DENNIS BALK
I feel grateful for literary fiction, the genre of it. It’s a good spot and a good fit. I wasn’t much of a reader as a kid. In the Kansas suburbs of the 50s and 60s, my reading was leafing through the major works, the thick, heavy books, the real bookshelf books—T.E. Lawrence, Herman Melville, the presence of the monumental achievement, and the gold-leaved titles embossed into the spines.
Historical fiction can be that much more honest and, not inconsequentially, that much more engaging the farther it’s pulled from the pretense of staged objectivity. It’s what I believe and where I sit, but I realize it’s just attitude and a contradiction in its own way. I write against the grain of the portrayal of the collective. If I’m going to flesh out a scenario or an episode of significance, it will be peopled with characters who have surprisingly little in common save the criss-crossing paths; one moment in the lives they live on their own, surrounded by others sharing the same.
Fiction is honest study. The really tugging stories are cluttered with the prosaic artlessness that becomes the revelation and the wonder of the page. Also, more than likely, it’s formula that keeps the misfit insisting on the off-beat, rebel-pathological, and the dramas whipped up. It’s the formula that’s the tedious punk. It’s go-it-alone, tough terrain. Also, it’s tough to portray the twisted complexities of the contemporary moment when you’re a narcissist who refuses the communal and only wants to get out and bolt the door. That attitude attracts characters who share that pang to extricate themselves and disappear. The mechanics of the exit are the rub and the run for the money. The better way to say it is that culture is not for everyone. And I’m not sure what that says about any formula for commiseration, wallowing toward an intolerable future. Thankfully, it’s not really the writer’s problem. Finding where it’s at is still the thing.
Representative Knight’s sketchy composition of a Kesey or a Kerouac at the wheel is about all he could manage. He was a little lost in the conflicting metaphors of the romantic, dusty sunlight visuals of one decade, layered with important authors and famous beats from a decade earlier, reconfigured with perfectly recorded celebrity voices from a decade later, now vintage. To be honest, Knight would hardly be considered one of the best minds of his generation. To be fair, he’s gifted in other areas. Oblivious to the awkward cliché, Knight’s quest was set in motion. The Winnebago hit the road.
BOATS ON A RIVER
BOATS ON A RIVER The dusty, dirty, nearly torn-to-shreds, beat-to-death book of adventures you’d pull out of your satchel while crossing the open prairie by wagon train. Or, before and after work on the seven train. History is a trail of unexpected minutia and unfamiliar people you’re ill-prepared to meet. Very far away, but everybody is traveling the same speed. Inspired by the Americana of James Fenimore Cooper and Charles Portis. Writers who rendered the gritty, immersive realism of characters driven by urgency, traversing open country.
Mythology floods in on its own. Maybe a touch of the quizzically plausible Terry Gilliam.
Out on the river, guts and perseverance stay the course. Downriver, the destination.
— A WILD RIDE DOWNRIVER
Balk conjures a wild ride downriver into American history with brilliantly drawn characters from the present. Of course, literature can shape and distort time, interpenetrating the present and the past and vice versa. In Balk's able hands, the journey is spectacular. I deeply enjoyed this adventure into Balk's rich and well-informed imagination.
— A MASTERFUL BLEND OF ADVENTURE STORY, HISTORICAL FICTION, AND TIME TRAVEL
Strange encounters and unlikely alliances are forged as the characters move downstream through many twists and turns. I loved this book even though I am not an avid reader of historical fiction. It is well researched and detailed, but the plot really moves. Really kept me wondering what would come next.
1 On the Road
2 The thicket of trees and vines
3 It takes time to know a stranger
4 The scars left behind
5 Off to better worlds
6 A true puzzler’s paradise
7 The one true thing
8 The world is this way
9 The deer at the spring
10 Dark Corners
11 The bloody rush is let loose
12 A burning building
13 With the morning light
14 The Garroted Man
15 Hooligans from Hades
16 The business of this world
17 Seven Eleven jerky
18 Barleycorn for the copperheads
19 A fleet of splinters
20 The stinking smell of river steam
21 Sittin’ ducks
22 Ripples on the surface
23 Gravestones and history books
24 Notes for the story
With this book, I’ve explored a type of journal format, which is also another form of conceptual fiction. I consider the book an exploration of the premise of the artist’s book as an extension of a studio practice. Essentially, it’s a hybrid between a graphic novel and a collection of short stories.
