Alan Flint
Canadian Art Online Feature Article: http://www.canadianart.ca/
COMMERCE / Alan Flint
Imre Szeman
Alan Flint’s work probes the borders between art and language, language and interpretation, interpretation and self-understanding. In Commerce, his exploration of the mysteries and traumas of language and meaning assumes new forms and travels in novel directions, connecting the dreamy insights of philosophical abstraction with the beating, straining heart of everyday life. For Flint, ‘commerce’ points to those economic realities that indelibly shape us and structure our lives. But it is also the name of a more general and mysterious translation process that enables dissimilar things to be exchanged as equivalents—money for carburetors, plane tickets, rosaries, and art; words for emotions; dreams for realities. These pieces show how both forms of commerce play a role in every attempt at interpretation and understanding, the shuttling of meaning back and forth between words and things being constantly refracted through the grubby traffic in objects and money.
As the profusion of languages in the world tells us, the relationship between words and their meanings is utterly accidental. Rien, nada, nichts, niente, semmi, ничто, 没有什么东西: all these different signs and symbols point to an absence of things, to “nothing.” It makes no sense to ask which of these words more accurately grasps the concept. It is equally strange (though it might seem less so) to imagine that what allows these words to be equated is that they are simply different labels for the same thing. Like tags at a yard sale, we imagine that language functions by fixing words to objects with a loop of thread or a piece of tape—quite difficult when what you are selling is “nothing.” Flint gives words weight and density, cutting and rearranging their orderly letters into disaggregated sculptural forms that invite novel recombinations. The effect, as in “NOTHING,” is to make us question our taken for granted assumptions about how language works. Should we take the jumble of letters huddled around a hole, a well, or an “O,” as a word or an object? Can we react to their physical forms separately from the word that we are propelled to reassemble out of them? How can these physical objects name or stand in for their opposite, this obvious something pointing us to “nothing”? The nest of questions and paradoxes that emerge out of “NOTHING” draws attention to the unexpected absence at the centre of language on which depends the apparent solidity of meaning.
Words may possess no deep interiority, no hidden depths. For proof of this, we can turn to a childhood game: repeat a word enough times, quickly, and its meaning drains away. Still, in its everyday familiar uses, we have the very opposite relation to language: a surfeit rather than a deficit of meaning. Words drag along with them the entire weight of the worlds to which they are chained. A whole way of life can be reconstituted from the associations and emotions stuffed into a single word, especially when it is placed into dialogue with objects carrying an equal weight of meaning. The philosophic puzzles that spill out of “NOTHING” are multiplied in “WORK” and “JESUS,” and turned in other directions, too. “WORK” is comprised of a 1972 Datsun 510 surmounted by a jumble of oversized letters that form the word “work.” Why “work”? It seems simple enough. The Datsun requires work to build, the automobile factory-line stands as a model form of work in our cultural imaginary, and it is even mental work to reassemble the fragments of the word and to figure it all out.
We cannot, however, rely on the word alone to help us make sense of the object. Flint has fused language and object, the verbal and the visual, into a form that raises questions about cultural memory and social identity. The auto industry produces not only cars, but jobs and communities, economies and mobilities, and new experiences from road-trips to traffic jams. The work of the automobile is simultaneously cultural, social, political and environmental. It is a common object that casts an immense shadow, shaping our lives as much as any grand narrative, such as religion, liberalism or the Enlightenment. This is perhaps especially the case for Ontarians, whose economy it has fueled at the same time as it has spawned the dreary commuter suburbs that are our unfortunate legacy to future generations.
The Datsun is not just any car, but chosen carefully to act as a physical and symbolic reminder of an earlier historical moment in which Japanese imports were seen as a threat to “our” way of life. The economic crises of the early 1970s were accompanied by the intensification of racisms and nationalisms that are reminiscent of our current moment. GM, Ford and Chrysler are again witnessing financial challenges that have an impact on communities in Southern Ontario, there is widespread anxiety about the promise and threat represented by the rapid expansion of the Asian economy—this time focused on China—and the headlines are dominated by the global struggle over oil. The ‘work’ of meaning here connects local circumstances of labour and culture to global dynamics and histories.
“JESUS” also chains word to object—in this case, quite literally. The word ‘Jesus’ and a car engine are not normally linked. The challenge Flint poses is for us to consider these disparate things in relation to one another. The car engine is part of the physical world of experience and immanence; Jesus awaits us transcendently in the heavenly space that comes after all work is done. It is not clear whether the chain symbolizes an unwilling connection or a necessary one. It is equally possible to see the narratives of religion and industry as at odds with one another, as it is to see these two belief systems as intimately related. Religion and capital are connected famously, of course, through Max Weber’s protestant ethic, though we need not turn to sociological theory to see this link. The signs are lie everywhere around us. Contrary to what we might have expected, there seems to be little tension between a world of freeways and strip malls and the social afterlife of the spirit of an ancient desert nomad, inspiration for a worldwide religion. How do we understand and live in a world defined as much by Jesus as by the combustion engine, by the language of peace and selflessness as much as by competition and selfishness? Does some deeper point of connection emerge from this unexpected conjunction of word and thing, or must we manage to live in the social and psychological indeterminacy it names?
We find a similar multitude of associations in the video projection of a mouth chewing and sucking on a crucifix. The sound of cars approaching and fading away can be heard in the background. The unnerving, blasphemous, and yet meditative act of sucking on the cross puts the human mouth—the source of language—into direct physical contact with the powerful image of Christ, who embodies the ‘word’ in yet another way. Jesus—car—word: these images and sounds are triangulated in a way that brings about renewed reflection on the questions and issues raised by all of the pieces in Commerce in relation to each another.
The final piece in Commerce is ‘Media Thugs.’ Six portraits of the same face are distorted in disturbing and horrific ways. The face offers a familiar surface that can dissemble, shielding both conscious and unconscious thoughts, identities, and fantasies. In the images of the media thugs, these hidden workings of identity take fleshy form in the same way that Flint gives physical shape to words. As the tsunami of contradictory meanings and symbols of the media crash over us, they turn us inside out, distorting our view of ourselves so greatly that it is impossible to pretend that some authentic identity exists, or ever did. The desire for such an unmediated experience is nevertheless as deeply felt as anything in contemporary reality. “Media Thugs” offers an allegory of life lived simultaneously with an abundance and an absence of meaning. One can neither give into the wash of the media nor reject it entirely, but must try to engage in interpretation in the blurry and uncertain traffic of commerce. “It's all so meaningless,” wrote painter Francis Bacon, “we might as well be extraordinary.” There is something of this struggle in the faces of the media thugs, which resemble closely the twisted fleshiness of Bacon’s own twisted self-portraits.
The philosopher Paul Ricouer has argued that “there is no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts; in the final analysis self-understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these mediating terms.” In Commerce, Alan Flint pushes us to confront the emptiness and depth of these mediating terms in strikingly original and powerful ways.