TONY GARIFALAKIS ENDISM (DOOM SESSIONS)

Mirror Doom Scrolling.

If I was going to write a letter to Mike Kelley, the envelope would be affixed with one of the stamps from the sheet I own with the now deceased Queen’s head iconoclastically erased.[1] Simultaneously more present, the face blackened-out, her eyes peering through a mask-cum-solidified oil slick – no doubt one accidentally yet predictably made by British Petroleum known as the always already horror film that reality titled “Deepwater Horizon”. 

A zombie sheet of stamps as prologue for an epistolary séance. 

To address Kelley via montaged memorial. Christopher LG Hill’s compote of corpse characters, deck chairs and debris standing on lattice waving hello to the soft stuffed lumpenproletariat hiding beneath an oversized crochet blanket. [2] Ashley Crawford’s Gothic candour, beckoning from beyond reminding us that the artwork is a coffin that will not be silent[3]. In order to know, he said, we must take a position.[4] Jean Rollin’s tweaked twins signalling to Cathleen and Colleen Wade from that creepy Arbus photograph taken at that 1966 Christmas party in Roselle, New Jersey transposed to Kubrick’s Shining via Stephen King[5].

A text behaving the algorithm mapping yearning to the monstrous. 

To subvert the sublimate resistant power of patriarchy. No. Day is done is now[6]. No Kings. No Queens. The cosplay insurrection, neither parade nor protest. How to aim. How to attack the flashy face of fascism fawning sycophantic psychopaths. AI slop so slick Body Melt returns as lookmaxxing determined by the PSL Scale zero-to-eight; stop, wink, there is no ten?[7] All for one and one for all nation dipping fat fingers in pies and slimy sugar cake and fatty salami— dolce and kabana. Fanta face, Fanta hair and Jabba the Pizza Hut. Oligarchs left to ogle, with love and thanks to Vincent.[8]

Doom scroll, scroll doom. There is nothing simple about taking a position.[9] Images as a landscape to horror; as we bear witness to yet another genocide and ecocide. That black plastic preparation for corpses, the works on paper grided upon it a prayer book for an orthodoxy of another kind of believer. Materialist ritual consumed by capital reclaimed in slips of tongue and sleight of hand cut from the pages of an online mag. Suicide is a revolutionary jazz band, I dug my daddy’s grave.[10] 

Hey Mike, what is this poly-perverse commodity culture manifest as a mistaken panorama, this psychodrama, this shared culture of abuse?[11] Can you hear the dead calling channelled by the coffin, that coffin, calling; the faint remnants of a Tik-Tok soundtrack singing Eastern Rosellas like Billy Bragg on helium. That phallic waxed candle belonging to Richter, handed down to Pettibon, repeated at random across a deconstructed atlas acting as breviary for cloud serfs.

Democracy has fallen asleep in the ruins of a castle and is looking for a cave. The tech regulated anti-Christ, hypnotised. Lulled to sleep, by the twin femme twins riding a motorcycle somewhere between dream and death. Fluro pink data sets seduce large language models singing, “Greetings from the oblong box”. The individuated subject trapped in the foyer of the collective unconscious. Beau is not the only one who is afraid.[12] Quick! Dance to the classical mess, laugh with the Medusa; flip the logic of the unconscious found in your prepubescent lived adultery. Paternalism and the State. The Exterminating Angel if set in a sexy cemetery, our lovers would be trapped by a wrought Iron Rose.[13]

Composed tableaux, orchestrated glitch. The missal containing a melancholy of myth captured by a clown in a Patrick Cox ad for loafers. The loafing clown. The laziest viewer. Abstractions as collages, pealed graphics; four-by-five grids negating the order of Cartesian in favour of clarifying chaos. Prehistoric. Achronic. Euphoric. Bataille scrolling on Grindr. Do what I say don’t do what I do. Kelley appropriated himself drawing as teenager, abandoning the Fine in art, because it is not. Fine. Start simple, he says, let the loafing clown in. Glitch wallpaper from a failed hard drive. 

Rollin’s Rape of the Vampire opened in Paris during the ‘68 riots.[14]  Backrooms began on 4Chan.[15] Corrupted memories materialised as missing body parts, body melt as body drag; this biennale in a furniture warehouse serves Severance as a nod to zombies not yet naked in The Night of the Hunted[16].  Memory, the decades post-war and the millennia pre-freedom; the sensuality of a miniskirt and skivvy. We are always already in war, a drone of distant drones — the cacophony coffin. The fantasy of nostalgia and the nostalgia of fantasy, vampires are less a representation of death than they are of another kind of life. Candles, pearls and a satirical slogan in slick pink script upon stock footage of boy-band-masculinity reading I am a beautiful being of light.

Andrew Tate has been arrested. The couples’ headstones bear Pillow Talk from the ‘80s. That melting ice looks like a dead goat. Ghosts and Aliens. Mike, do you think Jean Rollin met the Raeliens? The perversion of culture as mirror to the horror of life. Reordering the world with signs re-presented. I just read; The eyes alone are yet able to shout.[17]

To immobilise images is to simplify. To immobilise the viewer enforces excess humanism. This materially forced linearity desires a dress set in the melancholia of erotica. Were Mike Kelly and Jean Rollin friends? Tony? Rollin’s first film was a left-wing doco about Franco in Spain, hounded back to Paris, he found a mainstream via exploitation films. An exile of another kind. This Buñuellian surrealism with image association as backbone understands that to take a position means to situate oneself at least twice and on two of the fronts included in any position. Every position is inevitably relative.[18] Just ask Brecht.

Where the music doesn’t stop for life, glitter in the sky, glitter in my eyes. [19]

Twin Dua Lipa singing a future nostalgia in a room with a Bunnings fan and two Monobloc chairs. The campfire in your loungeroom, the skint smoking skeleton branded SATAN WANTS YOU, the cute “troubled” fox.  Strange things are happening. To take a position is to desire, to demand.[20] This counter-collage, an impersonal singularity, a necromantic note.

Written by Lisa Radford

Request preview for Tony Garifalakis