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     nwb12         

aim’s nwb series of paintings-its depiction of The Iceman and his Blocks

Aim, like any good experimenter keeps his identity just out of view. A host of uncanny copies of ice blocks, proliferating polaroids in anonymous rooms full of vibrant people; reconstructed blocks without any unnerving detail, doctored portraits with gazes from IM that pursue us around the gallery. What exactly have we stumbled into? An unearthly crime scene? Some psychic trauma? A Hollywood schlock? More to the point, should we laugh or, perhaps, shudder? Dubuffet said we should laugh a little and fear a little. I think with ‘aim’ the former predominates. However with the new series nwb , there is a sense of a serious purpose which he is almost open with when he mentions a new beginning or even a new way of being. He has range within the confines of his apparent fixation with ice-blocks

Each Block is a thoroughfare from the old to the new. A sensational highway, where otherworldly, almost electromagnetic invisible forces cross over to transform terrestrial perception (the visual experience of the frozen water.) From a distance, the Block appears as a luminous axis of the grid that orders the supernatural into the social. Electric spirits are already in the air. It’s more than an occult practice of spiritual telegraphy giving voice to previously ‘invisible’ beings. Consciousness flows through the medium of the ice, into the public world. The paintings carry a current from an unknown beyond into a sensing body- new optics for rural or urban life. The different geological shapes of each painted Block give the spectator crevices of divided meaning.

The depiction of the Blocks is oblique, a sort of distorted signage cut against the Iceman’s extended equipment. Blaring looped lines from the song” I Can’t Realise you Love me” are both poignant and annoying as a vocal backdrop. Many a time he has been asked to turn them ‘off’! He always cooperates with such a request. The nwb series encapsulate this complex web of the actual live performance and the visual depictment on canvas, which somehow has a ‘live’ component itself.

Both song and photos render social urgency from a remove, in the eerie abstractions of possible new technological forms but aim is about as un-technological as is possible. From flickering abstraction, we ride the avenue to transcendence: Can we take it higher? Aim seems to reply affirmatively. But then undercuts himself with a childish flourish of the paintbrush.

The New York scene and the cool conceptualism of the 1960s & 1970s provided forensically evident signposts.aim alludes to this in his own visual history. aim’s own identity, the touchstones of his most intimate connections to the real Blocks are preserved in the ready made-like polaroids. He will come to identify them as “his” even if shared. They are the markers erected after the fact to commemorate an event that actually happened, an encounter whose liberating effect on him arises from the fact that he was’ there’ with the Block, as were others. The sense of loss is clear in the nwb series but also a comforting sense of equanimity. The Blocks live on in the imagination and even gain an extra dimension through the extraordinary interpretations via ‘aim’.

The Block could be what Heidegger often described as a “primordial” example of seamless subject-object fusion. A thing. A Material icon of Zuhandenheit (translated as “readiness to-hand,”) the Block is used intuitively rather than intellectually analysed. Only when The Iceman causes the Block to break is a subject aware of its separateness. No longer a thing, a broken Block becomes more than one object. The Iceman could be called the quintessential fetish of 20th-century communications technology, and a perennial performance conveyor device for an avid audience. Emulating our private heroes, the Block cradles, twirls its cord in our fingers. Whispered secrets are put into IM’s mouth. Rather than restructure our material environment, as we had done for ages with material goods, the Block refigures social intimacy and our sense of presence in terms of almost semi-electrical pulses which are captured by aim’s bold strokes on the canvas.

Yet as the BLOCKS invoke these tactile intuitions and haptic memories, just as soon as they suggest that we reach out a familiar hand, an uncanny surplus of PAINTINGS emerge. We count more Blocks than can be wielded at once. The images are split, doubled, shot through with the unreal presence of the actual performer. Our embodied desire for connection runs up against uncanny leftovers of ice splinters. We feel something like interdimensional vertigo. There’s a sense of the forensic double produced, in criminological jargon, by “event analysis.”

I’m not saying aim is a criminal! But The commission of a Block like a crime takes on the weight of an originary event, as the broken tool ruptures a certain ocular orientation to the world. Inspired by the ubiquitous but protean forensic term of the “matching image”, aim has generated the Block series by matching leftover blocks to “The Main BLOCK’. Like the “demonstrative evidence” that fabricates the “way things were” at the scene before the crime, the Blocks appeal to that other place and time, where it all went down,literally. Crime scene reconstructionists, investigators, and litigators use matching images to define the contours of an event, after the fact. More than merely defining what may have happened, these images transduce the event into power ie visual narrative becomes juridical “fact.” Blown up for juries and attested to by experts with laser pointers, matching images are faked photos that acquire the force of law. There’s  nothing fake about The Iceman or aim’s painted blocks but there is always a tinge of the semi-forgotten being consciously resuscitated.

The proliferating Blocks melted by IM likewise stem from an artistic sense of criminology,perhaps. The IM’s project began from archive of Iceman materials related to celebrity performances such as at Crazy Larry’s in the 80s. With each permutation of the evidentiary image, its credibility creates a constructedness -a step- ladder of Blocks.

At first, we laugh: “how delightfully odd but symmetrical!” But the shudder soon follows, as we recognise that this same gaze reconstructs (and inflicts) very real questions. The Blocks continue in a kind of lurid forensic animism, their frames rendered not with documentary precision as much as sensitivity to the objects’ unconscious changes. An alien, bureaucratic vision beckons from the other side of the subject/object divide. Does it irrupt from that glint of light in the polaroid?? Out of this shadowy reflection? “Nothing is insignificant to record if it catches one’s attention.” The now mysterious faces in the audience beckon us to the once ‘live’ event.

Clues abound, and yet we feel no closer to their source. These ice-blocks might be found in a different form along any highway in the new World  or equally on cosy English country winding roads., and yet, they’re unmistakably from another dimension. The IM character offstage nervously whispers “Where am I?” and, receiving no reply freezes in silence, delegating to the visual images the sense of historical cultural existence. nwb11 asks, perhaps, whose arms are reaching out to whom. The Iceman’s apparatus and the markings of it and the flow of liquid all are presented as if aim is cooking. He may not appreciate that designation but aim’s sometimes ‘messy’ paintings almost have an aroma of the potwasher and the cordon bleu chef fused together.I sense this nwb series might be a long one-I hope so.

[Kafe Smictiric-art critic]