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Interactive Cubes:

60 Fractions of Megohn
—Michael Madore

"It has been discovered that the greatest number of color shades that the human eye can perceive is 14,420. It is obvious that even the most sensitive color film can only reproduce a fraction of these 14,420 shades." (1)

The color in David 'Reed 'newest paintings has shifted from an earlier redeployment of the Baroque to a type of "frosted technicolor" that is both pellicular and Solaris-driven. (2) That is, it is now literally filmic and monstrous as it drops into an indeterminate orbiting cycle. Color that is simultaneously viewed from a space station (frosted from its telescopic positioning) and the heated somnambulism induced by a vampire bite. It is both the look of hard science and the feel of teeth pressing into flesh. Not quite a "Solaristics" (i.e., not quite a totalizing system), Reed 's colors transmit puzzling data to a viewer sent to evaluate the mission's "status." Like the Solaris Ocean, these colors swirl like thought-gases that slowly blur the line between the dead and the living into a kind of non-dead; a vampire state predicated on the viewer 's precarious sleeping arrangements. It is here, within a monstrous conjunction, where blood thins and the swirl-intervals of the painting create a sense of weightlessness, that the "subject-entity" is propelled into a series of balloon prints and snow scenes taped among the portholes of Solaris Station. Seemingly destined for boudoir antics (despite the perception gaps created by trick mirrors and a break in radio contact), these colors seduce and repel so frequently that it is impossible to install any particular linearity or logic. Desire itself becomes the story of the story that can never be written, it is permanently deferred. To use another film, one that Reed has actively intervened with, these colors elude Scottie's desire to "fix" or "lock up" the identity of Madeleine/Judy in Hitchcock 's Vertigo in the same way as they skip and play havoc with the presumed causality of the storyboard. These are fugitive colors (never quite stable enough to be read as "natural") that may at times allude to anthropomorphic sites of sensation; to, if you will, a "becoming-animal" but the speed of their execution and the inconsistencies of their saturation and "bleed" leads us to yet another critical point or a "critical point state" (as in supersaturation or extreme undercooling) where "the cadaverous presence establishes a relation between here and nowhere." (3) As I've said, with Reed 's colors, we are terminally en route, inhabiting the monstrosity of a discursive conjunction or pause that, to push the metaphor, is like Dracula 's flight to London delayed by a freeze-frame or freeze-etching sequence where the fractions or shades cannot be totally reconstituted or even accounted for. Imagine the bat whose sonar or mapping capacity is unable to fully identify its target, or sustain the logic of its trajectory. And imagine color that breaks like fruit breaks into alarming, even toxic tonalities; as if an agricultural experiment on one of the outer colonies of Jupiter went beserk (so that oranges turn blue when ripe and edibility becomes dissociated). Where color exceeds its own packaging--so that the box of "fuck" chocolates and the requisite "love" scene in the castle turns into a riot of categories (where it becomes unclear where the host begins and the "visitor" ends). With Reed, color is a form of metabolism that alters the viewer so that he is bound to conflate bedroom, pharmacy and spacecraft. Once bitten, the viewer 's neurohormonal system becomes more receptive to sudden shifts in meaning --indeed, the site of transfusion becomes more like a suture, a stitching together or conflating of unlikely source materials. So it seems totally plausible that a reading of color would amble from Beccafumi 's Fall of the Rebel Angels (where color serves as a form of spiritual "electricity") to Mario Bava 's Planet of the Vampires where the opacity of the space crew 's defensively collared leather jumpsuits (so uncannily like the opaque zones of Reed 's painting) deflect yet attract the molecular discharge of a dying planet 's inhabitants eager to hitch a ride back to Earth where even the Pope promises sex in heaven (or, at least, a kind of narco-democracy). Seduced by its spectral range, the viewer desires flesh (wants to get a grip) despite the dematerialization of the flesh-eater. Like Solaris, we are both Earth-bound and yet distracted by the sending of encephalograms into the Solaris Ocean. Bedazzled, our bite exceeds its target as we pick the dirt from our nails while de-magnetizing our coffins. Can we truly comprehend this infinite billowing out of color as it loses altitude and inflection, its semantic coherency? Expelled to the folds of the universe, we try to stabilize long enough in order to witness the "conversion" of St. Paul from God-riddled emissary to a field of radio waves that indiscriminately activates burial devices, satellite launches and endocrinological self-started kits. For in the end, this is color weary not only of its human entrainment, but also of its encapsulation into filmic language. We witness the camera 's "fall" as it fails to capture the gleam of Nosferatu's ring-finger despite a full engagement of the Disney control throttle. No. This is color that triggered an enzymic reaction that jumped the reel and fucked the crew of next year 's Mars delegation.

