are still there but, what is not there, currently has my attention. Again and again throughout Dolye’s stories, the secondary characters and especially Watson are baffled by Holmes ability to solve the mysteries. And when met with his incredulous looks, he responds,“You will not apply my precept, he said, shaking his head. “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” 

Here’s a link to Adami’s editorial:

https://www.mnemoscape.org/in-the-presence-of-absence

Here’s a link to the Hirshhorn show:

What Absence is made of

OCT 18, 2017–SUMMER 2019

https://hirshhorn.si.edu/bio/what-absence-is-made-of/

And in support of the institution that I’m apart of, there is a great Kara Walker show up at @americanartmuseum. We are gearing up for the Art of @burningman exhibit at the Renwick Gallery

https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/walker