Man’s Fate in Doubt:
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Some books are memorable. They highlight an idea that you think is important, that you don’t want to let pass without comment. One of those books is a small paper-covered collection of collages called Several Steps From the Rope, published in 2002 by Xtant Press in Virginia. Part of what troubles in failing to say something about the book is its author, Guy R. Beining. I’ve been acquainted with Beining’s work since the 1980s as it appeared in early collage zines such as ‘PhotoStatic’, ‘Raunch-O-Rama’, ‘Atticus’ and ‘Mallife’. Beining’s work always seemed to be some of the best. |
In 2003 Beining published a similar, subsequent collection of collages, from Chapultepec Press in Cincinnati, titled Compact Duchamp Amp After Amp, a ‘portable’ version of a large scale work. I know from corresponding with him that Beining has not ventured much into the cyber world. His collages retain the flavor of ‘Xerolage’, Mail Art and Quick Print copy machines. |
The reason the work of the first book persists I think is its tough-mindedness of the sort described by its tough-minded title. There is not a lot of what is current in Beining’s work, manna, familiar approaches or styles of criticism. He doesn’t lean on anything, on excited predeterminations, any well-known terms. His message is the message as it slowly presents itself. This is not at all times a virtue. Usually popular art movements or cultural phenomena are worth looking into, especially if you separate the actual value from the exaggerated fashionable value. Abstract Expressionism might be objectionable as a fad, but as a considered art form it has much in it. |
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But isn’t it a matter of fact that we the people are accommodating too much what has become the extortion of renown, that society is presuming to take advantage of our sacrifice, has become bizarre, crooked, a one-way desert wind where every good deed is immediately negated by a foul antithesis? ‘...A haunt of every foul and hateful bird’. Doesn’t anyone watch the nightly news? What about this self-exalting gas peddling racket for starters? In hysteria a person attempts to immortalize him- or herself by becoming extravagantly demonstrative, exhibitionistic, in effect announcing his or her being as absolute and indisputable. It is given a surplus of presence. |
The collages of Beining seem similarly hectic and hysterical. They have not hint of ‘an obscure self that is forgotten underneath’. This awareness, as I have tried to show, has led the artist in a series of graphic steps away from language to the negative spaces of the page and eventually into non-verbal imageries.
Polkinhorn also finds in these collages ‘the sterner realities of a crumbling and disappearing order of representation’. Machine parts, human figures both dressed and nude, line-drawing designs, areas of texture, and sculpture fragments coalesce and swirl across the surface. The art remains figural but for the purpose of emphasizing fragmentation, dissolution, explosion, violent confrontation of the human body as a desiring machine at war with the inorganic order of things of which it is now but a subsidiary function. These elements (and other, similar ones) can be seen in the many collages....
Perhaps the newer collection is more optimistic. The naming of Duchamp makes reference to a famous, early quasi-abstract painting, Nude Descending a Staircase No 2, 1912. Artists and writers seem to me attracted to Duchamp because of his innovative yet serene character, indifferent to distortions of hometown, success, patriotism. Beining’s nudes ascend a staircase, the savage divisive hierarchical staircase that distorts values into absences of themselves. In the heatedness of its critique, the newer book seems to have become directed, as with some aim in mind, rather than based in the hopelessness of the earlier book. I too noted the lack of graspable words in the collages. But this is much less true of the later works than the earlier. Perhaps, after all, Duchamp symbolizes indifference even to destruction. |
Jacket 25 — February 2004
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