Cory James

PAINTING IN GLITCH MODE

Trained within the graffiti and street art scene of Northern California, Cory James Jacobsen has carried this undisciplined background into a field such as the Western pictorial tradition, which he re-signifies from positions close to the most revisionist forms of postmodernism. Indeed, Jacobsen goes beyond mere citation or reference: he proposes an appropriationist strategy of imaginaries that span from the Renaissance to the avantgardes, Piero della Francesca, Vermeer, Dalí, Mondrian… And, in line with the premises of this postmodern appropriationism, his aim is not so much to consolidate a status of authority as to carry out an incisive desacralizing operation. The distance that, a priori, separates street art from the hegemonic narrative of European painting gives Jacobsen a wide margin of maneuver from which to construct a striking gesture of irreverence. In fact, the hallmark of his work is none other than the destabilization of the classical image from within, through the disruption of its fixed and definitive placement within art history. Authority is the quality of that which occupies a fixed and referential place, of that which does not move and has ceased to transform. Against this condition, Jacobsen performs what we might call a dynamic decanonization, that is: a rupture of the canon through its “temporalization” and its subsequent re-entry into the circuit of the living. This “temporal activation” that Jacobsen carries out from street art converges with what Agamben called “profanation,” whose corrosive potential lies in returning to common use that which had been separated as “untouchable.” The thread running through this artist’s production defines an intervention project that could be characterized as soft iconoclasm. Through this particular methodology, Jacobsen does not seek to destroy the classical image, but rather to tension it and turn it into a territory of friction. The foundation of this “soft iconoclasm” is a form of iconographic parasitism: the language of Dalí or Vermeer , to mention two examples, becomes the host of a contemporary intrusion that transforms their historical authority and monumentality into a more relaxed lightness, recontextualizing them in the form of “casual paintings.” In line with the essence of graffiti and street art, Jacobsen’s approach to the European pictorial imaginary is carried out through the logic of sabotage. It is, indeed, a matter of introducing a regime of instability into the historical image and, as a result, inserting a calculated error into the system it defines. So effective and distinctive is this mode of operation that it would not be unreasonable to describe Jacobsen’s modus operandi as “painting in glitch mode.” As is well known, a glitch, in its most precise sense, is a significant error within a system. When Jacobsen takes highly coded images from art history, Vermeer’s classicism, Dalí’s paranoid theatricality, Piero’s perspectival stability, or Mondrian’s neoplastic composition, he causes them to collapse from within by introducing an element that interrupts their organic coherence. In digital culture, a glitch functions as a type of system interruption that reveals the code on which it is based. In Jacobsen’s case, the code made visible by the glitch is historical and visual, composition, hierarchy, canon, aura. What emerges from this interference is an image traversed by its own obsolescence.What, in this context, should be understood by “obsolescence”? Nothing less than the moment in which an image ceases to function as an unquestionable historical paradigm and slips into a state of ambiguity. It remains recognizable, yet unstable. And this instability introduces the factor of time. The image ceases to be a closed surface and becomes a field of tensions between past and present. Jacobsen’s “glitch painting” must ultimately be characterized as a strategy of deconstruction that exposes the historical seams of art through its temporalization via friction.