THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED [AFTER HUME]:

“The name is the end of discourse.” 

                                                                    - Michel Foucault.

What is in a name, other than signifying cancellation? Asha Zero’s paintings are testaments to this question. Even if read as a name, Zero as a moniker would nonetheless signify a vacuum, an indecipherable title with no discernable gender, politics, ethnicity, or socio-economic standing. Much like a brand, Zero interrogates the anonymity of the subject, the value of deception, where information is ubiquitous, and schizophrenia combines with anxiety to construct a benchmark for the here and now. From this basis, Zero appropriates from the media, creating trompe l’oeil painted surfaces that not only resemble collage, but also resign to the conceptual underpinnings of collage. By confronting painting under the rubric of collage, Zero embraces erasure, interference and artifice as the ‘norm’; an indifference-in-difference prompted by Marcel Duchamp, subverted with tremors of Andy Warhol, echoing Richard Hamilton.

Paying homage to the tradition of collage set forth by inter-world-war protagonists such as Kurt Schwitters, Hana Höch, John Heartfleld, Raoul Hausmann, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Gustav Klutsis to ‘name’ a few, Zero steals once mediated imagery, now weathered and torn, discarded, annotated with graffiti and a plethora of other graphic elements. These sources are all forms of mass communication that once used to conceal yet now somehow reveal. Zero’s voice is a palimpsest, the only way to arrive at something relevant is to combine elements together, to somehow recreate or simulate the notion of ‘otherness’.  Apathy being an agent of the ‘norm’, its symptom being the loss of difference, Zero’s cut-up images are a sign of the times, products of the system, conveying a message of Zeitgeist in Babel. It is within this post-global village landscape where Zero’s portraits declare the status quo staggering upon a bricolage. Zero’s paintings contribute more than just the sum of all parts, unfixing signifiers, stirring up turbulence, all developed from over-communication and an addiction to the media. There is no turning back, only surrender.

"It is only through difference that progress has been made. What threatens us right now is probably what we may call over-communication – that is, the tendency to know exactly in one point of the world what is going on in all other parts of the world. In order for a culture to be really itself and to produce something, the culture and its members must be convinced of their originality […] We are now threatened with the prospect of our being only consumers, able to consume anything from any point in the world and from every culture, but of losing all originality."

                                             - Levi-Strauss.

Zero draws from the conventions of the avant-garde, and the ongoing movements of the underground, including Dada, Punk, and current Street Art and Lowbrow trends. With the world in a state of Information overload, supporting a materialist existence that continually references itself, feeding off of itself, subconsciously inviting one to consume ever more to the point of critical mass and terminal identity, Zero exposes a sales agenda so pervasive that it almost does not need the consumer anymore.

Ideas being objects, with advertising, branding, and corporate intentions signifying the contemporary ideological canon, Zero juxtaposes and superimposes surfaces, concepts, and other communications, treating them in the same manner as objet trouvé, reverse-engineering commonplace broadcasts and points of contact, such as advertisements, magazine spreads, headlines, signs, billboards, posters, album covers, fashion photography and the like. From this archaeological perspective, the numerical digit Zero once again becomes a suitable replacement for the artists name, developing into a mechanism; a cut-up identity, constructing paintings that immediately communicate the primary concerns of collage: intertextuality, appropriation, pastiche, superimposition and juxtaposition.

‘We’ are the subjects of Zero’s portraits, Burroughsian cut-ups – disposable, interchangeable, random, yet somehow structured, serial, and patterned. Where humans once consumed media, it now consumes ‘us’. Zeroed-in, Zero’s work tolerates the extraction of small amounts of barely intelligible bits of information. This information is omnipresent across the painted acrylic surface, but has lost practically all its agency, meaning, and path of ‘origin’. Yet, despite being bereft of a suitable history, Zero’s cut-up images say something powerful about the murky opposition between historicism and futurism:

“When you cut into the present the future leaks out.” 

                                                                                       – Burroughs.

