Studio Offbeats 20.0: Andrew M. Mezvinsky

Eröffnung: 05. September 2025, 19h
Finissage + Artist Talk: 13. September 2025, 19h

“Why shouldn’t a fungus write philosophy?” This question, though never explicitly posed by Alfred Jarry, seems to pulse at the heart of his work. Jarry’s pataphysics — his “science of imaginary solutions” — behaves much like a fungus: unruly, shapeshifting, resistant to order, and oddly alive. Mushrooms, those sudden, subterranean, and defiant organisms, don’t merely symbolize pataphysics; they enact its very logic. (…)

Like spores on the wind, Jarry’s ideas have taken root in unexpected places: the anarchic theater of Fernando Arrabal, the dreamlike absurdities of Ted Hiebert’s “Breatharian Pataphysics,” and Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on inactivity. These thinkers, following Jarry’s lead, reject the tidy logics of capitalism and Cartesian rationalism. Instead, they embrace disorder — or better yet, they compost it.

Andrew M. Mezvinsky’s work embodies this fungal logic. His drawings and installations don’t illustrate pataphysics; they emerge from it, as if sprouting from spores left by Faustroll himself. Mezvinsky’s figures hover between symbol and story, half-formed and dreamlike. His goal is to “reveal unknown worlds” — not by creating new realities, but by unearthing the strange and fertile beneath the familiar, like mushrooms appearing overnight in a backyard.

His art doesn’t demand explanation; it invites a mycelial way of thinking — noticing, tracing, entangling. It echoes Jarry’s deeper impulse: not to clarify, but to infect; not to explain, but to suggest that beneath the world’s rational surface lies something pulsing, fertile, and a little absurd.

Fungi, like pataphysics, resist the tidy narratives of Western thought. They are collective, networked, and unpredictable — without a central root or final form. So too, pataphysics survives not in manifestos or museums, but on the margins: in small journals, artist studios, and speculative footnotes. From the archives of the College of ’Pataphysics to digital nodes like pataphysics.us and PATA NYC, the movement remains gleefully ungovernable. (…)

Like mushrooms after rain, its richest forms erupt from decay: failing systems, blurred categories, and logic left too long to fester. Jarry understood this. Mezvinsky channels it. And perhaps now, as the cracks in reason widen, it’s time we all begin thinking more like fungi — entangled, generative, and just a bit ridiculous.

(Text: Andrew M. Mezvinsky)
https://www.andrewmezvinsky.com/

Kuratiert von Patrick Schabus.