Jesse Bransford, View of Paranoia Land, 2000, 16'x56.5', Acrylic, marker and graphite on wall, site specific installation at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center.
Jesse Bransford’s
Paranoia Land
Matthew Greene
The TV is on, its Cops or something and theres this kid in a headlock by his dad and the cops have been called to break up the so-called domestic dispute, the dads a hick or whatever, he says the boys been sniffin paint, he disappeared a couple of hours ago when he was supposed to be out mowin the lawn then we find him all tore up with paint all over him. Can we get him some rehab or something. The camera jerkily zooms in to show the streaks of gold under his nostrils, tracks down his torso to the tips of his fingers, dripping also with the residue of metallic spray-paint. The kids contrite, which becomes tedious, so the camera pans around the room, pausing on posters for speed metal bands, horror movies, a mirror printed with the Budweiser label, bandannas, a picture of a hooded demon saying have you ever plucked a virgin? The officers ask, boy, what made you want to sniff the paint. Dont know.
I'm well aware of the answer hes too polite to respond with: the pursuit of religious experience.
Write this in your notebook for safekeeping: I am here for the sole purpose of your death. You will need to remember this at a later date. Revelations of your demise. Say it like a prayer over and over. In the name of the holy ghost! Repeating itself faster and faster, darker and harder, thats the spot, theres an x on your chest where your hearts meant to be, make an arch with your fingers and squint, imagine a mirror and you have a cathedral to invert.
(On the page opposite your notes you will inscribe one skull, three pentagrams, the names of seven bands, one UFO, one upside down cross, one goat. An army of zombies, corpses, the undead in general. Paranoialand. The image of an ideal castle. Happiness reversed. A place of darkness symbolized by repeated strokes of a ball point...)
Theres an intricate passage here, a lace curtain woven of guitar strings and broken blood vessels. If I could only close my eyes! The walls glow red and the temp. is rising. Breathe deeply, inhale and hold; repeat until vertiginous. Enter to the realm of perspiration. Beneath the surface of the earth there is fire and screaming. How are mountains made? The cavernous depths remind one of passages in the body and apocryphal texts. See how the diamonds are alive! Watch the rubies breathe, see the wings and the steeds and avert your gaze in the nick of time. Rub your face on a rock. Lick calcium and mineral water from the ceiling, practice hanging upside down. The blood in your head will make the visions come; rub your eyes, believe its true. Your hair is sticking to your neck, the sound that makes you shiver, death is fucking you insane, march into the kingdom of the dead, wait, theres a note to make, a technicality: When you decide to sell your soul, where will you take it? How does one establish commerce with the devil? Is this a Christian devil we are talking about or more of a bacchus-type situation? Will I need to find some train-track to the underworld? Will a tall black man with red eyes tweak my E string and give me everlasting life? Cant he just do some dive-bombs, or perhaps some screaming harmonics? Is there a harmony that is still considered true evil, as the flatted fifth once was? What becomes of those who hear it? A chemical smell. A lake of fire. Infinite echoes. Remember a name for a band you will start. Demonpit. Goatdemon. Something about a goat. A sacrificial lamb (that could be me). To be honest you did not believe until you saw the first dead thing; that to not be alive is to become an object rather than an entity. Whoah.
Jesse Bransford, Studies for Paranoia Land, 2000, dimensions variable, computer files.
(above image and all subsequent)
Jesse Bransford, View of Paranoia Land, 2000, 16'x56.5', Acrylic, marker and graphite on wall, site specific installation at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center.
Jesse Bransford’s
Paranoia Land
Casey McKinney
I remember the first time I ever saw a drawing of Jesse's. It was about twelve years ago, first period, Latin class I think. I was fifteen and he must have been sixteen because he had a car (earlier, while taking a few last minute drags in the parking lot I'd caught a glimpse of Jesse's long scraggly blonde hair in the driver's seat of a red Ricardo Montalban style Chrysler convertible with a 7SECONDS sticker on the back). I was quite envious of that car. Envious, but kind of confused because my first impression was "weird redneck" (no offense Jesse. You just looked a lot like Jeff Hanneman back then).
I got a better look at him when he sat down in front of me in class. I focused in on his jean jacket: A large pentagram of crossed daggers carefully scrawled on the back, lot's of blood, "Slayer" written in a bold heavy metal font, a Dirty Rotten Imbeciles symbol on the sleeve, the Black Flag bars, and if I remember correctly, he had written, "DO YOU WANT TO DIE?" at the base of the pentagram, also bold and drippy with cadmium red. This was the first drawing(s) that I saw of Jesse's and it kind of worried me. I mean I was punk too, but at the time I had this notion that Slayer was for trailer trash. His symbols were pretty much all over the place, almost contradictory and the choice of a jean jacket rather than the usual medium, the leather motorcycle jacket, furthered my fears that I was in the midst of a crazy person (I mean a sensible punk like myself would have opted for the more cultivated Samhain/ Misfits leather jacket look of evil, right?).
