“A body only exists to be other bodies”
- William S. Burroughs, The Electronic Revolution
OTHER BODIES + ANTIBODIES
Other Bodies + Antibodies is a Burroughsian slip on a banana peel, transgressing the real and the imaginary, while blurring the boundaries between what is material and immaterial in contemporary culture.
The exhibition consists of four mind warping sculptures - Woman Taking a Selfie Bisected by a Mirror (The Mirror Stage), Gold Hip-Hop Dancer In Relative Simultaneity, Virtual Reality Expedition in Grand-Antique d'Aubert (The Lovers), and The Three Red Bicyclists, or Menage Trois.
Plato stated that “reality is created by the mind,” John Beckmann asserts that society exists in a unconscious state of ‘cognitive dissonance.’ He envisions the lived world as a permeable space that is continually being altered, destabilized, and manipulated by a multiplicity of events that are both real, digital, and imaginary. Arguing that specific conceptual effects derange the senses and the mind, he makes assemblages of art and philosophy, intersecting, interpenetrating and embedding bodies with other bodies, objects and architecture which provide insights into the artistic event as a form of a manufactured consensual hallucination.
Sculpture: John Beckmann
Visualizations: Kirill Lynkovsky
Conceived for the Saatchi Gallery, London
© 2020 Axis Mundi Design LLC
