Introducing La Ruocco: Art Superhero, Girl Genius
Written: Oct 28 '03 (Updated Oct 29 '03)
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Pros: Witty and playful text, beautiful and disquieting images, high-quality production, hilarious episodes and pictures
Cons: For the prudish or easily offended: graphic imagery and blasphemous text.
The Bottom Line: La Ruocco has created a masterful paean to her rear end that reaches down to the gutter and soars to heights of imagination, clarity, originality and joyful humor. Utterly spellbinding.
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| trust12345's Full Review: Xero Books |
To enter the world of author/artist La Ruocco is to enter the carnivalesque: there is ritual, grotesquerie, a humor of the digestive system (one end to the other), a reversal of ordinary values and mores, bizarre costuming, extravagant sexual exhibitionism and glorification, and a corporeal philosophy that both celebrates and ridicules all things transcendent, taboo and spiritual— whether they be death, God, nation, faith and identity. With a labor or love four years in the making, her second publication and magnum opus, Xerø defies easy categorization or description; recently released, it marks a major event in the avant-garde literature and art world.
With a background in particle physics, painting, writing and performance art, 30 year old Ruocco brings her seemingly incompatible passions to bear upon her brilliant new book, synthesizing scientific disciplines and art forms with the sophistication and madcap humor of a giddy genius. For a book largely about her ass, she explores the topic with tireless (and oddly, never tiring) fascination, imagination, variety, and a heartening blend of seriousness, wit, play and silliness.
An experiment in some 204 pages, Xerø is properly considered an “artist’s book,” that is, a book (usually in limited edition) that explores and expands on the properties of book-making, and that often embodies innovation in printing, typography, form and presentation. Lavishly illustrated with photographs, multimedia artworks by the author, notebook doodles, diagrams, constantly shifting and playful type, and handwritten sections, the book is one of those rare literary/graphic marvels in which each page is a work of art.
With little in the way of traditional narrative, Xerø operates by way of poetic linking of associated (and sometimes jarringly unexpected) images, text and ideas. The encyclopedic range of references is like that found in James Joyce’s late works, a Tom Robbins novel, a routine by Eddie Izzard or the Théatre de Complicité’s play, Mnemonic, in which all the disparate strands and elements of the proceedings are eventually woven into a larger whole that unifies them, or at least holds them in magical synergy.
The first main chapter, entitled “Whitch doctor?” manages to touch on gematria, phonemes, intellectual property rights, teachings of the Koran and Talmud, pornography, death, psychoanalysis, gene mapping, the science of vision and taste, Zen, and quantum physics, among other things. Interspersed every two or so pages are photographs and drawings that further widen the lens to include fake menus (fish with feet), pseudo-scientific diagrams (a map of senses that includes figures such as Infrared, mild, luminous and skanky), vowel charts with letters superimposed on the author’s mouth forming those sounds, and hilarious send-ups of Calvin Klein ads. Beyond these allusions, there are also frequent and sometimes oblique references to Ruocco’s first publication, Document Zippo (1998), whose superhero character and the author’s alter-ego, Under Woman, makes a reappearance here. The scope is dizzying, alarming, often extremely funny on numerous levels, but there is also method to the madness.
As mentioned, the dominant and recurring subject (or object) is that of the author’s ass— a joyously Rabelaisian theme. Each chapter, each page provides a different take, as though this one object were being seen through a variety of filters. One such filter is religion (Western and Eastern), another language/etymology, while others touch on advertisement, food, science, and tantric/yogic practices.
The “Whitch doctor?” episode takes on psychoanalysis and medicine, with the overall rubric, “She goes to the doctor to fix the crack in her Ass.” Here (as elsewhere), the text reads like journal entries, though in such a work of art, the impulse to suppose everything is autobiographical is misguided. There is rampant fantasy, deliberate blasphemy held in check by equally reverent passages; if anything, the “I” of the various tales and episodes is a compelling, mischievous, and brilliant alter-ego (better yet, “id”) of Ruocco. Going to the doctor to fix the crack in her ass is, among other things, a metaphor for the protagonist (doppelganger Ruocco) going to a psychiatrist to be made “whole” again. The psychiatrist, one Dr. Korn, wages a rather hopeless and doomed attempt to treat his patient. Things get off to a bad start with a typical doctor/patient exchange being:
--“i May Be experiencing ‘Counter transference.’”
--“is that your way of telling me you hAlve A crush on me?”
The patient disarms the doctor (who in some passages resembles her literary editor) at every twist and turn. She says things like, “it’s not the voices in MY head that scare me, it’s the voices in yours" and “i think in font; & i speak in words. but my ass is the only thing that means anything.”
