reviews JIMMY RASKIN
‘Is the “philosopher” still possible today?’ asks Pierre Klossowski at the necessary detachment from the poetic ‘line’, which marks the tragic yet
opening of Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969), his magisterial study heroic act of, as Raskin confesses, ‘the possibility of artistic meaningfulness’.
of that supremely Nietzschean motif: the eternal return. The question Such deaths require memorials, though, which Raskin has provided
is a dual one, asking at one and the same time not only about the very in different sculptural, drawing and collage configurations, most of which
possibility of philosophy but also about the possibility of Nietzsche include diagrams of Raskin’s other alter egos too: Pinn is ubiquitous,
himself, about his relevance and necessity as the thinker for whom the but so is ‘Corner Man’, a stick figure of two arms, two legs and no head,
recurrence of the same was a revelation, and a creation, of the self. which stands at once as a diagrammatic line drawing of a room’s corner
This ‘self’ has served as a central concern of what we might as (a reference to an earlier work in which the artist filmed himself performing
well call Jimmy Raskin’s aesthetico-philosophical researches, which an undeniably Bruce Nauman-inspired series of leaps into the corner
have assumed written, sculptural, pictorial, diagrammatic and filmic of some nondescript interior) and as a reference to the headless figure
form over the last 15 years. And it is this self which once again assumes of the Acéphale (that dissident surrealist antidote to the stultifying
a central role in The Confession I (2007), a new hybrid sculpture and rationalism of the 1930s). When combined with a horizontal line,
video piece which finds the artist, filmed in black and white and facing Raskin’s Corner Man becomes the Tightrope Walker, whose fall begins
the viewer from within an egg-shaped projection of light, attempting the artistic process again and again, but always as if for the first time.
to explain himself, or rather his self’s tragic ‘fall’ into critical self- All of this is to say that, in Raskin’s work, Klossowski’s question is
reflexivity – the ‘severing of the poet from his poem’, as Raskin says. answered overwhelmingly in the affirmative, and what results is perhaps
This being a Nietzschean endeavour, Raskin’s Confession ‘returns’ one of the most genuine and engaged meditations on the possibility not
to scenes and figures from the artist’s earlier projects. Sculptures, drawings only of making art at a moment when cynicism has given way to a kind
and diagrams of ‘Pinn’, represented by a cartoonishly ovular head and of market fatalism but also of the creative act itself, an act which, as
conical nose (that’s ‘Pinn’ as in ‘Pinocchio’, ‘pinnacle’ or ‘piñata’) serve as Raskin’s show suggests, may indeed necessitate more of a sacrifice of one’s
an analogue of the Tightrope Walker who appears in the prologue of self, in all of its iterations, than we are accustomed to seeing at present.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–5), and it is the Walker’s fall off the rope, his Jonathan T.D. Neil
Jimmy rAskin’s Confession
MIguel AbReu, New YoRK
9 SepteM beR – 14 octobeR
Corner Man Collaboration
& Midnight Memorials
(in six parts), 2006-7,
mixed media, 114 x 152 x
78 cm
205 Artreview
November_REVIEWS.indd 205 26/9/07 13:44:44
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