B.C. EPKER press

The Empty Sky of B.C. Epker
by Huub Mous

It is the habit of approaching works of art in order to
interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really
is such a thing as the content of a work of art.
Susan Sontag

At the Prado museum in Madrid is a painting by Goya featuring a life-size doll on a cloth being tossed up in the air by four young women. The doll is suspended in mid-air, as if he has been immobilized by a camera. On his head is a remarkable contraption, and his posture is peculiar as well. His legs are crooked, his feet slightly set apart, and his head dangles limply to the side. In the background is an Arcadian landscape with a house partially visible above the foliage.

In eighteenth-century Spain, tossing a lifeless male doll in the air was a popular pastime. The scene might appear to be a rather stiffly painted folklorist genre piece, both innocent and timeless. But something is wrong. The women are smiling. They apparently enjoy this game, in which they control the man for a moment. Or perhaps they have always been in charge, and this is the secret message that makes this scene so mysterious. Or is the image devoid of an ulterior message, and does it refer only to itself? Perhaps the lifeless doll is a metaphor for the scene as such. The void of play is precisely what makes it enjoyable. Whether because of the ingenuous vision of Goya, who had a keen eye for life’s hidden cruelties, or the curious postures in which the figures are eternally frozen in time, the scene is somehow disconcerting. It is as if an indescribable doom has perforated the screen of the performance. Like in a David Lynch movie: one senses that something is wrong but cannot say exactly what.

In much of his work, B.C. Epker seems to express a comparable, sub-dermal sense of threat. The source is difficult to identify. Sometimes a revolver or pistol appears, but hardly anything else suggests impending doom. The slightly alienating scenes are a fusion of dissimilar visual elements.‘Found images’, derived from photographs, paintings, engravings, the Internet, pornographic magazines and comic strips, have formed chemical compounds in the imagination of the maker. The ‘junk food from the image culture’ has taken on a life of its own. A soldier, a man in uniform, a woman in folkloric dress – each appears lost in a new world, where something is very seriously wrong. But what? Perhaps it is not so much the depiction itself as the visual presentation. Everything appears motionless, as if it has been immobile for a very long time. The positions seem ‘frozen’, almost catatonic. The figures have delayed their poses, waiting endlessly until the image ‘is depicted’. This contrived pose is clearest in Epker’s photographs. There, too, the figures are rigidly motionless. They are even a bit too rigid, as if the camera has ‘drawn’ them very slowly. In addition, they are often in a space that is a bit too empty, a landscape that does not quite match their posture, dress or attire. Viewers sense that something is not right, but it is too late by then. The image has already become embedded in our brains as a self-evident but also disconcerting fact.

What makes an image an image? This question now preoccupies many art critics that operate in a world inundated with images. Individual images seem to vanish in the multitude and to lose their authentic value in today’s society of pictures. Images can be manipulated in countless ways. They are continuously ‘stripped’, wrenched from their origins and revitalized in a new setting. Fashion photographers apply the codes of documentary photographers. MTV clips feature stylistic visual techniques devised by
artists. Even photographic images are no longer intrinsically reliable, as the digital process allows for manipulation. Photographs no longer mirror the truth. Nietzsche’s famous words, ‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted’, seem to have reached an unexpected destination in the seething maelstrom of contemporary image culture. We have all become extremely sensitive to images. Conversely, everybody is becoming increasingly numb to them as well. An odd paradox. We live in an era of ‘visual literacy’ but at the same time experience utter ‘visual indigestion’. We subconsciously perceive the stratification, codification, stunts, associations and connotations related to images, while deliberately commenting on them as well. Amid that pande-
monium, artists are responsible for producing images that resist this maelstrom. Such images generate friction and catch on. They irritate and intrigue subliminally.

Epker is wonderfully successful in this respect. Time and again, he creates images that captivate viewers or achieve even more. Epker’s images are grating, they cause a subdermal itching that scratching will not relieve. In recent years his handwriting has become increasingly recognizable. The extremely nervous, almost disturbed,‘rough’ signs from his early period, when his ballpoint pen became a compliant instrument like a seismograph of an apparently tortured inner self, have made way for a more considered black-and-white visual structure with pen and pencil and frugal use of colour. Each individual work is immediately identifiable as an Epker. The drawings have come to symbolize themselves. The resulting Epkerian universe of images is clearly defined by formal factors. One case in point is the ability to depict the empty white of the surface as an actual space. Some figures are ossified in a vast decor of air and landscape, which is suggested by just a few lines. Sometimes a few birds in flight are sufficient to make the space palpable. In other works a vivid horizon or a small church tower in the distance may open a magnificent perspective. Epker toys with the desolate look of the landscape area like in a romantic image process. The views of the figures are frontal or appear with their backs to the horizon. All alone in the great world. Desire is everywhere, but the sky is void. An ominous void.

Perhaps the sketches here are not so much landscapes than they are decors of the inner self: ‘mindscapes’ instead of ‘landscapes’. The characters appear to be vehicles of indeterminate feelings, as if they have been caught sleepwalking and have subsequently rigidified, like a rabbit in light. The scene continuously appears to be about to come into motion, like a movie still, but stopped in a feverish dream. This surreal, almost dreamlike performance keeps being subtly set in motion again. The ambience has an obsessive quality, as if everything has emerged in a trance. The handwriting is highly affected and seems to have received too much attention, as if a large, subconscious force propelled the pencil. The effect looks more like a graceful scrawl than a relaxed stroke. Still, the individual rhythm of the line keeps recurring, sometimes almost ornamental but usually imbued with a seemingly congealed emotion. At any rate, the inner world is seamlessly connected with the ‘exterior’. A distinct boundary between the two suddenly becomes difficult to draw. We are not in another world but on the threshold of one. Rather, we are in a universe – just beneath the reality – where the symbols have unleashed a flowing series of transitions. In this parallel world, nothing has a circumscribed significance anymore: it is merely suggested. In her essay ‘Against interpretation’, Susan Sontag argues that interpretation is not an absolute value, as most people believe, a timeless ability of the mind. Interpretation always needs to be considered within the historic context of human awareness. Sometimes interpretation is liberating and offers a means of escape from a past that is dead. More frequently, however, it is mainly a reactionary and rigidifying instrument. Endless interpretations by a procession of epigones from Freud to Marx have sufficiently drained our world. Get rid of all untrue, linguistic duplications in the world, says Sontag. Get rid of them, for us to start re-experiencing what we have directly.

The most characteristic feature of Epker’s work may be that the image radically withdraws from interpretation while continuously encouraging it.

As I write these words, I am aware how absurd this assertion really is, as it is itself an interpretation par excellence. Anybody endeavouring to reflect upon the phenomenon of interpretation will sooner or later slide into the abyss of total insignificance.

Is Goya’s scene of the lifeless doll being tossed up in the air by women an image in its own right, or is there more than meets the eye? Can an image radically withdraw from interpretation? Are all images not continuously renewed by a flowing pattern of lapsing symbols? ‘There are no facts,’ said Nietzsche, ‘only interpretations.’ If that is the case, is every image not by definition an interpretation? Is every image not at least doomed to be devoured by the interpreting creature known as mankind? Is there really a boundary between inside and outside? Is every image not a phantom of our brain in the final analysis? Are we not surrounded by a terrifying void? Epker does not solve this compelling enigma in his work. His images – to their credit – do raise these types of questions. They self-invert to explore the question of what an image really is, and how it functions in our mind. Epker’s empty sky remains empty but compels us to acknowledge the emptiness.