Everything Touches Everything: Matthew Rose’s Suicide Specials

Everything Touches Everything: Matthew Rose’s Suicide Specials

By Joseph Nechvatal

Published at

http://artillerymag.com/everything-touches-everything/

Matthew Rose, “Suicide Special” (2013) collage on paper, 51.5 cm x 34 cm

“Our whole purpose was to integrate objects from the world of machines and industry in the

world of art. Our typographical collages or montages set out to achieve this by imposing, on

something which could only be produced by hand, the appearances of something that had

been entirely composed by a machine; in an imaginative composition, we used to bring

together elements borrowed form books, newspapers, posters, or leaflets, in an

arrangement that no machine could yet compose.”

-Hannah Höch on Dada Photo Montage

Hannah Höch, “Love” (1931)

Matthew Rose’s collages do not point me at Hannah Höch’s machine world, nor at the

organic world, but rather, towards the full nothingness that I have discovered in cyberspace.

It is neither surprising nor coincidental that Rose has picked up on epistemological changes

in art and art theory that follow connectionist developments inherent in hyper-media.

It is a well worn cliché by now that we live in the era of information overload.

Rose’s perspective on, and use of, the vast pool of connected-yet-unconnected free-floating

pop images around him, allows him to question the legitimacy of commonly held beliefs and

the forgone conclusions established concerning the theoretical issues of sexual politics,

multiculturalism, gender studies, and the far-reaching heterogeneous philosophical critique

of the cultural mechanisms of representation which have preceded it. Familiarity may not

always breed contempt, exactly; but it does tend to inspire complacency. We are tempted

to overlook, to take for granted, what has become blatantly familiar, no matter how odd it is

in itself. We may look and register the presence of something without really seeing or

understanding it. Isn’t that a basic working premise of pop collage?

It is clear that for Matthew Rose, like Höch, collage is still synonymous with some

imperative promise of liberation: not only aesthetic liberation, but social, political, and even,

it seems, what I might call metaphysical liberation. But what about Rose and pop collage as

an enchanted form of psychoanalysis? No. What about Rose and pop transference situated,

not on an analyst's couch, but within the imitative gestations of collage? No. No. What

about Rose and the noisy yet dreamy flow of pop images conjured up by the global

enthusiasm for digital communications and their visual free floating signifiers that circulate

by interface? Yes.

The personal computer has created for us all an affinity with fragmented visual and textual

vignettes linked by nothing and everything. Rose, has picked up on this nomadic attention

and, by scanning and plucking from the spread of visual representation around us, takes

advantage of today's virtual image saturation; a saturation so dense that it fails to

communicate anything particular at all (except perhaps it’s overall incomprehensible sense

of ripe delirium) as the reproduction system pulses with higher and higher, faster and faster

flows of representational images to the point of near hysteria. Networked computers offer

collage the promise of a near mythical future in which anything and everything will be

immediately available to touch anything and everything else.

Specifically, in Rose’s small format collage on paper series Suicide Specials (2013), he

seems to offer me an appropriately decadent regard on our social media environment. This

collage series, for me, embodies the arbitrary nature of all signs grouped with other signs.

Here he subverts the socially controlled systems of meanings, and so, offers me the

opportunity for the creation of applicable anti-social signs (absurd anti-signs) which may

continue to mentally move and multiply. Thus his Suicide Specials provides a fundamental

antithesis to the authoritarian, mechanical, simulated rigidities of the controlling technical

world. My experience of them, as a group, has an almost transcendental dimension. They

appear to me ritualistic. I would suggest that perhaps beneath the collaged established signs

that Rose selects and makes touch each other, another deeper discourse is at work which

recalls a time of sacrificial phenomena.

Suicide Specials seems, to me, structurally located as an activity that abstracts from a

material order an aesthetically disembodied spirituality. It lifts the spiritual from

institutional authority to individual disposability. This happens beneath the interplay of

their precisely delineated distinctions. Rose brings sacrificial similitude to the sign that

ultimately erases assigned singularity. His series title Suicide Specials suggests as much, and

to me, it seems clear that he invested the life or death of human imagination in the outcome.

Suicide Specials evokes body and void, corporality as simulation - meaning Suicide Specials

has signs of withdrawal from the direct circumstances of their original presentation and

portrayal. This paradox accounts for much of the naked potency of his art.

The Suicide Specials series is elaborate, heady, intricately composed, grotesque and

artificial. It makes the familiar world of the simulation seem chaotic; annihilating the

rejected, the external, the given, in our minds with Nietzschean slyness. It is an art of

circulating forms that represents the de-centered ideological space inherent in the

postmodern sensibility. These hybrid and perplexing sacrificial compositions open up a

territory of arcane spiritual signification and de-territorialized meanings. They act as ciphers

of the harrowed mind.