In this sense, Zero’s paintings take advantage of the value-of-deception inherent to popular culture and the mass media, sampling glitches and iterations from mediocrity, re-remixing scraps that have already been Xeroxed, copied, or stolen. Rendering the here and now in bits and pieces, hyphens and splices, Zero’s paintings dictate impossible exchanges through the continuous, looping sedimentation and erosion of information, in-turn generating new, hybridized and mutated forms of meaning. Furthermore, Zero ‘hacks’ the familiar, the commonplace, evading efforts to decipher or extract any fundamental or conclusive meaning.

The world is no longer binary; it isn’t root-like with hierarchies and oppositions. It is now anarchic, a rhizome, where the subject, the self, the one, or whatever analogy there may be becomes an indecipherable cipher within a hum of cellular automata. In a world that has lost all sense of the real, Zero’s paintings numb as much as they stimulate. Paintings become topologies that have been scratched and scrambled, simultaneously multiple and singular, depicting everyman, nothingman, overman; effectively combining the ability to differ and to defer.

“Who’s the parasite and who’s the host?” 

                                                                                       – Burroughs.

_______________________________________________________________

This text was first published in the 4th issue of Kolaj Magazine, (Canada, June 2013), titled "Asha Zero: Who's the Parasite & Who's the Host - A Profile by Shane de Lange". It is the latest iteration of a series of negotiations and meditations on Zero's work from the past decade.

Copyright © Shane de Lange, 2013.

HYPHEN AND SPLICE

If hysteria was the pathology of the exasperated staging of the subject – of the theatrical and operational conversion of the body – and if paranoia was the pathology of organization – of the structuring of a rigid and jealous world – then today we have entered into a new form of schizophrenia – with the emergence of an immanent promiscuity and the perpetual interconnection of all information and communication networks.                                                          Jean Baudrillard (1988: 26)

When Picasso painted Still Life with Cane Chair in 1912 he made a profound contribution to the conversation of art that still resonates today. By combining found material and elements from the media into the painted surface, Picasso effectively breached the barrier between the real world of the viewer and the represented world of the image, heralding the emergence of Synthetic Cubism. Picasso’s hybrid of collage and painting included a clipping from a newspaper that stated “the battle has began”, knowing that the foreboding tradition of painting was under attack, and that a shift was underway in the evolution of the medium, challenging the way human beings perceive things to be, and providing a reservoir of artistic material for decades to come. Cubism incorporated the politics of the canvas, picture frame, and surrounding walls, in effect socializing painting. So too, an emphasis on the multidimensional and conceptual thinking, including the influence psychoanalysis and existentialism, altered the way we see the perceived genius of the artist, asking the question: what is in a name, other than signifying cancellation?

Asha Zero is a painter reverse-engineering these once-anarchic, now-traditional Avant-Garde ideas, hard wiring established Modernist perspectives to suite the needs of a ‘post-postmodern’ world. The numerical digit ‘Zero’ being a pertinent replacement for the authors name, Zero’s reinterpretation of identity and representation in the context of the information age finds an association with Francis Picabia’s Cacodylic Eye (1921), where the artist had his studio visitors sign a canvas on entering, not allowing for one single signature to be credited as the maker of the artwork, composed around a huge eye gazing back at the viewer. Parallel to the estrangement of the author, the use of body parts, particularly mouths and eyes, is a mechanism echoed in all Zero’s work, describing the almost prosthetic, cut and paste identities that humans adopt in contemporary society. Reminiscent of George Bataille’s theoretical method known as the Exquisite Corpse, Zero in affect creates a discursive ‘body’ for the current post-industrial information age. Similarly, in Erased De Kooning Drawing (1953) painter and collagist Robert Rauchenberg took the notion of identity, discourse and representation a step further, deleting the subject in his artistic inquiry entirely, revealing more informal considerations based on the absence and ambiguity of the author, concluding his thoughts by erasing a drawing by Willem De Kooning as an act of art in his own name, at once communicating the primary concerns of collage: intertextuality, appropriation, and juxtaposition.

