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RICHARD CARLYON
Looking at Richard Carlyon
by Susan Glasser
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"Inside the playground
an absolute and peculiar order reigns…[play] creates order, is order.
Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings
a temporary, a limited perfection… Play casts a spell over us; it
is ‘enchanting,’ ‘captivating.’ It is invested with the noblest
qualities we are capable of perceiving in things: rhythm and harmony…
[But] as soon as the rules are transgressed the whole play-world
collapses. The game is over. The umpire’s whistle breaks the spell
and sets ‘real’ life going again." During the Northern Sung Dynasty (960-1127) scholar-painters created a school of painting called "playing with ink" (mao hsi). Later Western critics condemned these scholar-painters for being escapists. Su Tong-p’o, a practitioner of this art, once stated, "Judging the scholar’s painting is like judging horses. The professional artists often see only the skin and hair, the whips, the trough, and the hay. That is why the professional artists are lacking in spirit." |
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"Every occupation is a different
version of making toy models." When Chico Marx’s wife caught him kissing a chorus girl he protested that he was merely whispering in her mouth. "We need to reconstitute the pleasure
principle in our experience and public talk about art." "You could look for a long time
and not come to the end of it." "Fewer and fewer things are not
television." |
Scientists have isolated the part of the brain that allows us to perceive the spatial and temporal boundaries of our physical world. They recently discovered that when people enter a transcendental state through meditation or prayer, activity in this part of the brain declines dramatically. It seems Richard Carlyon has found a vehicle for narcotizing this same brain region for aesthetic ends: play.
Carlyon invents (invisible) rules for collecting, assembling, and ordering mundane things in meaningful ways.
Avoiding the politics of Dogma 95 and with more humor than the Oulipou, his aesthetic games are frivolous constructs that transport us to seriously amusing places. Playing along, we make friends with uncertainty and gossip with the unknown. In the process, our minds expand beyond the visual, linguistic, and auditory to a sensory-less, logic-less place—an aesthetic realm of lucid abstraction.
Carylon is a happy existentialist. On his playground
we ride Pegasus instead of a horse. Romping with our own minds is the
ultimate subject here. The only losers are those who don’t play. 
