Body Without Organs

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New paintings by Sean Robert FitzGerald
Props by Alex Da Corte

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FJORD is pleased to announce its 13th exhibition, Body Without Organs, opening Friday, July 5th from 6-10pm. This exhibition will be on view July 5th through July 28th.

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A prop can be a deceitfully straightforward object, often times masquerading itself as purely ornamental or decorative. However, a prop can also become a vehicle for deception if used as a pointing mechanism; transcending the utilitarian through the idea it’s being used to represent. In this instance, the simple theatrical device raises an interesting dilemma about the tension inherent between the world as surface and the world as idea. In the everyday, it’s necessary that we suspend our disbelief about reality and complacently accept the objects around us as idea-props, culturally suited to represent the ideas we’ve grown comfortable to know them for. However, what if a prop or an image were to one day call attention to this discordance between image and idea rather than disguise it? What if one day, the man dressed in black moving things around on stage called attention to himself? Would we be able to reconcile between surface and idea? Or would idea and sign collapse back into the bodies that produce them, proclaiming nothing other than their own meaninglessness? For idea to die, it would have to do so by its own hand; in effect unmaking and consuming itself in a slow suicide. Either way, the erotic fantasy is ruined when the handsome actor looks in dumb submission towards the director off screen for his cue.

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However, there is a moment of beautiful pathos possible when the actor accidentally lets out an almost inaudible fart. The unanticipated event serves as a subtle foil for the humanity we all possess yet try to forget. Likewise, the images and objects in this show stand as foils for themselves, acting out hypothetical scenarios in a tragicomic play written in water. This collaborative effort is a sort of double suicide. Through this act, and during this mutual process of becoming, the death of the author is inherent and central to the collaborative spirit. Both parties agree to a generative sacrifice of identity in an effort to create a third identity which exists as a sort of phantom body without organs; with one foot in the physical, and one foot in the conceptual. This new body is a bastard organism with faculties and parts so strange that they have yet to define their own function. This bastard body breathes ethanol, sublimates into a queer apparition, shits cadmium and snorts lye through an alabaster straw off the downy blonde ass of a cherub. For the idea is not bound to the same rules as the body. This apparition-body is free to goose the fetishistic hierarchies of tradition with the scatological nonsense of the pornographic. These images and their props point to themselves and proclaim the idea of reality as a farce. We adjust the frequency and witness through a rip in the curtain a theater performed backwards, by actor-objects that not only stare back, but who shriek forth song in tongues unintelligible; frozen in the act of their own becoming.