Dean Monogenis:
The Value of Uncertainty

Elizabeth M. Grady

In quantum physics, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle posits that the more closely any one physical property of a particle or phenomenon is observed, the less anything precise about its other properties can be known. The related so-called, "observer effect," notes that the act of observation often changes the object or phenomenon being observed. Although the Uncertainty Principle and observer effect are most commonly used to describe phenomena that occur in the realm of physics research, together they provide a useful metaphor for explaining Dean Monogenis' artistic strategy to maintain an open-ended approach to imagery and meaning. Refusing to depict a precise, but ultimately limited and limiting, view of the world, he instead insists upon a sharply delineated and carefully organized vision of indeterminacy. 

In his conceptually rich paintings, Dean Monogenis welcomes uncertainty, and the very clarity with which he paints unusually juxtaposed objects -- like enormous sheets of tempered glass and the decaying stone ruins of ancient civilizations -- acts like a visual analog of the observer phenomenon. As soon as an element, is clearly identified, its usual roles, functions, and associations are shaken loose: its nature has been changed through his observation of it. For example, in Another Residential Fantasy (2007), instead of its usual association with public spaces like shopping malls, subways, and airports, an escalator proceeds from a patchy ground of livid reds to a futuristic structure of indeterminate use. Without falling into the trap of providing a vision of his own utopia, or passing judgment on the aspirations of others, his striking paintings occupy the rift between ideology and reality; and in so doing provide his viewers a space in which to think critically about the precariousness and limitations of their worldviews.

Rife with images of geodesic domes (Cathedral, 2009; Another Residential Fantasy), cantilevered pods (Leviathan, 2007), and concrete-and-glass structures (Commune Edition, 2009; Surrender, 2007), Monogenis' paintings evoke modernist architecture and its ideology of progress. Modernism posits the notion that humanity is always moving forward and leaving the past behind. It is progressive, optimistic, and fearlessly forward-looking. At first blush the oft-present construction sites that we encounter in the paintings suggest an unending state of social improvement. New structures are financed, designed, and built, as time rumbles on into the future. However, in Monogenis' world we should know better than to take all of this at face value. No matter how often the media might inform us of remarkable new scientific discoveries, it is difficult to escape the simultaneous messages about the failed economy and deadlocked political system. The once-unstoppable machine of progress has stalled. On closer examination, the paintings exhibit a similar kind of rupture: ruins of the past vie for our attention with not-yet completed buildings, as in Living Here (2009) and Surrender. The transient nature of all human endeavor is suggested, as the cutting-edge constructions of bygone eras crumble from disuse, even as their replacements are constructed. 

The paintings exist in a moment of perfect stasis. His construction sites are not approaching completion. They are devoid or workers or occupants, as in Living Here, where construction and the evolution of building techniques cannot be seen as an analog to progress, rather their abandonment implies the failure of the modernist paradigm. Monogenis soberly records the fact of his own experience of living in a post-real-estate-boom Brooklyn, where evidence of the burst economic bubble and the failure of the optimistic promise of venture capitalism is written everywhere in warped wood, exposed concrete, and rusting steel. Far from a dry depiction of an ordinary if disused site, however, the polluted yellow haze of the sci-fi sky, together with the fantastical element of the hovering island, warn us against a literal interpretation. Instead of a simple depiction of a specific place, we are provided with the static image of an idea: the conceptual but nonetheless real gap between ideology and reality. 

Clearly, there is a tremendous difference between the ideals of the society in which we live, and the experience of living in it. Monogenis seeks in his works to resolve the question how this disjuncture can be depicted objectively. How can the precariousness and uncertainty of life be acknowledged and rendered visible without critiquing or championing the current state of affairs? How can an artist simply come to terms with the realities of life, and bring some kind of order and clarity to an existence that offers little basis for either? Monogenis engages in a number of strategies, including the use of paradox, simultaneity, and the exploration of potentialities, to do just that: to render the gap between the ideal and the real visible, and to come to terms with uncertainty. 

Paradox may be found everywhere in the work, in terms of not only imagery but technique. In works like Surrender  and Leviathan, there are visual challenges to coherence and logic. In Surrender, a simple line divides an otherwise continuous landscape into day and night. Although the color of the mountains remains relatively consistent between the left (daytime) part and the right (nighttime) part, the simple change in the color of the sky completely alters the viewer's perception of what is seen. As soon as we think we understand the mountain landscape, the time of day makes a 180-degree change. The paint application is as contradictory as the subject matter. Areas of thick, coarse-textured paint butt up against silky-smooth acrylic, used to especially strong effect in Living Here and The Bell is a Cup Until it is Struck (2009). In an echo of the shift from abstraction to representational depiction, also in The Bell..., smooth, hard-edge areas of formalist geometric composition encounter a verdant landscape delicately picked out in elegant curved brushstrokes, where the hand of the artist is evident. This formal strategy recalls the contrast in imagery between barren desert and fecund wilderness that is also found often, as in Another Residential Fantasy. By depicting seemingly contradictory states and using contrasting processes, Monogenis embraces complexity. 

