Cliché garden

Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to announce Cliché garden, by Jimmy Raskin, the artist’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery. In varied new sculptures, paintings, collages, and wall reliefs, Raskin furthers his extravagant, playful exploration of the poetic impulse and sharpens hisvision of what the formation of meaning might “look like”. He introduces, here, the key figure of the Witness, as it relates to the mysterious text collage in the show: The meta is not the witness.

Raskin’s initial ‘singularity’ or first strike, so to speak—that elusiveinitial point of stillness which becomesat once the destined through linefor an artist—wasviewing Arthur Rimbaud’s handwritten excerpts from Illuminationsat the Huntington Library in Pasadena. The pages were displayed underglass within thick wood vitrines. Raskin was not so much drawn to the writingas such, but moreto the presence of“text as both object andreadingmaterial,” asacontainer of thoughtand feeling one could literallygaze upon.

Ultimately inspired bythe text-as-art strongholds of Barbara Krugerand Lawrence Weiner, the philosopherpoetand designerearly on chose his ‘devotional typeface’: Avant garde. Heembraced the font for its sturdy, plain design “perfectly fitted to hold potentialzingers”. Further, he created astreamlined typographicsystem that allows him to capture basic phrases he calls "Cliché candidates. Raskin is interested in clichésas endpoints of signification. Likethe pun, both areassigned the function of pluralizing meaning with the simplest of formulations in alanguagespace where 1+1= 3. The pun’s mission is meta, that is itexists primarily to trigger the sarcastic laugh at the joke of a word’s double entendre. And yet, the cliché holdsasecret key of sensitivity with itsauthentic attempt to instill asense of meaningfulness within a person’s “felt-mind.” Like the pun, the cliché holds outsized meaning, yet if positioned at the right time for each encounter, it might produce a moment of felt-connection where 1+1= ∞. Alas, the cliché requires such a high degree of vulnerability of the moment to deliver a felt-experience, it nearly never finds a path to fulfillment. Thus, containing a magical paradox, “the cliché carries with its instantiation its own amor fati; as the French poet Gérard de Nerval once said, ‘The first man who compared woman to arose was a poet, the second, an imbecile.’ Bestowed with a lack of originality, the clichésets adrift as a sign of and for critique itself”¹.

The Cliché candidates survive over time in the auxiliary space of the artist’s practice. They generate works of art which bring to life not only the literal qualities of language, but the paradox itself: we are all in on the joke of how rudimentary meaning can be, yet we would not know it without the work’s capacity to expand and bring the viewer back in through Raskin’s pivot a land recurring motif of the Cone of expression.

This idea of singular intensification reminded him of the stones set in an ancient Zen garden he visited in Kyoto a few years ago. During the contemplative tour, he received a text message from Miguel Abreu: “objects and thoughts need to mutually reinforce one another, one cut at a time, and build up toward something objective. No sentimentality, eliminateall narcissistic impulses”.

“How did I solve this?” notes Raskin, “I brought in the witness to the self enjoying oneself in the process of making art”. The exhibition turned into an experience of Beingness. Each stone is alone, yet belongs in an ocean of sand, the erosion of the stone itself. This is epic in the mind-body, yet simple enough to elicit the right kind of laughter, the kind that releases oneself from the binds of the meta, becoming free for a moment as the witness of it all.

Space serves I
Or the rebirth of myth.

A breeze without a source
Or the allure of the nonsensical.

The meta is not the witness
Or the pure speck of in-sight.

When I close my eyes I stare.

Jimmy Raskin (b. 1970, Los Angeles) lives and works in New York. A graduate of Cal Arts, Raskin has exhibited his work and staged “lecture-performances” in institutions, art galleries and alternative spaces internationally since the mid-1990s, notably at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Cooper Union, SculptureCenter, Thread Waxing Place, Foundation 20 21, Greene-Naftali, and Miguel Abreu Gallery (all in New York), as well as at Centre Pompidou, Paris, Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT, Swiss Institute, Paris, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. In 2013, Raskin participated in Performa 13 as part of Performa After Hours, which marked his second contribution to the performance biennial, following A certain misgiving in the disciple (2009). His work was selected for the Art Statements sector of Art |42| basel (2011), and was included in For the blind man in the dark looking for the black cat that isn’t there (2010), a major group exhibition organized by Anthony Huberman at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. The exhibition traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, the ICA, London, de Appel Arts Center, Amsterdam, and Culturgest, Lisbon. Raskin also participated in the group exhibition Breaking new ground underground (2009), curated by Thea Westreich at Stonescape, a private museum in Napa Valley, California. In 2022, Raskin staged his fourth one-person exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery, Stations of the Last Eccentric. Raskin’s publications include The prologue, the poltergeist and the hollow tree (Foundation 20 21, 2005), The Lisbon lecture (Sequence Press, 2012), Corner jump (Onestar Press, 2012), and The final eternal return, published in 2019 as part of his participation in the group exhibition Tribe-Specificat Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna.