Semi-Final Frontiers

recent work by Seth Adelsberger

"Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien."
— Terence McKenna

Following his commercially successful album Transformer1, seminal New York musician/songwriter Lou Reed released his harrowing album Berlin2, a song cycle detailing a triangular relationship fraught with abuse and addiction -- not because he was contrary or artistically brave, but because it simply was what he found himself writing. He recently elaborated: “That’s what got written down. That was what was there. When there’s something to work with…that’s what I’m gonna do. 3

Seth Adelsberger is a Baltimore artist who has never been a theorist and has always avoided dogma; he, like Reed, instead trusts and follows his artistic instincts. “I don’t analyze it all too much when I work,” he says; “I do what I am interested in at that moment and consider the ramifications later. It comes together.”

In 2008 he made a trip to the capital of Germany -- a city Lou Reed had, in fact, never even visited when he wrote his tragic opus. Seth had been awarded the Maryland State Arts Council top honors in painting that year. The prize was six thousand dollars, no strings attached. He used it to travel abroad for the first time, and when he hit Berlin, he found he felt very much at home. Stoic Euro-mechanist structuralism and wild bombed-out communal flair thrive together in this fast-paced, art-colonized, post-millennium epicenter. The powerful, often transgressive art of Berlin does not shrink from any subject, no matter how taboo or silly.

He came back with a newfound sense of purpose. An earlier sojourn within the United Sates had had an even more pronounced, transformative effect on Adelsberger. He spent some time in San Francisco soaking up the cultural atmosphere. 'Frisco is like no other American city; the long continuum of U.S. bohemianism flourishes through generations and remains intact there -- in fact, it dominates the city. Psychedelia continues to be a surprisingly pervasive influence. Aspects of classic psychedelia and op-art in general appealed to Adelsberger, and would begin to seep into his work soon after his return.

The artist, a small town kid from the East coast, had already made his mark in the big city closest to where he grew up. In Baltimore, his visually astute, hyperactive, thick-brush-loaded, multi-layered, biomorphic abstract paintings, created after he graduated from Towson University, quickly found an audience. Young artists, older practitioners and regional critics all took appreciative notice. He could have easily stuck with this style of work, refined it, and garnered more acclaim. But over the past year his work moved in a significant new direction. As with the aforementioned Reed, it was not career strategy that drove this change; it was the result of the artist’s personal studio practice. Like many painters, the truth is that he plays it as it comes and sticks with what pleases him, with what he finds compelling as he digs around. He found himself guided by the detailed geometric structures that emerged in his new work; the results contained a striking new subset of psychological underpinnings.

Recent paintings Red Dawn and Plastic Galactica are emblematic of this change, with their intricate, hard-edged linear overlays and symmetrical triangular shapes painted in a bruised purple-to-red palette; they gaze outward, shifting, possibly menacing; insect-like. The viewer is intentionally given a choice as to how to interpret these paintings. Are these elaborate, non-representational works formal in intent, with no other meaning, a playful sparring by the artist? Or are they cool, skittering, emotive, full of slippery representational visage—images of disembodied faces, bodies, eyes -- a revelatory, spewing rumination of domination, flux and psychosis? The artist sees it both ways, with meaning shifting between the two extremes.

Employing a cut-up neo-visionary style, Adelsberger vanquished many of his previous influences (Phillip Guston and Cy Twombley4 —- though ghosts remain) in order to embrace a new, flat, synthetic formula. By combining stoic German utilitarian form with freewheeling California acid-test-disorientation -- along with bits of the artist's autobiography (primitive video games of the nineteen eighties, current art warehouse communal lifestyle, fringe sci-fi such as Phillip K. Dick and William Burroughs, and his own droll, humorous and anxious persona) -- Adelsberger’s once expansive landscape-meets-internal-rollicking-rollercoaster derived work is now deeply internal, jammed through pulsing windows of distorted, reflective portraiture. With the painting Let Cyclopes Be Bygones he pushes the new formula into high gear, doubling the symmetry and increasing the color key. The hidden, fractured images mimic those found in worldwide shamanistic practices. They have a layered gaze that pays witness to the dark shadow of calamity. But Seth’s examination of calamity is of the giddy manic sort that results from “button mashing5 ” -- a form of aggressive gaming strategy play employed in the 8-bit action side-scrolling videogames6 of his youth -- and here, when the game is over, the player resets the game for another round.

A key addition to the aforementioned work is Adelsberger’s expansive wall paintings. These large, temporary installations envelope the viewer, further immersing him in the artist's brave new synthetic world, broadening his perspective. The wall works contain angular, girder-form geometrics as well, though these are more askew, piled high with linear debris. Grounded in earth tones, this work is central to understanding the epistemology the art is engaged in -- the feel is less claustrophobic; here the external returns, the world sighs. Hints of Guston re-appear in the central absurd stacking and piling of form. This is the incongruous cosmic carnie world we and his other works inhabit.

With its increasing flat color composition and detailed cosmic goof, Adelsberger’s new work, then, is ultimately derived from a mash-up of many strains of contemporary pop culture, aligned with graphic art, video games, cinema, online music, skate culture, computers graphics, etc. Strains of high and low art, popular culture, and counter-culture coalesce, blend and bleed together, permeating most every aspect of our lives. It is here Adelberger's recent work situates itself, in the ever-evolving, interconnected world of the popular now -- a contemporary collective place where an individual's creations become a part of a greater expanding whole.

Jack Livingston
January 2009

Jack Livingston is an artist, writer, critic, teacher, activist and raconteur who hails from Denver, Colorado. He is the founder and executive editor of the online arts and culture review RADARREDUX.net, a project created in partnership with Maryland Institute College of Art and Johns Hopkins University.




1The David Bowie-produced album album was Reed’s second solo effort and contained his signature cool do-wop-ish ode to the Warhol set “Walk on the Wild Side”, a song that despite its often overlooked adult subject matter made its way up the charts, becoming an international mainstream hit.
2Reed recently revived the Berlin song-cycle, now a recognized masterwork, via a series of live performances with a follow-up film by artist Julian Schnabel who also served as the performance set designer.
3From a January 2009 interview with Lou Reed by Holly Gleason for American Songwriter magazine.
4Phillip Guston (1913 –1980) and Cy Twombly (Born 1928) both used thick brush strokes of loaded oil paint and suspended imagery on fields of white or off-white; their later work is full of abstract imagery, often humorous, with pop and sexual pathos. They heavily influenced Adelsberger’s earlier work.
5Button mashing is a term used in console gaming contexts to refer to quick, repeated, and generally random button pressings. The technique is used often out of desperation, barraging the opponent to win, or just because the "masher" likes the reaction he/she gets while mashing. — From Wikipedia
6The most popular use of the side-scrolling format is in the platform game genre. Platform games are action games that feature jumping, climbing, and running characters who must be guided through many diverse levels. Games such as Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog are among the most famous side-scrollers of this type. — From Wikipedia

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