6 December, 2013 – 19 January, 2014

Opening reception Friday, 6 December 2013, from 6 – 11 pm

Marginal Utility is proud to present DON’T BE A DREAMER MR. ME, a solo exhibition by the itinerant artist Alexi Kukuljevic.

He was one of those creatures, at once simple and complex, encountered most frequently on the lowest rung of the social ladder, in whom constant, direct contact with a hermetic world of objects had developed, unbeknownst to those around him, a sixth sense—a sense of forever foreign, silent matter — often found in those spending long periods of time among deaf mutes.
Bruno Jasiénski, from I Burn Paris

To approach oneself one has to be a bit of a swindler. A conviction I share with Konrad Bayer. One looks for the self but encounters the me. One looks at the me and says I. One looks for a subject but encounters an object. But it wasn’t this bit of ghastliness I was looking for, this sorry sack of shit, but the I. Well, the I isn’t just any old hunk of meat that one can poke like an eyeball. One has to learn how to set the right kind of snares, to be a real trapper, the kind that still knows how to make their own skis, to choose the right kind of timber and how to use a plane. In short, one has to be ready to go the whole hog, to play the idiot, to confuse space and time and be a bit literal about spiritual things: to be a nihilist, to say I am bone with a clean conscience, to treat styrofoam like it is some kind of spiritual substance. One needs the sixth sense.

What does it mean to have the sixth sense? What is the hermetic world of objects trying to communicate to us? (Cunt! Wretch! Swindler!) Philadelphians already have their script with a clear answer. “I see dead people.” However, before M Knight Shyamalan there was Ferry Radax. I have in mind, Sonne Halt! [Sun Stop!] A beautiful movie! It has a wonderful script written by Konrad Bayer. The beginnings of his novel, the sixth sense. And what an actor!!! A first rate dandy! He played his self as a proper object.

But what is the sixth sense? Well, it is quite simple really. It means that in all circumstances where one can say Me, Me, Me, one can say I, I, I. It means knowing when to risk being a dummy. It also means lucidly apprehending the constraints that human life—that fit of decorum—imposes on what you see, hear, and understand. It means knowing the confinements, learning to experiment with their slackening. It means learning how to live with non-sense, to dispel the ease with which you move from the object to the subject. It means wearing incommensurables as one dons a mink. It means not being but becoming an abstraction. It means grasping a life, with all its contingencies, pointless details, the significant and insignificant, that whole jumble collecting like filth under a finger nail. I know what you’re thinking. But this has little to do with the hackneyed theme of mystical union or the infantile desire to see all those oppositions that cleave the world give way. The clue might be the refrain from the sixth sense: “when life and property are threatened all distinctions come to an end.”

Sometimes I don’t feel quite like I own myself. Have I too become a dreamer? Non-sense.