999 Tolerance

"White has very low density. In prismatic osmosis the colors penetrate white more easily than white penetrates color. At a grand ball all the ladies are lovely until the colored dresses "dirty" the white ones. Military leaders seem to know this: they never wear white. The Pope wears it to declare his humility." (4)

If color in Reed 's painting acts as a kind of neurohormonal trigger (where biting initiates the swirl or delirium of a "gothicized" body) then his use of white tends to serve as an antidote. Measured against the velocity of the color forms (really more like dermal patches or ruptured tissue cultures), the white areas slow or frame the "cascade" in the way morphine transforms human metabolism. And while they constitute a ground or field for the splaying of these outbreaks of color, they also subtend or subvert them as well. Whiteness (like the Doctor suffocating in a burst of flour in Dreyer 'sVampyr ) literally bleeds into or overlaps the color so that a normal figure/ground relationship is impossible to sustain as one travels across the painting. This bite or transfer between color and ground is such that one is always buried in the other, like the entangling of the host with its "visitor" within the monstrosity of an infinite Transylvania. It 's as if we are viewing two competing neurologies --two life forms locking on for a transfusion before resuming incompatible orbiting cycles. This hyperactive feeding "...produces a wild parasitism which makes it difficult to tell who eats whom, whose gaze penetrates whose body, whose body is drained, whose becomes too fluid, whose remains pure, when business eats pleasure or pleasure becomes profit, or when what you eat eats you." (5) What these white areas do is create a site for a suturing and de-suturing (6) that simultaneously reveals and conceals the constructedness of the painting itself. On one hand, whiteness appears as a kind of vapor deposition, hinting at materiality before retreating into a false neutrality. And yet the very whiteness of the surface, enhanced by its contrast to the sweeps of color that "sully" its shot or frame, calls attention to its physicality. We are pulled in and forced to look at a skin that suddenly tears or solidifies into ridges and other disturbances that heighten our consciousness of its fabrication. Bitten, we find ourselves drawn yet repulsed by this looking for places where the surface stretches too thin--here copping a look so easily slips into popping a vein. It is this "hungry" look that so vividly conjures up a figure like Dracula whose own look relies on the perceptual gaps (hypnosis, mirrors, artificial lighting, etc.) of his victims. In this way whiteness becomes a haunted enclosure, Dracula 's castle or estate, where the staging of the look and the counter-look is enacted. Where we attempt to navigate the white light of restless sleep or a drug-induced stupor or trance--becoming like the giddy yet doomed organisms of the painting as we all glide along the edges of a "grand ball" collapsing from internal bleeding. What we experience in this act of looking is a degradation of purities and an acceleration of tolerances --toxic zones that converge and replace blood with neutrino compounds (like the thought-vampires in Solaris ). This is no ordinary exchange or osmosis-- because as much as Hitchcock 's Madeleine or the other guests inject the ball with hits of chromatic instability, the castle-as-pharmacy surmounts and anaestheticizes each infusion. Each hallucinates the other in a gaze of no return.

I Don't Know How to Sleep...

"Invoking the "living dead" is no accident...in our ordinary language we resort to indefinite judgments precisely when we endeavor to comprehend those borderline phenomena that undermine established differences, such as those between living and being dead...the uncanny creatures which are neither alive nor dead, the "living dead" (vampires, etc.), are referred to as "the undead"-- although they are not dead, they are clearly not alive like us..." (7)

From spectral range to "spectral supplement," the gesture or mark in Reed 's painting resists the attempt to fix or isolate its positioning. It is mutagenic and elusive, frustrating the binarial logic that holds a reflection hostage to its mirror-field. It is a "vampire mark," embodying a perverse delight in negating its point of origin as it saunters between grave and boudoir. Its monstrosity lies in this perpetual in-between state so that what seems to be isn't what it seems-- where the very notion of categorization is called into question. The mark's itinerary never arrives, never reaches a destination --it is always "off the screen" or "jumping the tracks"--it never quite reaches the cemetery. It is indeterminate in the way the vampire's "history" eludes the "natural" progression of man--never terminating or fulfilling the scripted conditions of biological time. Reed 's marks constantly reverse direction and any sequential reading is thwarted by sudden gaps in their execution or their staged disappearance into the white fields that promise disclosure only to deliver yet another round of deferrals. As such, the mark's identity is never stable; sleepless and omnivorous, it is more like Dr. Seward 's diagnosis of Renfield: "I shall have to invent a new classification for him, and call him a zošphagous (life-eating) maniac; what he desires is to absorb as many lives as he can,... He gave many flies to one spider and many spiders to one bird, and then wanted a cat to eat the many birds." (8) The mark and the vampire operate under a rabid-like generativity: absorption, expansion and substitution work to undermine any one-to-one correspondence or causality between host and visitor or detective and target. The food chain becomes truly viral, doubling and multiplying so that detection and naming become as ill-fated as Scottie 's obsession in Hitchcock 's Vertigo to track down and resolve the identity of Madeleine/Judy (who are really just one person). This is a incommensurable mark, somewhere between here and nowhere, a form of the "living dead." A haunted mark in haunted enclosures (Solaris Ocean/Transylvania/Inner London) that inhabits a "condensation of the field and counterfield within the same shot." (9) The mark which forgets or is unable to sleep and, like Dracula, "cannot feel guilty." (10) Cast from nature, it shows no remorse as it seeks an infinite exponentiality.

April 1996

FOOTNOTES

(1) Carl Dreyer, Color Film and Colored Film, Dreyer in Double Reflection, Da Capo Press (1973), p. 170.
(2) Solaris, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972.
(3) Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, Univ. of Nebraska Press (1982), p. 256.
(4) Malcolm de Chazal, Sens-Plastique, SUN (1979), p. 20.
(5) Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Duke University Press (1995), p. 183.
(6) For a more extended discussion on suturing/desuturing see Slavoj Zizek's For They Know Not What They Do, Verso (1991), pp. 19-20.
(7) Slavoj Zizek, "Kant as a Theoretician of Vampirism," lacanian ink 8, Spring 1994, pp. 28-29.
(8) Bram Stoker, Dracula, Signet Classic (1965), p. 80.
(9) Slavoj Zizek, "Kant as a Theoretician of Vampirism," p. 25.
(10) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, Univ. of Minnesota Press (1986), p. 32.

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