April 22 - June 18, 2006
Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum
Santa Barbara California
April 8 - 13 May, 2006
Feature Inc.
New York, New York
Of Two and Three (The Left and Right Hands II), 2006, Dimensions variable, Latex and graphite on wall.
Installation at Feature Inc. (Destroyed).
Of Two and Three (The Left and Right Hands II), 2006, 78x62", Acrylic, watercolor and graphite on paper.
Collection of Juliet Jacobson.
(above image and all subsequent)
Of Two and Three (The Left and Right Hands II), 2006, Dimensions variable, Latex and graphite on wall.
Installation at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum (Destroyed).
Jesse Bransford’s
Of Two and Three: The Left and Right Hands II
Casey McKinney
Turn back the clock a few months and artist Jesse Bransford and I are fretting away a morning at his studio in Long Island City, NY (hungover, listening to The Jam, eating egg sandwiches, being boys), trying to stretch a deadline for a collaboration on “death” for John Russell’s book series, Frozen Tears 3. It’s my own excuse to finally tackle a subject I’ve wanted to address since last summer––father, son, and ghost themes in Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park, Dennis Cooper’s God Jr., and (cough) James Joyce’s Ulysses. Bransford is drawing, I’m writing.
The studio is set up for a perfect play on Ulysses’ Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan’s tower apartment on Dublin’s Sandymount Strand––replete with a rooftop, urban waterfront overlook, and a spiral staircase—engendering discussion of the omphalos (the navel chord stretching back in time), a metaphor for the mystical ties of papal succession and the Eucharistitc consubstantiation of the father, son, and holy spirit––that masculine trinity which eclipsed the natural heathen triad of father, mother, and child. I end up going on for 10,000 words (see Russell’s book––still forthcoming). Here, in this essay there is much less room, and there are obvious omissions from that session to be amended. Bransford has taken the lead in correcting those with his follow-up large scale wall drawing for Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Of Two and Three: The Left and Right Hands II.
The big ghost, the elephant in the corner that haunted our FT3 collaborative project was the lack of female representation, which of course was acknowledged, but wasn’t the point. The FT3 essay referenced works that were at least peripherally gay-themed (the least so in Cooper’s novel), and therefore, even with no mention of women, perhaps inferred a focus on difference. The Luce Irigaray kind––a feminist argument for the subjectivity that isn’t “one.” Still, then the question becomes, “well is it binary instead?” Irigaray, the former Lacanian student (and therefore once Freudian, guilt by association) would still say (yes and) no. There are multiplicities in sexuality, gender, and beyond that can’t be accounted for in the phallogocentric Freudian model.
Since Bransford began doing large mural installations several years ago, his work has dealt with perception and the limitations of space he has been afforded to work in, from smaller galleries to the vastness of UCLA’s Hammer Museum staircase entrance. As a sculptor begins by thinking about materials involved––the bronze, marble, etc––Bransford first becomes accustomed to his space, and only then starts playing with optics in a diagrammatic, mathematical context––which of course may be construed as more masculine control, yet his subject matter has always taken the less normative, more apocryphal paths to knowledge.
A guiding influence has been the subject of alchemy. While some criticism links Bransford to recent popular neo-gothic themes of art via heavy metal iconography and Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) fantastical symbolism, as he has matured, he is discovering that his earlier (admittedly fun, teen latent) fascinations have taken on a more substantive meaning. Just as the process of alchemy developed from the once literal pursuit of creating gold from base materials into a spiritual tool for adepts to transform the human condition, Bransford’s sometimes almost rote, cryptic signs have garnered a deeper, personal, uniquely subjective significance.
Though promising not to focus on actual personal matters (what good fellow secret society man would...haha...), if one looks carefully and reads the mural (yes read it––though it is not obvious), the piece refers to male/female relationships. It is an avoidance of the monad, a play on symmetries, and a refutation of what was once a helpful tautology for Bransford: Plotinus’ (and Meister Eckhart’s subsequent Neo-Platonic) systematic condensation of all matter into “The One.” These once heretical notions, which challenged the concepts of the Christian trinity, play into a more modern-day, Hawking-esque concept of the birth of the universe from the Big Bang for the artist. As all chemical elements can be derived from hydrogen, all that we now know of, materially, may have emanated from one miniscule egg-like singularity. Yet, juxtaposing Einstein-Rosen bridges (black holes) and modern string theory, which allows for up to nine dimensions (plus time) and perhaps unseen Lovecraftian parallel universes, such reductions get tricky at best.
Walking into the room that houses Bransford’s Of Two and Three: The Left and Right Hands II, one encounters two alchemical vessels situated in opposing corners. It is impossible to see each in their proper resolutions simultaneously no matter where one stands. On the left is a Hermetic icon of the alchemical trinity, often represented as a tree (tree of knowledge). The right vessel represents the chemical wedding, in which male and female elements are married into a hermaphroditic state. “They fuck each other, then become one another, then die and are reborn,” Bransford has suggested offhandedly. In the middle of the room is a D & D representation of the universe. The central globe is the universe as we know it with its various galaxy clusters. The segmented ring, which encircles the globe represents all of mankind’s various religious belief systems. While above and below are disks symbolizing positive energy and dark matter framed against the powdery material of the aether. By setting a 20th century D& D graphic against 15th alchemical century etchings, the mind is tricked into combining them into a symmetrical triad.
