#scott dickson

We Are Not This Body, an exhibition of some 60 small collaged works by Scott Dickson on view at PLUG  Projects through the end of February ’14, wishes you were here at its dreamy sites and sights from yesteryear’s futuristic, utopian technopolises.

Most immediately and pervasively striking about Dickson’s postcards? “They’re kinda perfect, aren’t they,” a local arts matron commented. Dickson’s process involves precisely inlaying a positive shape into a negative void, resulting in matte, holographic, pebbled, and gloss glacial planes incised with the fault-lines of their editorial history. They’re more like jigsaw puzzles than mosaics or photos simply glued on top of each other.

What makes them so alluring is their “clutch-power” – a phrase that comes from the way two LEGO bricks perfectly snap together, coined by a CEO discussing the brand’s market success. While structural soundness is LEGO’s game, Dickson’s clutch-power is primarily aesthetic: the appearance that the pieces of his pieces were put together just right. If you can take the door of craft for granted, it opens to more interesting conversations.

The retro vibe of the postcards’ materials and rendering comes from the past, but Dickson’s aesthetic sensibility points to the future. Using the word with a capital-F in ten of his titles, he means the kind dreamt of in the past by people like Hanna-Barberra’s Jetsons. So there is this paradox of time as Dickson looks to the past as a mirror in which he sees over his shoulder into the beyond.

If I were a sci-fi publisher, I would be all over Dickson’s images, because great book covers exhibit iconic yet obscure emblems of the narrative they wrap around. Conversely, Dickson’s pictures imply events larger than their perimeter’s peripheries, like all good short stories. Imagine the pinkish glow of Emanating Monolith, Monument to The Other, or the most obvious example in the room, Future Formation, Pulpit Contact, matched to a sci-fi epic…

For example: both Philip K Dick’s Valis (1981) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969) achieve their peculiar sense of disjointed, vivid surreality through their centering of the literary (or alternately filmic, to switch things up in the case of the latter) lens around inanimate or otherwise imaginary essences. Like the way that Dick’s talking, multiple universes of time, his alter-ego Horselover Fat, his mysterious pink lightning  seem insane and unreal unless directly in the narrative lens, Kubrick’s epic involves the transformation of antagonistic-forces into -agents. There’s obviously HAL, but the most important thing-come-alive is the cosmic Rothkoid obelisk, which drives essentially every movement in plot across space and time. Others have pointed out that the monolith is “a highly expressive film device that functions as an emblem, more than as an artifact, of the Mystery Beyond … [in its] anthropomorphic geometry” (Thomas Allen Nelson, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze, 2000, p.118). Imagine Future Formation, Pulpit Contact as A Space Odyssey – standing austerely, glinting coldly, while playing the monumental first notes of its siren song, Thus Spake Zarathustra, on the keys of its tailfin synthesizer.

Over half of the 56 pieces in We Are Not This Body use the word monument in their title. From the great pyramids to the Statue of Liberty, monuments are icons of the culture they represent, things given profound symbolic importance. That’s why they’re on postcards. They’re iconic. In their sacred, art-historical origins, icons signified a higher power who would be otherwise everywhere and thus nowhere in particular. 

It’s no coincidence that in alternate denotation, icons float as tiny images encapsulating objects of desire in the relatively uniform chaos of the computer-screenscape. And is scrolling through a stream of near-identically sized icons in a monitor really all that different than perusing the 47 works resting on sleek shelves in the PLUG space? 

Funny. For work that seems so adamantly not about the computer in its mode of analogue fauxtoshop, its layered compositional organization roils in the undercurrent of a picture-in-picture psyche. Like PKD’s ancient Rome superimposed over 60’s California. Specifically, anytime there is a remotely rectilinear section of the picture plane with a different spatial structure than its surroundings, that quadrant becomes in effect a screen or window within another into which we can peer – a phenomena that is only underscored by Dickson’s making use of seductively specular materials that glint with neon luminescence. 

Think about the difference between landscape and landscaping, like the edge between nature and a garden. This is both the collage of curating and the curation in collage. And like topiary, where cutting something out is sort of alchemical, Dickson’s collated fragments enable the hallucinatory leap into the depths of fiction that is one of art’s greatest gifts to the conscious observer. Yes, that’s right, sci-fi means fantasy in the realm of images, where your wildest dreams can come true.

But if this is about objects of fantasy, then what about the pieces that just have plain old open space? Although some consider nature romantically, I think in this show there is something else going on. We are never allowed a landscape alone, because at the very least there is some sort of framing device built into the image so that it is always just that: an image of an image of a landscape. In Dickson’s world we only see our nature through a proxy. 

Let’s end in the sci-fi spirit. Imagine it’s a futuristic society long after Mother Earth has died. Technically, she’s sort of more like in a coma. We, humans, killed her, obviously, but we’re also sort of keeping her on life support and holding on as best we can. The details aren’t important, it’s pretty much the same sort of scenario as E M Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’, from the serendipitously titled collection The Eternal Moment (1909). But what makes our story unique is that now, images of the natural world, whether holograms or Old Masters landscapes, are sacred and mythic and everyone’s total fascination, and they’re basically everywhere now that they somehow actually matter again to contemporary art/social critics, to the extent that the human presence in visual art is not only lame but offensive and so anytime an artist wants to represent a persona of some sort they have to do it via an inanimate proxy. Like a screen. Or art.