Nonfunctional Stylistic Dynamism

Riber Hansson, August 27, 2013:
"Today Charlie Parker's sax is singing to me with sore vocal cords".

They keep themselves on the alert in the role of turning the world inside out each new day. They handle the worst within humans, which the latter fight to keep hidden, while they stay firm on cartoons already drawn that others will try to make undone, such as drawing Virgin Mary giving information on contraception.

Cartoonists are continually walking the plank on the mutineer's ship that is human civilization. It is imperative to stay perceptive and to this end they go all out when off duty.

Cartoonists off duty throw themselves into total chaos.

Riber Hansson, September 21, 2013.
"Today my GPS broke down, so I taped this drawing
to the windshield instead".

To highlight the route off logic, Riber Hansson made a water color GPS to set forth and get totally lost. The watercolor was a page in his drawn diary, in which he creates a challenge for himself with each new day.

This way he places himself in a position to be inquisitive, setting up a wonder, in fact an obstacle, to which the brain and pen has to find an answer and as in the case of the GPS the answer incorporates the obstacle, making for layers that dance in and out of one another.

In like manner, hearing Charlie Parker is a layered structure in its own right of his giving his all; the musician's letting his blood in making a structure in time come alive before us. It is now a structure that we hear, when we see it. We recognize, what made Charlie Parker unique.

Parker crossing the boundary is at one with the cartoonist refusing to stereotyping, keeping his definitions open by way of:

Nonfunctional stylistic dynamism

Riber Hansson, August 17, 2013.
"Today I woke up exhausted. I had been sleepwalking and
brought the bed with me onto the roof".

There is of course a fully formed theoretical structure behind the letting loose. According to this - I am paraphrasing - an artwork need not have cadence or closure; it can be open, unresolved, ending in discord or confusion:

"The distinguishing attribution of the artist's role is to create occasions for the disorientation, and of the perceiver's role to experience it".

Riber Hansson, August 23, 2013.
"Today I am meeting the morning red-eyed
and with wispy hair"

Thus according to Morse Peckham's Man's Rage for Chaos from 1967. It has since been the bible in the multi-facetted artist Brian Eno's work. Brian Eno will cite from him, knowing every word by heart.

Chaos is another word for freedom, and freedom is made palpable, according to Peckham by way of obstacles. We just noted the layers upon layers in Riber's diary watercolors. Peckham would call them discontinuities, and mastery at that for their making a picture plane problematic.

The discontinuities are the reward for imposing on themselves an extraordinary number of rules, many in conflict, but all of which had to be obeyed so they might be violated:

Riber Hansson, August 15, 2013.
"Today the sun got competition from the moon, which got
entangled in a juniper bush".

"The drive to order is also a drive to get stuck in the mud. There must, it seems to me, be some human activity which serves to break up orientations, to weaken and frustrate the tyrannous drive to order".

The thing is, it works. The brain jumps on the game every time. No obstacle tells you where to go, even though it speaks to you in imperatives, but it is of the open sort. Were you to meet the very same obstacles two days in a row, it would never take you to the same place.

Riber Hansson wilflully plays with perception itself, problematizes his definition of what comes from him and what is to be seen, letting the sun and his eye change their respective courses. Thus even natural phenomena, which can be verified. If the sun can be misconstrued, then what about everything beneath it?

Riber Hansson, August 5, 2013.
Today the desire to work is fading away in the sunshine.

There is an unmistakable humming at play in Riber Hansson's diary entries. His life's work in art concentrates on the worst of man, yet the two sides complement each other, or the disorientation of the one secures the disorientation to be embedded in the other, which Peckham denotes the necessity of art. Art refuses the comforts of validation. It reinforces our capacity to endure disorientation, and does so from a protected situation in which artist and beholder alike can rehearse themselves for the drama of life:

"Of all man's burdens, art is one of the most terrible and certainly the most necessary. Without it he would not, he could not be human".

Riber Hansson, September 10, 2013.
"Today I think Monseiur Gustave Courbet moved into the house next door"

The cartoons shown are courtesy of Riber Hansson and must not be reproduced without his permission.