Subscribing to historical collagist practices, notably the work of Dadaists such as Hana Hoch, Raoul Hausmann, and Kurt Schwitters, Zero confronts the medium of painting based on contemporary conventions such as schizophrenia, pastiche, anxiety and erasure. All under the guise(s) of imitation, artifice, and anonymity, Zero takes a cue from Marcel Duchamp’s conceptual art practices and Andy Warhol’s Pop Art wit, approaching painting on the same conceptual grounds as collage, depicting the everyday spectacle of human habituation in the urban sprawl of the modern city. Zero becomes a cipher, an indecipherable title containing no gender or name, the personification of collage: a cyborg. Borrowing from everyday media sources to construct detailed, photo-realistic compositions (trompe l’oeil), Zero presents the status quo of the Global Village as a bricolage, made-up of found objects (objet trouvé) and constructed bodies, using newspaper headlines, various street art elements, billboards, posters, album covers, fashion spreads, and print ads as pertinent social content.

Delivering layered facsimiles and masked captions from ground zero, Zero stumbles upon the defunct and deteriorated relationship between the original and the representation. Where humans once consumed media, it now consumes us, and Zero presents the remnants of this memory, pooled experiences faded and used, somehow tolerating the extraction of intelligible bits of information. Rather than being direct representations from some distant ‘original’ source or ‘authentic’ subject, Zero’s paintings are processed transcripts of lost and found representations, which have lost the agency of ‘origin’. The notions of memory and history are treated in an archaeological manner, mediated and weathered into the surfaces of the urban landscape, peeled back by Zero to reveal the remaining strata of our mediation, all too often hidden from us, or simply ignored and forgotten. “The informational function of the media today would thus be to help us forget, to serve as the very agents and mechanisms for our historical amnesia” (Jameson, 1999:20). Zero finds keepsakes from the fragmented landscape of the city – its histories and geographies incomplete – in order to piece together portraits of its cyborg citizenry, blip culture, raising relevant doubts about the Human Condition.

Saturated in the synthetic culture of the 80s, steeped in Punk and Indie Rock, Zero has a penchant for the appropriation of middle class consumer appetites. Forgetting and indoctrination being the staple of the day, the working class ideology of the Apartheid proletariat gave Zero special insights into the power of propaganda and marketing, and the social programming of the minority white population. In this sense, Zero’s paintings take advantage of the value of deception, equating perception with deception, perversion with reversion, at all times being unsympathetic towards any political agenda. Zero samples glitches and iterations from mediocrity, remixing scraps Xeroxed or stolen from popular culture, numbing as they stimulate, rendering the information age as bits and pieces, hyphens and splices, scratched and scrambled. If Pierneef were alive today, Zero’s portraits would be the landscapes he would paint.

This approach to the present day by way of the art language of the simulacrum, or of the pastiche of the stereotypical past, endows present reality and the openness of present history with the spell and distance of a glossy mirage. Yet this mesmerizing new aesthetic mode itself emerged as a elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way. It cannot therefore be said to produce this strange occultation of the present by its own formal power, but rather merely to demonstrate, through these inner contradictions, the enormity of the situation in which we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current experience. 

                                                                                   Frederic Jameson (1993: 21)

When viewed from a distance each painting appears to be hyper-realistic visions pieced together from discarded or found media parts. When each of the many segments are appreciated for their individual surface qualities, ranging from topological interactions to hijacked typographical vectors and dirty grunge-inspired textures, they display abstract expressionist tendencies, marking a sea-change in the context of Modern painting. Simultaneously multiple and singular, Zero’s paintings dictate impossible exchanges between different surfaces in a continuous sedimentation of information.

Zero’s own ambiguous identity poses a similar question, where the authenticity of the author gives way to the representation of the brand; a sentiment relayed by Guy Debord (2004:12) when he states: “The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation”. With this simulated sense of Self Zero plays with the unsolicited aesthetics of the street, in an overwhelming image economy, a contrived society continually referencing itself, feeding off of itself, inviting one to consume. Zero’s paintings illustrate the sales agenda of the Global Village; so pervasive that it almost does not need the consumer anymore. The world is no longer about good or bad, black or white, ones and zeros; it is no longer binary, it is anarchic based on technologies that currently dictate the resolution of reality and the ‘deresolution’ of the body. Everything is transferred and transmitted under tragicomic circumstances, making room for the entropic madness of the machine aesthetic that Futurists such as Fillippo Marinetti envisaged being the culmination of mankind.

The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do... If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, there I am. There's nothing behind it. 

