JON RAFMAN, GEEK ARTIST

MINING THE DEPTHS OF THE VIRTUAL WORLD, HIS WORK EXPOSES THE PYSCHIC UNDERBELLY OF OUR 21ST-CENTURY SOCIETIES. AT THE SHARJAH BIENNIAL, HE’S SHOWING DRAWINGS BEFORE A RETURN TO DIGITAL FORMATS AT THE VENICE BIENNALE.

It’s spring, and Jon Rafman and I are wandering the galleries of the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The Louvre represents nothing less than the entire history of world civilization, and now it’s been sold to the Emirates. Everything’s on sale now: our past, our memories, our nostalgia, our dreams. Society has become a sort of trap that’s hard to escape, and it’s only by acknowledging this, Jon says, that we can have a chance at transcendence. We’ve come to the United Arab Emirates for the 14th Sharjah Biennial, 100 miles up the coast. The Arabian Gulf, where everything feels like a mirage, seems the perfect place to speak to Jon, an artist who trades in digital worlds – from early works like Kool-aid Man in Second Life (2008–11), which took audiences on a tour of Second Life’s strangest and most alluring lands, and 9-Eyes (2008, ongoing), which collects extraordinary scenes captured in Google Street View, to recent projects like Dream Journal (2015–present), his greatest work yet.

The futuristic feel of Sharjah is what made Jon want to show his 2017 film Legendary Reality there. Composed of found scenes from video games that he’s treated so they hum, shake and tear themselves apart in the digital smoke, it tells the story of a man who’s been kept alive in a pod for 10,000 years, in a city of shimmering towers and flying cars, through a poem the narrator began to write one night

when he couldn’t sleep. After watching it several times over inside the stuccoed, claustrophobic one-person viewing pod Jon’s made for it here, I finally open the small door and step back out from Legendary Reality to “reality.” Dusk has fallen over Sharjah, apartment blocks and minarets are glowing against the dark sky, and I feel like I’ve emerged into another world. Later, back in the Louvre, Jon, who’s usually so restless, stops in front of a Mayan terracotta vase with a face whose mouth has been open in an anguished howl for over two millennia. He stares at it for a long time – it’s hard to drag him away – and says it reminds him of something that happened to him once. To me, it looks like a character from one of his works.

For his new commission at the biennial, Punctured Sky (2019), Jon’s been working with an illustrator on a single, continuous drawing that goes on and on, like the Bayeux Tapestry, depicting scenes of everyday life in an imaginary city of the dystopian near present. One day these pictures will be coloured in, but here in Sharjah the working sketches are on display in the form of four partly unwound scrolls stretching roughly the length of a swimming pool, which is still only a quarter of what he’s completed so far. A cycle of terrible events is rendered in incredible detail: the remains of a suicide bomber in the square; bodies melting up into the sky; a girl with no nose smelling a rose; blindfolded, naked figures in a ring, crawling over broken glass in search of the keys that will release them, surrounded by jeering crowds; sorry characters plumbed into one another’s orifices at the dinner table and made to feast on their own

and everybody else’s vomit, piss and shit in a sadomasochistic vision of excess that evokes, for me, the feeling of what it’s like to use social networks in 2019. The whole city brings to mind Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s visions of hell. “I really believe,” Jon tells me, “that making this ‘pessimistic’ art is actually the most utopian practice one can have, because the only way to ever transcend our current situation, our sense of hopelessness, whatever you want to call it, is to express it in all its complexity. I do think it’s important to capture society for what it is. Ultimately it’s an Enlightenment ideal: once you understand your limitations, you can transcend them.”

Every morning, Jon writes down his dreams. When he’s collected enough, he has them digitally animated into passages of his Dream Journal (2015–present), which trails a cast of memorable characters through the wild, perverted lands of his imagination. Continuing where the Surrealists left off, he’s mapping his dreams onto virtual space; where before he was trawling the darker corners of the net and discovering some extraordinary fetishes and scenes (nobody in my life has shown me more disgusting pictures than Jon), he’s now making worlds of his own that strive to outdo the net for abjection, weirdness and uncanny beauty. His latest dream installments will be premiered at this year’s Venice Biennale – never will the venerable halls of the Arsenale have been witness to anything quite so dank. Since the beginning of consciousness, man has always felt that urge to dig down to something hidden underneath, below the reality that we can see, touch and feel, but few people will ever take us as far into the wonderful abyss of the human mind’s sublime as Jon Rafman.