Bransford has studied 15th-18th century science since his undergraduate tenure, receiving two degrees from The New School, NY in both fine art and the history of technology, and has settled into particular affinities for Goethe’s color theory and Newtonian optics. Today, people still may argue about David Hockney’s theories concerning Renaissance painting and the use of the camera lucida, yet no one disputes the confluent, perhaps reciprocal burst of knowledge in all areas of the humanities from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.
Scientists currently rely on our seeming vast resources of technology to “see” cloud nebulae; those fantastic colors that Hubble sends back aren’t red, blue, or green in reality, but are only the red-shifted valuations of energy emissions. Likewise, as chemistry, physics, and even psychology were first evolving, visual tools were needed to aid research into these territories of the unseen––hence the graphic, highly symbolic illustrations that simultaneously informed the medieval adept and protected against charges of heresy, shrouding science in the obscure ritualistic metaphors of religion.
And things haven’t changed all that much. As late as the 1970s, Irigaray’s challenges to the phallogocentric Freudian model were deemed heretical to conventional psychoanalysis and led to her termination as a professor at the University of Vincennes. True, there are still witch hunts, and sometimes obfuscation has proven helpful. Without alchemy’s hermetic symbolic triad, Hegel would have been lost for his dialectic. Without Hegel, Freud and Lacan would be diminished. But without an open challenge to the lack of feminine representation in the mystic union of three (via theorists like Irigaray), which was integral to the trinity the early alchemists embraced, where do we stand in our knowledge?
Bransford, in his latest work, asks the viewer to slip through a wormhole and mix for a moment with the elements inside. Within are contained the complexities of mother/son dynamics, relationship splits, resolutions, death, and the rebirth of love. The stories there are indeed masked, obfuscated in a masculine way that fears direct, open emotion, but the waters are at least tested. And there is always an out, even if understanding lasts only for a moment, and is emitted tenuously, scattered, garbled as Stephen Hawking would say, on the other side.
For reference:
Cooper, Dennis. God Jr., New York: Black Cat, 2005.
Easton Ellis, Brett. Lunar Park, New York: Knopf, 2005.
Eckhart, Meister. Selected Writings, London: Penguin Books, 1994.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York, Avon, 1980.
Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time. New York: Bantam, 1998.
Hegel, Georg. Phenomenology of the Spirit. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Hockney, David. Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters. New York: Studio Books, 2001.
Irigaray, Luce. I Love to You; Sketch of A Possible Felicity in History. London: Routledge, 1995.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York:Vintage; Reissue edition, 1990.
Lacan, Jaques. Ecrits. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.
Plotinus. The Enneads. New York: Penguin Classics; Reprint, Abridged edition, 1991.
Russell, John, ed. Frozen Tears III, London: forthcoming fall 2006.
Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum
Santa Barbara California
April 8 - 13 May, 2006
Feature Inc.
New York, New York
Installation at Feature Inc. (Destroyed).
Collection of Juliet Jacobson.
Of Two and Three (The Left and Right Hands II), 2006, Dimensions variable, Latex and graphite on wall.
Installation at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum (Destroyed).
Of Two and Three: The Left and Right Hands II
Casey McKinney
Turn back the clock a few months and artist Jesse Bransford and I are fretting away a morning at his studio in Long Island City, NY (hungover, listening to The Jam, eating egg sandwiches, being boys), trying to stretch a deadline for a collaboration on “death” for John Russell’s book series, Frozen Tears 3. It’s my own excuse to finally tackle a subject I’ve wanted to address since last summer––father, son, and ghost themes in Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park, Dennis Cooper’s God Jr., and (cough) James Joyce’s Ulysses. Bransford is drawing, I’m writing.
The studio is set up for a perfect play on Ulysses’ Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan’s tower apartment on Dublin’s Sandymount Strand––replete with a rooftop, urban waterfront overlook, and a spiral staircase—engendering discussion of the omphalos (the navel chord stretching back in time), a metaphor for the mystical ties of papal succession and the Eucharistitc consubstantiation of the father, son, and holy spirit––that masculine trinity which eclipsed the natural heathen triad of father, mother, and child. I end up going on for 10,000 words (see Russell’s book––still forthcoming). Here, in this essay there is much less room, and there are obvious omissions from that session to be amended. Bransford has taken the lead in correcting those with his follow-up large scale wall drawing for Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Of Two and Three: The Left and Right Hands II.