The model is the standard model—the traditional format and content of collected aesthetic-theory essays against the cataloging of the artist’s work. The conceit of this book converts the critical writing into the essential format of a short story. The art work becomes the illustration or anecdotal caption. It’s something I played with. Most primarily, the book is a collection of prose pieces and musings on the subject of our composed and contemporary moralities and the narratives of how that might be expressed. Scenarios of art and narrative essays plot to create an original proposition.
MORALITY COLLECTIVE invites the reader into a formal assemblage of short stories and narrative prose, interlaced with graphic visuals and visual art. The multiplicity of voices throughout the Reader find themselves intrigued by the thematic ideas of morality as a collective tactic, awkwardly wedged in the contemporary media moment. Morality evolution theories are teased with mini-dramas and short essays. Puzzling evidence is collected; forensic analysis is inconclusive.
MORALITY COLLECTIVE animates characters that scavenge the omnipresent veneer of social aesthetics in search of a decent enough story to perform for the enterprising and curious reader.
MORALITY COLLECTIVE
—The characters in the Reader maneuver through states of self-imposed victimhood, flipping through revolving narrative conventions to explore a proper fit.
—The Graphic Reader recruits the humor of newsy reportage to sift the anxious resolve we employ to temporarily achieve what we believe it means to be a proper social being.
—Many of the short stories in the Reader are so pleasantly inconsequential, it’s as if the characters are passively waiting, somehow expecting to extricate themselves from the foul air of media culture.
For several decades, I’ve been keenly interested in creating fictional contexts, often very detailed, with peculiar situations of experimentation and elaborately staged varieties of storytelling. For this exhibition novel, Seven Eleven, I worked with the idea that the actual, original artwork produced is developed by the characters in the sci-fi drama. Honestly, I thought, where else can the work of art go to turn away from the creeping trends of regressive formalism? With this book, I sought to take up art’s discursive legacy, which demands an inventive move into someplace yet unexpected. My effort was to create a body of visuals that might challenge the context in which art can be considered.
PART ONE, The Cash Register Files, is a collection of stories that revolve around a mysterious source of data that has been streamed directly into the store’s cash register. The codes, buried in the pop-visuals, have been decrypted by a group of renowned geneticists. The implications for our current understanding of human behavior are troubling. The characters—who are trapped in the convenience market—record their passing time in a variety of ways, which become their graphic stories. Several of the characters are young designers. Their designs are represented and critiqued in the book by a bevy of important professionals, which become other narratives embedded in the overall tale.
PART TWO, The Radio Interview, is the recorded and transcribed interview of the main characters long after the major event has passed. Their hardships become another narrative of noir drama, laced with suspicious conspiracies. The story comes together in the real-time interview, eventually dissolving into further unanswered questions. The unexpected conclusion is a shocker, especially for the author.
SEVEN ELEVEN, THE COMPLETE FILES
—WILDLY IMAGINATIVE
This book is wildly inventive, visually exquisite, and culturally relevant. Eight people are trapped in the universally familiar setting of a Seven Eleven while a protest rages outside and communication with the outside world is temporarily suspended. Part adventure story, part mystery, and part catalog of exquisite images that were mysteriously received through the cash register. Was there a ghost in the machine trying to tell us something, or was it just our own imagery ricocheted back from space? Forensic and visual analysis and interpretation by historians, linguists, and scientists uncover meanings that may be of great import to humanity. The multiple voices, writing styles, and narratives, which are wide-ranging and hilarious at times, collide and accumulate significantly in this timely and scintillating narrative. While you could just flip through the book, looking at the images, I recommend reading it as a novel. It’s on my shelf between J.G. Ballard and Don Delillo, where I believe it belongs.
“As an independent code analyst in Mumbai, I first discovered the Rogue Personality Feed when I was isolating aspects of data stream noise, the digital noise that can accompany less than perfectly composed code strings. This type of noise can damage and corrupt even the most succinctly written code. Similar to misdirected DNA in a chromosome. We arranged these fragments into a typical sequence, and surprisingly, it was a coherent conversation. Coherent, not in the sense of worldly participation or commentary, but coherence in rows of isolated thoughts within a container of semiotic sameness. The data was a living stream, organizing its thoughts as it was downloading into the cash register. The stream was thinking in real time.”
