Timur Si Qin’s work explores the spacing of contemporary late modernity with a glamorous insistence that is absolutely infuriating, and yet it is in research such as his, which refuses the sub-ironic withdrawal of so much bland post-internet artwork, that we discover a way out of the maze of the hyperglamour of the interface. Timur Si Qin, like the writer Tao Lin, is a master of annihilation. In experiencing his work authentically, we find ourselves practically burning up in a hyper-rarified aura of plastic phosphorescence and slippery surfaces. Likewise with Lin, “stupidity” becomes the very surface of the so-called unconscious, involuting the facial presentation of self in a continuous slipping out of identity into differential hyperchaos. Axe Effect, a veritable masterpiece of twenty-first century art-making, is like an artifactual lifeline extended to the trembling fingers of the flaneur, who can barely lift his opium pipe, having already drowned his Baudelairean superfluity in a mask of chaosmotic eroticism. The maniacal laughter of the “hipster” who has found himself as, to put it in a Hegelian manner, the absolute coming to itself, is usually hidden in the heartrendingly loud noise of oafish intellectuals grasping at some ineffible philosopher’s stone, when this very object is nothing other than the attitude of certainty that they are too pious to assume. For example, the jadedness of Tao Lin’s characters, which is indistinguishable from a kind of primordial innocence, is nothing like any of the commonplace jadednesses any postmodern quasisubject can find at his corner art gallery or zine stand, inasmuch as it derives its surprising force from the very “death” that lingers like a malevolent ghost in the pages of Lin’s great novel, “Taipei”, waiting to usurp the meandering consciousnesses of its suicidal protagonists, threatening to suddenly leer in front of us, like a demon created out of some literary black magic. “Paul began to feel, in a way he hadn’t before, like he comprehended double suicide–the free and mysterious activity of it, like a roller coaster descending only into darkness, but accessible from anywhere [emphasis mine], on the theme park of Earth, always open.” There is a similar if not even more intense existential violence in Si Qin’s work, for example in Axe Effect, where a kind of ritual is devised by superimposing a sword onto a series of bottles of Axe-branded “shower gel”, the hyper-cathected ooze of its very brandedness approaching us like the bloody remnant of some proto-religious sacrifice, schizophrenically inviting us to taste the deliciously rounded and ergonomically available edges of the perfect hypercapitalist package, a container from which we liberate a suprising energy, a kind of industrial perfume. It is as if we were now invited, as viewers, as consumers of the artistic lifestyle-brand, to experiment, to take part in the very ritual implied by Si Qin’s sculpture, baptizing ourselves in the stink of Axe products while chanting or just ecstatically melting. The addictiveness that Heidegger identified as a salient feature of “everydayness” looms large here, as we are invited to slip vertiginously into a kind of compulsion-to-experiment, to become “ferociously religious” as Georges Bataille put it, and discover in capitalism not merely a cult of money but a religion of energy (Cf Bataille, “The Accursed Share”). When Lin says that the air is “paranormally ventilated”, or describes “a pale fence with the colorless, palatially melancholy glow of unicorns”, we are precisely in the world of the aura, plain and simple, and Si Qin is by virtue of the same logics of energy and magical immediacy a kind of hypershaman who creates from the hyperfeminine stickiness of commercial cosmetic ads a kid of surface-of-cathexion or magic writing pad by which we can agree to participate in an exercise in aided self-hypnosis, turning consumerist banality into a kind of playful sorcery of the image, a kind of “art of memory” a la Bruno, or a Castaneda-esque “dreaming”, which is, in a sense, already the “initiation into evil” that Georges Bataille made the rule of great literature as such. Consider the figure of the “traitor”, for whom Dante reserved the “worst” circle of hell, the perpetually unlucky person who is damned by their lack of principles to a permanent exile, damned to be a stranger, a monster, a kind of pirate… maybe what we are describing is the artist, Nietzsche’s revolutionary man of the future, a sort of untimeliness… In short, in Lin’s work we discover Beckett’s principle that the ascent to heaven and the fall into hell are the same thing. With Si Qin, we are given already the image of this hell, as a kind of secret token threatening to become a tool in the hands of the one who makes of the imaginatio (imaginative faculty, transcendental schematism) a machine courageously for defying so-called “reality”, flying in the face of good manners, good taste, and good breeding. In short, what is at stake is a kind of inhuman-superhuman ἐποχή that would liberate us from the ethical, teleoligically suspending it for the inwardness of the knight of faith, which is perhaps nothing other than the “hipster” who discovers that, in Lin’s words, he is “already, always orphaned”.
