ONNI NORDMAN Munich Project 2020: August 2020

QUARANTINE PICTURES
MARCH - AUGUST 2020

A Kleenex box designed for the 2019 flu season, with a carefree mid-20th-century graphic of jazz microbes, becomes indexical in late March 2020 as a shelter for a self-isolating film noir woman in trouble.

2020 50.8 X 40.6 panel
Kleenex box, Belgian film poster

Every visual artist in the world is by now engaged in figuring out how to portray a new milieu of masked faces. Or rather, how they can say something that is not self-evident, not overly on-the-nose, perhaps even resistant to becoming dated too soon. The masked face is to today as the postures of a figure seen from a distance addressing their cell phone is to just yesterday.

An airplane motion sickness bag takes on a glow of nostalgia in light of the increasingly empty skies. The 3-D glasses complete the portrait by their association with escape bought at the cost of vertigo.

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3-D glasses, air sickness bag

There is, of course, a video game based on Homer's 'Odyssey'. And the Magavox Odyssey was the first commercial home video game console, released in 1972. Millions of young people are relying more than ever this summer on escape entertainment, distractions, and reliefs. Ice cream and comic books are evergreen comforts.

This piece hooks up with picture no. 6 below, in its chain of associations. According to Julian Jaynes, in 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind', the temporal distance between Homer's 'Illiad' (treating 'Homer' as a label for a bardic tradition rather than as a single author) and Homer's 'Odyssey' is an index of the emergence of consciousness, or private inner life-- the human ability to introspect. Jaynes posits that before the 2nd millennium BCE, the hemispheres of the brain communicated as if they were separate entities.

The warriors of 'The Illiad' are guided by voices, which they reasonably interpret as coming from the gods. They act within a fatalistic world of myth. Odysseus, in 'The Odyssey', is the first modern man; his brain has achieved an early form of functional lateralization. Possessing the solitude of a unified inner life, he is now capable of trickery and deceit.

Whether Jaynes' theory is genius or fallacy, it yields an excellent metaphor. To be isolated, to be fundamentally alone as oneself --especially in the company of others who are in the same fix-- is a new existential quandary. It demands either a sharpening of whatever it is we mean when we speak of 'mindfulness', or else we face a sinking back into the mindset of bicamerality-- into the comforts of escape, surrender, and compliance with the voices from tireless, opaque places in the culture which would shape our ethos to ends beyond our acknowledgement.

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Vintage Classics Illustrated No. 81 cover, 1951
Wooden ice cream bar stick

The letters spelling 'hope', scattered like dice, quickly suggest 'home' as well. But just as quickly the name Poe emerges like an unnerving guest. When we think of Poe it's likely that our first thought will be of 'The Raven', which here appears as spread wings creating a roof shape, with a thunderbolt descending. The Goth-Romantic endpaper illustrations of wrathful waves stress the idea of the sea as land's end: you're going no further. The apocalyptic oracle bird is now inside the house. The letters reflect your own face.

The likely second impression in the chain of associations with Poe will be 'The Masque of the Red Death', which, along with Bocaccio's 'Decameron' and Camus' 'The Plague' has become a lockdown bestseller.

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Hardcover pastedown endpapers from German edition of Virginia Woolf: 'To The Lighthouse' ('Zum Leuctturm') 1952;
Plastic mirrored letters

Being a Finn, my favourite 20th century Finnish pop singer is Tapio Rautavaara, the "Finnish Johnny Cash". One of his signature songs was 'Tuopin Jäljet', which translates as "the marks, or stains, that my drinking mug leaves on the table". The singer ruefully recollects his life of mostly distraction and dissipation, but accepts that it's his own albatross: "I recognize my own tankard rings".

   The mug stains here have become a roiling sea of isolation drinking --temps perdu-- with a Captain Ahab questing for his lost 52nd card, like the singer in the Statler Brothers' 'Flowers on the Wall': "playing solitaire till dawn with a deck of fifty-one".

The ace of spades contains a pair of wrestlers struggling over a Mercator map of the world. The card states "designed and made in British Hong Kong". The once and lately small, flat, global world has now reasserted the severity of distance and the resistant topography of politics.


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Rockwell Kent: Captain Ahab illustration photocopy;
Novelty oversize playing card, British Hong Kong, c. 1960;
Coffee, tea, ink, watercolour

The meditating Buddha / Ganesha figure sits under a cloud of dubious theory, which nevertheless offers a toehold of hope for the ascendancy of heedfulness over shambles.

2020 50.8 X 40.6 panel
Mango packaging, Colibri Fruit Co., Mexico
Dust jacket, Houghton Mifflin Co.,1976
Post-surgery eyeglass insert
Lenticular 3-D plastic eye

Tuesday, 18 August 2020