Pryor x Perec: Serendipitous Dialogues
by Silvia Perea
“What happens every day and comes back every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual—how can we account for it, how can we question it, how can we describe it?”—Georges Perec, The Infra-Ordinary
In contrast to prevailing consumer preferences for the exotic, rare, and extravagant—fueled for decades by mainstream media—Pecos Pryor (1988) finds a rich mine for artistic inquiry in overlooked aspects of daily life. For the Carpinteria-based artist, as for French novelist Georges Perec (1936–1982), questioning the ordinary is a means to reveal the creative potential hidden in the marginalized, if not an implicit critique of the media’s selective portrayal of reality. Although not explicitly driven by a political agenda, this stance centers the individual and their circumstances, unfolding through Pryor’s artistic practice, much like in Perec’s literary output, as an anthropological exploration.
Similar to the French writer’s keen interrogation of the mundane (as exemplified in Life, A User’s Manual), Pryor approaches his immediate environment with humble curiosity: How much fruit did I eat this year? How much coffee did I brew? How much can I draw with a new 2B pencil? What does one mile of straight lines look like? And one million tally marks? Focused on elements familiar yet usually displaced from the scope of attention, these inquiries challenge convention from within. In this context, they reflect the artist’s intent to provide a visual scale for magnitudes that exist primarily as mental abstractions: “I’m interested in reflecting that which is known, but we don’t quite picture,” Pryor explains.
Answering such questions through art demands a methodical approach: collecting, arranging, and rendering every sticker from a year’s fruit consumption, or calculating the length of a line that, drawn repeatedly, will equal a mile’s length. This meticulous process serves as the foundation for each artwork’s start, development, and finish, minimizing the risk of creative anguish. Still, such process is not so rigid as to exclude play and experimentation. For example, when shaping a sculpture, Pryor might use every carving tool at his disposal, while in printmaking, he could explore techniques like mezzotint, lithography, or woodblock printing, among others.
The questions driving the artist’s practice not only establish his working protocols but also sustain his motivation. “If I hadn’t come up with the one million target for the tally marks project, I probably wouldn’t have gotten that far,” he confesses. Drawing on this motivation, his inquiries find expression in two- and three-dimensional artworks that, despite their minimalist appearance, convey intense dedication. Ultimately, these form a diary of life’s periphery, hinting at a parallel universe of drifting reality shards.
The taxonomic, principled, and challenging nature of Pryor’s artistic practice aligns with that of the OuLiPo collective, a group of French-speaking writers and mathematicians—including Perec—who, since the 1960s, have explored the potential of self-imposed constraints to push literary boundaries forward. Even if intrinsic to the creative process, constraints are rarely revealed in its outcome. Perec and the OuLiPians, however, highlighted them explicitly in their writings’ style, structure, and even publication formats, defying traditional narrative methods. Pryor’s art embraces a similar approach, mirroring the group’s avoidance of redundancy and predictability. Unsurprisingly, their respective works exhibit remarkable resourcefulness in engaging with ambitious statements. Pryor, for instance, tackled his one million tally marks project employing an array of formats and techniques, including index cards, colored etchings, ceramics, and even a tattoo. Perec, on his end, penned a 300-page lipogram, La Disparition (1969), without using the letter ‘e,’ and followed it with Les Revenentes (1972), employing exclusively that vowel. The immense effort invested in works of this scale can sometimes overshadow the appreciation for other embedded semantic and technical qualities. Yet, it also exemplifies a resistance to market-driven demands, making the artist and writer’s output more appealing to niche audiences than to mainstream circles.
For Pryor, embarking on challenging art projects aligns with his tendency to push himself to the limit while surfing or biking, activities he practices regularly. Whether in the studio or in nature, challenging his endurance capacity provides him with relief from past adversities, including separation and loss, processes he is still navigating. “Art has definitely a healing power for me. I often get trapped and lost in what I’m doing, and that allows me to process things more deeply. It’s like a prayer, a meditation of sorts,” he acknowledges. The series of drawings Single Beds document the physical and emotional itinerancy that he went through following his marriage’s dissolution. While symbolizing the loss of his partner in a poignant way, they also attest to Pryor’s willingness to cope with and build on such absence. Similarly, Solo Cones, a series inspired by an abandoned traffic cone that the artist used to drive by on his daily commute to work, responds to his craving for solace after tragically losing two close relatives. Narrowing the view of reality by peering through the cone “felt good.” Out of this realization came dozens of traffic cones, varying in scale, sizes, and materials, from clay, plaster, and concrete to tinfoil, paper, and cardboard.
Notwithstanding the somber context in which Pryor has developed much of his practice, humor and nonsense remain essential triggers for his creativity. Fruit stickers, coffee grounds, or traffic cones acquire a satirical dimension when removed from their inconspicuous context and rendered into art. Both humor and nonsense, according to Pryor, provide an escape from societal conventions: “To do something ridiculous is an expression for human freedom, of not being tied to everything that is expected from us, especially in terms of professional and financial escalation,” he asserts. While not overly concerned with the impact of his work—"I want my art to have meaning for me, primarily"—Pryor sees humor and nonsense as valuable tools for engaging the public with his creations. Indeed, their absurd appearance allows viewers to imbue them with their own meaning and emotions. In this regard, Pryor’s output extends the legacies of art movements that have embraced the ridiculous—from Dadaism and Surrealism to Absurdism and, also, OuLiPo—to reflect and question the follies of life.
As the Fourth Industrial Revolution deepens the threat over a full comprehension of reality, propelling an overconsumption of the lurid and spectacular, Pryor and Perec’s methodical dedication to elevating the infra-ordinary becomes increasingly significant. With a balance of gravitas and humor, their work offers an inspiring call to embrace life with greater awareness, demonstrating that the seemingly insignificant holds the power not only to illuminate humanity’s essence but also to spark change toward a more authentic and fulfilling existence.