The collages suggest the ritual potential of social re-configuration that subsumes our

previous world of simulation/representation into a nexus of touching-linked observations of

the outer world with extractions of deep human mentality. This is what I appreciate most

about the collages of Matthew Rose in our time of a widespread surveillance, our sense of

staleness, futility and artistic disenchantment. They have an almost romantic reference to a

deep time; a shadow life of nonverbal existence that moves me internally, beyond my own

place and situation, and allows me the possibilities of fresh insight into art and life. I can

imagine his art as a place of asylum. Or it is a place of metaphysical solidarity with

everything. It is a world of glue and seduction.

Suicide Specials collages have misleading existential claims as their sentential surrogates (or

general proposals which lack specificity) and therefore remain only sentential. Rose

consciously exploits unfulfilled expectations by elaborating existing representational

tradition to the point of apparent dissolution. As a model of conversion, Rose visualizes

change with his employing of existing convention on one hand, and it's negation of them on

the other; denying normal grounds of interpretation and reception.

With the Suicide Specials collages, I see a groundless surface as the dominant image. They

have become terminally polluted with the collapse of once fundamental distinctions, the

collapse of meaning (and the subject) through over circulation, and loss of meaningful

context. Depth in such a surface-based art as collage, survives and becomes condensed and

enfolded behind and beside the flat picture plane, granting me an aesthetic experience

vertical in nature.

If what I have said sounds metaphysical, it is metaphysical only in so far as it is memory,

intensity, and stratosphere all working together in making up an internal model of the self.

As we know, a sacrifice is for expressing thankfulness or atonement.

In our era of frenzied late-capitalist circulation of signs, Rose’s Suicide Specials create for

me an almost erotic transference of voluptuous reverence that takes place beyond the point

of consumption. These are spoiled images.


His symbolically spoiled and sacrificial collaged images cuts up the corporal in a private

ceremony that glues delight to the grave. So, for me, there is an intimate psychic elevation

here by means of the sensual. There is an invocation to the life force here, codified through

the physical actions of cutting and pasting. These cuts and pastes symbolize an often

cryptic and fugitive strength that is fundamentally reflective of what I widely understand as

sprit. This dual commitment to corporality and abstraction is what gives the work its

prestige.

In the Suicide Specials, Rose mixes and weaves composition into a rich mix of contending

elements, the order and significance of which can be recovered only through an effort at

comprehension. The works are embodiments of texts (in the Barth sense). They call upon

me to interpret the various elements of the composition, reading the chaotic and conflicting

details. Although I can almost draw their parts into a coherent whole, they still retain a

provocative discord or irritation; tantalizing me towards something (a meaning, a resolution)

withheld in the work.

The work’s cuts and pastes theorizes principles of linkages, of connectivity, and the

intersection of everything; giving rise to theoretical production and creativity. Quite the

opposite of making me consider suicide, these assemblages of appropriation suggest an

almost decipherable meaning that transforms their pop form in favor of a higher

psychologically and spiritually grounded subtext. My mind is stimulated to aspire to a

unity of ideas that is only implied in the work of art. Only by penetrating the significance

of the various details, does the organization of the compositions make some sense to me.

Rose’s Suicide Specials are a rejection of the contemporary world and it's values. Perhaps

that is suicidal. But it represents, to me, a thrusting beyond all existing boundaries.

The Suicide Specials are complex and asymmetrical, mirroring my own fleeting impressions

that constitute the movement of my consciousness, the perpetual weaving and unweaving

of myself. My own cuts and pastes.

Additionally, his work captures the complexity and turbulence of our age, as it is not a

reductive concept or practice, but a diagnostic one. His is the revelation of a higher order

hidden in the overexposed pop image.

Rose’s Suicide Specials emphasize for me joy, death, tantalization and provocation. They

seem to dwell upon the joyful pain and longing that is symptomatic of our time where no

state is permanent. All is open to rearrangement in a society where there is no distance

between categories of images any longer. Rose’s Suicide Specials emphasize this outlook

while forcing on me an intellectual re-creation of form in my mind. Indeed, to my eye,

within the borders of his collaged spectacle, Rose’s tottering and circuitous fabrications

automatically hasten my own elaborate visual irrationality. Consequently, Rose’s collages

lead me to a teeming process of rational expurgation through visual excess. They lead me to

scenes of elation mixed with tremendous dread, and can, at times, be ethically evasive, as

they seem more concerned with the unfathomable, the sublimity of pessimism, the

disappointment of failed rationality, the horror of a bottomless human nature, and the

wonderful terror of the empty fullness around us.

Everything Touches Everything: Matthew Rose’s Suicide Specials

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