Sleepy Brain: The Jargonists

Sleepy Brain: The Jargonists

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Commentary Enzo Franchetti ||| Photography Dario Argento
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The Jargonists are a self-proclaimed “culture lab” based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Led by Italian expat Enzo Franchetti, they were formed in the winter of 2001 and have since cultivated a somewhat caustic public image, largely fuelled by their incendiary attacks on prominent politicians. Who could forget the Jargonist’s staged orgy — with simulated cannibalism — on the front lawn of Victorian Premier Steve Bracks’ house?

But the heart of their philosophy lies not so much in a desire to overthrow “the system”. Rather, the Jargonists seek to claim truth and beauty in even the most heinous political acts, revitalising and resampling a culture specifically reserved for “function” and “public duty”. Their obvious touchstone is Futurism, but there’s more than a hint of JG Ballard in their method, as well. If Marinetti and the Futurists sought to destroy conservative values through ‘the beauty of speed’, then Ballard’s Crash filters that manifesto through a thoroughly modern, split-screen sensibility. Whereas the Futurists hyped an extension of consciousness via machines, Ballard occludes the flesh — and Futurist notions of aesthetic purity — in favour of a posthuman psychosis.

The Jargonists sit somewhere between these poles. Deliberately anachronistic, they nonetheless have their sights fixed firmly on a timeframe roughly five minutes into the future — give or take four minutes.

With this in mind, we invited Mr Franchetti to illustrate the Jargonist approach, using Melbourne’s Westgate Bridge as his springboard.

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Sleepy Brain: The Jargonists

ENZO FRANCHETTI: We Jargonists renounce art to do with aesthetic sensations deriving from the physical body. We Jargonists imbue sights, sounds, smells in rivets, pulleys and iron cladding and salute the physical transcendentalism of the Westgate Bridge, motion sculpture for the masses.

With its buoyant lines and curves snaking into the heat-hazed horizon; with its vectors of speed, then recipes for disaster, converging effortlessly into gated throughways. With its twisted screams, contortions and bends, tectonic plates grinding and stressing with humidity — and humanity (the screams of the 35 workers killed in initial construction — mid-section collapse — who gave their lives for this art). With its ribbed underbelly simulating the skeletal structure of some bizarre, alien creature, archaeological find of the 25th century; with its slither of metalskin urgently making its way toward autogeddon, at the speed of 80km/h.

With all this we have The Bridge, art in motion.

Common dialogue states that The Bridge and other great works of industrial art are against nature but we say, think again: they enhance nature. The Westgate Bridge is made for aesthetic appreciation of the loftiest order. Its full and considered design gives rhythm and repetition, from lamp post to signage to emergency stopping bay.

Plays of light at sunset glint with gunmetal grey; superenhanced colours tinge the sky, horizon and even street-level politics with new scales, new palettes from which to daub. The Bridge is preoccupied art with singular purpose. It subordinates human scale, sings with the power and majesty of electrical motors, pulleys — petrol combustion equations. With the fine tuning of engines magnified by huge volumes traversing tarmac, there is music, poetry, rhythm.

Stand beneath and listen: there is life, encased in metal. In the newborn phase of the 21st century, human evolution sheds its penultimate stage: onwards, then, to posthuman intelligence, armoured, body-enhanced, supermodified. But before the final solution — disassociation from the flesh, in favour of pure matter, pure mind — we must salute and cherish these monuments to our armoured selves, as we do the bone-fashioned club from our CroMagnon ancestry.

Sleepy Brain: The Jargonists

For it is on The Bridge’s grand stage where new dramas are played out, far more interesting to the true aesthete than any human drama. The Bridge is seductive and erotic as only technology can be, because it fulfils our dreams, modifies our desire unto the lap of the gods. Until we are superhuman.

The Bridge lifts us, carries us aloft on the wings of misery — the 35 dead — and those of ingenuity — engineering marvels.

The equation, then, is this: “sacrifice” times “technology” equals “progress”.

Equals The Bridge.

– Enzo Franchetti