The Three Strategies of Huang Shigong

Antitransgressive prevent strategy has three specific objectives: (1) respond to the ideological challenge of deviancy and systemic transgression and the threat we face from those who promote it, (2) prevent people from being drawn into boundary challenging behaviour and ensure they are given appropriate advice and support, (3) work with sectors and institutions where there are risks of radicalisation (hot spots, suburban abandoned areas, et al.)

_{The Three Strategies of Huang Shigong (Pencil, crayon, pastel, acrylics on paper, 65 x 50 cm)}

Look at a brutalist office edifice with sustainable, architecturally integrated cooling and climatization scheme, dedicated to the established best practice of social work and the prevention of social disintegration by all forms of deviancy, including chronic fatigue syndrome.

See how the sculptures of three modes of transportation – (steam powered, bodily propulsion by legs, petrol based motorized solution) are forming an allegory of adaptability and the value of “getting out of the comfort zone”, to achieve better social results which will all eventually end in failure due to entropy which besets the universe and is totally against all human endeavours to create stable (“sustainable”) solutions. See also that the tricycle of the Dion et Bouton type is meant to be an immovable sculpture, bolted to the pavement, just as the Greek Riace bronze warrior is only a mass-market die-cast full scale model of one of two actual sculptures, found in 1972 in the sea near Riace, Calabria, of an actual and organic bearded warrior, and the Engine on the roof is also just a light-weight, plastic replica in slightly reduced scale. This is all architectural art of the Kunst am Bau variety, later added to the stark and elegant brick edifice which in its purer form served purer functions, supposedly.

Please note that this drawing is not only in actual execution, but also in reproduction of only middling quality. This reflects a remark by an actual social worker “social work is always and in all forms dedicated to failure”. In fact, even though in rough form, the drawing includes and merges all sorts of painterly and graphic techniques. If the artist was a Norman Rockwell this should mean that the work was supposed to shine in photographic reproduction, but this was achieved in this case, due to inferior photographic equipment and lack of photographic expertise on the photographer’s side.

Drawing and text © 2052 by Torsten Slama and the SHY Laboratory Group

Advertisement

The Marianne Dreams House

_{The 2nd Marianne Dreams House/The House on the Borderland (Acrylics, [coloured] pencil, on two A4 sheets of “Durex” technical drafting paper)}

This house is the second variation on a dream location described in the book “Marianne Dreams”, by Catherine Storr. It is a house containing a boy, inflicted by polio, who lost the will to live (or to move which according to Wolf Larsen is roughly the same), a house with barred windows at first and no interior furnishings, surrounded by encroaching rocks with evil eyes. Marianne enters the house, which she had created by drawing it with some sort of very powerful pencil, in her dreams, while herself in her waking state being bedridden with some illness but a sense of agility far surpassing the progress of her recuperation, and engages with the boy, whose name is Mark (he could have been aptly called “Mark One” had this story been set in a science fiction as opposed to a sort of fantasy setting).* She challenges him, much to his discomfort, to get out of his self-protective identification with the limitations and the confinement of his illness, and finally succeeds, after having empowered him by dreaming/drawing up an exercise bike for him to train his legs, to have them both rescued by helicopters.**

_{*If set in a “parodic” sort of internet and social media world of the 2010’s, the character could also be aptly rechristened “Chris”}.

_{**For a slightly darker toned rendition of same image, please visit this address}

First edition cover art by Marjorie-Ann Watts

Drawing and text © 2052 by Torsten Slama and the SHY Laboratory Group

The Meat Packing Plant

^{Vize 4: Tajná raketová sila / Vision 4: Das geheime Raketensilo / Vision 4: The Secret Missile Silo,
2020 Öl auf Holz / oil on wood 70,2 x 60 cm / 27.6 x 23.6 inches}

This 2020 painting harks back to several versions of the same motive, a 2006 drawing, another smaller 2009 drawing, a comparatively large painting from the same year and a later, 2012 re- or overpainting of that painting. It is based on a Heljan plastic model, the Heljan #673 N Scale Meat Packing Plant kit. While painting this iteration of the structure, one of the artist’s roughly four favorite and therefore recurring real world or model-type architectural structures, the artist was grappling with ocular clouding (encroaching blindness) and also with a newly developed (or degenerated) technique of mixing organic substances with oil paint and acrylics, applying the resulting mixture, uneven because of different solubility of its constituents, often in half dried states or different phases of coagulation, onto the canvas with brushes in varying states of distress, interspersing the emerging image with highlights of synthetic luminescent powders and pastes. In this painting the artist perhaps reached a pinnacle in the materialization of a certain style he envisioned – a style where the constant fight between the youthful wish for perfect execution and the cosmic truth of decay leads to its own results, where human mind control and the freedom of molecular motion and chemical interaction coexist, where the Jungian amateur pursuing personal narcissistic goals of alchemical omnipotency finds respite in the struggle between time-bound limitations of the human flesh with the desires of the mind and the phantasy of timelessness.*

