Massurrealist Overload – In the
Studio with Cecil Touchon
Collage works in Sound, Text and Image
by Cecil Touchon
Opening 5.31.03 at The New Gallery - Houston,
Texas
Living the last four years in the
central Mexico city of Cuernavaca, Cecil Touchon gives us a rare glance
into the startlingly wide range of his creative working process.
A prominent member of the Massurrealist
Society (founded in 1994 by
James Seehafer) Touchon explores
the various strands of the construct he identifies as the ‘massurreality’
- the meta discourse of globalization as it relates to modernist
art and its aspirations to radically recreate the world in a utopian fashion.
Touchon’s installation of hundreds of works on paper, digital photographs,
notes, poems, and sound collages in constant loop on several portable CD
players connected to headphones, seeks to overwhelm the viewer with an
inordinate amount of information intended to simulate his sense of information
overload as typified by the Internet – the ultimate expression of Modernist
Culture.
A basic premise of the exhibition
is that we are living in the future world designed by the modernist pioneers
of the creative community between the World Wars of the 20th Century and
which only existed as a science fiction type dream of the future only 80
years ago. Touchon’s exhibit seems to ask the question; ‘So where to from
here?’
As one stops to ponder the message
presented by Touchon’s exhibit, it becomes clear that the exhibit is the
product of a multifarious inquiry into the variegated intentions of many
different avant garde artistic heritages from the past with the purpose
being to find the spiritual underpinings that give our present modern life
a value worth spending one’s time to pursue. These heritages include Constructivism,
Minimalism, de Stijl, Bauhaus, Cubism, Futurism, Letterism, Fluxus and
other visual idioms of the last 100 years that Touchon combines, recombines,
mutates and contorts in order to find new and unexpected combinations.
Touchon maintains his center in seeking out and exploiting elegant abstract
relationships from the heap of visual material his work compiles and explores.
It this doesn’t seem enough to cause
overload, add to it a several inch thick pile of ‘collage poems’ constructed
by Touchon from material gleaned from email correspondences, spam mail,
text from web pages found through strange search processes on Google’s
search engine and other digital sources that are cut and pasted line by
unrelated line into ambiguous yet provocative clusters of intuitively
poetic statements.
It is clear that these are not wholly
random, such as John Cage might have constructed by mechanical means but
rather are the product of gathering and constructing the lines of text
into collages not unlike his visual works. Other compilations of notes,
books in progress and the like are on view.
Then there are the sound collages
called Massurrealist Meditations that can only be heard through the earphones
attached to portable CD players where several minutes of constructed sound
works are playing on continuous loop so you don’t know where they start
or stop. These works are composed of sounds from Touchon’s field recordings
of Paris subways, Mexican market places and water parks and/or ‘found noises’
that Touchon appropriates from unnamed sources on the internet which he
manipulates and alters with audio editing software on his computer in the
manor of which is currently known as Microsound. The works range in emotive
content from frantic to sublime to humorous and clever.
In addition there are digital photographs
taken of scrambled TV images that have then been blown up, amplified, edited,
isolated into all that emails are lovely, lyrical abstract relationships
of color and form. And there’s more! But you’ll just have to go see the
show for yourself.
