Lunar Follies

JURA MOUNTAINS

A staggered pile, something like a perverted, tortured ziggurat in shape, of fawn-colored bricks, many bricks, much too many to be counted, sprawls across the floor of the Kansas Jura Gallery. The whole is transgressive of something, even subversive, but of what? The piece might be a static representation of an early Stones tune married, gloriously, with a “drone-and-squeal” sound project by the Lombardo Collaborative. The bricks, in their essential posture of gestural, defiant decrepitude, manifest a core transgressive spirit (if “spirit” is not too grandiose a word, and if Jamón is to be given any credence, it is not), one that is rigorously detached from the paradigmatic pieties of the fading Zeitgeist and the late phallo-millennium. The occasional fly that settles on the bricks serves to recall their primary significatory duties, as if these everyday objets are, indeed, no more than horseshit, even though that may be their nominative potential, rather than their constative one. In any event, as signifiers, they gesture toward the salutary emptiness that one discovers in the spaces of a poem by Mallarmé, and never in the words themselves. It is, then, Mallarmé to whom we must turn in order to permit this haunting, oddly rhomboidal construct to assert its cone-like, cubist, empty qualities, qualities which are, at once, always terrible, absent, yet eerily sublime, and, perhaps most movingly, qualities that insist on the absence that is within the implied absence of the brick pile itself. The sun which slants in through the quite perfectly grimy skylight touches the work with the poignancy of nature forgotten if not nature betrayed, nature ignored if not nature assaulted. The silent and somehow disheveled construct seems to emerge, at such times, from the very earth itself, and its stillness is that of the greatest, or, at least, the pleasantly mediocre, works of art.