The significance of paradox is enriched by the way that it intersects with the notion of simultaneity. Instead of viewing elements as merely equal and opposite, Monogenis insists that they also coexist. Past and present are frequently juxtaposed, and it is rarely clear which, if either, is preferable. Improbably, trees from different climate zones, like palms and deciduous species, are found opposite one another on the banks of narrow waterways. The artificial and the real confront one another in tightly composed and spatially consistent environments. For example, abstract stripes seem at once to overlay the landscape and underlie architectural elements in Hope (2007), rendering the gap between concept and reality suddenly habitable, empowering the viewer to imagine occupying that liminal space. In Destination Journey we see a rather literal depiction of simultaneity, that works as a visual description of the Uncertainty Principle, where we can only know about one facet or aspect of the RV, such as its stripes or its silhouette, at a time. It appears to be rocketing forward in a kind of Star Trek-like warp drive that leaves bits temporarily behind even as its bulk shoots forward. Caught just at the moment of takeoff, it is the embodiment of continual movement that is at the heart of the lifestyle of its presumed nomadic inhabitants. 

Monogenis' engagement with the idea of limitless potentialities may also be readily found in the work, in the repetition and reiteration of forms and ideas in different visual contexts. Tents, ruins, and specific rock formations all recur, sometimes repeatedly. Their meaning, significance, and overall subject changes from work to work, depending on the manner in which they are deployed. Monogenis works from a personal image encyclopedia, and mines this archive thoroughly and regularly, using it as the basis for a visual language in which idea construction and syntax determine meaning. Just as a simple word may change drastically in meaning, depending on how it is used, the images have infinite possibilities for signification, some of which lie outside the knowledge or control of the artist himself. His mindscape intersects with recognizable aspects of a landscape, and his imagination thereby becomes the agent by which ideas and images are freed of their ideological and cultural moorings and allowed to interact freely, with infinite possibility. By focusing on possibility and potentiality, and using images almost interchangeably, he opens the narrative so wide, that no specific story line is discernable. 

Creating the room for potentialities is to create a liminal space where a continual state of transition is the norm, and to try to pinpoint an idea is to ensure its rapid transience and obsolescence. Monogenis' insistent focus on impermanence encourages the view that while nothing may absolutely be relied upon, still all things have the potential for change. The physical world and the evidence of our societies - with architecture as the most obvious and enduring marker of their makeup - is symbolized by the abandoned buildings Monogenis depicts, caught as they are in a continual state of becoming, but also a continual state of entropy. Unfinished buildings stand in for the unrealized plans, hopes, and dreams of individuals and cultures, and serve to point out that circumstances often trump intentions. By depicting them as part of his world, the artist shows his awareness of his role as a participant in a self-destructive society, a cog in the wheel of the wheezing and sputtering machine of modernity.

So where does this leave the work as a whole, and how does it intersect with the world as we know it? Monogenis' work, as fragmented as its elements may at times seem, actually makes up a strikingly coherent whole, and the strategies by which this totality is achieved mirror many experiences available in everyday life. In the current age of globalization, we are accustomed to occupying way stations distributed along a worldwide network. Cell phones, the internet, satellite and cable television, along with good old-fashioned radio enable a high level of connectivity among people who may never lay eyes on one another or occupy the same room. We are, significantly, often in closer communication to one another across this network than within any given locale. Even when we manage to move physically along the pathways of this network, we arrive at inevitably at its hubs. These include airports, train stations, subway platforms, strip malls, and other anonymous sites referred to first and famously by Mark Augé as, "non-places." Such places tend to look strikingly similar, to have the same features, and offer the same services. In his use of interchangeable and repeated imagery, Monogenis creates his own non-places, inviting us to impose upon them our notions for their use. The nomadic global traveler experiences such spots as interchangeable, as s/he rushes here or there to conduct business or pleasure, and there exists a similar embrace of the nomadic life in Monogenis' paintings. In addition, elements like escalators, concrete block, rebar skeletons, and whole construction sites occur throughout the works, echoing the visual language of such globally dispersed places. In fact, Monogenis often allows such features as wires and structural elements to trail off the edges of his painted panels, implicitly linking each work to the next like a series of nodes that admit to no central control. Instead, he relies on a principle of organization based on a centerless web, rather than a hierarchy, and thus brings order to his imagery while circumventing the ideological trap of passing judgment and creating rankings. For each moment when the viewer stops to look at a given work, that work becomes for a moment the center of the web, changed in its relation to the rest of the multifaceted work by the viewer's observation, and rendering the other nodes in the network temporarily indeterminate, in accordance with the Uncertainty Principle. The non-places illustrated by Monogenis cannot be put in the service of an ideology because they do not have a fixed identity: they are all function and no ideal, all utility and no vision. Monogenis uses non-places as a way of getting around the use of modernist and other structures in the service of ideological notions of linear progression, forward motion, and progress. Uncertainty must be maintained in order to find a way to defeat ideological thinking: lived experience is concrete, but we do not learn anything new by observing what we already know. Ideology is a false absolute, which the uncertainty principle tells us must mask a clear vision. Therefore to maintain uncertainty, and to preserve the liminal space between ideological paradigms and lived reality, is the logical path to opening up freedom for thought and new ideas as we struggle to find solutions to problems and to come to terms with the precariousness of existence.

1. Augé, Marc. Non-places : introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. London; New York: Verso, 1995