The Dream of Reason Brings Forth a Monster
Tim S. Brown
Voltaire took great pleasure in building straw men from the excessive personalities on parade during his time. He would stand the straw men on their heads and with barbed wit cut to ribbons their self-serving and simple visions of the world. With that same skill he dissected the clowns posing as royals. He displayed their guts to be made of confectionary toad stools. He built a roster of imbeciles in order to fully burn them in effigy. Aidas Baraikis has taken a similar turn in our own age of foolhardy men.
Bareikis has been witness to grandiose plans that crash and burn on the NASCAR tracks of the real world. He was drafted for service in the Soviet war in Afghanistan, a study in futility and destruction ostensibly driven by rational thinking men. We see today how both sides of that war fueled more impacted clown blowback than sense.
The Barekis exhibition at Grand Arts is its own violent eruption of form and color. As if a post-pop Guernica had fallen off a truck, been set free and went on a rampage smashing through a thrift store. This is a high Baroque mash up, certainly not obtuse, too slick or glibly eliding ironic agglomeration. It’s assertive, cogent and not pretty, a mosh-pit of demons, a Wagnerian nightmare.
These are our own grotesqueries at the edge of a party, figuring the off-shore and off-balance-sheet sublime, speaking moments that have no voice. The Bareikis grotto-conflagration is not an academic or dispassionate thing. It is bold and it has power in its directness; a raw power, sonically more folk than chamber orchestra, the first Modern Lovers, the Stooges or the VU. Yes, a mosh-pit in the gallery can be challenging to people expecting anesthesia and safety.
This idiom of cacophony is only a mess if its internal logic fails to muster a sensibility and in the case of The Guard of Sorry Spirit, this is not a decorative or compulsive activity but rather a real and authentic production of sense. It holds together, it works.
Aidas has successfully performed a fugue of clustered avalanched rotten erupting guts in beautifully saturated dense colors of clothing, string and deserata. By the same token that Rauschenberg’s Monogram said "the painting need not hold its plane and hell, the painting can hold my goat," so The Guard of Sorry Spirit, is a voluptuous horror of color and form, a painting outside the rules that never took on a frame, never needed one.
It stands self-sufficient, complete and in the viewer’s face without need of either redemption or the distance of irony; a practice of something different than resignation, reproduction or refusal. Akin to what Hebdidge explained from the punk generation: a strategy to invert the commodity logic in spectacle and take pleasure in that perversion of the normative, a rewriting strategy of upending the rules. Revulsion in that context becomes the revelation, the index, of indoctrination. To be revolted tips off one’s own position in the economy of reason.
There is a power in this pile of stuff that is more than hormonal. It could even be in the category of truth, a rare substance in our swirling hyper-decorative discursive art world. There is possibly more real work in this little forest of Technicolor evil than in 10,000 hours of technocrats on C-Span. One might even dare say, amidst the plague of lawyers on this land, a practice of reason.
