Visual Propaganda #9: John O'Reilly

The violent eroticism of a Worcester, MA local's collages and photomontages

I’ve always been fascinated by the collage. The medium would become a fascination for me as I discovered underground noise and industrial music in my teens. Steven Stapleton’s macabrely surreal album covers for his Nurse With Wound releases, the volatile clashings of kitsch and pornographic photomontages that adorn Masaya Nakahara’s album covers for his Violent Onsen Geisha and Hair Stylistics projects, and Marco Corbelli’s xerox experiments reeking of death and decay emblazoned on his Atrax Morgue releases all imprinted upon my brain and have shaped my aesthetic sensibility forever thereafter.

Later, while studying art history, I learned about the history of the medium from Dada onwards: Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Hoch, Max Ernst, Picasso, Duchamp and others. I devour these images. I emulate them in my own experiments with the medium. So know that I don’t make this statement lightly: Worcester, MA-based artist John O’Reilly is the greatest collagist in history.

Born in Jersey and educated at Syracuse, O’Reilly has spent the vast majority of his life in the infamously rough Massachusetts city of Worcester (coincidentally, the locale of my first Wu Tang Clan concert, another formative influence on my world view). What appears to allow O’Reilly’s photomontages to rise to the level of an undeniable evocative and potent method of art production is in their balancing of the precise formal considerations of the medium’s dadaist forebears — all O’Reilly’s collages are assembled without digital aid, often splicing his own photographs and self-portraits into images otherwise composed of pornography, fashion and news media in ways that disassemble meanings and alter narratives — with the charged, violent and pornographic imagery that I’ve come to associate with and love about the Xerox imagery of noise and industrial music.

Influenced by literary giants like Genet and Henry James and art historical titans like Caravaggio and Bonnard, O’Reilly’s collages are rife with literary and artistic references that evaporate doubts typically placed upon the medium in terms of the leniency with which it’s constructed as opposed to the demanding physical rigors required of painters. These images are so unsettling, gloriously ambiguous yet narratively rife, and undeniably beautiful that the relative ease with which they’re made ceases to cross your mind. This is what collage must do to justify itself as a high art discipline. It needs to make you forget that it’s just an artist cutting and gluing photographs and other media together and suspend all reservations about it as a medium. The images need to dissolve your ego entirely and invade your brain, like a hallucinogen bleeding its way into your cerebral cortex. You simply can’t deny it.

Henry James is O’Reilly’s most consistent fascination. “He wrote a lot about the psyche and anxiety of art and I think I capture a little bit of all of those things in my work. To me he is kind of representative of going into the unconscious and probing people.” Angst is a permanent feature of O’Reilly’s images. They simultaneously illustrate the fascinations that animate him while casting doubt upon those very fascinations and making self-inquiries into his own unconscious mind. Though he is a homosexual artist, there is nothing particularly “out and proud” about his work, which maybe explains why he was overlooked as an artist until he was in his sixties and was included in the 1995 Whitney Biennial.

Jeff McMahon, writing (predictably) for Hyperallergic, took O’Reilly to task for his wall text at a recent career survey that described his own homosexuality as “a struggle.” “This is often the critical context imposed on work by LGBTQ artists whose sexuality is in any way overt, he says. “Framing sexuality as a struggle implies a problem.” Well, Jeff: why don’t you go back in time and be a faggot in fucking Worcester-Massachusetts and report back to us about how easy it was to be a gay man. But more than that, ALL sexuality IS a struggle. Sonic Youth said it well: CONFUSION IS SEX.

The name of Sonic Youth’s debut LP could also be used to describe O’Reilly’s entire practice. Everything he produces reverberates with confusion, with the anxiety of being a human compelled to fuck other humans despite certain

death always looming in the horizon. His images excavate the desire embedded within doubt. Nothing is simple. It’s all endless shades of grey. For these reasons and for many more, we are proud to claim John O’Reilly as one of our own.

John: welcome to the Counter-Agency of the Avant-Garde.