Heresy Becomes Habit
Exhibition review for artist's promotional brochure.
"Rake's Chortle," Jakub Kalousek
Jakub Kalousek shuffles in SmartWools© loafers in a cavernous garage studio in the infamous West Oakland hood. Is it planned hipness or lack of taste? The scene is already a contradiction that is mirrored in his work. Contradiction, defined by the sense of instant disbelief, is a constant companion in navigating Kalousek’s tohubohu.(1)Little can be found to point to any specific aesthetic direction or to some indication of an intended message. We are lost to disbelief until we forcibly choose to escape from his maze-like constriction into the consolation of the white gallery wall—of course, that being hardly possible amongst the musty, amorphic objects nestled between an avalanche of brushes, inks, and vessels. There, his drawings lie prostrate for Kalousek’s sisyphean task to fill the physical boundaries of the paper. Indeed, a sense of fatalism seeps out of the work.
Each mixed media drawing is a map. The viewer sees the overall terrain and then zooms in and out on hairline details that lure her into associative realms: a Boschian vista of humans, animals, and in-betweens ring around penetrated orifices. Improbable landscapes merge, and emerge, in and out of idiomatic orthography. The pentimento of handwritten quippings rise and fall in lachrymose atemporal realms and codes—language, forms, decals, symbols, or collaged physical objects, ad infinitum.
As her perception trawls through, her eye is subtly pushed and pulled through the physical universe of matter, hue, and symbols. The twang of thick and thin lines, both free-style and calculated, attack and retreat in persevering vibratos, creating pleasant discomfort and a feeling of levity.
In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud writes that we enjoy a joke because it unveils what the conscious mind is repressing. But, at that point of laughter, the point of pleasurable connection, we do not think about the comic’s technique. We are free to recognize and play with the philosophical and behavioral contradictions of our daily lives.(2) Kalousek does infuse his “visions” with salacious ribald word-play such as “pussywing” and “true masturbiece.” He juxtaposes puerile and sophomoric representations of disembodied erotica along with a cartoonish menagerie of dogs, cats, elephants, bunnies, and amoebas. This reminds the viewer of the innocence of prelapsarian sexuality. At first glance, the joke is realizing one’s adult pretensions and or inhibitions.
Despite the drawings’ apparent open-ended insouciance and charm, the viewer is put on trial. One is lured in by the singularly executed physical elements of the work, alongside intellectually disarming wordplay, then sucker punched into a cynically redolent world. Kalousek asks his audience to reflect on the boundaries between titillation, repression, and prurience. The more time the audience invests in reading and understanding the work, the less funny it becomes. The sensual turns grotesque. Phrases such as heresy becomes habit, or the overvague world within the vagus, (with the artist’s demanding morass of imagery and solipsistic references), mirror not only his own but also the audiences’s apostate thinking. His conflated quiddity is everyday injustice, perversion, and malfeasance. His eyes scour signs of the human capacity to blissfully obfuscate the truth: We are weighed in the balances and found wanting.(3) Or better yet, in Søren Kierkegaard’s words: “The comfort of the temporal existence is a precarious affair: It lets the wound grow together although it has not yet healed, and yet the physician knows that the cure depends on keeping the wound open.”(4)
END NOTES
1. Tohubohu–A state of chaos; utter confusion. Hebrew tōhū wa-ḇōhū, as “without form and void”–a phrase used in the book of Genesis to describe the world before God said, “Let there be light.” Gen.1:2 (Bible of 1611)
2. Freud, Sigmund, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 1905. See Sigmund Freud, www.sigmundfreud.net/jokes-and-their-relation-to-the-unconscious.jsp, last accessed June 21, 2016.
3. Daniel 5:27, The Bible. See commentary, “TEKEL; You are weighed in the balances, and are found wanting.” Biblehub, www.biblehub.com/commentaries/daniel/5-27.htm, last accessed June 21, 2016.
4. Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of the Heart is to Will One Thing, Brown, Doug (1990) Leaven: Vol. I: Iss I Article 16. http://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/leaven/vol 1/iss1/16.
© 2016 The Author, Janet Silk.
Each mixed media drawing is a map. The viewer sees the overall terrain and then zooms in and out on hairline details that lure her into associative realms: a Boschian vista of humans, animals, and in-betweens ring around penetrated orifices. Improbable landscapes merge, and emerge, in and out of idiomatic orthography. The pentimento of handwritten quippings rise and fall in lachrymose atemporal realms and codes—language, forms, decals, symbols, or collaged physical objects, ad infinitum.
As her perception trawls through, her eye is subtly pushed and pulled through the physical universe of matter, hue, and symbols. The twang of thick and thin lines, both free-style and calculated, attack and retreat in persevering vibratos, creating pleasant discomfort and a feeling of levity.
In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud writes that we enjoy a joke because it unveils what the conscious mind is repressing. But, at that point of laughter, the point of pleasurable connection, we do not think about the comic’s technique. We are free to recognize and play with the philosophical and behavioral contradictions of our daily lives.(2) Kalousek does infuse his “visions” with salacious ribald word-play such as “pussywing” and “true masturbiece.” He juxtaposes puerile and sophomoric representations of disembodied erotica along with a cartoonish menagerie of dogs, cats, elephants, bunnies, and amoebas. This reminds the viewer of the innocence of prelapsarian sexuality. At first glance, the joke is realizing one’s adult pretensions and or inhibitions.
Despite the drawings’ apparent open-ended insouciance and charm, the viewer is put on trial. One is lured in by the singularly executed physical elements of the work, alongside intellectually disarming wordplay, then sucker punched into a cynically redolent world. Kalousek asks his audience to reflect on the boundaries between titillation, repression, and prurience. The more time the audience invests in reading and understanding the work, the less funny it becomes. The sensual turns grotesque. Phrases such as heresy becomes habit, or the overvague world within the vagus, (with the artist’s demanding morass of imagery and solipsistic references), mirror not only his own but also the audiences’s apostate thinking. His conflated quiddity is everyday injustice, perversion, and malfeasance. His eyes scour signs of the human capacity to blissfully obfuscate the truth: We are weighed in the balances and found wanting.(3) Or better yet, in Søren Kierkegaard’s words: “The comfort of the temporal existence is a precarious affair: It lets the wound grow together although it has not yet healed, and yet the physician knows that the cure depends on keeping the wound open.”(4)
END NOTES
1. Tohubohu–A state of chaos; utter confusion. Hebrew tōhū wa-ḇōhū, as “without form and void”–a phrase used in the book of Genesis to describe the world before God said, “Let there be light.” Gen.1:2 (Bible of 1611)
2. Freud, Sigmund, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 1905. See Sigmund Freud, www.sigmundfreud.net/jokes-and-their-relation-to-the-unconscious.jsp, last accessed June 21, 2016.
3. Daniel 5:27, The Bible. See commentary, “TEKEL; You are weighed in the balances, and are found wanting.” Biblehub, www.biblehub.com/commentaries/daniel/5-27.htm, last accessed June 21, 2016.
4. Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of the Heart is to Will One Thing, Brown, Doug (1990) Leaven: Vol. I: Iss I Article 16. http://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/leaven/vol 1/iss1/16.
© 2016 The Author, Janet Silk.
