Peter Toccalino is Horse Jam.
“One day I hollowed out entirely an end of a loaf of bread, and what do you think I put inside it? I put a bronze Buddha, whose metallic surface I completely covered with dead fleas … After putting the Buddha inside the bread I closed the opening with a little piece of wood, and I cemented the whole, including the bread, sealing it hermetically in such a way as to form a homogeneous whole which looked like a lttle urn, on which I wrote ‘Horse Jam.’ What does that mean, eh?”
- Dali, The Secret Life of Salvadore Dali
We’ve been galloping headlong into the great Western frontier of the collective unconscious since at least May 2008 (i.e. the year we overcame the ‘pestilent conditions’ of existence, and embraced life). It was around that time that Horse Jam revealed itself as a philosophical position from which I might base my day-to-day operations. It was immediately obvious that it was a hybridized existentialism for the post-absurd 21st century, the uptake of which could be considered categorically imperative. Naturally, it has since become my modus operandi. My deflector of inner-city pressure; my perspective of stillness from which to view the writhing of my increasingly urbanized ego. The intrinsic stillness of Horse Jam is in fact derived from the sublime manner in which it fuses content with fundamental life processes. This is eloquently symbolized by Dali’s flea-coated Buddha stuffed into a Portuguese loaf and coated in cement. Horse Jam could very well represent that liminal node of fathomless creativity that lies between the paranoic-critical analytic and the paranoic-critical mystical methods. And now that my holiday has officially begun, I now have a moment to reflect on the blessed strangeness of the Horse Jam manifestation, and how it has dramatically improved the quality of my life. It has enabled actual strutting about in spaces charged with uncertainty – embracing start-up projects freshly born of the ether and quivering with raw potentiality. It means revolving elliptically in a constellation of unknown variables – making this one’s home and aesthetic.
