NATHANIEL WALLACE

                                         VERTICAL SLUMBER, THE HYPNOGLYPH,  
                                        AND THE OUTS AND INS OF POSTMODERNISM

OVER THE PAST FEW DECADES, sleep-phenomena of every sort have given rise to an abundance of visual and other art. It is even possible to detect a contemporary quasi-genre, the "hypnoglyph," that exploits the enigmatic and evocative dimensions of human dormancy. This aesthetic type is extremely varied in its manifestations. Although postmodernism is often
said to have concluded in the late 1980s, the new sleep-centered work incorporates such "traditional" postmodern goals as problematizing prior genres and seeking to depict what is unpresentable. The popularity and persistence of the hypnoglyph imply that postmodernism in some ways continues as an aesthetic and cultural movement. 

The most significant trait of this "genre" is the presence of narrative resistance, usually in the form of a frustrated diaristic
impulse. This feature is tied to the decay of the modernist perception of time as a unified, predictable, and fulfilling phenomenon. The diary, a recording of circadian transactions, is the counter-text that the hypnoglyph aspires to write, the main prior genre that it scrambles. In contemporary contexts, which are often given to displays of intense paradox, narrative resistance may also be linked to an exhibition of and implied protest against too much narrative.

The hypnoglyph as representational kind is here examined via what is perhaps its most distinctive subpattern, the depiction of vertical slumber. A prototype is found in a bronze statue by German photographer-sculptor Fritz Behn. Dating from 1908 or '09, it portrays an African boy, apparently asleep, standing on his right leg. The work alters a resting pose of the Masai tribesmen of present-day Kenya. An early, full-blown example is located in Elizabeth Bishop's eccentric poem, "Sleeping Standing Up." Two paintings by contemporary New York artist Vincent Desiderio are discussed in detail as characteristic visual texts.