The most famous obscure artist of the 20th century. Here, Proximity Magazine is thrilled to reprint a lecture given by Zach Plague, in the Loop during Artists’ Month: Trapped in the middle of this century, like a sardine in a can, exists its most relevant artist, whom I’m quite certain you’ve never heard of. Nevertheless, he managed to radically subvert the thought-world of the entire arts universe, essentially reversing the flow of art space-time. In the interest of revealing his hidden celebrity, I have been commissioned to cast the net, if you will, of a conversational dialog centered around the many faces of his life and career. The man of whom I speak is none other than the late, great A. King Oscar. If you are unfamiliar with his wide influence, examples can be found at www.kingoscar.com. I recommended perusing this life/work vicariously. In doing so, a picture emerges of the way Oscar reinterpreted performance pseudo-sculpture. When convoluting one’s personal grid of perception, we risk a pedestrian mix of fishy ingredients coalescing into a multi-omniscient theory of art orientation, ad nauseum. The mutable, inchoate historical context belies a murky avant-garde, buoyed by no small dearth of imagination. The pre- and post-distopian confusion creates an almost tragicomic contextual self-dramatization. Therefore, it’s easy to see why most iconoclastic, unformed statements of the zeitgeist, albeit ensconced in artworks unrecognizable to the larger cultural milieu, were nevertheless created by Oscar. Redefining “anti-art” by pointing at what it was not allowed him to successfully skirt any sort of showy un-involvement with the shaky notion of an “art community.” The neo-irrelevantists of the day were hostile to dialogues with the “canned heat” of newcomer Oscar.

Did Oscar take a lover, and did that let the heat out of said can?

The seasons of output following his early-mid-late period afforded a disciplined rejection of sophistication doctrine and a platonic macro-perception, uninhibited by any kind of cohesive, self-flatulating juxtaposition of disconsolate sentiment and jubilant belligerence. Oscar’s pervasive and carefully orchestrated social mock-disregard incited a group of conversely-minded aesthetes to almost seizure with contrived expressions of an ironic spontaneity. How can one co-inhabit one’s own contemporaneous lifeworld? His disciples could achieve no empathy with the wider aesthetic agnosticism. The null-and-void framing device, definitively a post-modern anarchistic stratagem, discouraged would-be imitators from filching, referencing or indeed, even knowing about his work. The implied ideological bias was folded in to the larger thought-form of radically sensitive misanthropy. Oscar’s unified anti-manifesto, while never directly stated, irregardless whipped his constituents into a frenzy of converging artistic and mock-conscience thought streams. They operated on the subtext that “art” does not equal “art, thus what we find when a revisionist subjective doctrine rears its ugly head is that no one escaped untouched by Oscar’s wandering hand. All of this begs a few questions: Does the myriad of “post-post” ingredients insist on poly-perception primordial soup, undefined as it is? How has the status quo of anti-conformist manifestos been upset by adherence to a strict rejectionist world-frame? Did Oscar take a lover, and did that let the heat out of said can? Art determines the evolutionary pseudo-humanity. Discuss. What can console us now? What are the risks in straying from pre-conceived blind spots in the observer/observee thought-form construction matrix? Would it demonstrate a neo-predilection for interconnecting disparate ideological pre-thoughts? Is it time for a reformed subjective doctrine, in light of the paradigm shift following Oscar’s pre-written obituary? Why is there anything at all? by Zach Plague