Parolin Products

Parolin Products: Maria Anna Parolin, Lecture Review.
by 0018922

Maria Anna Parolin is an artist working with multiples in various contexts who delivered a lecture on her artwork and practice. She is a printmaker, and I know her from the plate lithography course that she taught here at Emily Carr two years ago. Her presentation was less a conceptual argument than an artist's talk. She presented her work to let it speak to us, rather than her for it. Her practice being generally print and paper making, with also a strong conceptual element. She focused on the idea of the multiple, the idea of detail in a vast world of multiples, and various aspects of our multiple society such as business, depression and invasive species.

Since her presentation was so purely descriptive, we need to look to the two background readings she presented to see the ideological underpinnings. The Baudrillard writing, Simulacra and Simulations, is a confusing one. It starts off with a statement from Ecclesiastes, "[simulacrum] is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." This paradoxical statement is not more easily understood by looking up the word, simulacrum: it means an "image or representation," or "a faint trace or semblance; as, a simulacrum of hope" [wiktionary]. Basically, the word is very similar to simulation, but with more emphasis on the image. As the two words are hard to distinguish from one another, so is the language of Baudrillard intentionally confusing, the idea of truth is challenged.

Throughout his essay, Baudrillard is constantly building up elaborate pyramid schemes of a conspiratorial nature, then quickly dismissing them as merely one perspective that is no less true or false than the alternate mundane explanation. He talks about Disneyland a "hyperreal" unreality, of Main Street America, yet this colourful faux street is an illusion for children. The cartoon childishness conceals the intention of being a place where adults get to act like children, but also to hide how it is normal for them to act like children, as if this were the only place. Then when one leaves the Disneyland Park grounds with it's charismatic manufactured busyness we are confronted by the stark inhumane parking lot with isolated complex automotive machines. And the delusion goes even further, when we see how all of America is alike with its malls and parking lots. So, Disneyland is just the same and no more an illusion than anywhere else.
Similarly, Baudrillard attacks the truth of radical political realities. He looks at a communist political revolutionary group that is dealing with the ideology of power. Yet, this group may have a co-opted discourse if they are part of the system and their rebellion only symbolic. He examines multiple perspectives on the truth of the conspiracy to overthrow power or maintain it and finds that all perspectives are equally true and equally false. The end of his essay is a cynical footnote about buying the vote in what he sarcastically describes as 'more advanced' Athens.

Baudrillard's message is one of confusion, of total imaginary and imagery saturation. Borges is less desolate, by talking about the desert he humorously illuminates the paradoxes of a map so big that it covers the entire surface of the empire, one and the same, the artefact of empire being real or reproduction? After reading these two absurd writers, I feel lost, without direction. Is the map real? Baudrillard seems to be referencing Borges map but is a lot less humorous. I think Borges is a bit more sophisticated still because laughter is more complex than tragedy.

Parolin does not have a clear direction in her art that I can see, except her method. She is printmaking and doing it all by hand, highly detailed. What she produces she brands as her 'Products,' an embrace of mass production. Yet there is irony in all her work, her labour intensive printing process is not cheap production at all. In the material she chooses we see truth and paradox: paper and anti-depressant. Knowing lithography, I know the detail and inhuman dedication to that truth of the finite, yet the impossibility of perfection. The lithographer learns a physical appreciation of the role of the machine. It reproduces more exactly than the human can yet never with the same care and reality of detail; a human can fix or finesse to correct for error, while the machine has specifiable parameters and does not see the flaws except as another number.

In our alienating mass society depression is common, as are anti-depressants. However I don't think that is the sole focus of her paper and pills. The pills are revered; we awe at their power yet printing into paper is an arbitrary circumstance. That randomness is the post-modern bit. The control of all variables can't hide the lack of control. Her invading species is similarly about a certain lack of control, the beauty of chaos.

Her conceptual focus is that control of complexity issue, and the impossibility of control. It's how the individual is lost in mass production, even as she is the master of it able to finely hand craft that which seems inhuman.

After all that work, she invites rich CEOs with a coupon for her Product. Busyness and lack of control of our time - the most valuable of resources - is apparent. In this, Borges' tricky humour is at play. The powerful CEO who has the power over a mass of people, a mass of production, is given a coupon to her fine art. In an artist run gallery her commercial exploitation of the hand craft is underlined by controlling those CEOs who are such expert commercial exploiters.

Her work is probably better presented not by herself, because she is too sincere and honest about her confusion in our era. People need to be explained the concept. Confusion may be apparent by immersion, but not artistically appreciated. I recall her description of working with a master lithographer in Italy and all the variables such as humidity and sunlight that come into rolling that slab. Others without that story I don't think will feel the terrible irony of hand lithographing cheap packaging in multiple colours. And that may be the point. Control or out-of-control, we can never appreciate all that goes into the materials we consume in our interconnected society. If we try we're confused, we're consumed ourselves. Despite our grand post-modern narratives and technologies, we are all still at the whim of nature which can reproduce better; it reproduces us.

• Baudrillard, Jean. "Simulacra and Simulations." Stanford History and Philosophy of Science and Technology website. From Jean Baudrillard, "Selected Writings." ed. Mark Poster, Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988, 166-184. (15 February 06) http://www.stanford.edu/.../Baudrillard_Simulacra.html
• Borges, Jose Luis. "On Exactitude in Science." Washington University in St. Louis website. From Jorge Luis Borges, "Collected Fictions." Translated by Andrew Hurley, Penguin, 1999. (15 February 06) http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/.../stories.html
• Parolin, Maria Anna. "Parolin Products." Art History 333. Interdisciplinary Forums: Studies in Contemporary Praxis. Emily Carr Institute, 9 Feb. 2006.
• Wiktionary. "Simulacrum." A Wikimedia Project. (16 February 06) http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/simulacrum