JARED MADERE

In the back of the restaurant I made him kiss the ring: Haunted House in the Key of New Years
Paths to G-ddess~ Tiny Dick Timmy Ricochet~ Live from the Geomancer’s Clit Ring
You say one thing and everyone acts like you don’t mean the opposite of it at the same time too

FEBRUARY 13 - MARCH 27, 2020

This work levitates above the more common pitfalls of abjection, instead of romanticising the complexity and depth of an artist's personal degeneracy and attitude, Jared Madere aims at something more universal and infinite. Charity and sincerity hang together with the ambiguities of perversion. The result is aporia, trading in definitely political but ultimately ineffable morals. Your first and last moments of clarity come from associations, but Madere’s gyre of images will scramble your trust in your own subjectivity. Reality becomes the tense knot at the base of a balloon, holding back the ecstatic lunacy of the exhibition expanding before you.
Jared’s is possibly the most contemporary art I can imagine, by virtue of his ability to interact with the exact problem of the now. Take for instance Disney’s recently released Last Skywalker. The movie whiplashes between saccharine swells of winning and archetypal terrors meant to trigger our most base and least analysed fears. A multicultural company of rebels and fan service cameos embrace in celebration, seconds after the screen was splattered with astounding bloodshed and pyrrhic carnage. This barrage of constant victory or constant anguish isn't unique to Star Wars or any major media franchise. All available narratives present us with the same struggle beyond limits lasting precisely until the penultimate victory, where all becomes invincibly correct in the world. Engagement with politics, culture or spirituality requires you to wade through chest-high pools of some liquid composed mostly of crocodile tears and the imaginary sweat of heroism.
Madere’s work does not attempt to arbitrate the situation we find ourselves in, rather he presents us with the poetry of it all. Look at his tapestry Bubble and ocean, in which the central image depicts a moment of tenderness between a Vin Diesel-esque tattooed bodybuilder and his prepubescent daughter. Mugging for the camera, arms parallel, the pair compare pointer fingers, the difference of size is humungous and sweet. Floating above are either thought bubbles or angels of opposing pairs. On the left, an emaciated elderly father in the arms of his adult son, and on the right a family on a bus, the mother wearing a hijab, the child wearing a Star Wars T-shirt. This contrast has a confusing morality. At once the central pair becomes grotesque—a roided, smirking hedonist engineering endearment for social media, his strength is vanity offering nothing to anyone but himself, and his daughter a prop to illustrate this. The complete work, however, demands a more complex and multivalent interpretation. The representations of the significantly less advantaged, non-white, families come with smiling faces, also performed for “the gram”, the sufferers also hamming it up, selling their own narrative. Gestures of care, familial bonding, bald opportunism, there is a unity in the trifecta that presents these moral disparities as harmonious and these realities as simultaneous. Condemnation and celebration are pulsing states of energy the difference between them is immaterial to the nirvana-esque road they lead to.
When I said Jared’s art was the most contemporary I could imagine I did not mean these contradictions aren’t eternal. Anyone who has lost their virginity the midnight following being slapped by their father, or became friends with someone after stealing money from their wallet, knows that life is a rollercoaster. But as media and politics stupefy themselves into a corporate lull, these universalities of pain and beauty are presented closer and closer together and contradictorily more and more distinct. Ambiguity is lost, morality is definitive, like a centrifuge spinning the heavy materials from their lighter counterparts. This separation is so highly privileged that there is no room for any other content. The concept of good exists only as the struggle against annihilation by evil, liberal politics exist only in blind resistance to Donald Trump. This bipolarity is infantilising. Fitting since Jared’s art frequently depicts children in the roles of adults.
Rather, I mean Jared Madere is the most contemporary artist due to his ability to address the unique ways in which these contradictions are conveyed by media and experienced by individuals now, an advance in the industry of Hollywood and Social Media which the dialogue of art, for the most part, has yet to catch up to. Nostalgia and referentiality are the main obstacles, most current exhibitions seem to find urgency in re-insisting that Attitude Becomes Form. Stuck in the past, contemporary art has left mass culture to the task of framing our emotional, political and spiritual lives. Jared has reached this same mastery of pathos and uses the set of tools only that art has at its dispense to rend this coagulation of manipulation open.

