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Flynn’s Arcade: Obfuscation and the Art of Christian Flynn

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In 2018 and 2019, we have seen a radical reexamination of what it is to be an artist, and how divisible the work is from that artist. Though this is not a new phenomenon (one thinks immediately of debates around the artistic worth, after considerations of personal conduct, of Pablo Picasso, Michael Jackson and Roman Polanski), this revisionism has taken on an urgency and scale never seen before, due in part to evolving identity politics, themselves partially attributable to evolving technologies. More than ever, viewers (consumers?) refuse to see a distinction between the artist and their work. This may not sound like a seismic shift for performers, who, despite the fact that they are performing, are constantly in the spotlight. There is always a presence of the performer, whether they’re playing themselves a fantastic character (consider David Bowie or Orson Welles who we will come back to), but for the painter, the writer, the director, who have the ability if they wish it, to stand completely behind their works, out of the public eye, this is a massive change. Picasso, a very public figure for a visual artist, is one thing, but for many artists, part of the freedom is the ability to act, feel, think and play outside of the spotlight, unencumbered by the moral and philosophical certitudes of the masses. Obscurity isn’t just a cloak of safety, of invisibility, but a key artistic strategy. Considered in the contemporary context of the artist being indivisible from their work, obscurantism becomes doubly powerful.

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Returning to Orson Welles and his own deployment of obscurantism, I would like to draw attention to his efforts to finance and create what became his final film, the Other Side of the Wind, which was never quite finished, and released posthumously after an edit. The film provides valuable insight into the idea of narrative and autobiography, and the slippage between, for Welles’ film was built around a brilliant conceit; one half of the film was to be ostensibly about an aging filmmaker trying to finance and create a film, the other half being the film itself, the film within the film. Such ideas were decades ahead of what we now take for granted in the post Larry Sanders/Gary Shandling world, with metaphysical acrobatics that serve as much as trailblazing formal experimentation as winking satire of an industry forever eating and regurgitating itself for the masses. These metaphysics build additional layers of fascination, with Welles casting real actors and directors to play not themselves, but vaguely analogous ciphers, cartoon versions, of themselves. The film-within-the-film appears to be a pastiche (or a satire) of the French New Wave of cinema, which was so influential to Hollywood’s own New Wave, which more or less destroyed the very system that Welles had helped build, and had worked in, or in opposition to, for decades. This may appear to be a tangled web of references, puckish winks and deferential nods, but Welles’ insistence upon the separation of autobiography from the film’s analysis is, in itself, revealing. He saw it, despite being a partly-improvised and partly-constructed narrative, as a kind of documentary, or analysis, of Hollywood, rather than himself.

 

Temporarily moving the conversation away from art, but perhaps more closely to Christian Flynn’s recent paintings, we should consider the activities of Richard Doty. Doty is a former Special Agent for the United States American Air Force Office of Special Investigation, who specialized (and many would argue still specializes) in counterintelligence and disinformation. He is also a UFO expert, and has appeared as such in many interviews and documentaries. Doty is an interesting figure, not because of his claims– which are relatively tame compared to many similar figures of the UFO community– but because his claims butt up against his former profession so neatly. To the casual observer, Doty’s talk of UFOs, ETs, black ops government research projects and conspiracies could be construed as so much hokum. However, and this is where it gets interesting, Doty’s accounts always sit flush beside well-established and well-documented  timelines, and can often be corroborated by way of evidence, or claims consistent with his own, from (more) reputable sources. Upon careful inspection of the man’s claims, the question shifts from whether or not Doty’s claims are real, to whether or not he is still going through his counterintelligence motions after his retirement; are the elaborate narratives he has built over years of interviews themselves the fiction? And if they are, what are the real truths being obscured by these narratives? It is in this way that Doty is truly a master of deception. The UFO community is deeply suspicious of Doty because his public claims, if taken seriously, are offered unvarnished, with various support and evidence, which is highly unusual in this context. Conversely, if Doty’s claims are to be dismissed as obfuscation, they create a desire for a deeper truth, which Doty must be hiding. Another alternative, and perhaps the most likely, exists somewhere between, where Doty’s information and misinformation is all documented with equal sincerity and, by default, equal credibility; the truth is hidden in plain sight, alongside parallel half-truths and untruths. This is, of course, the arena of the artist, the writer, the filmmaker.

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Welles and Doty may seem strange framing devices for discussion Flynn’s artistic practice, but there are many parallels that can be drawn between the artist, his works, and the narratives threaded between them. Just like Welles and Doty, Flynn’s use of narrative serves a purpose we can only guess at. Broken down into an index of points which chart a narrative timeline (or is it a cartography?), we are bombarded with half-truths, innuendos and red herrings. While narrative itself is a relatively recent concern for the artist, his continuing interest in the detritus of humanity, whether it be advertising, popular culture, or the byproducts of the body itself, has always reached toward some kind of reconciliation of the future, and what is gone and will never, ever return.  This is the same artist who at one stage used the physical and spiritual disposability of advertising itself, using bottle shop corflute signs, as a graphic starting point. It is in this way that the work continues an ongoing conversation with itself. While many artists’ work seems to progress in a linear fashion, a chronological development of ideas and their execution, Flynn seems to work in a circular, but forward moving, fashion. Studio touchstones recur, but not without significant pauses, often years-long. Old works are rediscovered, stripped and mined of ideas of merit, and finally reconstituted and redeployed in new work. Without laboring the point, the work reaches inwards and outwards simultaneously.

