This year I’ve had the pleasure of meeting two talented and singular artists, Ragna Berlin and Brian Bodt.  Berlin is based in not the German capital, but New York.  Bodt lives across the continent in Lancaster, California.  Both work in a variety of media: paintings, drawings, sculpture, photography, digital art, lamps, video, music, even robots. 

Berlin was formerly an architect, and recall I reading she said she grew weary of omnipresent straight-lines and right angles.  There’s certainly none of that in her work.  Roundness is her central motif: flowers, buttons, spots, dots, balls, and most all, stones.  It’s not the perfect circles of industrial design: it’s nature’s irregular and distinct ovals and ellipses.  Her colors are light, even pale, like a forest at twilight.  Life is everywhere.  I wonder if the rocks in Berlin’s universe are living, breathing pods.  It’s Mother Nature’s world, we just us live in it.

I intentionally wrote “Mother.”  If nothing else, Berlin’s oeuvre is feminine.  “I was taught as an architect to express male aspects of life,” she writes in her artist’s statement.  “I am a woman and I want to explore and express what I being a woman find important.” 

Just as Berlin’s feminism infuses her work, Bodt’s Satanism pervades his.  Two of his graphite drawings, “Tribal Mechanics” and “Poseidon’s Daemons” are exercises in high darkness. Skulls and skeletons (human, goat, and alien), tentacles, a circular saw blade, and a univalve act out indescribable nightmares.  But nightmares, like anything else, can be beautiful.  The intricacy and detail is exquisite.  And uncommon: When was the last time you were blown away by an artist’s realism and vividness?

Yes, the Devil’s in the details.  Bodt’s video, theRapist, also painfully illustrates that.  Bodt describes it as a “metaphysical journey through the downward spiral experienced by a mental patient dehumanized at the hands of a deviant ‘therapist.’”  Bodt confronts the viewer with simple yet disturbing images: bubbling water, surgical implements, and a shrouded, ghostlike figure staggering through filthy tunnel (the patient’s soul under treatment?) accompanied by lethal electronic-noise soundtrack.  There’s no dialogue or special effects.  They’re not necessary.  The economic selection and juxtaposition of visuals does all the talking.  Or the screaming.

I was going to write that the art of Bodt, a “self-described serial killer in art and design,” and of Berlin was a case of dark versus light.  But that’d be too cute.  And inaccurate.  A few Berlin’s photographs and photo-montages reveal a decidedly macabre, even blasphemous, vision.  One series depicts a bull’s scrotum resting on fabrics of varying colors and textures.  The elegant backgrounds—pink gauze, blue-grey velvet, and pale-green cotton—contrast bizarrely with the scrotum, which looks more like a pair of uncooked chicken legs than a sex organ.  The effect is like a page from a high-end butcher’s catalogue.

Yet more disturbing is Berlin’s Pope series.  She manipulates images of John Paul II to striking, John Heartfield-esque effect.  The pontiff rests his feet on a prostrate young woman; he sits with Saddam Hussein and Hitler standing by his side; he’s on all fours before Madonna (the geriatric disco diva, not the mother of God).  In “If you abandon your family for the sake of Jesus you shall inherit everlasting life,” the only photo-montage without the pontiff, a ballerina is nailed to a cross.

Who’s to say if there’s not darkness in the rest of Berlin’s work?  Her rocks, live or inanimate, might have insalubrious plans for you.  And is Bodt’s work entirely dark?  Not to me.  Together with horror, I’m filled with childlike wonder at his drawings’ intricacy.  Some of his ambient soundscapes are soothing.  “Conglomerating Planetesimals” isn’t so much sinister as majestic.  If the spheres made music, it’d sound something like this.

Light and dark, masculine and feminine, good and evil. . .  They’re useful categories, but through classification we can distort and obscure truths.  Is Notes on Democracy a serious, reasoned argument against universal suffrage?  Yes, but it’s funny as hell too.  Is Don’t Call Me a Crook!  a comedy?  You bet!  In fact sometimes it’s slapstick. But it’s also a shocking and fascinating self-portrait of a sociopath. 

“If you didn’t laugh you’d cry,” my mother would joke, imitating an old Mancunian landlord of hers.  And if you didn’t cry you’d laugh…

And here’s our first review:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4404736.Notes_on_Democracy

We were so happy and proud that this was our first release and that it turned out so well.  Mencken’s words read like they were written today.  And they’re just as shocking–maybe more so–as they were when “Notes” was first published in 1926.  Marion Elizabeth Rodgers’ introduction and annotations open up fascinating vistas on the Sage of Baltimore’s prose that otherwise would go unnoticed by the average reader.  Anthony Lewis’ afterword is passionate and a fine nightcap to an evening (or week or month) spent with “Notes.”