*Timelessness of art, which Oskar Kokoschka found perfectly represented in Rembrandt’s “Self-Portrait at the Age of 63” at the National Gallery in London. While bemoaning the bombing of Dresden, visiting the National Gallery at the suggestion of his wife, he found back his inner peace at the contemplation of old skin, “like the skin of a dead chicken”, in the way in which Rembrandt understood to apply his own virtuosity in an inimitably masterful loose yet perfectly controlled application of paint, where molecular structure of the medium and chemical changes taking place in the process of drying and hardening, together with said virtuosity and sheer dexterity of application lead to a lasting and static depiction of a particular stage in a process which in the natural universe leads through life to death and complete disintegration in a matter of only a few years. **

_{**This anecdote is repeated here not to glorify the artist’s own desires of creating such an effect, but to humble it, as the above painting is not only a very serious effort, but also a typical example of Schlawinertum, as a surrogate to virtuosity and diligence, in contemporary art. It might be even that some hypothetical onlooker would only see the jejune and the would-be where in the eyes of the creator there is at least a glimmer or echo of the inner truth they sought, approached in baby steps which are much too short to reach their goal even within the whole lifetime of a person so encumbered by their own deviant desire for a sorrow-free life, which so often leads in truth to an inordinate accumulation of inner sorrows, often seen and belittled as minor by others, as they are sorrows of the imagination. While someone like Dostojewski, who knew exactly the interaction of sorrows of the imagination and the true sorrow of, for example, hemorrhoids, which so often result from sins of the mind, was so perfectly cognisant of the fact that nobody is entitled to define or judge the difference between imaginary or true sorrow, as their is none in degrees of pain they inflict.}

Drawing and text © 2057 by Torsten Slama and the C.O.D

Three Dwelling Houses

_{The “The Most Dangerous Game” House, 29,8 x 21,5 cm, pencil and crayon on tone paper, 2019}

This, the “The Most Dangerous Game” house, is a lodge for a special kind of hunter, a bearded one, who hunts the most crafty, murderous, cruel animal: the human animal. Which is the only animal with ethics and moral judgment, thus capable of revenge, not humble. Instead of fangs and claws, it has intelligence. Thus, it is the most dangerous game to hunt. The hunter type to take residence in this house has a taste for Eastern European low density dwelling architecture. The actual depicted setting is generic. A type of less dangerous game, a Bruderus Horten Noncaudatus, a flying wing-type ancient animal with an especially small brain, is flying by, unmolested. It is unclear whether the hunter is presently at home.

^{“Judge Dee” Country House in Carboniferous Setting, 31.5 x 23.5 cm, pencil and crayon on tone paper, 2019}

This is a retreat-type home for the more benign, less damaging to the social fabric kind of hunter, the hunter for peace, quiet and solitude which he/she/it finds ideally represented in a dwelling detached from civilization by a certain distance in the fourth dimension. Thus, the person for this country home must be a time traveller to take leave from all that binds them in the now and find what they seek in a geological space and time which gave birth to all fossile fuel reserves which now fire our unpeaceful modern world, the carboniferous era.

^{The Abductionist’s House, pencil, pastel on tone paper, 29,7 x 21 cm, 2019}

This house offers shelter for a very special kind of lover of humans, the abductionist, the John Fowlesian Collector-type. These are mostly male, for certain reasons which are difficult to specify or elucidate or trace back to either evolutionary or civilizational reasons. The collector traps another hapless human being (like the spider the fly in the parlour with the fine edgings), and keeps this hostage-type specimen under lock and key, for fear of abandonment and in the hope of by keeping this other stationary they could by pervasive and tenacious persuasion win reciprocal love. This person, as the chimney smoke indicates, and by general habit, home. The victim lives probably in the cellar. Two dogs are in a playful mood, but would alarm the house owner by raucous barking if anyone should approach. The house shares certain decorational and structural characteristics with the “The Most Dangerous Game” house, which indicates certain interesting psychological links between hunting and collecting.

For a different kind of author-approved viewing experience, you are invited to redirect here.

All depicted house studies © 2019/2037 by Torsten Slama and the TTS®