APOC-COLLAPSE:
POSTFLUXPOST BOOKLETS FROM LUC FIERENS
 reviewed by Tom Hibbard, 3/02

PostFluxPost Booklets 45, 46, 47
Reed Altemus, Xtof Bruneel, Annina Van Sebroeck, Luc Fierens, Michael Basinski
Published By Luc Fierens in Belgium

 

 

 

The 1980s deified the manual typewriter. Early versions of the Xerox copy machine proved a convenient black-and-white 'instant print' tool for projecting the unfocused speed vision of the elapsed lead-em image. These two factors  augmented the onset of two art movements— Mail Art and Intense Disbody-Zine. The altered result resembled photographic reproductions of pornography—processes of innovation promising to solidify stark contrasts that searched the mythos of irreducible building blocks of minimalist Structurism. The massive postal network classified nostalgic, shadowy crannies for lost souls of the American Dream. Coincidentally, a lightning florescent blast momentarily freed from justification in the nocturnal glass-covered chamber to show relativity to be absolute form.

Like a cared-about building, Mail Art has vanished in the U.S. It seems to have ascended to computer Web sites, disguised in ordinary color and supplanted by its powerful offspring sect, Lettrism. Through the darkened door of scanners, collage should be able to effectively reappear. But in Belgium Luc Fierens still puts out small four or five-paged pamphlets of adjacent 'recombinative' Xerography just as in the postmarked days of 'Letter Bomb', 'Naked Man', 'Mallife', 'Janet Janet', 'Raunch-o-Rama', 'Couch Potato', 'RetroFuturism', 'TapRoot', 'Atticus' and many, many, many others. Fierens' booklets are named 'postfluxpost'. I recently viewed numbers 45-47 containing the art of Fierens, Read Altemus, Annina Van Sebroeck, Michael Basinski and Xtof Bruneel.

Collage is a shattering mode of obsolete conceptions, distorting them to convincingly prove that children shockingly do not have much similarity to a new CD player. Collage exposes benign cover-ups whose blinded vigilance turns into an abdication that estranges humanity from emotion. It is a found art and an artistic finding. It is visual as opposed to written, though it often transadopts writing for its use. The principle of collage is decriminally poetic. But its overall effect is `graphic', a term that came into use at the beginning of the Twentieth Century in the retaliation woodcuts of such artists as Erik Heckle and Karl Schmidt-Rottloff as an off-school of German Expressionsim. It has a kinship to journalism because essentially 'graphic' means opinion. It means action. It means making a strong statement. It is a response to time-space. It detects macro-theories of millennia, the ongoing apoc-collapse of everyday life from egoistic chance formulations of absurdity.

Take Bruneel/Fierens/ Sebroeck's artwork of a television with abhorrent tangled incorporating- numbers picture on its screen, instinctively reaching to grab onto the sides of the box, to gobble up everything around it, prompted by stimuli restricted to inner commands, to sling-shot all possibility of outer context/content from the intestine of the instrument like a fatal gob of all-encompassing snot. Or a fashion model with a rifle target for her mouth. Or Basinski's auto-destive letters in worm holes of the morally aboriginal Yetti's preconscious Os. Or Reed Altemus's Mickey Mouse's legacy to revisionist history. Or Altemus' sympathetic `human' face masked for the ball of mortality by skull-and-crossbones. Squatting wallflowers at the end of painted matter. Salvage yards. The forbidden inland terror of the congenital dog girl.

I remember some collages of Luc Fierens in `PhotoStatic' put together on a background of musical notation. He's still doing that. On a background of musical lines he has placed a four square of war machines, tanks and artillery, to symbolize the virtues of radically mononymous mail art, all the more needed today to go to the beach. War is the music of eternity, composed by the blood of the dead/ living waking to smell the gun powder perfume of Jesus' rotting flesh.

milk home

back to volume three