WOID XVIII-8. Review: Carping Tunnel Vision.

Sunday, November 4, 2007 10:50 am

Envy and Stupidity make a deadly combination in association with Ignorance; I can’t do much about the first two, but at least I can help with the third. Larmee’s design, entitled “Guns” is a nice combination of visual sophistication and political forthrightness.

In the notes to his doctoral dissertation Karl Marx noted that “Positivist philosophy is only capable of requirements and tendencies whose form contradicts their meaning.” The curse of all positivisms (including those that like to pass for marxist) is a distrust of all form in culture; in the visual arts that distrust often takes the form of an opposition of text and image. In “Guns,” Larmee sets text and image along two parallel horizontal tracks - parallel, perhaps, but straining against one another in a slight vertical offset that gives the viewer’s reading of the work an asymmetric, energetic propulsion from left to right:

Consciously or not, Larmee has structured his design along a series of interlocking rectangles built around the Golden Ratio:

Note the three horizontal lines formed by the half-square, the square, and the harmonious rectangle built from the two preceding: in each case the vertical enhances the three foregrounded faces, while the diagonal movement that constructs the rectangle brings the viewer’s eye down and up and rightwards, so that the movement of the viewer’s eye (la marche du regard in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art theory), passes through a brilliantly orchestrated dialectic of color contrasts, brown to orange, orange to green, green to blue, with the intense red of “monsters” setting up the final, clausula-like rectangle.

This work has been attacked for its “message"; that’s not surprising since all the positivisms of the right and left are incapable of grasping culture as anything but “superstructural,” a vehicle for the “realer” message. It's this inability that drives our positivist critics into the arms of idealism, to the argument that “Guns” does not “represent,” is not “transparent” enough; that the “message” conveyed is unclear, or if clear, is not the “right,” the “ideal” message. It would require a particular blindness not to grasp Larmee’s cultural reference in “Guns” to that fixture of American popular culture, the teenager turned monster. Curious that our leftist critics attacked Larmee as if he opposed all guns in general – it’s like blaming Peter Parker for his spider powers. To say that “Guns turn us into monsters” is not to say that guns themselves are bad, or good, or to pick up that old line about people killing people. It is to say that the cost of violence, even legitimate, is very, very high. The dynamic, probing forward movement of Larmee’s visual organization runs parallel, also, to a probing, open-ended argument about the real nature of political violence. Those who cannot fathom Larmee’s visual logic will naturally despise his political logic as well.

- Paul Werner.