The big ghost, the elephant in the corner that haunted our FT3 collaborative project was the lack of female representation, which of course was acknowledged, but wasn’t the point. The FT3 essay referenced works that were at least peripherally gay-themed (the least so in Cooper’s novel), and therefore, even with no mention of women, perhaps inferred a focus on difference. The Luce Irigaray kind––a feminist argument for the subjectivity that isn’t “one.” Still, then the question becomes, “well is it binary instead?” Irigaray, the former Lacanian student (and therefore once Freudian, guilt by association) would still say (yes and) no. There are multiplicities in sexuality, gender, and beyond that can’t be accounted for in the phallogocentric Freudian model.
Since Bransford began doing large mural installations several years ago, his work has dealt with perception and the limitations of space he has been afforded to work in, from smaller galleries to the vastness of UCLA’s Hammer Museum staircase entrance. As a sculptor begins by thinking about materials involved––the bronze, marble, etc––Bransford first becomes accustomed to his space, and only then starts playing with optics in a diagrammatic, mathematical context––which of course may be construed as more masculine control, yet his subject matter has always taken the less normative, more apocryphal paths to knowledge.
A guiding influence has been the subject of alchemy. While some criticism links Bransford to recent popular neo-gothic themes of art via heavy metal iconography and Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) fantastical symbolism, as he has matured, he is discovering that his earlier (admittedly fun, teen latent) fascinations have taken on a more substantive meaning. Just as the process of alchemy developed from the once literal pursuit of creating gold from base materials into a spiritual tool for adepts to transform the human condition, Bransford’s sometimes almost rote, cryptic signs have garnered a deeper, personal, uniquely subjective significance.
Though promising not to focus on actual personal matters (what good fellow secret society man would...haha...), if one looks carefully and reads the mural (yes read it––though it is not obvious), the piece refers to male/female relationships. It is an avoidance of the monad, a play on symmetries, and a refutation of what was once a helpful tautology for Bransford: Plotinus’ (and Meister Eckhart’s subsequent Neo-Platonic) systematic condensation of all matter into “The One.” These once heretical notions, which challenged the concepts of the Christian trinity, play into a more modern-day, Hawking-esque concept of the birth of the universe from the Big Bang for the artist. As all chemical elements can be derived from hydrogen, all that we now know of, materially, may have emanated from one miniscule egg-like singularity. Yet, juxtaposing Einstein-Rosen bridges (black holes) and modern string theory, which allows for up to nine dimensions (plus time) and perhaps unseen Lovecraftian parallel universes, such reductions get tricky at best.
Bransford has studied 15th-18th century science since his undergraduate tenure, receiving two degrees from The New School, NY in both fine art and the history of technology, and has settled into particular affinities for Goethe’s color theory and Newtonian optics. Today, people still may argue about David Hockney’s theories concerning Renaissance painting and the use of the camera lucida, yet no one disputes the confluent, perhaps reciprocal burst of knowledge in all areas of the humanities from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.
Scientists currently rely on our seeming vast resources of technology to “see” cloud nebulae; those fantastic colors that Hubble sends back aren’t red, blue, or green in reality, but are only the red-shifted valuations of energy emissions. Likewise, as chemistry, physics, and even psychology were first evolving, visual tools were needed to aid research into these territories of the unseen––hence the graphic, highly symbolic illustrations that simultaneously informed the medieval adept and protected against charges of heresy, shrouding science in the obscure ritualistic metaphors of religion.
And things haven’t changed all that much. As late as the 1970s, Irigaray’s challenges to the phallogocentric Freudian model were deemed heretical to conventional psychoanalysis and led to her termination as a professor at the University of Vincennes. True, there are still witch hunts, and sometimes obfuscation has proven helpful. Without alchemy’s hermetic symbolic triad, Hegel would have been lost for his dialectic. Without Hegel, Freud and Lacan would be diminished. But without an open challenge to the lack of feminine representation in the mystic union of three (via theorists like Irigaray), which was integral to the trinity the early alchemists embraced, where do we stand in our knowledge?
Bransford, in his latest work, asks the viewer to slip through a wormhole and mix for a moment with the elements inside. Within are contained the complexities of mother/son dynamics, relationship splits, resolutions, death, and the rebirth of love. The stories there are indeed masked, obfuscated in a masculine way that fears direct, open emotion, but the waters are at least tested. And there is always an out, even if understanding lasts only for a moment, and is emitted tenuously, scattered, garbled as Stephen Hawking would say, on the other side.
For reference:
Cooper, Dennis. God Jr., New York: Black Cat, 2005.
Easton Ellis, Brett. Lunar Park, New York: Knopf, 2005.
Eckhart, Meister. Selected Writings, London: Penguin Books, 1994.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York, Avon, 1980.
Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time. New York: Bantam, 1998.
Hegel, Georg. Phenomenology of the Spirit. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Hockney, David. Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters. New York: Studio Books, 2001.
Irigaray, Luce. I Love to You; Sketch of A Possible Felicity in History. London: Routledge, 1995.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York:Vintage; Reissue edition, 1990.
Lacan, Jaques. Ecrits. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.
Plotinus. The Enneads. New York: Penguin Classics; Reprint, Abridged edition, 1991.
Russell, John, ed. Frozen Tears III, London: forthcoming fall 2006.
