BRIAN W. ALDISS
Very few science fiction stories deal with the arts; fewer still deal with them well. Brian Aldiss is an enthusiastic and knowledgeable collector of watercolor paintings, and an amateur in this medium, as well as that of the written word. He utilizes both talents in this brief chronicle of another artist, one born just this year.
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DAYLING, Orton Gausset (1972-1999).
In a brief transmission, scant justice can be done to this great and still controversial artist. The accompanying holograms will convey Dayling’s outstanding qualities better than words.
Illusion and dissolution mark the stamp of his mind. During the last period of his life, Dayling believed himself to be alone in the world, and to have been appointed custodian of the city of Singapore, which he spoke of as one of the world’s deserted cities on which the tide was fast encroaching.
His mother was the noted biophysicist, Mary May Dayling. His father was killed in a traffic accident on the day of his birth. Perhaps it was this ill chance, coupled with a peculiar cast of mind, that caused him to become obsessed with the last words of dying men. He came to them, as he came to art and love, precociously early; last words form the titles of all his creations. Once he had access to his mother’s art-computer terminal at the age of five, creation seems to have been a continuous process with him, at least until the lost years of his middle period.
His first great work,
THE SUN, MY DEAR, THE SUN IS GOD,
dates from 1979. Its contrapuntal sets of interwoven structures culminating in an attenuated parallelism is a gesture towards representation which seldom recurs - Dayling’s is the art of a world beyond mundane perception. Although the work is not well integrated, its daring and light remain attractive and, in its overall spiral movement, it stands as a fitting statement on the painter Turner, whose last words contribute the title and whose life inspired the young Dayling.
MORE LIGHT, MORE LIGHT
Goethe’s last words, and related schematically to the item above. More ambitious, less intense, already showing a fine awareness for the new language Dayling was creating. It points its way gropingly towards
GIVE DAYROLLES A CHAIR,
indisputably an early masterpiece, with its mobile nonrepeating series of peripheral lights and the first use of that central darkness - speaking of radiance as well as gloom - which later becomes a feature of Dayling’s work. No reference here to the external world, unless it be to the basic formal structures of physical phenomena themselves. A certain delicacy about the entire composition reminds us that the words were spoken by the dying Lord Chesterfield.
I HAVE BEEN A MOST UNCONSCIONABLE TIME A-DYING
This work is also known as Open the Curtains that I May Once More See Daylight, apparently through some confusion over what the last words of King Charles II actually were. The former title is certainly to be preferred, since this work marks the end of the first stage of Dayling’s career; like the three works preceding, it has as its theme light, and the rioting radials suggest a variety of diffusions of light. From now on, the works become more vigorous and coarser, as Dayling masters his life and his medium, beginning with the almost Rabelaisian account of
I COULD DO WITH ONE OF BELLAMY’S MEAT PIES
said to be the last words of one of England’s great prime ministers, William Pitt the Younger. Dayling’s amazing tumescent forms enter for the first time, as yet not dominant, but certainly in the ascendant. This is a large work, almost the size of the Houses of Parliament, with which it has sometimes jocularly been compared, and for durability Dayling and the computer used daylite, a plastic of their own devising with a semi-fluid core. With daylite, the famous “molten look” was developed, so that in some of the later works in this series, such as the
I WISH THE WHOLE HUMAN RACE HAD ONE NECK AND I HAD MY HANDS AROUND IT,
based on the words of the mass-murderer Carl Panzram, the
IF THIS IS LIFE, ROLL ON GERM WARFARE,
of the Scottish Patriot McGuffie, and the
OF COURSE THE CONFOUNDED GOAT WAS AN EXAGGERATION
of the painter Holman Hunt, one cannot tell whether the forms emerge from obscurity and formlessness or are being pressed back into obscurity and formlessness. Perhaps it is because of this sense of what one critic, Andre Prederast, has called “cellular oppression” that Dayling has been spoken of as a latter-day Rodin; but Rodin dominated his sculpture; the tentative statement of as to which end of the bed is which… would be beyond him. Dayling’s morbid preoccupation with death and his sense of humour combined, are complementary, and force him to work always on the verge of disintegration, at the point at which being becomes non-being. Although his approach could scarcely be called scientific, the extent to which he was conversant with current scientific theory is generally apparent, not least in As to Which End of the Bed is Which… where the strange tumescent forms of Bellamy’s Meat Pies have transformed themselves into clouds of virus, life and non-life, fitting symbols of this terminal art.
No artist’s art stands apart from his life. At this period, Dayling’s love-group broke dramatically apart. The three males and two females who comprised the group had lived in equipoise for some eight years. Dayling suddenly found himself alone.
Now follow the somewhat mysterious years of wandering, when little is known of Dayling’s life beyond the facts that he subjected himself to the hallucinatory drug DXB and underwent five years in suspended animation in a clinic in Canton. For the rest, he appeared not to have gone near a computer terminal. His only work from these lost years [The once accepted Madame, Please Remove Your Lipstick, I can Hardly Hear You is now known to be a forgery.] is
I’VE HAD EIGHTEEN STRAIGHT WHISKIES - I THINK THAT’S THE HECORD
registered from a monastery in the Sanjak in Jugoslavia. Based on the last words of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, this small block shows no development and generally marks a return to the more formal tone of Give Dayrolles a Chair.
Only in 1995 did Dayling emerge again; he had but four years to live. He was in his twenty-third year and had had both legs and one arm amputated, the better, he said, to concentrate on his art. He settled in Bombay, under the firm impression that it was Singapore. Despite such delusions, his mind was creatively clear enough, and he set to again wholeheartedly, living in a deserted government office, the complete solitary, though in an over-populated city, seen only when he made an occasional midnight march on cybolegs to stare out over the sea, which he believed to be moving in over the land.
His method of work was now more brutal than before. He worked on the daylite himself, leaving the computer to copy the results, to change and eradicate according to open programming. Thus, he was working not with light but with the material itself - a reversion in technique, perhaps, but one which yielded its own unique results. There may always be an area of discussion centering on these last desperate works. Was this reversion a sign of Dayling’s failure to adjust to himself and his times? Or is the reversion merely to be regarded as a substitution, remembering that Dayling is the great transition figure, the last major artist spanning the days of the biological revolution, the last major artist to work in inorganic material?
However we answer such questions, there is no disputing the maimed vigour of Dayling’s output in his final years: One World at a Time; On the Whole, I’d Rather Be in Philadelphia; Make My Skin Into Drumheads for the Bohemian Cause; and As for Our Fatal Continuity… These are small works, small, dense, and ruinous. All of them speak of fatal discontinuities. All of them have formed the basis since for countless experiments into the new media of semi-sentience.
It may be, as Torner Mallard has claimed, that these final works of Dayling’s mark the demise of a too-long sustained system of aesthetics going back as far as Classical Greece, and the beginning of a new and more biologically based structure; certainly we can see that, in the Dadaist titles, as well as in the works themselves, Dayling was undergoing a pre-post-modernist purgation of outworn attitudes, and carrying art forward from the aesthetic arena of balance and proportion to the knife-edge between existence and non-existence.
In his reckless sweeping away of all the inessential props of life, Dayling - by which of course we mean Dayling-and-art-computer - takes the bone-bare universe of Samuel Beckett a stage further; humour and death contemplate each other across a tumbled void. Only the grin of the Cheshire Cat is left, fading above Valhalla.
From Sculpting Your Own Semi-Sentients:
A Primer for Boys and Girls. By Gutrud
Slayne Laboratories.