(Really) High Fidelity by Carlo McCormick
This essay and more can be found in the catalogue for ‘Amplified Space’, available at Howl! Happening, An Arturo Vega Project. Join Howl! for the opening of ‘Amplified Space’ on 1/12/17 at 6pm (6 East 1st Street, NYC).
Like curios scavenged from some impossibly chic future—or maybe more the treasured artifacts of that future we were promised but never delivered; a shiny new world of flying cars, friendly robots and surfeit leisure in that all-expansive ultra lounge where sound envelopes the soul in bubbly sonic cocktails spilling out in pill-shaped pools of happiness—Jonny Detiger’s sculptural hybrids design better living as a highly aesthetic, multisensory, interactive and experiential conceptual décor. Ecstatic and really funny, a wink in the mind’s eye and a secret little love finger to tickle one’s fancy, you just get the feeling that Detiger offers meaning through magic, super smart but unabashedly ridiculous, the hypnotic dance of a trickster-artist who took Fluxus out on a danger date with the promise of some dark rock club of angry intellectuals but then the bait and switch of a hedonistic dance floor swarming with smiling people bearing shimmering gifts of light and love. Can you dance to it baby?
At play with Cage’s chance, measuring sound as a wave, joy as a kind of dizzying geometry, color as an emotional nuance, Jonny invites us to take a seat so we can feel the beat and stroll through rainbow prisms that we might get lost in, a psychogeography of being there. At last, science left to the alchemists, art forged in the act of participation, experience delivered from the realm of individuality and offered up to the collectivity of community. The more players the more chaotic, but in this a sweeter, richer sound, more dazzle to the vision and depth to the space. Here is catharsis without the trauma, the audio illusions of stereo multiplied exponentially to the sum of everything and then distilled down to a minimalist essence, primary colors fractured into impressionist shards and op medleys, love the message of popular culture most eschewed by fine art, disembodied and crystallized into iconic primal and precious riffs from Moroder’s Donna Summer of Love and the Floyd’s Remembrance of Syd’s Past. It is all too much, but can it ever be enough?
Everyone will experience Detiger’s universe of concrete abstractions in their own way, but they will do so together, for ultimately it is all about the company we keep. By the notions of art we might look at Jonny’s work as a succession of objects (with occasionally something like paintings that seem like anagrams of ideas on the A-side of a forgotten single), but they are rather more akin to vessels; perfectly packaged, beautifully sexy containers for something we may never hear, see, touch, smell or taste so much as know. They bring us distant memories as a matter of present anticipations, the roiling echo and strobic flashbacks of culture before it became an industry, and industry when it was still an ingenuity. The song remains the same but now it is an infinitely extended remix, an anthem of togetherness written in a chorus we all sing along to, even as we forget the words and visit each sound as a picture that keeps on changing. Do you feel the love?