The failed exchange with her psychiatrist is mirrored by a set of photographs, at once erotic and absurd, of the author, stark nude on a table being rectally examined by a surgeon (actually Dean Heady, the main photographer for Xerø). These sidelong portraits (i.e. nothing too explicit) show the patient poised on all fours while the doctor examines her from below, as well as prostrate with the surgeon carefully doing something between her buttocks with a butter knife. The implication, in both the photo set and “Whitch doctor” episode, is that there is nothing really to be “fixed” here, or at any rate, that the medical establishment is filled with quacks (and cracks) who smugly diagnose and pigeon-hole free-spirits like the superhero, Ruocco.
Rare is the book in which all formal, narrative and graphic elements are not only original and innovative unto themselves, but are of a piece with one another. Xerø is such a work. The more I take time with it (the more I have fun with it— for above all, this is an opportunity for the reader to play, to make associations and imaginative leaps), the more I discover just how systematic and brilliant the overall conception is. The rampant punning and play with font, meaning, punctuation, spacing, spelling, and capitalization appear more than arbitrary or haphazard. If grammatical perfection equals a mythical state of total sanity, Laruocco’s breakdown of language, deconstruction of meaning and multi-layering of text and font mirror the patient/author’s supposed insanity. But like a good Foucauldian, semiotician or deconstructionist, Ruocco situates herself and her text outside the ordinary paradigms of institutional rigor.
Needless to say, the text can be difficult to decipher at times. Even when it is written in ordinary English and with conventional spelling and grammar, the often-disjointed juxtapositions of ideas and voices requires a little getting used to. Some readers may not have the patience, though I believe a little diligence here pays off, not only because there are a number of culminating, bravura passages that tie the loose ends together, but because there are many outstanding phrases— some ridiculous, some quite moving, most of them very humorous and sophisticated— liberally strewn throughout the mix. A few samples are in order:
Next to a section with the heading “On CAPITALism & Monopoly,” Ruocco creates a triple-entendre on the word ‘capitalize’: “im just as Atheist as the next chick (Not), but if there is a God im gonna capitalize.”
Another exchange with Dr. Korn:
--- i need someone more than-is gonna dot my i’s & cross my eyes & move my comma’s & reschedule periods. . . . iAM my OWN editor.
--- isn’t that dangerous Like being: Your own Lawyer. ?
Ruocco is a phenomenally gifted painter and artist, and one of the great pleasures of Xerø is seeing a number of her paintings, drawings and sculptures lavishly and beautifully reproduced. While her first illustrated novel had a publisher (Soft Skull Press), she has benefited greatly from self-producing this work, exerting her control over all aspects of the book’s layout and editing. Roughly half of the pages are in full color, allowing the vibrant and appealing photographs and artistic reproductions to shine on their high quality, glossy pages.
Stylistically, Laruocco’s post-modern, self-referential and ludic text bears kinships with works of the OuLiPo (Workshop of Potential Literature) authors such as Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino, Marcel Bénabou and Harry Mathews, as well as with the stream of consciousness style of James Joyce in Finnegans Wake and of William Burroughs in Naked Lunch. Her paintings and drawings resemble (wittingly or not) diverse traditions (or anti-traditions) including the rough-hewn Art Brut style of artists like Jean Dubuffet or the cartoonist Saul Steinberg, as well as the more polished and provocative self-portraiture of Frida Kahlo. The playfulness and overt sexuality of her imagery also bring to mind the sculptures and paintings of Niki de Saint-Phalle and Marcel Duchamp.
There is also the gonzo performance artist in her blood: in one hilarious caper, she and artist Michael Portnoy created enormous posters of themselves posing in mock Calvin Klein ads and affixed them overnight to buses carrying the authentic ads. The episode is described in the book (“Project: Switcharoo Ad-Replacement Strategy”). In La Ruocco, then, we have a singularity among singularities, a by-product of glorious fusion and atom-smashing, a massively talented artist, author, scientist, philosopher and provocateur brimming with derrierudition. Introducing Laura Ann (La) Ruocco, art superhero, girl genius… and her brand new book, Xerø.
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Epinions has not provided a link for the purchasing of this book. It is available at Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0974345407/qid=1067403598/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-3621450-6062438?v=glance&s=books
To get a glimpse of the artist’s work, in this instance, clearly an homage to Frida, see the cover of her previous book, Document Zippo:
http://www.epinions.com/book_mu-3503258
Recommended:
Yes
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