The Cremation of Care — Nick Angelo’s Models
What does it mean for a painter to think? — Hubert Damish
The hedge is perfectly manicured, the expensive-looking wood planters a shade somewhere between bourgeois respectability and denuded avant-garde. The finishes, materials, and layout suggest refinement, a mashup of Ozempaic Hollywood Regency and clear-cut mid-century Modern — this is the lobby of a luxury building. The penthouse, slash-cut through all of that intervening “immaterial” matter (the floors separating the lobby from the penthouse significant only in their elevatory capacity), sits directly atop the lobby, floor-to-ceiling windows framing a fiery sunset cresting the megapolis. The adjoining room– an aberration in the heartland of this real –is a scene of near-total destruction, twisted furniture smashed into its center as if spontaneously sucked into one of the pocket black holes that scientists have recently warned permeate our universe.
Another building, more structurally complex, appears grafted together from different tv or movie sets: the workout room of a high-end Malibu treatment center, walls lined with self-help slogans; the dingy low-ceilinged meeting room of some post-Rapture religious cult; the trash-strewn den of a sufferer of one or more “diseases of despair”; the wood-paneled boardroom of a Major Foundation; an unfinished stockroom with industrial shelving packed floor-to-ceiling with Narcan, fresh needles, antiseptic wipes, a plastic barrel marked with the biohazard warning sigil.
Nick Angelo is best-known as a painter who occasionally makes models. Perhaps though, he is a model-maker who also paints — the early paintings are folkish, diagrammatic circulatory systems: modest home-to-anonymous-pharmaceutical- company-to-burnt-out-room-to-drug-treatment-center-to-modest home — in an endless spiral. In Painting as Model, Yves Alain Bois suggests a mode of approaching art rooted in “the formulation of a question raised by the work of art within a historically determined framework, and the search for a theoretical model to which one might compare the work’s operations and with which one might engage them.”
In Angelo’s works, the primary theoretical model is that of “care”– as in healthcare, care-giving, harm reduction, and the familial-social-emotional act of caring for one another sometimes referred to as mutual aid. Tightly juxtaposed with this in Angelo’s work is its opposite: a model antithetical to care. This model of anti-care looks coolly past or through what theorist Caroline Alphin characterizes as “necrotic spaces”; those zones abandoned by contemporary political and productive regimes to the sick, the poor, the dying. Drug users and addicts have historically been the target population within these spaces. They embody a perfect interweave of virtual and actual necrosis, material and “moral” poverty, “antisocial” actions and criminalized behavior. The addict is more easily scapegoated than those who suffer more conventionally blameless challenges: neuroatypicality, poverty, and disease. The aggressive anticare model thrives on outrage and blame, positioning its subjects “beyond the pale”, as externalities cast out from the polis. The “continuum of care” — the spectrum of harm reduction characterizing one pole of Angelo’s models encounters its opposite: maybe call it “the cremation of care”. Like the unyielding caste system that relegates some like the Doms, untouchables who specialize in the cremation of the dead to live, work, and die in necrotic spaces, the necroscapes of the neoliberal world are securitized, policed, populated by untouchables.
Angelo’s models describe the material, physical spaces where contemporary malaises of the soul: addiction, depression, anxiety, suicide — “diseases of despair” — fester, are mitigated or controlled, and are (occasionally) successfully treated. But more importantly, the models proximally splice the causes of this despair: the radical inequality embodied by (and within) the penthouses and luxury high-rises to the organizations committed to cleaning up the fallout: the well-funded think tanks, foundations, and family offices and ultimately to the necroscapes: the spaces of illness, drug-use, and despair outside capitalist space and time.
In Angelo’s models, the Marxist geographers’ Spatial Fix — the investment of capital directly in land or a sector of real estate: be it penthouse, needle exchange, dingy apartment, or workout room — is pried from its conventional arrangement and set down, à la Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz, in uncomfortable proximity to opposing sectors. By collapsing the distance between social spaces and unceremoniously prying them open to view, Angelo reveals a dirty secret: it is all one system — the externalities of the luxury suite materialize in the addict’s den, the tastefully appointed non-profit is enmeshed with the woes it seeks to address — contradictions once set in motion are inextricably linked.
In A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick’s recovering addicts work the fields that produce Substance D, the addictive drug that landed them there in the first place. In sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein’s World System Analysis, the interlocks that simultaneously produce highrises and “diseases of despair” are foundational while economists, city planners, architects, and neoliberal politicians work to deny their very existence. Caroline Alphin, following Mike Davis, suggests that the “spatial tendencies” of the contemporary city actively produce the “securitized sectors”, “necroscapes”, and “quasi-lives” that Angelo deftly mashes together:
For Davis, (Blade Runner) “captures ethno-centric anxieties about polyglottism run amok, but it misses the real problems Los Angeles faces because it fails to capture the “spatial tendencies” of this modern city. The real spatial tendencies of Los Angeles are to securitize sectors, build upwards, and surveil, all of which serve the purpose of making some populations live.”
According to Davis, there are more technologically sophisticated high-rise buildings, more securitized, walled off neighborhoods, and more surveilled areas for the purpose of protecting some populations and making others vulnerable.
…the spaces and temporalities of neoliberalism are necrotic. People are generally more insecure as they intensify their acceptance of risk and responsibility for maximizing their human capital and avoiding burn out, but clearly, some populations have less resources, less money, less/no capital, and thus struggle or fail to compete within the marketized spaces of the present. They then must endure a quasi-life since competition is equated with living.¹
Angelo models the spaces in which quasi-lives occur and the securitized spaces of those that benefit. Angelo’s models, however, are never purely illustrative and, even in their careful detail, never simply “image” a set of problems. Yves Alain Bois, following Hubert Damish, suggests that there is much in Mondrian that is “destructive”, an active force set in motion against mere mimesis, mere abstraction. Per Damish:
One cannot give way to reverie in front of a Mondrian painting, nor even to pure contemplation. But it is here that there comes into play…some more secret activity of consciousness, an activity by definition without assignable end, contrary to the imaging activity which exhausts itself in the constitution of its object. Each time perception thinks it can go beyond what is given it to see toward what it would constitute as meaning, it is immediately led back to the first experience…²
Amidst all the questioning, there is an element of glee in Angelo’s models. We sense that he takes as much pleasure in destroying spatial conventions as he does in constructing his simulations. As much (more?) care is given to the necroscapes, the wasteoid spaces — as to the luxury spas. This leads the viewer to another uncomfortable realization: the intact spaces appear hopelessly banal next to the smashed and frayed remnants of the social.
¹ Caroline Alphin, Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction (New York, Routledge, 2021)
² Yves-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1993)