Flynn’s artistic career, which comprises of many series of paintings, which each explore an additional register added since the last, does gesture toward expansion, or the infinite, but always remains grounded with an Earthly, or human, element.  It is an effective visual binary, and universalizes Flynn’s work without pandering, or diluting the artist’s most promising visual strengths. Science fiction is perhaps the most immediately apparent aesthetic influence on Flynn’s work, and this binary is often reflected in the genre’s own spiritual aches. Think of the endless galactic nothingness of Dark Star, grounded by the astronauts’ growing collective boredom, irritation and madness; the boundless, optimistic possibilities of time and space of Interstellar, grounded by the dirt and dust of a dying farm, symbolic of a dying world; or Roy Batty’s vivid, allusive proclamations shortly before his unavoidable, predetermined death in Bladreunner. Like these films, Flynn’s work operates as a universe in miniature, he charting of one specific story in a galaxy of stories, yet obscured through abstraction, of form and shape. The forms within are familiar, but evanescent. The artist may flesh out these alien environments, but is the viewer who traverses them.

 

Science Fiction is also, perhaps, the fuel most often consumed by the artist. In the age of streaming, the internet offers a steady and accessible diet of the genre, which Flynn uses in the studio in the way many artists use music or podcasts. It is listened to rather than watched, a steady and familiar narrative which can be focused in and out of; a radio play for the Generation X. Whole television series are steadily absorbed and revisited later; Voltus 5, Transformers, Star Trek, the X-Files. Such visual influences have been easily identifiable in Flynn’s work for some time, particularly the bold colors and streamlined forms of the Japanese-designed Super Robot subgenre, but it could be argued that, compellingly, it is the subversive theme of alienation, a mainstay of science fiction, which has resonated with the artist most personally over more recent years. This ongoing presence, a steady stream of visually and philosophically-compelling narratives of alienation, identity crisis and paranoia, is certainly a defining through line of Flynn’s studio practice, when put in relief to the nihilism and outright spiritual and philosophical doom of the late-capitalist era. Considering the visual and philosophical influence of science fiction, and the artist’s fascination with ufology, it might be easy to prescribe some kind of ill-advised theory of fandom or even obsession, but I would argue that nothing could be further from the truth. In a parallel to his work, Flynn considers each angle and position quite carefully, with an objective detachment. To take a cue from the X-Files, itself an intimidating mythology built on a mish-mash of conspiracy theory, but expertly tempered by the yin and yang perspectives of FBI agents Mulder and Scully (belief and skepticism), and in later seasons, Agent Doggett (who brings a third perspective, reason, into the mix), Flynn’s position is somewhere in the middle. Open to new ideas and possibilities, but requiring evidence to proceed.

 

This studio practice is itself somewhat unusual in its execution. Flynn typically works on several— sometimes dozens— of works at one time, usually prepared and started during the same studio session. A loose, gestural layer, usually acrylic, is lashed over each piece of paper or canvas. Harder geometric forms are then layered, one by one, in considered fashion. In many recent works, this is the point at which Flynn will begin to reincorporate more organic forms, something more or less absent for over a decade. It is over these forms that we seem to project narrative, blobs and cells linking with the hard geometric edges, which can be difficult to resolve. Around this time, when images begin to set, is the most dangerous stage of creation. This part of the process is deceptive; often works will sit, untouched for months, awaiting the correct addition to transform and complete their composition. It is at this moment where a simple mark or shape can weld the image into place, bringing about a sudden tension or unity, resolving the work. These moments are almost always unexpected to the casual viewer, even if they have been able to see the works at each step. One can’t help but wonder how unexpected these moves are to the artist.

 

Returning to the many faces of Orson Welles, and the many potential interpretations of the Other Side of the Wind, there seems to be a preternatural demand by scholars and critics of its autobiographical qualities; it mirrors or parallels the artist, so therefore it is autobiography. I believe that this is largely attributable to three contemporary phenomena, the first being the prism of narcissism, engendered by social media, in which the world is largely viewed through today (everything is about us, always). The second is the now casually arbitrary nature of the surveillance state (all of your actions are being monitored, all of the time). The third is the deep distrust of the concept of artistic genius (the postmodern fallacy that anybody can be in artist is, of course, bunk). Every contemporary artist must deal with questions of autobiography, whether it is an aspect of their practice or not, because that is the direction people approach it. Therefore, is it any wonder that obscurantism becomes crucial to the artist? Obviously the interface with the public, via exhibitions particularly, is important, but art remains one of the rare aspects of contemporary life where everything need not be revealed right away, where mysteries can linger. Christian Flynn’s work maintains its mystery and challenges us to go deeper. To demand of it neat, contemporary interpretations of autobiography seems a redundancy, given its grand, outward reaching scope, and its simultaneous intimacy. As viewers, we bring with us our own experiences and transpose them onto these alien landscapes and biological forms, searching for a meaning in the visual terrain as we are trained to throughout our multiphrenic lives. This isn’t necessarily the wrong way to look at Flynn’s work, but just as taking something Doty or Welles tells us at face value, we may be left to search for the unstated subtext to these works, or to hold them up to a mirror to reveal some hereto-unseen aspect.

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The truth is out there.

Jonathan McBurnie