Beginning At The End…


It's not altogether impossible to imagine a world in which outcomes we know to have already taken place were different and definitive endings never quite arrive. It is after all just this kind of imagination that has guided romanticism and held the candle of hope to all religious ideas of afterlife beyond those that merely bring moral economy to the calculus of reckoning. For these imaginations the beginning of the end is also the paradox of new beginnings. We exit stage left precisely to avoid the finality of departure, to prolong the theatre for which the irreversible has been substituted for the more redeemable semi-finalities of eternal return. Failed bulwarks against the inevitable they are our conceit, our hubris. They are the folly of the reader for whom the final chapter has come too soon and realizes too late that even themost adagio comprehension will not stave off the last full stop, the moment at which the narrative ends insists we put the book down. They are the monuments whose eventual disintegration – whether as fiery explosions or damp squib - mimics that of the very thing they were designed to commemorate. They are signposts in the promise that we are going somewhere there to be observed them for afar, like astronomers who debate whether an extra-solar object hundreds of light years from Earth is a planet or, like the brown dwarfs it orbits, simply a failed star.

Lives after death are what Kris Martin bequeaths to those around him. Like tombstones inscribed with disappearing ink they exist as monuments to our varying states of disappearance and becoming - slight handwritten gestures condensed from the interstices of opposing forces, of faith and stone. The endeavor to create art that engages and perhaps survives these battles of impermanence has led to the creation of objects that self-destruct, pages that literally have the last word, weapons too large to wield and thoughts too ephemeral or fugitive to pin down. Some, though not all, ask that we revere this fragility and to see in it reflection and portent of our own demise. Others ask only that we revel in its comedic aspect, that we see in the dance macabre the only true carefree celebration of life. Less inclined to upstage his own subject with grandly operatic arias about morbid psychology than to identify those absurdist traditions that deflate such claims, Martin preference for the dunces cap is also wisdom of the highly cultured fool. Like much of his work, the signboard Mandi 111 is a monument to many things. In static form its commemorative readings range from the prosaic to the sublime; from the passing of analogue information technology to the notion that the very idea of passage has itself become just another empty conceit in the endless revolution of unfulfilled possibility. Most of Martin's art suggests that the road to nowhere is littered with the debris of fallen abstractions of which Mandi 111 is undoubtedly the most striking. But, stand in front of it for some time and the pall of existential futility soon dissolves in the comedic timing of the flaps as they tap their unpredictable dance to blind rhythm of chance.





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