PowerPoint Art, Graphs and Relations: The Anxiety Graphs
The Gnostics believed the world was a mistake and that "salvation" was to make sense of the world by rationalizing it. When things fall apart we either embrace the dissipation and orgy of chaos or search for a schema that will organize the mess and horror. By adopting the same rhetoric that simplifies culture through amplification, these graphs present a picture of unification and provide a home for free-floating anxiety.They accomplish this state by joining thought and feeling along sets of reputedly indisputable axes. By placing the elusive elements of our psyche in mathematical relation to dependent conditions or impulses, the culture of anxiety suddenly becomes manageable and predictable because when Cartesian co-ordinates are applied to the ineffable forces of human beings, a mathematical function transforms into a comfort function. When you locate your position on the graph, you also locate where you are in time and by following the trajectory of the graph, you can predict your future. Conversely, if you work backward along the curve of a graph, you have access to a past that is now closed.
The graphs are both the rationalization and the visualization of states that resist measurement but despite their soothing manifestation, resolution takes place just outside the points of the graph.