Milo Conroy
Edited by Lauren Burns-Coady

~

Neither is Jared Madere’s work out of time nor out of place, even though it depicts visions of pan-space and synchronizes huge whiffs of aeons. Consequently, and still counter-intuitively, a less interesting way to look at his sculptural opera would be to speculate all too much up or down in scale, let us say to speak of this œuvre as an inhabitant of the milky way or imagining to zoom in on a nano level (I admit both could be funny hyper or displacement activities), or even to go, once again, for the sterile and tautologic identity of a phony “grand family of man”.

One could think of Madere’s exhibition, Paths to G-ddess~ Tiny Dick Timmy Ricochet~ Live from the Geomancer’s Clit Ring, to be frivolous, as what he depicts in his installations are – although mythical situations, albeit highly artificialized – clearly reality-related, abundant bricolages, displaying contemporary materials and subjects.

In this all-over stage set, Madere first gives way to a huge cat, nearly a lioness, which calmly sentinels the room: Herself being half dressed in a costume of denim cloths, marked by a multitude of rainbow-colored fingerprints, and equipped with an ultrasonic vaporizer, she spreads light in a variety of hues and equally disseminates cents of lavender and wintergreen. Despite her key role in terms of senses and mood, the center piece of the room is two-dimensional – an expansive wall-drawing, in which comical lipstick figuration and expressive gesture merge.

Escorted by white swans molded in rice, drifting on a streamlet of foamy food boxes which are eaten up by nail art liquids still coating them in pearly glitter, there is a celestial entourage around the G-ddess whom we seem to be intimately confronted with. Levitating by the grace of the creator*ess, of spikes, or of chemicals, fiery beings with several pairs of wings, which are seraphim, passionately sanction the occurrences. The following narrative was told to me by the artist:

“The center wall bares a lipstick mural depicting a family of cartoon bacteria clutching each other for safety while standing on the peak of a clitoris ring[.] The enormous waves represent tsunamis of vaginal fluid from an aroused giantess that is inexplicably titillated by the presence of an imaginary character that we the audience are never actually confronted with named Tiny Dick Timmy Ricochet. The family of bacteria living on the peak of the giantess' genital jewelry are suddenly catapulted into crisis mode as they see their very lives are threatened by the arrival of impending waves spawned by eros[.] […] The seraphim] are flying to rescue the family of bacteria from impending doom.”

Indeed, if at first sight the environment deployed here triggers an immersive, New Ageian atmosphere at all, what we witness is at most a “pseudo erotic drama” (Madere). Fragility, hybridity, climate change, and violence are part of the cosmos as reflected by the artist, depicting, although in mysterious translations, images of disintegration (a notion I lend from Alex Comfort): The iridescent, acidy lacquer bizarrely scarred the food boxes, while the indices on the cat guard (which do not stem from Madere, but are those of a class of art students who assisted him) literally point to questions of technologies and (state) security. If the exuding scents are simultaneously lavender and wintergreen, isn’t the one meant to be relaxing, and the other to be stimulating, while the open scull of the glamorous animal exhibits their liquids melting into air?

Not least, the lipstick with all its undertones which the artist used to draw carries erotic and threatening features both in itself as well as on the level of figuration. Unfolding an extinctive scenery, set gently and at moments boldly in the distant and redemptive realm of humorousness, we are now for sure transposed into the sphere of “male fantasies” (Theweleit). A manspreading of a giantess’ spreading, no “vagina dentata” is pictured though, the encounter rather involving an ocean of force majeure, where the vagina is imagined as the “sea of seas”, not so much seductively, but in the catastrophic version of a tsunami. While probably by most of us merely experienced as mediatized phenomenon and still a word in the attention economy, the connotation of such a series of colossal waves becomes increasingly ecological.

Interestingly, this imagery of the Origin the World, which is a world of fluids, and of the pending decay of another, that at the same time may be a megalomaniac’s revelry, finds itself on a protective dam: not only are the visitors of the exhibition standing on a black plastic moisture barrier, the artist having once suggested his work to be best perceived as a backdrop of lived experiences, but also is the installation contextualized by the gallery space, while this cube admittedly multiplies into several coexistent sites. Therefore, the fleshy colors, the organic, artificial, and spiritual materials, as they allegorically discover a spectrum of life-related forces, are double framed and reined at that very moment, while the Paths to G-ddess in the future may develop into an opera, a form of musical theater sometimes described as an “impossible work of art” (Oscar Bie), as it escalates into all art forms, blurring their boundaries.

