BeRzeRkeR
by jwc 3o2
Setting aside for the moment the accomplishment of the painted & constructed works, some brief commentary is in order on Berzerker's ubiquitous use of "tagging", a form of urban urination i'm ordinarily unamused by (though i've gotta admit that when, for instance, a door gets so covered by tags that none of'em're any longer readable, the resultant typographical frenzy can oft-times put the boots to the more deterministic affectations of lettriste hypergraphie).
Not that my knowledge of "graffiti" is all-encompassing or even anything remotely resembling "familiar", but i've certainly been aware of "the urban arts" since living on the street in the 197os, having watched its quickening encroachment on all areas of the urban environment. While admitting that my primary interest generally runs away from the selfconsciously "artistic" redundancy of graphic trope infections peculiar to the genre (preferring, for instance, the deliberately artless & paranoid "journalism" of Toronto's Mr. P.Cob), it is impossible to ignore even all those ugly beige rectangles signalling the absence of a previous presence, let alone all the stuff out there desperately vying for attention amidst the scopophiliac nightmare the cityscape has become.
Amongst this semiotic splatter, Berzerker's taggings are unique in their application of techniques of "composition by field", a literary device determining the placement of words on a "page" such that a reader's consumption of the text is controlled so as to encourage the recognition of multiple layers of meaning which would otherwise not be present if the words were arranged otherly. While this notion could be said to have as its beginning Stephane Mallarmé's 1897 poem "Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard", it was Charles Olson who used the phrase in a different sense in 195o in his essay "Projective Verse", extending on William Carlos Williams' concept of a poem as "a field of action".
While Olson's poetry continued to follow primarily linear strategies to deploy his meanings, it was the concurrent development throughout all this time of concrete & visual poetry that most aptly utilized the more radical applications of the theories in its adaptation of the idea to generate content through a visually syntactic use of language & its particles.
Whether or not Berzerker is aware of any of this academic stuffage is irrelevant: the tags are high-end examples of the principles of "composition by field" "concrete poetry" at work. Each example of a tag i've seen has been uniquely suited to the surface it's been applied to, "site specific" in every sense. The use of space is impeccable – not only in the application of letters to a substrate but in the choice of the letters & supplementary marks themselves, decisions of whether to spell out "Berzerker" in full or abbreviate it to "BER" not necessarily a matter of available area.
If we (generally) – & taggers (specifically) – posit identity through & with language (& other forms of semiosis), Berzerker's tags attest to an awareness of a sense of self in concert with its environment, rather than in conflict (as most taggers aggressively demonstrate). While always composed of the same letter elements, their configurations vary enormously, formed in no small part by the frames one finds them in; a question of "how do i fit?" (no wistfulness implied) instead of the blatant contentual void of "I was here" (John Robert Colombo, Canadian kindergarten concretist, was parodied once with a triplet that applies equally well here: "I came, I saw, I ruined").
Topographically, a better abbreviation couldn't've been chosen: the B loses its round bits to become an E then gets the top round bit back with the bottom line reaching up to it to become the terminal R. What's done with all this semisymmetry is no less than magical at times, reaching a new high in its variations as applied to the pair of mannequin legs stuffed into a pair of pantyhose & flung off the Somerset Street bridge into a tree behind the City Centre building. Intentional or not, the visual rhyme with Maori warpaint is stunning as applied to a pair of legs "amputated" & signed by a Berserkr warrior.
Geographically, i can't help but be astonished by the extreme prolificity of Berzerker's tagging praxis. It's no longer a surprise to find evidence of it everywhere during my own urban explorations, most recently/dramatically after having rappelled down a 2-storey canal wall, transversed a cliff through a tunnel & followed a stream through a little hole in another wall. On the way back, there it was in white grease pencil on a small rusted plate bolted to a slab of wood on a post; not one of the more elaborate tags but certainly one of the more exotic placements (see www.flickr.com/photos/48593922@N04/8038725109/).
Entertainingly enough, Berzerker's works on canvas (& other substrates) are devoid of any signature beyond the obvious style, a further embodiment of the "composition by field" notion i'm thankful for. It's always struck me as a form of garish arrogance to see an otherwise hermetic work defaced with glops of paint spelling out just who did the thing: was that name laying there in the grass in ol' what's'isname's landscape & so had to be painted in?
This is a highly sophisticated intuition at work here that i find quite significantly more fascinating in its improvisational nature than the larger, plotted, painted "tags" – not to denigrate that part of Berzerker's ongoing selfhistorification project, which is, to me, the bridge between the signature & the art.
