As usual I'm awake at 4am.
Can't sleep, so over to the comix shelf-- even though the main research book checked out is due in 3 days. I can't do research first thing in my day. I pluck 'Mirror Mirror' vol. 1; mainly to browse the Connor Willumsen strips toward the end of the volume. They're really fascinating works of comix. Maybe the best works of comix to incorporate / contemplate the internet-in-relation-to-self I can think of, next to '2oo1'. The internet's not a thing I want in my comix, generally. I'd be happy if the 'net weren't in film, but fat fucking chance of separating the two at this juncture. I'm not a fan of the internet. I had my own contretemps with separating my sense of self from blogging, a decade ago. I don't want fame, and I don't want the majority of people to have access to me. So these strips by Willumsen, 11 in all, speak to what I feel like the-space-that-isn't is about.
Because that's what the internet it, what cyberspace is: it's a space that defines itself, in (absent) relation to the sphere of the individual. The 11 strips by Willumsen cover all the probable permutations of self Connor could conceive of; where the Self touches the Screen, and where it evades & elides contact.
At least that's how I define these strips. They're very spare, meditative pieces, drawn as iconographically as possible; there aren't even any full-on Faces in the strip, strictly ikons representing eye & ear & mouth. Each page in the series bears a central window, a digital notepad file, printed onto tracing paper & superimposed atop the 9-panel comic window Willumsen uses to explore / manifest the written / poetic content. The strips begin with a meditation on The Body (point of origin & departure for The Self) and run through a series of explorations of where 'net & self contact one another, concluding with a meditation on Time, as in time spent, the current of time, the currency of time-as-capital, the Waste of time.
Inasmuch as any of it's Waste(d). It's only waste if it's not capitalized on, right? Material conditions and all that. If the material conditions of the Self are the body, what is the body, when you're talking about the internet? You're talking representation. Connor represents the Self as rituals of self-embodiment, self-improvement, self-care, self-awareness. His self is rendered into abstractions, filtered thru comix, using technical tricks to express emotion & intellect.
These comix aren't just meditations by the artist: they're for audiences to meditate ON, and so they're superbly suited to the format of Mirror Mirror, which (for Connor's contributions, particularly) mimics-or-mirrors gallery space. Gallery space is one of those wild theoretical states of being that belongs up there with Hilbert Space. Fuck, gallery space might as well BE Hilbert Space. Mirror Mirror #1 is a theoretical interior space for the appreciation of where comix & art collide, collaborate, cohabitate. Connor's strips are presented one at a time, on the right, faced by a blank-- the comix face out, facing us, when the book is open, and are closed against Nothing, blanks where (perhaps) biographical data relating to the art / artist might be placed, spaces where information could be placed, blanks for the studious to annotate within, gaps for vandals to scrawl across.
Connor doesn't come to any "solid" conclusions in these 11 strips. The artist contemplates their body, then the Space they've chosen to put their mind into, the Screens we filter thru, the Representational Reality we are ruled by / against (photographs, for instance), the representational geometrical abstractions produced by the coding & overcoding of Self & Internet-image, the conceptual Fog it all emerges out of & recedes into, et al. The materials Willumsen uses to express it all waver between representational (a Scan of a Transparency of a Printout of a Window) and manifest (the tracing paper wavers, is wrinkled, becomes occluded by excess of imagery, overlaid) and the resulting Waveform never collapses into Fact or Fallacy, in spite of, perhaps in triumph over, the artist's misgivings about the medium.
Blah, blah, blah. These 11 strips-- the only Connor Willumsen in my comix library, point of fact --are another one of those works of Art that keeps pulling me back in. Like '2oo1', it's a comic about the internet, kinda: it's about how comix end up on the internet, and WHY they end up tatted across that vast numinous & honestly kinda gross bathroom wall we all stare for minutes? hours? every day.
I try not to insert the internet in my comix. Only one of the five books I've been working on even admit the existence of this-thing-you-are-using-to-read-now. I've resisted the internet most of my life. It started with Bulletin Board Systems back in the dial-up days of '93; since then I've crashed out and committed e-suicide several times: nuked one blog after another, yanked my art from the server racks of friends, bailed on lifetime accounts with Flickr & Librarything, and essayed virtual leagues outta my general way to avoid social media tar-pits like Myspace, Facebook & Xitter. I've only had the internet in my pocket for, like, maybe seven years total, and only ever on a flip-phone because fuck the illusion of Access, man. My current flip-phone doesn't even have a functional browser. It's bliss!
I still pay my phone bill in person.
Anyway, here we are, at 6:38am-- did it really take all that time to pile all those thoughts there, like a bunch of mismatched socks? --having learned very little about Connor Willumsen or Connor's art, much less me, because by some perverse twist you (of all people!) are reading a text-heavy blog, authored by an oldfag with organic brain damage & cognitive issues. Mirror Mirror #1 sits on the kitchen table, to my left, shut, Connor's comix closed on themselves. To my right, a stack of sketchbooks & pencils & erasers, topped with some pithy post-its about projects forthcoming & in process. Nothing legible.
It looks a little like this:
It looks very little like life.
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