This piece is about a witty vitalism, including its critical implications, and about easing, as it is easing to feign transcending yourself by putting an electric globe in your living room (if scale is planetary), which is a materialized fantasy of control; or, conversely, to imagine the world, if not the milky way, being nested under the brim of a hat of a random semi-fictional person (say, Jane Fonda’s stunning feathered red Fire Drilling Friday hat) or, of course, on a giantess’ clit ring. Stylistically close to mannerism, displaying infinity, labyrinthic divinity, and disparities, Madere’s promethic hyper-immanence dares to do two things: first, it reflects and refracts images of disintegration; second, he thereby may renounce their possible implications. While we are both seduced and repelled by the abjective and by the pleasing moments in his work, twisting into a grotesque, the artist touches upon the absurdity of life and ridicules the scandalon of death. Sinfully transgressing into the area of the divine, which Madere reveals to be based on plainly impure conditions, his de-clarifications do not debase the (un)safe space of the art gallery. Whether Tiny Dick Timmy Ricochet refers to a wrestler, a bow technique, or ballistics, the trajectories are free floating inside their scrambled fields. If heresy here is a painful impulse that can merely dissolve, Madere presents himself as an entangled artist who doesn’t seem to share an apocalyptic vision, instead opting for radical immanence and wholeness, at times in the form of parody.

Cornelia Kastelan

~

You say one thing and everyone acts like you don’t mean the opposite of it at the same time too

I do not like the idea of punishing anyone ever

Do you want to be right so badly that you force others to be wrong?
-My friend’s marriage counselor

Somewhere within me I know better than to ever become upset about anything

It is difficult to behave with this touchstone as the guiding principle at all times

Whenever I hear of someone being punished I experience an upset within myself

A mother hears that her child has been accused of murder and harbours them in the attic to protect them from a viscious world of accusors

To the devoted mother it makes little difference whether the child has committed the violence or if it is an empty accusation~ if the violence did infact transpire and even out of malice, to the mother this facet of the truth can be made negligible by thinking of the traumas and misunderstandings that they witnessed the child endure from the moment of birth all the way up to now~ hope of future transformation or redemption also enables even the most civically minded to turn their back on the demands of the larger society in favor of protecting the precious creature they have nurtured. If the accusations are purely a fabrication of a society seeking a target to receive their rage, still the mother’s jewel must be protected just the same.

In this sense I feel as though I am everyone’s mom

Rapists, male politicians, and pedofiles are all easy targets for our collective disdain because they possess such overwhelmingly negative qualities that when coupled with their veracious appetite for influence do tremendous violence unto their neighbors. Even these vile offenders would become dedicated servants to the mutual good joining hands to carry buckets from the river in a society reshuffled such that it makes these tortured brats turned insatiable bullies feel cradled and listened to. Unfortunately we as a species are still very much hung up on righteous notions of revenge and justice that keep us hung up on seeing retribution served to those that transgress us even if this means turning ourselves to demons. It is very difficult for the victim bleeding from their gums a puddle in their lap to look at that who moments ago kicked their teeth in with eyes full of sympathetic tenderness knowing that only a series of anguishing knots of experience could have brought this contorted being to a place where they are capable of delivering such a spiteful blow to another. Unwavering patience is required in a world that more often than not would interpret this as a sign of passivity or weakness.

Banishment and incarceration turn those seeking safety into monsters as they do violence unto those they fear would do violence unto them.

An 8 year old boy hears that an old man says EVERYONE thinks about having sex with their mom- but the boy has never thought of this- what now?

When you think of the times when you have felt true remorse for your actions and know how it felt to look into a mirror in these moments, how can you wish imprisonment or external punishment upon another?

Wet sitting beside a river. They look into the river and notice a scorpion has fallen into the water. They reach down and rescue the scorpion which immediately stings their palm. Later on they see the scorpion stuck in the water again and reach down and rescue the scorpion with the same outcome~ a repeated sting. Dry asks WHY DO YOU KEEP DOING THAT????DO YOU SEE IT IS VICIOUS AND WILL CONTINUE TO STING YOU???????

Wet says YES OF COURSE IT IS WITHIN THE NATURE OF THE SCORPION TO STING BUT IT IS IN THE NATURE OF THE HUMAN TO SAVE

Even the purifying fire produces smoke ~ choosing not to perform your labors in hope of avoiding the ugly by-products they produce would be to miss the point

I think I’m order to believe in anything I am saying you probably have to believe in G-d or the inate goodness of all things or else maybe it is just words. You might have to believe that evil isn’t a real thing too.

Jared Madere

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