John Perreault: Pataphysician
Robert C. Morgan
John Perreault
has always struggled to separate the things he likes to do from the things he
does best. In this way, he maintains a discrete repertory of objects, words,
and events. He writes poetry. He writes criticism. And he makes serious art that
appears flippant. He makes paintings with toothpaste and does performances on
the street. He is a kind of cause celebre, a total artist , or — as the
writer Richard Kostelanetz would say —“a polyartist.” The category
of art-making (which is not really a category) is lesser known in the oeuvre
of Perreault than his writing. It is lesser known unless the reader has been
around New York for at least three and a half decades, observing how eventually
everything gets repeated.
Before I get into
this, I would like to say a few things about Alfred Jarry — an artist who
lived and worked in Paris more than a century ago. I don’t want to overdo
the analogy — or for that matter, the apologia — but Perreault, like
Jarry, is a kind of quirky genius, an urban cultural renegade, bent on originality.
When I think of Perreault working away in his East village flat, I am reminded
of Alfred Jarry more than a century ago, living in his tiny attic without heat
or running water, hovering over pen and paper, making scribbles and writing plays,
novels, and delightful, if not insouciant scatological poems. Jarry’s discourse,
as it were, was filled with nasty sentiments, solipsistic meanderings, torturous
obsessions, and endless toothpicks. Were he resurrected today, he might encounter
the same trifling academics and vindictive egotists, filled with rancor, putrefaction,
and deceit that lived in Paris during La Belle Époque.
“Absurd!”
I hear the poststructuralists shout! “Why resurrect that frothy bohemian
n’er do well? He is not one of us!” Indeed, the academic theorists
have a point! Who needs intimacy in art today with all the vapid spectacles buzzing
around the Guggenheim? Who needs to feel anything anymore? Yet it would be pretentious
if I said that Jarry’s audacity fits the character of Perreault, because
it doesn’t. Whereas Perreault may be a genius in the mild sense of the word
— more like Barry Manilow in hip-hop — fiendish Jarry distrusted the
sentiments of the cultural elite, l’haut bourgeoisie, as it were. He chose
to become an arcane linguist, stridently investigating the cavities of language.
(That’s what happens when you open your mouth!) Then, in order to codify
his revenge against the rising middle class, this willful French Bohemian labeled
himself a “pataphysician.”
For those unfamiliar
with Jarry’s theory of pataphysics, let me say that it is different than
metaphysics. Pataphysics carries a more defiant demeanor with a pariah tendency
toward overdetermining one’s repressive impulses. For Jarry, the pataphysicist
was the artist in exorbitant transit, the perennial cyclist propelling his spokes
twixt the air of physics and the desperation of the senses. In many ways, all
of this is beside the point. Who cares about Jarry’s spokes? And furthermore,
John Perreault is not Jarry and Jarry is certainly not John Perreault. But the
equivalence is interesting from the point of view of pataphsyics. To be in the
midst of a gravitation pull away from reality while resisting the sensory appellation
of art is no mean feat. It can be both exhausting and exhilarating.
Now I don’t
mean to denigrate toothpaste as an artistic medium. But I would insist that B.
P. (Before Perreault), the medium was hardly known in terms other than hygienic
or cosmetic. Does it qualify as a Pop medium? Perhaps. There are those who would
claim that Perreault belongs to Minimal Pop, but I have never heard this claim
made by the artist himself. (I must say that it is difficult not to stare at
the artist’s teeth while he is describing his intentions.) Again, this is
not to disclaim his seriousness. One cannot assume that because toothpaste is
available to everyone in the same way that anyone can go into an art supply store
and purchase a tube of paint , that it is not a legitimate medium. (I am, of
course, coarsely quoting Duchamp from Apropos of Readymades, 1961.)
What sets Perreault
apart from the fray is his attempt to deal with the medium aesthetically, that
is, to experience and investigate the medium in terms of its inherent chemical
and polychrome potential. There is, indeed, beauty inherent in most everything,
but not quite everything. Also, let’s face it — how many painters have
never considered the connection between squeezing a tube of toothpaste and squeezing
a tube of paint? If it has not occurred to them on a conscious level, it has
certainly occurred on an unconscious one. Personally, I love Perreault’s
“toothpaste tondos.” but I would not renege on one of his wall paintings,
such as the fabulous installation he did recently at the 7th Floor Gallery at
473 Broadway.
The fact is that
Perreault has a great sense of color and he recognizes the limitations of the
medium in terms of the color available. Also, he is a frugal artist — what
the late film-maker Emile di Antonio used to call “an economy of means.”
For example, Jasper Johns painted a bronze cast of a Savarin Coffee can holding
a bunch of brushes in turpentine in 1960. In doing so, Johns made a point that
the means for making a paining could also be its subject matter. Does this sound
Neo-Marxism? Quasi-Marxism? I don’t think so. It was just another case of
the Signifier and the Signified playing themselves out over a cup of coffee.
Perreault does something similar with his Colgate toothpaste boxes. Not to imply
that he is stuck only on Colgate, but he uses the boxes as Minimal tropes by
stacking them on the floor or shelving them on the wall like miniature minarets;
thus, Perreault uses the means (the container, the signifier) as an ends after
the fact, after the production of the tondo or the wall painting. These clever
“stacks” of toothpaste tube containers function both like the Johns
and a little like a Warhol — specifically, the Brillo boxes. Perreault is
frugal because nothing is overlooked. Everything counts within the realm of his
aesthetic.
He had a dream
one night that he went to the mirror in the bathroom and saw toothpaste on his
face like war paint and thus decided to make a photograph of himself in that
state of appearance. The dream was realized both as a mailer for an exhibition
and as a performance piece in a hot tub in San Francisco. Frankly, the hot tub
piece had the look of a Die Brucke painting from 1910. What impressed me even
further was how close Perreault comes to being a pataphysician in the act of
applying the toothpaste. He extends reality through science but always on the
edge of sensory delight, always in transsit between the two — the reality
and the delight, the speed within the cyclical repetition, thus disguising the
fact of motion through illusion. It is precisely within the oscillation of fact
and illusion that I locate these marvelous toothpaste paintings of Perreault.
He functions on the intimate level of art to give the spectacle a serious intonation,
yet a playful one as well. We escape the drudgery of reality in these paintings.
Perreault offers a stroke of genius that brings us back not only to the expressive
impulses of the body, but also to the emotional delight in discovering who we
are in spite of all the distractions so endemic to the virtual age.copyright
2003 Robert C. Morgan
