Jon Rafman Installation view Westfaaelischer Kunstverein, 2016, photograby by Thorsten Arendt
Stepping into Jon Rafman’s solo exhibition one feels as if they are standing on the edge of eternity while blue strips of light mark the borders of a room reminiscent of bus station toilets. Your veins lose visibility as you leave your human ecology behind for Rafman’s image ecology. Today moves at an accelerated pace and a new form of alienation starts to burden the human psyche. Before the 20th century, 2D visuals were restricted to paintings. Now, anything can live inside a screen. Perception is habitual and automatic, negating the sublime and hacking the mind to suspend its perceptions. Cyberspace toys with our image ecology leave us somewhere between life and the living. The images are deeply impersonal. Therefore, they are personal to all, leaving the viewer to ponder.. Life trapped inside motionless matter, the works are a reflection of shared memories and future ones. Rafman’s solo show allows viewers to enter these glitched lives of others, stepping where few have tread before. Pain melts into humiliation, alienation and eventually silken security as Daniel Lopatin’s commissioned rave baby “eccojams” fill your gut with nostalgic electronic sound waves backing Rafman’s surf achieves.
The show is uncannily personal and strikingly intimate, with a pool of pearl balls inviting patrons to comfortably watch “Still Life – Beta Male” or slip into the soft, waist-clinching seats of “Mainsqueeze.” The resulting feeling allows your mind to float into an unknown but familiar void. Portraits of digital subcultures and meta-fetish fantasies flash over the screens: furries posing seductively; young teens passed out as their encroaching friends disfigure and cover them in pen; goths in gas masks strutting a carefully choreographed dance routine; a washing machine spins itself into destruction as a brick is lodged in its drum; a young girl speaks of her sick mother while stroking a prawn before crushing it under her foot. Hours of pain, fascination and shared user experience map a “virtual sublime” as Rafman surfs,searches, selects and curates the lives of thousands.
Still Life (Betamale), Jon Rafman + Oneohtrix Point Never, 2013 from jonrafman on Vimeo.
Some of the most interesting sites to watch Rafman’s stories unfold are the tiny cupboards specifically built for one person to sit comfortably and consume the screen. One such piece, entitled “Codes of Honor,” tells the story of an ex-professional gamer in his glory days, his strive for the community he once had and the achievement he failed to replicate. It’s the tragic pursuit of gamer versus computer, and without it life is lonely and meaningless. Unfortunately, this is not a niche fantasy. This is reality, and to some, a very real problem known as “hikikomori.” More than a mild teenage online addiction in Japan, this phenomenon has become a psychological ailment that the Ministry of Health estimates in 700,000 people. Interestingly, most studies show those diagnosed with hikikomori to be independent thinkers and have a sense of self-orientation that does not fit into the current Japanese cultural and economic climate. And perhaps this is a subset of young people seeking refugee in the only rational and safe place they now know – the cyberspace.
Jon Rafman’s solo show is at the Westfaelischer Kunstverein until 1 May 2016