                                                                                                                           Andy Warhol

We are all Burroughs’ cut-ups, disposable, interchangeable, random. As passive consumers, compiled identities, and poster egos, most people are bored and nobody wants to change anything, shape it, form it, and translate it into a form of expression. It’s all about imitation, consumption and manipulation, and the only way to arrive at something relevant is to combine elements together, just as Zero does. This boredom is symptomatic of the lack of difference and Otherness in the world. Zero is the only relevant symbol, Zero’s cut-up images are a sign of the times, products of the system. Much like Gustav Courbet, Zero is a realist for the times, a traditionalist conveying the contemporary message of Zeitgeist in Babel, manifesting what it means to be human in the composite landscape of website hits and dots per inch, at all times leaving the debate open and playful.

Alongside contemporary artists such as Gajin Fujita, Takashi Murakami and Barry McGee, Zero draws attention to a society in a state of terminal identity, where the neurosis observed in the everyday becomes the norm. Marshall McLuhan referred to this neurosis as ‘narcosis’ (2001:45), which is an analogy used to describe our addiction to the media and our indifference towards it, linked to the idea that human beings and culture are paramount to a reproductive organ for the media and technology. Zero executes this narcosis through transient and ambiguous mergers of realism, naturalism and abstraction, somehow incorporating small pieces from just about every discursive structure in painting since the Renaissance. Silence and noise find common ground here, where the cosmetic fabrications of the media are expressed through hybrids of texture, colour, and pattern; chimeras that lead to continuing discussion on painting.

Micro Cluster Picnic progresses past Manichean binaries, in a post-hyperrealist realm that is inadvertent towards humanist or capitalist polemics and politics, differing from previous exhibitions, say for me (2008) and macro soda text hits (2009). As the world grows ever smaller, proximity being equal to promiscuity, Zero chooses anonymity over autonomy. Embodied and embedded, disassembled and reprogrammed, Zero’s paintings contribute more than just the sum of all parts, unfixing signifiers, stirring up turbulence, entangled in alienation and artifice to establish a clear-cut message. By piecing together counterfeit truths that can be bought over the counter, Zero makes the distinction between the authentic and inauthentic obsolete, perhaps exposing the only ‘truth’ left. History, identity, representation, culture, and the like, no longer teeter on the opposition between good and evil, or even tinker on the pitting of evil against ‘evil’, Zero simply makes such distinctions null and void.

Text Copyright © Shane de Lange 2011.

Image Copyright © Asha Zero 2011.

LOST IN THE POST

Asha Zero depicts a world molded by the media, communicating a synthesized and accelerated society. Zero’s hyperrealistic painted collages express the pastiche of audio and visual simulations that have developed into the anxieties of the present day. His work suggests a kind of neurosis that most people seem to experience in the present Orwellian constructed world.

Zero exposes us to the media spectacle of the global village by juxtaposing many traditional modernist approaches, such as collage, gestural painting, and pop elements, with more contemporary elements and concepts, such as Neo-expressionism, graffiti, and electro-clash design. Extracts from torn tabloid icons and celebrity magazine cut-ups are pieced together to assemble ‘über-cosmetic’ and ‘pseudo-idealistic’ deformations. By sacrificially mutilating already established modernist perspectives, Zero turns plasticity into plastic living, and manages to expose the dissident of postmodernism. Zero embraces the comedy of the techno-urban environment in its entire tragic splendor, finding parallels between the angst we feel inside the city, and the awe we feel outside of it. In this way, zero creates a poisonous concept of lethargy as a cathartic cure to an over-accelerated instantaneous world of glitches and delays.

As the world becomes ever smaller with the growth of media orientated technologies and the increased speed-up of networks, proximity is often equated with promiscuity, covering the world in a blanket of globalization and westernization. This is a schizophrenic space that Zero relates to in an equally schizophrenic fashion through his use of various guises. He plays with various aliases in an attempt to negate his own identity, choosing anonymity over autonomy. Zero delivers a perspective of a downloaded reality in the midst of a smoldering consumerist society which has a special affinity to the techno-organic space of the city, where the individual merely becomes a cipher in a buzz of cellular automata. Spectacular culture has saturated the globe in a haze of electronic media that brings traditional modernist notions of identity into question. Zero’s ‘trans-politics’ filters out the capitalistic and consumerist elements that structure western existence by utilizing clippings from the very advertisements, tabloid photo’s, and television programs that propagate the supposed coherence of society.

