rollin beamish
The Situation is Excellent

In the Waiting Room of Art

by Dr. Peter Lodermeyer
Curator & Art Historian, Bonn Germany

In 1961 Erwin Panofsky, an art historian who had fled Nazi Germany and emigrated to the USA, wrote a letter to the editor of ARTNews in which he decried the mistake-ridden Latin used by Barnett Newman, from whom a painting with the title “Vir Heroicus Sublimus” was depicted in an earlier issue of the magazine. With the full haughtiness of the classically educated European, Panofsky insisted, if you please, that it should correctly read “sublimis” (as soon became apparent, Newman’s titling was in fact completely accurate, the “u” was merely a printer error). In Rollin Beamish’s new works, presented for the first time at Eli Ridgway Gallery, numerous Latin phrases can be found, not all of which prove to be grammatically flawless. The artist makes no secret of the fact that he generated these phrases with the help of Google Translate. Nevertheless, thanks to their imposing graphic presentation, they appear to have the “official” dignity and authority of a classical education. With his synthetic Latin, Beamish caricatures a historic feature of American society, the political iconography of which refers to Roman antiquity: from the Capitol in Washington, derived from the Roman temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, all the way to ANNUIT CŒPTIS, found on the 1-dollar bills held in the wallets of virtually everyone.

It’s only consistent then that Beamish named the five protagonists of his large formatted, three-part works – “titans” as he calls them, works which, with their phrases, emblems, and texts are much more than mere drawings – after Roman deities from antiquity: Necessitas, Nox, Arges, (Pseudo)-Moneta, and Saturn. The goddess of the night, a cyclops, and the god of time who devoured his own children – such sinister figures represent to a certain extent the dark, uncanny underside of American society. It’s a bitter irony, however, that such forces can be found deep within the illustrious power centers of society: within the highest court in the USA, within the US Senate, in the headquarters of technology firms, and in the offices of the finance world.

Beamish’s works prove to be political caricatures; biting satire with which he skewers the threatening outgrowths and ominous developments of contemporary society and politics. The five “titans” are monstrous composite figures, bizarre and surreal. The works are part of the series “post-human”, on which the artist has worked since 2011. However, as opposed to the earlier drawings, in which he mostly portrayed singular filmic characters as examples of certain aspects of societal reality, the “titans” are wildly assembled from parts of varied real personalities. Viewers can perceive some of these quite quickly; the former National Security Adviser John Bolton for example, who can be found in “Saturn”, or Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chairman of Facebook Inc. as a part of “Arges”. Other details demand careful observation to be correctly identified, as well as familiarity with the physiognomy of important persons in politics, business, finance, and high-tech.

The timeliness of Rollin Beamish’s images also typologically situate them within the old tradition of political caricature. One thinks for instance of the “Papal Ass”, which Martin Luther and Philipp Melancthon distributed in 1523 as a woodcut in a satirical pamphlet during the time of the Reformation. In it, they caricatured the Pope of the time, Alexander VI, in the form of an allegorical composite creature, with the head of a donkey, naked breasts, scaly arms and legs, and with oxen hooves and eagle’s claws. Beamish’s “titans” are also allegorical figures. The monstrosity of their partly comical, partly disgusting anatomy is representative of the monstrosity of societal processes; the hubris of a faith in technology which revolutionizes all conditions of life, the subjugation of each and all under the laws and logic of capitalist exploitation (including necessities such as affordable living space), or the negligent endangering of the basic principles of democracy. Thus, for instance the monstrous inscription found as if chiseled out of stone in “post-human (Nox)”: “It shall remain (un)known that democracy is the wisest tool of oligarchy…”

Political caricatures require broad dissemination to achieve an effect. The reformatory pamphlet presupposed Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press as a basis of media technology. Instead of an exhibition catalog, Rollin Beamish has printed a newspaper in a large edition, which, as a medium in digital times, represents a slowly dying star of the Gutenberg galaxy. In this respect it bears mentioning that Beamish’s ridicule also strikes at the media, which highlights permanent crises – and coverage of them – in the pursuit of increased circulation and a greater slice of the attention economy, as with the motto allegedly attributed to Mao Zedong, “Everything in the heavens is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.” Beamish counters this with a paper that he calls “The Saturnalia Oracle” (apropos saturnalias: was not the storming of the Capitol in Washington DC on the 6th of January 2021, the closing act of the tragicomedy that was the Trump presidency, a perfect example of a festival in honor of Saturn, complete with a transposition of high and low in the form of Q-Anon adherents and other cranks straying though the sacred halls of parliamentarianism?). With aphoristic escalation, the articles in “The Saturnalia Oracle” dispense to the reader an overdose of critical theory, mostly presented in the ventriloquial tone of a hyper intellectual and cynical social analyst. In between, passages can also be found which allow for the “authentic” voice of the artist to be discerned, and which reflect on the status of art within a thoroughly economized society. 

 The artist’s most surprising decision is to transform the gallery into a kind of waiting room. This results in a typical double-bind, where on the one hand the viewer should contemplate the works arranged on the walls while simultaneously being prompted to sit and wait - for who or what is unclear. Whoever sits on the unpleasant bench in Rollin Beamish’s exhibition at the Eli Ridgway gallery can read the writing on the wall: “Sit. Sit. Sit. Sit. … Not one little bit.” This fragment from Dr. Seuss’ “The Cat in the Hat” - in full, “So all we could do was to Sit! Sit! Sit! Sit! And we did not like it. Not one little bit.” - doesn’t make the situation any more comfortable. Before the sitter lay a few copies of “The Saturnalia Oracle” upon an idiosyncratic little table. The inlay in the tabletop depicts an owl with outspread wings and an infinity symbol in its claws. Above it, in gothic script and in questionable Latin, reads the motto: “sapientiae post facto”. Surely this is not the Owl of Minerva, the symbol of absolute knowledge which, according to the famous line by Hegel, “…spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” In contrast, the owl of the post-truth era closes its eyes to reality, lifting itself above it all in blind flight.

On the wall hangs a peculiar clock, its many hands referring to no discernable time, encircling it a fabled creature called a Cockatrice, whose gaze was supposedly deadly. The waiting room of art in which time stands still – semper nunc in omne tempus – in combination with the caricatures of the current social situation, is this not a perfect allegory for the frenzied inertia that has seized our world? For this permanent alteration in which everything nevertheless remains as it was? And what is the status of art in this situation, what value does it possess? Beamish’s art would be grossly misunderstood if one regarded it as “political art” because of its manifestly political motifs. The artist is neither an activist nor an illustrator of his own political convictions. Beamish is vehemently opposed to the contemporary economization of art, he wishes to provide no service to the valorization industry of the art market. In a striking passage in “The Saturnalia Oracle”, the author describes art as, “a SIGN – perhaps the only true sign – of the ethical capacity of humankind. (…) this – not gold, not utility, not quantity – is the true lodestone of value: human CAPACITY-AS-VALUE.”

For me personally, a phrase said to me by Rollin Beamish while we were having a chat together in a Cologne gallery remains unforgettable: “I make my work so that I can discover for myself why I make my work.” In the void of this Münchhausen-esque self-justification exists the central element of artistic praxis: its freedom.