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

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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

The Dedicated Engine

The Dedicated Engine (The Jane G. Goldberg)
Pencil, couloured pencil, gold leaf, 36.5x48cm

Thrusting, trusting, elongated, phallic, dedicated, this engine seems to go somewhere. Yet the composition is static. The engine was copied from one originally painted on glass, perhaps for a magic lantern, which originally bore the name “Little England” on its golden nameplate. The artist decided rather whimsically, truly quite in earnest (though jesting, maybe as a means for self-protection), to change the dedication to “Jane G. Goldberg”, after watching all available sessions of her televised group therapy show on a well known, cheap, as in free (or ad-financed), resource for online videos. Jane G. Goldberg, apart from being a real analyst of the Freudian school, also has a holistic day spa called La Casa Spa and Wellness Center, where amongst other things, one can get one’s colon cleansed, have other things done, and emerge hopefully rather cancer-free, fit for the future allotted to one. Dedications are something questionable, especially unsolicited ones. The author would profess shyness and insecurity about own worthiness as reasons for not seeking such authorisation. The background to the proud engine: a hydrogenation plant for coal liquefaction, either Bergius or Fischer-Tropsch style, ironically rendering coal, which makes the dedicated engine run, into petroleum, to make cars go. Thus the path into the future is opened. A future which now belongs to the past, even though the way to go, electric propulsion, is of course mostly a sham, a magic trick to evade the problem of nuclear fusion or some such groundbreaking thing. The whole further background is a landscape in the Chinese style, with two buildings of unknown purpose, fog, rock, and firs. The entire work forms a kind of stump or rump for a whole holistic world view, such as art should strive for. Stress release (and build up),  homogenisation, liquefaction, bowel maintenance, mental control, control functioning, anger management, again liquefaction, energy management, etc. are all the core techniques which ideally should join to form a true society for all, a universe for worthwhile existence, not only in life, but also in death or near-inertness (or extremely slowed down or procrastinated reactiveness), as is the life of a tree, and then, at the furthest end, a rock.
Future © of this atmospheric rendering by Torsten Slama and the Group Therapy Board

Dionysian Cult Centre with 1911 Renault 2-Seater

Dionysian Cult Centre with 1911 Renault 2-Seater
(297 × 420mm, pencil, coloured pencil, acrylics on paper, © 2013 by the Tellurian Society)

The title and conceptual framework of this drawing ought to be understood before the background of Johann Jakob Bachofen’s work on matriarchy and gynaecocracy, Das Mutterrecht. According to Bachofen, human civilisation went through three stages: a wild nomadic, tellurian stage, the “lunar” period of female supremacy, then the backlash of the Dionysian period, worshipping the phallus, favouring the anus over the vagina, favouring intoxicating masculine wine over female milk and honey, followed by the Apollonian period, modernity, the age of reason and necrophilia (now in a process of dissolution, entering the enigmatic, presumably female, Aquarian stage).

The depicted cult centre is of the Dionysian-Apollonian type*. It offers safe outlets for the Dionysian impulses of domesticated Apollonian Males. Wild, intoxicated, sex-crazed orgies are not to be expected here, these are relegated to Bacchantian cult centres, the dance-clubs, as opposed to the model railway, antique car, or life steam clubs, which are all part of the Dionysian-Apollonian category. This Dionysian Cult Centre is a place where playful, supposedly harmless necrophilia is taking place. Necrophilia is the supremacy-oriented form of sexuality ascribed to men by the combined forces of Dionysus and Apollo. We ought to bear in mind that quartz watches, pocket calculators, microcomputers, laptop computers, tablet computers, cell phones, “smart” phones, and many types of cars and mechanical devices (also child pornography and tame popular music) are all part of the large necrophiliac outlet device network for Dionysian impulses. Soon these cult centres will be demolished all over the world, relegated to the dust heap of history, as we enter a new age which will put an end to the ill-regulated sun-worshipping** Apollonian rationality so inseparably tied to frenzied Dionysus, and bring forth the real, biophile rationality of the well-regulated, tellurian woman-god-serving era of the moon and the atom again.Illustrative sketch and explanatory note © 2013 by Torsten Slama

*In fact, the author is struggling here with the drawing’s title. It seems that what is depicted is clearly an Apollonian-Dionysian cult centre.

**See also Lewis Mumford’s concept of sun worship, worship of speed, empty space.llustrative sketch and rumination © 2013 by Torsten Slama

World Wide Instrumentation Centre with 1912 Packard Landaulet

World Wide Instrumentation Centre with 1912 Packard Landaulet
(A3, mixed media, © 2013 by The Instrumentalists)

After the great unification of all continents into one supercontinent Eufricasia-Panamerica, the need for a coordinated world wide interactive system of communication and production is stated and instigated by the Instrumentalists. The whole world joins in multilingual agreement, and thus a Centre for World Wide Instrumentation is set up in Tripolitania, formerly district of Libya. a medium-grade metropolitan area located nearly exactly in the geographical centre of Eufricasia-Panamerica.

If vagueness, ambiguity and symbolism are reactionary forces bringing unrest, totalitarianism, and war, World Wide Instrumentation, with the totally concise and logical flow of goods, services, and communication it provides, will pave the way to a bright future of love and happiness. The dangers of a chronically crisis-ridden world economy or the inadvertent cross breeding of all sorts of squirrels into a race of super squirrels can be easily averted by the world wide employment of completely standardized instruments of measurement, production, transportation, and communication. A universal currency will soon be followed by a universal language for communication between people, animals, and machines: POYUTL, a language consisting of three consonants and three vowels, 21 syllables, and thus, using the well known formula of Newton, a total of 210 two-syllable words, which can express about everything. Thus, according to Tellurian principles, one Tellurian deity, OUY-PYTOLU, will come into being, a sentient and conscious superorganism, composed of all people, animals, and things on the surface of the earth and under.© 2021 by Hecate Herma Ecdysone, The Instrumentalists, Torsten Slama Historical Society

Multi-Purpose Worship Centre “Sindelfingen”

Multi Purpose Centre “Sindelfingen”, 2012, Oil on canvas, 40,3 x 53,3 cm

This former motor hotel was acquired at an undisclosed date by the Illusionist Society Sindelfingen and converted into a multi purpose and worship centre. All kinds of gatherings are taking place here, suitable for all age-groups and with a clear anti-violence bias. All community gatherings are thus designed to be completely pressure free, allowing all kinds of individual expression, from introvert brooding to carefree dancing. The only commandment to be followed is that of interdependability, that is, everything is done with the fellow creature in mind. Animals and plants are always included in the gatherings, preferably in their actual form, or at least in effigy. It follows automatically that whatever is taking place in this centre is always in accordance with known Tellurian principles. The centre therefore forms a spiritually viable alternative to the city church. The layout is strictly Tellurian: the horizontal plane is for togetherness, the vertical form for compartmentalized administration and individual accommodation purposes. Two crystal shaped monitor probes made from space-age UltraQuartz™ sheets are homeostatically designed to use solar irradiation for buoyancy.Painting and explanatory note © 2021 by Torsten Slama and The Illusionist Society/Hekate Sibonga (Dir.)