SPLINTER GROUP The streetwear brand can be seen as an extended effort within the broader context of gallery art and the type of esoteric projects that operate in the cross-referencing of cultural production. The short-lived para-fiction projects in New York and the performance-as-concept movement in the recent history of art practices help define the overall experiment of the SPLINTER GROUP brand. The catalog documents the majority of the creative output from the design studio during the years 2010 - 2018. A short span of time for a fashion brand.
The merchandising graphics and the visual clutter that accumulated around and throughout the streetwear and accessories merchandise and the ads generated to promote the brand, along with the inventory photography, merchandise samples, production design sketches, and drawings, are the takeaways of the branding project effort.
Print ads and pop-up announcements make up the majority of the visual design. Poetry, prose panels, and short narratives composed with geopolitical photography from the Middle East and Southeast Asia are a primary component of the iconographic visuals.
SPLINTER GROUP, THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT
— Certainly, the façade of sociopolitical indulgence within the brand aesthetic will appeal to the rank-and-file ideologues who roam social media and hide in the dark web. Perhaps the catalog, The Long And Short Of It, the visual history of the brand, will reach an audience as confounded by their own role in contemporary culture as is this fashion brand, and they will resonate in that particular confusion.
— Considering the title of the catalog representing the brand, what is this really? How do you categorize this catalog? A history of the brand? An inventory, a shopper’s guide in the ruse of yet another graphic departure? Perhaps take it at face value and let the work present in this catalog define the brand as the noisy hype and lost-in-the-clouds aesthetic culture it represents.
“The maverick visual philosopher Dennis Balk has produced a new body of work that, unlike his earlier multi-disciplinary art, theater, and cultural projects, is self-contained as a book for mass consumption. On first glance, it appears to be a traditional “coffee table book,” which usually functions as a passive sign within the reader’s ambient of décor, delight, and good taste. This book is anything but... Balk has subverted this conventional structure and demands that the reader take a serious step outside. His current work and data ask us to presume a leap of faith in exploring uncharted aesthetic territory and actively engage in a multifarious visual narrative. One can scan the surface of this tome, but that would be a waste. This is not an easy exercise in image consumption; we must dig deeper. The demands will not go unrewarded.
If Syd Mead, one of Balk’s idols, consistently provided us with mind-blowing illustrations as a visual futurist and P. K. Dick, another Balk anti-hero, has given us the sprawling narratives of the future past, Dennis presents us with a much more intricate and highly nuanced picture of the stranger than sci-fi future present.” —Ken Saylor
PARTICLES + WAVES WITH PLAUSIBILITY
In Particles + Waves with Plausibility, artist Dennis Balk employs various forms of visual expression—from abstract, digitally created images to straight photography, not missing many steps in between—to explore the relationship between models for subatomic particles, designed by the artist, and the day-to-day life of human beings.
Balk shows us his models as they take on shape, form, and personality, displaying patterns of behavior similar to those of human culture. Just as we pass on elements of our cultural identity through social interactions, each particle has a specified code, formed from its physical qualities, that passes from receptor to receptor to other particles in subatomic space. Using scientific methods such as nanotechnologies—engineering processes that operate at a molecular scale—Balk confronts the possibility of the visual description of subatomic material (material that, even with the greatest of modern technologies, cannot actually be seen).
“The trip that Dennis immerses us in is both hyper-rational and a spaced-out visionary quest. Attempting to make visible relationships between such disparate elements as art, science, and daily life, Balk has graphically charted the behaviors, forms, and transformations of his 3-D sub-atomic particle models (they are spectacular fictions) and slyly intimates that similar forms and behaviors exist and/or contradict human life and the physical world. Traversing seamlessly between pictorial images of the ancient Giza plateau, scientific models of his virtual creations, daily life, and popular culture on the back streets of Cairo, as well as interspersed texts and snapshots of Balk’s daily sci-fi reality, the reader is led to wonder whether the connections Balk describes are purely fictional or whether ancient and contemporary cultural codes are indeed intimate with the mysteries of contemporary science.
Balk is a ‘big picture’ man. A bulky question implied by his method of science fiction/cultural critique seems to be whether all of this information was codified by the big bang, billions of years ago? And are we just endlessly playing back the echoes of the cultural dawn?”
PRODUCE AND PUBLISH
