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Innocent Butcher Bunnies: Pop Surrealism - How to
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Mark Ryden, The Butcher Bunny
Oil on Panel, 2000 [link]
Mark Ryden, Little Boy Blue
Oil on Canvas, 2001[link]
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Innocent butcher bunnies, children that hold small political
figures from the hand and a kitsch statue of the Christ
watching
over them are images that on a first glance they seem innocent
and innocuous, but when more closely glanced they acquire
an uncanny essence. Antitheses are getting interviewed in an
image that is both cute and grotesque, innocent and evil,
natural and artificial. The pop aesthetics of the image blended
with that surreal ambiguity and absurdity spread this
uncanny essence into the aesthetic level as well.
Watching Mark Rydens works is like watching the world
through the eyes of an innocent child that has not yet
formed
stable binary concepts of his reality; a child that is both
innocent and evil at the same time.
Through the expression of such ambivalent, vague and absurd
images, Mark Ryden might actually express a critique towards
the way our cultural logic creates a binary system of
understanding the world: good vs. evil, pretty vs. ugly,
moral vs. immoral and so on, which ultimately becomes the
inescapable frame through which the world acquires
significance and meaning for us, as well as also become the
justification for many of our unjustifiable or brutal
natural
needs. When one attempts to escape that frame one is
facing a rupture with his reality.
Artificiality and a malevolent kind of cuteness are the
central
themes to Mark Rydens art; maybe thats because he refers to
the way culture is wrapped around the natural order as a
plastic cute, seemingly innocuous mantle that delude us into
believing that we are able to transcend our nature, or that
we are capable of evolving beyond the crudeness of our
brutal nature effortlessly. Religious and political figures
referring - in the paintings of Mark Ryden- to
unquestionable
beliefs ideologies and the past; fairy tales, bunnies even the
concept of the childhood innocence are for Mark Ryden just
prejudices; images that support and perpetuate a reality that is
delusional and solely in our minds; a binary reality that
blinds us from actually perceiving the rawness of our
surroundings.
In fact childhood -depicted in nearly every painting of Mark
Ryden- is a very peculiar part of our developments timeline:
It
is the most innocent, yet the most raw and nature-driven
part
of our aging process. Children are innocent yet in that
innocence exists a raw natural organism, a wild animal that
acts upon ones instincts and raw needs, sometimes if needed
at the expense of others; it is the most seemingly
innocuous,
cute, pretty part of our aging timeline and at the same
time the most raw, brutal and evil. Mark Rydens
surrealism signifies the vision of the child which sees
everything beyond good and evil, beyond the logical and the
illogical, beyond morality and immorality; it perceives the
world in a way where that binary cultural system collapses
and
give its place to an experiential singularity through which
everything seem crazy and contradicting but in fact it is
what
constitutes reality itself.
Mark Rydens technique of achieving the expression of that
singularity is through the impersonation of "belief systems"
in his paintings: the religious and political figures that
become
just empty, banal images without deeper connotations, the
fairy tale bunny that through his cute masquerade chops a piece
of meat, even the innocent child that would gladly eat
that piece of meat, all work together but contradictory in order
to create a reality that binary definitions of good and evil,
ugly and pretty, moral and immoral no more exist.
Children in Rydens work might also incorporate our tendency to
find transcending value in a glorious past, individually
(self-beliefs and self-identity) as well as collectively
(nationalism and patriotism); to create prejudices that keep us
stuck in
a past that exists only in our individual or national
imagination. To yearn for an imaginary past is consume an
experience of
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Mark Ryden, Pink Lincoln (#92)
Oil on Canvas, 2010[link]
Mark Ryden,The Meat Shop (#97)
Oil on Canvas, 2011 [link]
the past, a heroism that has never existed beyond our wishes,
and that blinds us from actually acknowledging our
problems and overcoming them creatively.
So, progress and civilization for Ryden become nothing more than
an
artificial label that has nothing to do with the primitive way
things work in
reality. Maybe religious or political figures once had indeed a
deeper
meaning, maybe not, but whether civilization exists or not, we
have to
acknowledge the fact that it tends to get alienated from its
original purpose
and becomes just another empty image without any deeper meaning
than the
one it superficially denotes; it becomes a prejudice that
conceals the
brutality of things instead of actually transcending them; it
becomes
conservatism which consumes solutions instead of creating
solutions, it
becomes the belief that conceals the truth instead of creatively
transforming
the truth; and that is what the banal aesthetics of Mark Ryden
denote.
Banal aesthetics in Rydens art denote exactly that kind of
consumerism (not
only in regards to material products, but also a consumerism in
ideas, beliefs,
ideologies, and identities) that draws cultural material from
the large pool of
societal images and prejudices to conceal the ugly truth instead
of facing it.
Chinese letters to describe American political figures such as
Lincoln, connote
exactly that tendency to massively, effortlessly and cheaply
recreate,
reproduce and consume a belief, so that it ultimately become
alienated not
only from its original purpose but also from its original place
in time and
space.
Maybe Rydens uncanny worlds call us to release ourselves from
established authorities:
beliefs, morality, the past, and instead experience the world
directly and creatively. It might
be also that I am just projecting my own ideas on the paintings
of the artist and they are all
just pointless pop surrealism without any actual significance
beyond their aesthetic
value, but I believe that thats the value of such kind of art;
that it doesnt dictate you what
to understand, instead it lets you to reflect your mind on them
without intervention. It
doesnt lend you the "authoritarian" "eye" of the "genius" artist
in order to see the world
through his mind; it instead opens your own mind into different
kinds of possibilities and
understandings.
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