RICKELS' ESSAY Crockett Fortune Katz Pearlstein Robinson Shaw Tapola Weaver Welch

For the time being we leave our evolution to our machines, but we must also still serve as the genitals and life support of the machines that continue to develop and change for us. As genealogy of the media -- the meditations and the means of human being, evolution comes complete with constitutive interruptions, gaps, so-called missing links. This is a precision fit with the way the breakdown of mourning always admits, via the narcissistic and psychotic conditions or conditionings of the melancholic retention span, the frontal shot of direct connection with our technologization. What's thus put through also passes through the link that's missing.

The ghosts of missing links, lost generations, mutations have come and gone by the name aura. For Walter Benjamin it's the cult, the relay of ritual, that control-releases the parting shot of aura. Ken Weaver accelerates the synchronic selection work the either - aura-- of technomutation and degeneration to arrive at a reception of media that's internal to the image: in conclusion ...paintings should be generated from reproductions of photographically projected reproductions rather than reproductions of photographs. I am interested in representing the electronic degeneration of a reproduction which occurs when a film on video tape "projected' through a television is fast forwarded, rewound, paused, photographed, then projected onto a canvas. I paint from this mechanically reincarnated photograph.

Technology becomes the missing link in the series of mutations across the losses in generation.

In Weaver's sex education manual series there were photo finish models -- it just takes two per image of reproductive fun -- that were scrambling for the positions in the prehistory of each painting. The sex education manual (which by metonomy and absence suggests that the missing link that just has to be added is the hands - on approach for masturbation) already epistomologizes reproduction by faking the connection, the same one that pulls out for overexposure or surveillance at the other extreme of fakery or pedagogy, namely in porno. In the how-to it's all positions and no erections, please. In porno it's all the seed to be believed, its not the man. In both cases what we see is what we forget in the true-love reproductions. The paintings alight at the end of a tunnel of technomutation gleaming with the masterpiece black-on-white brushstrokes of Manet or Kline: these alien blob beings, the twin orbs, they are us. Weaver reclaims in his most current work UFO projections as the group portraits of the missing link -- to our own ongoing technologicalization.

Living life as a tube, one looks at life from both sides now. The past and the present are both lights at the end of the tunnel. You are the missing link between these two worlds ... The flying saucers are back, hovering spectral bodies of the skies. We awaken to the fact that yes we are those creatures that pass through the walls, those oversized alien eyes are mirrors, we look at ourselves looking at ourselves, and we are horrified.

Sometimes a great notion, like that of aura, from Benjamin to Andy Warhol and Shirley Maclaine, comes down to the half life of the original or the authentic. That's the internal shift that goes down with the death drive of replication. The photos of ancestors still offer retrenching for and around the projective flickering of aura. In the New Age, the aura of the subject (of technology), the space time coordinates of relations with the other, where symptoms or histories get projected and contained, becomes so videomatic and cyberspecial. But what was current only to be gone again, also comes back. This conjugation of present and past tenses proceeds more rapid-fire than ever now that the manic metabolism of recycling has been brought back to consciousness in the 90's. Thus Weaver switched channels from the 70's from the glorification and demonization of the other's bad taste (which packs a peristaltic resistance to what's going down) to the 80's channel of channeling which developed new standards of interiority or outer-bodiment that admitted all non machinic impulses of technologization in a fetal surrounda-world of good taste or no taste whatsoever. First there was the copy- formatted mutational photo-degenerate subject given the old one - two of masterful painterly reproduction and rest in one piece. On the brighter side of the New Age or death drive, it's the Kiss look, the video hello that emerges in the shift from black and white to color, a shift first undertaken over the body of Linda Blair's scream memories. Via this run through of the exorcise program the first recognizable live transmissions begin making it to the other side in Weaver's work. Through the work of exorcism a first landing strip gets folded out, (the welcoming carpet that hits the floor in the abbreviated discourse of real estate advertising in local papers as crpt of CRYPT). What lands on this strip are the UFO visitations, the channeling possessions or depossessions, the primal submissions of the humanoid to wedding service as fuckdolly for alien consummation.

When in Totem and Taboo Freud equates every person who dies with the vampire, the corpse animated by the survivor's repressed death wish, a wish that is, via projection, the phantom's telecommand, he sets up a series of relays (and delays) that will network his theories of projection and identification and of their alternating alterations within the destiny of the ego with the technology of mediatic projections and the cryptology of incorporations. This is how Freud began building up the group, the group-of-one, as a haunted site of reception of the undead in a context or contest between mourning and unmourning, substitution or circulation and recycling. Where there's an impediment to mourning there's haunting, and there's the opening of the inside view of our ongoing technologization and group psychologization. The foundation of Freud's second system thus came to be laid -- but the ghost not.

For Jim Shaw what goes wrong with the narcissist is his double-or- nothing commitment to couplification or reflection. The external, vampiric route checks narcissism in at a group rate that does not require the superintendance of a host or ghost or reflected other.

I did one comic strip piece that's a version of the legend of Narcissus. He's frozen by this pond until a vampire sucks his blood out, which caused his reflection to go away. He's free to become a vampire himself and intermingle with people, and finally overcome his narcissism, So maybe that's what I'm doing -- overcoming my narcissism by becoming a vampire.

Shaw the vampire declares open season and sesame on the seemingly endless resource and reserve supply of the dream and puts psychoanalysis to good use as guide book through the vampiric nightly reflex of the unconscious. But there are also two degrees of difference separating Shaw's work from that of same old surrealism. One, his unconscious packs and endopsychic rapport with technologization, and, two, the carrier of this unconscious is neither the individual nor the couple (the two it takes to conduct, say, individual therapy), but the group, the teen group-of-one, always the accessory after the fact to the special introductory offer of every new gadget. The adolescent experiences everything in reproduction, in funereal downscale, in the technoformatting of sameness, of likeability. This assembly line of simulation is the only means available for keeping up with the teen's prematurely rich interiority and insight. Shaw's work bares reference to some other place, "but restated,"as he puts it, "in adolescent terms, scale, and materials." Teen or group reception only raises an abjection, Bevis and Butthead style, to what's on. But the polymorphous publicity teen reception gives libido is not genitally nor visually centered up and down the upright body or whole object. As the myth of Osiris already bears out the libidinal corpus without a genital center is the resurrected or reanimated body. Freud's first discovery of the transference, l largely over the acting-out and splitting body of his teen patient Dora, sought first analogues with the printing and reprinting medium of "cliches"it is this papered realm within which the melancholic take alternates with an overcoming of thôe one way bond with loss by following the upbeat of vampiric modes of self creation out of preexisting phases, phrases and transferences. Before computer graphics proved quicker to the draw, Shaw drew on animation for a living, contributing motion graphics, for example, for the horror classic Nightmare on Elm Street, IV. The line given animation is a stroke above the while-object incorporations that, for example, made the figures of Snow White and Prince Charming in Disney's film so compelling, so uncanny. When it's a draw, the objects are only part objects, are only parting. But the wholesomeness of computer graphics will form a more perfect union in Shaw's explorations of vampire-technologized narcissism beyond the lag and gag of jumpcut incorporations, without the wear and tear of editing, suture, or teeth marks. The self portraits of the artist as super hero appearing and disappearing in a flash begin Shaw's forced entry into cyberspecialization.

December 1995