Of course my fears were not assuaged when he started talking in class. Not only was he this headbanger/punker/hardcore guy who rode to school on Corinthian leather, but he was also smart as hell and never silent in class. We were both new to school and his lack of timidity was quite unusual. Over time we became friends and I learned in piecemeal all of the other dirty little secrets - Star Trek, Starblazers, The Smurphs, Gary Numan, D & D. For years I never quite knew where he was coming from with all of this as I never had the attention span for complex modern mythological systems myself (yes even Gary Numan is a complex mythological system in himself. Just let Jesse explain it), but as the world changed a bit and grunge and heroin chic was eclipsed by computer geek I could see that his interests where not really that odd at all. They were the interests of someone capable of creating virtual worlds, parallel universes, of someone a little bored with the regular old laws of science, of spatial and dimensional limitations.
At the New School Jesse earned two degrees, one in fine arts, and one in the History of Technology (of course anyone who spends five years in that den of conspiracy theories can't expect to emerge without being a little "paranoid"). He garnered there an appreciation for the aesthetics of math, alchemy and the writings of the sophists and the great satirists, Sterne, Swift, etc. The most salient constant that I see in his work is an interest in systems that don't quite add up. But when I asked recently him if he thought that his work functioned as a kind of sophistry, he replied emphatically: "I want to believe!" If I was completely cynical I couldn't be doing what I am doing." And even though this is kind of a half joke (the phrase, he admits later, slightly horrified, might have been unwittingly appropriated from the X-Files), stills resonates with sincerity. There is a strong Romantic spirit in his work that is unique in the light of so many ironists in the Artworld today. And even though systems like Star Trek and D & D aren't really logical when thoroughly examined, they aren't any more illogical than other systems more widely accepted on faith - the rites of The Church, or the stockmarket just to name some of the more obvious, and are to some extent just as complex (and arguably even more so, as a perusal of some of the spaceship design books done by Star Trek fans would affirm).
The piece at PS1, "Paranoia land" combines some of Jesse's favorite, most personal, and darkest systems of study. It is meant to be viewed from a sweet spot in the middle of the room, from which the columns in the room line up with the columns in the painting, following a classically constructed vanishing point which trains the eye from left to right. From any other point the piece looks disjointed, the narrative disrupted, as if one where trying to look around a mirror. The purpose of this is to create a solipsistic sensation (as Jesse explains) akin to the final "Jupiter and Beyond" Übermensche section of Kubrick's 2001:A Space Odyssey. In that sense it is a kind of last judgement, where one's belief systems are brought together and put into question before death. The ships on the left are taken from a Japanese cartoon called Starblazers that went off the air in 1983. The main ship in the cartoon is based on a real Japanese battleship which was sunk in a humiliating manner in WWII. In the cartoon it was refurbished and turned into a spaceship used to fight an invading army of radiation bombing aliens. It is a symbol of a country's greatest humiliation turned into its greatest power. The ships in Jesse's painting are headed to dock at "Paranoia Land," but must navigate through the artist's interpretation of 4D geometry, fractals, a random rust monster (from D & D: most of the characters in the game have historical references, alluding to previous myths. The rust monster, however, was created on a whim. It has no cultural resonance other than to those familiar with the game), D & D skeleton warriors, an iron cross, a Star of David, a Corrosion of Conformity Skull, battle ships of the evil radiation bombing Gamillions, and the implication of some heavy metal music pumping through the speakers at the hell mouth of Paranoia Land. Someone has described the piece as "a portrait of paranoid America." But when you when you take into account the forced vantage point and the personalized symbols, you get the feeling that it is Jesse's own moment of final judgement where apparent good (Star of David) and evil (Iron Cross) and the undefinable other (the C.O.C symbol.) get turned upside down and inside out, just as the Yamato was turned from a source of humiliation to one of pride.
I guess it could be considered a reflection on America culture at least as in the sense that it is one American's examination of his own repressed fears and drives, especially in regards to fascism. In a sense the piece exposes the breakdown of linear historical thinking. The end of WWII as a watershed for the dissolution of modernist utopian directionality. Roles are blurred. America becomes the Gamillions, the Japanese the freedom fighters, mythologies are broken down, rust monsters are invented and enter the collective culture.
Ultimately, Jesse Bransford belongs in the company of other artists (mostly writers come to mind, modern satirists actually, like Bret Easton Ellis, Dennis Cooper) who have proved not afraid to personally explore the sadistic tendencies in the human spirit and who question our basic assumptions of order, and who through the arduous process, like the alchemist in the quest for gold, approach a spiritual resolution and cleansing. "Paranoia Land" is the product of an artist in the midst of battle.
