Pessimistic ravings on ‘Forced Passage’ at ArtInformal
by Levi Masuli

This is a winning entry from the inaugural Art & Market ‘Fresh Take’ writing contest. For the full list of winners and prizes, click here.

All matter matters, in all its gradations and moods. In fact, it is precisely when a thing’s formal constitution lapses that it sheds the membrane that separates it from others: when rock starts to drip, or when water calcifies, or when breath thickens to drag at the speed of sound and scalds human skin. This passage, when pushed to a certain scale, can threaten our own organic constitution and reduce us, the conscious viewer, to mere material.

Fortunately, JC Jacinto’s ‘Forced Passage’ (2020), part of ArtInformal’s ‘Becoming Trees’ online exhibition, are but parceled premonitions of phenomena of catastrophic proportions. Perched on unassuming woodblocks, his artificial plastiglomerates are proofs of concept of a disturbing hypothesis.

Plastiglomerates are here defined as “indurated, multi-composite material made hard by agglutination of debris and molten plastic.” Considered as fossilized markers of pollution by humans on the natural world, plastiglomerates are ‘naturally-occurring’ (that is, without human intervention) in every sense of the word. But in Jacinto’s works, it is the process, not the materials, that is artificial. The artist himself crafted them from “molten plastic, natural and man-made detritus.”

JC Jacinto, ‘Forced Passage 1’, 2020, molten plastic, natural and man-made detritus on wooden block, 24.1cm. Image courtesy of ArtInformal.

You’d imagine we’re tiptoeing in familiar territory, of the aestheticization of nature for whatever intention (to fashion, for instance, an ecocritical comment). But something more blunt is at work here. There is a monstrosity, an ossified violence, in these pieces’ impossible forms.

‘Forced’ is a curt yet eerily precise description. Indeed, what mutated these materials is a human-inflicted trauma, a practical mastery of the destruction of matter. Daniel Charles Barker wrote: “Trauma is a body. Ultimately – at its pole of maximum disequilibrium – it’s an iron thing.” Trauma thus achieves in ‘Forced Passages’ a palpable body. But don’t be mistaken: what is on display here isn’t mere allegory. Trauma itself is matter. It can take on the form of an iron sea beneath the earth’s crust as per Barker, or perhaps a coral reef, a rotting swamp, or the human spine, as easily as it can take the form of some abstract, mental anguish.

Indeed, our bodies can be equally considered as alloplastic assemblages in the same way as underwater gorges, desert landscapes, plastic toys, and supercomputers are also assemblages. Cosmic forces which we can only call ‘natural’ created these assemblages with violent means.

But because human cognition only recognises equilibrium and consistency, we continue to gloss over anything that deviates from the established forms. For instance, while psychoanalysis has already rooted trauma to disturbances in the libidinal flow, imagined or otherwise, we continue to think normatively, as if no such disabilities and inadequacies exist. As a result, in the same way that our neuroanatomies dictate so-called “optimal” coital patterns and therefore limit sexual expression to a finite set of positions, capitalism has also set into stone the possible couplings of different matter. Of course, we are now all too aware that anatomy, capitalism, ecological equilibrium etc. are all artifices that we can do away with and will inevitably disintegrate through time.

Through material violence, the artist amputates matter, liberates the repressed forms in which it can relate to other matter, and releases the trauma that has condemned the object until then to staticity. Trauma expresses its fleshly form, and the materials, abused beyond recognition, embodies the uncanny.

JC Jacinto, ‘Forced Passage 3’, 2020, molten plastic, natural and man-made detritus on wooden block. 22.9cm. Image courtesy of ArtInformal.

If the recent lessons on the so-called Anthropocene have taught us anything, it is that such processes are happening on a planetary scale. All the world’s oil, carbon monoxide, sonic space, even human labour, are now being mulched, chewed up, torn apart at the molecular level by complex processes beyond our civilisations' control. Even today, as the entire world braces against an existential threat, no bigger than the size of a needle’s point, we know that we are frail assemblages susceptible to even the slightest organic paroxysm.

If, as Freud claims, “the aim of all life is death,” how do we process the possibility that underneath the drive towards more and more technological sophistication is a thirst to “become inorganic once again”? We thus arrive at a suspicion as to what really draws us to Jacinto’s pocket-sized apocalypses. That we are, in fact, drawn by this beckoning premonition of a future planet-sized monstrosity. Seething earth and molten iron, limbs and guts, nerve and plastic circuitry, injury and memory all elegantly perched on a tiny woodblock.