Zero draws much of his inspiration from music videos, cult films, poster and album cover art, because they are indicative of, or rather they render an awareness of, a late capitalistic, postmodern era. Such imagery is also evident in the billboards, MTV blips, and humming fast food signs that surround us. Zero simply makes this sublime situation apparent in a funny and sometimes juvenile manner, supported by his refined sensibility and wit.

Zero is careful not to conform to a singular or autonomous individuality, but rather incorporates a number of brands into his idiom of multiple personalities and bogus corporations. Zero refers to these brands and aliases as his ‘collectives’, intent on confusing the assumed universalism and coherence of the global village. Zero does not have a preference for any specific guise, and he adopts these ‘sub-alter-ego’s’ as playthings of sorts. These characters include such names as Palinki, Broop Nook, Whatsnibble, and most importantly, the Imposter. The imposter implies deception and falsity, but it also suggests the all important poster boy; the face of the brand or corporation and the mediator of capitalistic dogma.

Zero, like many other artists today, dramatizes the fabrication of western, and westernized, society’s so called multiplicity, which has grown out of an obscure postmodern faith in pluralism. It can be said that our society is a binary singularity trying to cope with a supreme lack of difference in the world. With the lack of any Other, Zero is the only symbol that can distinguish and support the One. Zero’s self-denying pseudonyms are epitomized and controlled by two counterfeit brands called Roadvisionkilltoiletries and Mobilediscoetcetera. These brands form the corpus of his ‘collectives’ and subvert, or even invert, capitalistic processes of institutionalization. Corporations and institutions are mechanisms of representation that allocate purpose, meaning, and identity to things. Zero’s cut-up images are fragmented products of this system: a homogenized societal husk in the wake of a specific brand of modernism that has turned into the spectacle of market capitalism. Zero’s corporations are ventures that externally and conceptually compliment his painted images, and clone, even mock, the fictional basis of multi-national corporations, humanism, globalization and the like.

Various traits, both conceptually and formally, from Modernist movements such as Cubism, Dada, and Futurism can be found in Zero’s work. He openly admits to the influence of Dada poster art and often mentions the conceptual approach of Marcel Duchamp, specifically regarding his embrace of the anonymous, unpredictable and unknown factors in life. Following Duchamp, Zero’s images are ambiguous, and honest. They use capitalist, consumer orientated tricks and fibs to suggest many possible truths. Zero’s collectives are mutated electrical digital mechanical monsters that grow sporadically. They reveal a polemic of reality and simulation that entails an existence bent on instant communication and infinite consumerism. By painting his collages as realistically as he can, and re-representing already highly mediated imagery, sourced from tabloid magazines, children’s books and the like, Zero makes a serious comment about society as bricolage; a world that has lost any sense of the real.

Zero’s paintings are portraits that have been pieced together from the appropriated features of media icons and cover models that many people desire to be. His paintings are self-portraits and portraits of the viewer; they depict everyman and the overman. Such portraits make one aware of the various cultural masks that people need to wear in order to be accepted in society.

As a constructed and abstract entity, Asha Zero is a parody on consumer brands and capitalist politics. His ‘collectives’ are both the object of consumption and the subject that produces. His paintings are deliberate satirical reproductions of collages by pseudo characters that ‘exist’ in a sequenced and controlled world-wide domain.

Zero plays with contemporary societal issues, where Orwellian concepts no longer teeter on the opposition between good and evil, but tinker on the pitting of ‘evil’ against ‘evil’. Zero shows us his dreams of a sublime digitised and Xeroxed space that has developed from over-communication and an addiction to the media. In Zero’s world we are all impostors living the illusion of a man-made human-condition that is decaying from its own processes of modernisation. Asha’s ‘collectives’ attest to this universalistic paradigm of drone nations, cloned identities, and ultimately ones and zeros.

Latest article on Asha Zero : Hyphen and Splice (click here)