Deportraiture: Recent Paintings by Barbara Friedman

April 20 - June 29, 2014
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 19, 6-9PM

Barbara Friedman, Cropped Gertrude, oil on linen 2014

BLASTA! - a thought about allegory in immersive art

Vlasta Volcano, Signs Along the Road, at Art in General, 1993

A good friend who is Serbian brought to my attention early this year, a piece made by Vlasta Volcano some 20 years ago for a show at Art in General about Yugoslav identity. I must say the "Yugoslav identity" dimension of the work was lost on me when I first encountered it in photos. Volcano was a member of the Immersive scene in Williamsburg, and so my initial response to this work of his was from that perspective. Here’s what I wrote about it almost a year ago:

They are figures, like Rodin or Giacometti, except they appear in abject material in a desolate place. From the bubbling coils of melting rubber, phantoms peel out and spring to life ... on a ghetto beach, oh brave new world. From an artist's hand, light of touch, comes a first-rate exposition in Vlasta's work of a certain ... insouciant minimalism of warehouse art of the time. A very simple process, burn rubber tires on the waterfront. A regular fine art foundry. And why not. If you can manufacture art in shops and factories, it stands to reason that you could make art at the ass end of industry as well, from the refuse. Off the schmelting rubber come leaping lords and hipstresses. Vlasta did not draw or paint, he lit a fire, and he caught our shadows all the same. 

— Ethan, January 6, 2014

1992 to 93 was a very dark time in Yugoslavia, and there were a number of Serbs and Croats in the local art scene. As it happened I fell in with that crowd for a while. My friend Jelena Tomic is Serbian by way of Paris, I introduced her to my old friend Ivan Kustura, who is Croatian and a painter whom I knew from a circle of Greenpoint artists in them mid-80s. And soon we were drinking at Teddy's with eight or nine other Yugoslavians.

Vlasta Volcano, from photos taken between 1990-93.

Volcano is Serbian, and I knew him the way people in close art communities know each other. That is to say, like family, even though we rarely ever spoke with one another. It might be like that in a Serbian village as well, with someone you've never spoken to, but have known for a thousand years. In a big-city avant-garde, you have people from all over the world, who know each other implicitly.

I do recall one funny exchange with Volcano at a subterranean club on the Southside of Williamsburg called El Sensorium, some 20 years ago. Sub-maritime as well, bulging with aquaria, waterfalls, unearthly lighting, dry-ice vapor, and Volcano was wearing a strip of duct tape over his mouth for most of that evening. At some point I caught him without the tape, and I asked him if he thought the phenomenon of fame and celebrity might be an evolutionary precursor to some form of social telepathy that might become highly articulated in another 40 thousand years or so.

“Could be” he said.


Volcano was, after all, an early proponent of transhumanism, in Brooklyn and Belgrade, which are both places where transhumanist aesthetics took shape in the early 90s, concurrently with the philosophical development of transhumanism in California. Volcano was a founder of the group Floating Point Unit, a major branch of Immersionism, and he always struck me as a most chill and immersive sort of dude. I called him “Blasta.” But I am only now decades later connecting with this artist’s work and its position in the Brooklyn movement.

I gather this work is made from burnt or unraveled automobile tires. And it is Rodin-like, in is morphogenic release of energy and material. It is exemplary immersive sculpture. A calculated manipulation of the concrete random. No arty trappings or skills known to the genres. A process shall be deployed, upon such material as is readily available. No rules of the minimalists are broken, and an appreciably different world from theirs is revealed.

In 1998 Craig Owens located the “allegorical impulse” within minimalism and material art, and extended that impulse to the postmodern art that followed. The immersive artists are also allegorical, but they absorbed this irritating chestnut from the history of art in a different way. Brooklyn artists generally turned away form the analytic approach of the 80s, and discovered the synthetic approach. And so, where the allegory of Robert Smithson or Robert Morris is astringent and literate, the immersive sculpture of the 90s can be saturated with allegory and downright baroque. It must be noted, many thousands of people experienced immersive art first as entertainment.

Lauren Szold was making her seminal immersive work in Williamsburg in 1990 and 91. When I interviewed her at that time, she spoke about meaning embedded in raw material. She said she tried to avoid obvious cultural references; loaded objects and symbols plucked wholesale from the culture. It is characteristic of a lot of immersive work that narrative is ingrained in the material and the process, but not forced through symbolism. Dennis Del Zotto's polystyrene structures come to mind, as does the “plastic fog” of Frank Shifreen at the Flytrap in 1991. And of course many of the schemes of Lalalandia are exemplary in this regard.

The catch here with using the word “allegory” in this connection, is that this word has a precise meaning in literature and art. It means to tell one story by means of another. Usually, this means to recover some aspect of the past, of history usually, and pitch it as a new “story” that can be comprehended by a present-day audience. Napoleon as Caesar for example. But when we get into modern uses of “allegory,” the concept has been harnessed to other similes. Allegory is a resilient and flexible attribute of aesthetic experience; it may not always appear in a sharp “this-for-that” formulation. Allegory may be mixed in with the aggregate, so to speak, of a morphogenic and immersive art.

Volcano's work here is an example of allegory in immersive sculpture. It clearly suggests a lively narrative space, but it just as easily can stand for nothing but process and material.

Volcano, early- to mid-90s, with friends. Brooklyn or lower Manhattan. Photo by Megan Raddant

See my Facebook album on Immersionism

Post by Vlasta Volcano.