Andrew mclaren

USSA 666 - 1776

August 22 to September 3, 2020
*call Andrew for appointments (902) 329-1106

“These large paintings were made in late 2002, and were tentatively given different titles, but were for the longest time, collectively entitled as 'USSA 666 - 1776'. They remain the largest output of this branch of my artistic development, culminating earlier experiments with elliptical patterns and projections (1986 +) and nested star patterns (1994+). The time of their execution was also politically charged by the scenario of American imperialism in the Middle East, and a strongly authoritarian (for the era) slant in Washington politics; these canvases do clearly relate to elements of the US flag and to the notable year-date 1776, not to overlook the number 666, which all merit further elaboration below. Numbers can have purely mathematical/structural significance, or a status understood as literary, or even fictitious interpretation(s). Overwriting all of these painted patterns, there are also text elements physically impressed into their surface with 3/4" steel stamps and a mallet. These exemplify both wordplay (perhaps according to the British term, 'Cod-Numerology'?) relating to the Apocalyptic 'number of the beast', and the obsessive repetition of 'MY FRIENDS' and 'MY ENEMIES' along the red stripes of the largest, elliptically patterned panel.

To return to the time I painted them 18 years ago, is to revisit an era when the Conspiracy Theory genre was rife in popular culture, shows like the X files fresher in memory, and books by Dan Brown topping the Xmas sales lists. Some of my own elliptical map designs (based on the Mollweide projection) were featured in a show at Ontario Printmakers space that year curated by Carla Garnett, which thematically related to the works of Science Fiction author Philip K Dick, a noted literary innovator with a considerable legacy in film. Yet the 'paranoid despot' figment that is implied by the repetitive, alternating 'FRIENDS' and 'ENEMIES' in concentric elliptical bands in the largest panel, with 'MY SELF' in the centre, actually refers to a passage in Alan Watts book, The Wisdom of Insecurity, citing an ancient Indian account of how the inner court, and further social strata of an ideal depot would be structured in terms of immediacy and 'circles of influence' surrounding one another, with "keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer" being a kind of operative mantra, holding everybody in check. This was a kind of authoritarian logic pre-dating such similar modern absurdities as 'Mutual Assured Destruction' in the nuclear arms race.

The first of the four paintings, most obscure in appearance, is marked by a pattern placed in an illusionist perspective, of six primitive star-fractals (each of ten sides of a pentagram, marked by a smaller pentagram, a process in two generations yielding a total of 111 stars). Although the factors and patterns based on the number 666 are numerous and featured extensively elsewhere in my published book art, it was only three years later, in 2005, that researchers announced that based on analysis of the oldest known manuscript of St. John's Apocalypse, the 'number of the beast' was first stated as being 616. It is speculated that the two numbers 616 and 666, related in the authentic Roman numerology, to different spellings of the name of the Emperor Nero (or Neron) who was commonly reviled as the incarnation of all things antithetical to the well being of everybody else.

So, what follows below the pattern of 666 stars, is also a comedy of errors that unfolded during the painting's completion. I had composed texts relating to an alphabetic numbering-value as a kind of numerology (distinct from the more sophisticated maths implicit in ancient numerology), that assigned values consecutively A = 1; B = 2;  ... Z = 26. As such, I composed the central text in stamped in steel in the painting first: "WE HOLD THIS TRUTH AS SELF-EVIDENT: THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED UNEQUALLY" believing that the number values for the letters in this phrase (clearly based on the first sentence from the US Declaration of Independence) would add up to 666. So, I physically stamped them into the painted surface before realizing that they actually add up to 665 according to my system. Given that I chose to compound the error by adding two more blocks of text: "WE HOLD THIS TRUTH TO BE SELF-EVIDENT: THAT ALL MEN ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL" (letters adding to 664), and "WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS AS SELF-EVIDENCE: THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED IN SEQUELS" (which actually does have letters adding to 666). It is true that many tragedies can be constructed from pure rhetoric, and the malleability of language.

Yet satire, and the influence of satire in politics, was very much in current in the eighteenth century discourse, and the figure of 'the devil' in the print trade back then was said to be "in the details" or more commonly, a typesetter's assistant. I used to regularly drink at a historic pub known as The Printers Devil near London's Fleet Street when I worked as a bike messenger there. Centuries earlier, the eminent Benjamin Franklin belonged to a libertarian society known as the "Hell Fire Club" thereabouts. A more sober minded philosopher of those times, whose work I have come to appreciate more recently, was Jeremy Bentham, whose Theory of Fictions predated Martin Heidegger's thesis of Language Games by well over a century, and identified number values in particular, as being the most fictional entities in all language, capable of being arbitrarily assigned according to all sorts of assumptions and conventions. Is it coincidence that the chapter ELLIPTICAL FICTIONS appears at page 66 in Bentham's book? Yes, of course.

It is also coincidence that the fabulous number 666 and the much-valorized number 1776 share a common root in the number 111, by factors of one-sixth and one-sixteenth. In the spirit of the unruly and erratic texts of the first painting, the critique of an arbitrary number can be applied. As the convention of dates based on the Christian or Common Era did not start at number zero, the number of years marked by the occasion of the 2nd Continental Congress authorizing the Declaration of Independence, was in fact, 1775.5048 on July 4th (it was a Leap Year). Making a reversion of date adjustments due to the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1583, it would only be 1775.4781 Julian calendar years if such details actually mattered. Such precision and accuracy does not apply to the iconic significance accorded to years made notorious in history.

What is presented here in these paintings, is a kind of constructed logic, referring to iconic, nationalistic, value-invested ideals, which also relate considerably to emotional-based communication which has always fired up politics. Most primitively, the concentric ellipses of the large panel are duplicated, tilted and compressed into the narrowest panel, to form a symmetrical heart-shaped pattern, with half-mirrored text reading left-to right, 'EG: NEVER' and right-to-left 'REVEN :GE' as a kind of polarized back-and-forth. Such is the tragedy of what much partisan-based politicking always was, and still repeats itself as the permanent-campaigning farce of today, 18 years after I made these paintings, when "You're either with us, or you're against us" as declared by George W Bush, seems quite anodyne in retrospect.

In 2020, these paintings are exposed to a near-generational rollover of history, while the vagaries of American politics have morphed into a remarkably cult-like figurehead and partisans adopting wild conspiratorial beliefs, exemplified by Q-Anon, on top of the more banal practices of gainsaying and nay-saying which frame 'fake news', 'junk science',  'deep state', and other such bromides of disinformation. On the other polarized side of things are such phrases as 'white male fragility' which is historically, a premise which reflects much truth, although as logically flawed as any slogan will be. The constructions of political ideals from the 18th century still frame the USA of today, but they are further distorted, abused, yet unmasked, and exposed as the assumptions of white male supremacy. There is, in the real world, nothing idealistic about despotism, and this group of four paintings is for all the messy and flawed concepts that they elaborate, very much at home with the ideological malaise of Trump's America in 2020, a time when figments and fictions are privileged over facts and good-faith bargaining." — Andrew McLaren, August 19, 2020

If you’d like to make an appointment to view the exhibition or purchase Andrew’s work, please call him at (902) 329-1106.