First, Bio-centric Van Gogh

I wrote this as a timed essay, but I have recently changed my the opinion. I also fixed my grammar… a lot.

The Starry Night, 1889 painting by Vincent Van Gogh, is considered the popular magnum-opus/masterpiece of a mentally ill western artistic genius. The aura, the reputation of Van Gogh himself, shadows the formal innovation he made within Western painting, as his technique was educated and informed by cultural exchange between East and West and wide-spread, accessible print media. While the late 1800s within Europe was marked by the Industrial Revolution, cars, and electricity, Van Gogh, in Starry Night, focuses on “the natural” instead. The painting is biocentric in its subject matter, but its stylistic execution. This dissonance, between human-technological-exchange, hierarchy, and the natural “God-made” earth lets this painting resonate with audiences is globally, and timelessly.

First, in terms of subject, Van Gogh’s buildings mush together as if they were bushes or grass, with only the Church steeple barely being able to announce itself over the mountain range behind it. Our main subject, instead of man-made buildings, is a large tree in the foreground the draws the steeple. Swirling astrological phenomena outshine the artificial lights below, they use the same cadmium yellow, yet man’s lights get lost in the brush. Second, in terms of execution, the thick borders and mark making reference the visual language of wood-block printing, and act as directional, visual guides. The colors are flat, limited in range, and graphically intentional. Color choices, line weight, and lack of graduated shading all point to Van Gogh’s personal collections of Japanese prints and the aesthetic exchange between the Japanese and Dutch.

This Japanese-informed graphic style reinforces the goals of Van Gogh’s subject and composition. Marks Van Gogh made, for everything man-made, lead into each other and themselves. The black lines bushes around them, also are self-contained, and lead into themselves. Only the marks of the Church’s steeple, which mimic the tree in their gesture toward the sky, are allowed to lead the eye in an upward direction. Our big black tree, also composed with parallel marks, shooting upwards, moves our eyes, like the steeple, up to the sky. Van Gogh is deliberate in this parallelism and scale.

Once our eyes have met the sky, the marks change direction once again, leading us up toward the moon, over the mountain, and off the canvas. This is a succinct, intentional, poem about the European country-side written in a Japanese, wood-block font, not an expression of inner turmoil or random genius. Through very mindful, intelligent, mark making, Van Gogh holds the viewers gaze and guides us toward the sky, and off the canvas. Starry Night reminds us, through its formal decisions, of humankind’s hubris in trying to reach the stars. The clearest, most organized attempt, of the church steeple, to reach the sky, to each divinity, or the unknown, is still dwarfed; not just by Earth’s obviously grand geography, alluded to by rolling mountains, but also the average tree.

I kind of disagree now.

My eyes were blurry, I had oil paint on my face and phone and glasses, and I was upset. I went to sit next to the man-made still water pond next to the university art building. I spent a long time looking at the reflections of the streetlights in the gentle ripples of that man-made water. It just looked like Starry Night. I have never seen stars like starry night, but I’ve now seen the reflection of average human lights mog the stars. In an industrializing society, would he have been busy looking up at the stars or in awe of the new dazzling lights? Van Gogh had new paint, new pigments, new Japanese references. Van Gogh must have loved man. Van Gogh must have loved society. Did he really find peace in the countryside, or did he miss the newly mechanical murmurers of men? Is Starry Night a man longing to be in nature, or a man missing the reflection of other men?

Culture Wars and Identity

Same Mdluli, Tania Bruguera, Terry Smith and Fuco Coco all explore the nature of art, identity, symbolic representation, and freedom of expression and their interconnected nature to politics and power. As technology has shaped art and warfare alike, culture and thus arts, propaganda and the soft power it creates, the arts and media have become increasingly advantageous arenas for disseminating ideas. Historically, the narratives that are presented by galleries, museums, and textbooks are often deliberately blind to particular, usually unflattering, moments and certain, usually disempowered, demographics.

As an American on the politicized internet, I have been long plagued with what the public has dubbed “culture war debates.” Questions of historical revisionism in media, diversity and representation, and artistic integrity are tiring and ever present in the current discussions surrounding games and films. Deliberately, I avoid these conversations, out of both fatigue, but also, out of my conviction regarding the very meaningless nature of even having these conversations in the first place. “Issues of identity are just there to divide us.” Coco finally articulated, in a manner I was able to sympathize with, why these conversations must happen, and are happening so persistently. If culture disseminates and popularizes ideas, then the question of symbols and representations is literally a question of political power, and thus must be fought for and protected.

In my lifetime, I believe I have seen Japanese, South Korean, and Chinese thought enter the everyday life of young Americans, specifically through fine art, like I Can’t Help Myself, and culture found through media like animation and music. Chinese artistic thought, as discussed by Terry Smith regarding the Beijing International Conference on Art Theory and Criticism, set out to the international market, often, with this very intention: acquiring soft power. Domestically, the United States seems to much more mirror the experience described by Mdluli. The legacy of chattel slavery and segregation haunt the cultural institutions here as apartheid haunts South African institutions. Our battles of representation, soft power and culture, are forced to be domestically minded, as we struggle to re-define ourselves and our collective narrative. In a post-nuclear global society, where warfare comes with publicized, violent, civilian bloodshed, nations must fight through ideas, and citizens must fight for their voices to be heard within these nations.

Why have there been no great women artists?

Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? and Leo Steinberg’s Other Criteria, written in 1972, both offer insight into the nature of American art and thought following the Civil Rights Movement and at the turn of the post-modern to contemporary period. Both writers find themselves re-evaluating well established historical narratives and take notice of the ways in which culture and identity seep into artistic output and reception. Both seem critical of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique.

Reading Nochlin was almost cathartic, as a female artist who has spent a not-insignificant amount of time wondering about the title of her essay. In particular, the notion that male artists may sacrifice a family life for their painting, but will not be seen as having sacrificed their “manhood,” speaks to the all-consuming role of mother. The single-minded focus required for “genius” can only be fostered from some place of privilege. Yet, as Nochlin’s questions, with their excess time and resources, why is it that members aristocracy are not likely to fill the “great artist” station either? What the preconditions are, or how institutions foster these types of artists, still seems dubious. Regardless, historically significant female artists like Yayoi Kusama and Marina Ambrovic are ever emerging.

While not assigned reading for this class, Steinberg acknowledges a divergence in the way Americans were choosing to describe and understand their artwork from European notions, in a manner that seems relevant to Nochlin. “Action” painting, “work” over “art,” reflected the post-World War American preference for labor, a cultural moral good, over something frivolous, “plotted”, or haughty, (or even French.) Nochlin nods to the undervalued position of women’s labor. Artistic pursuits, for a woman, become frivolous “hobbies.” The United States, in particular, with its brandishing of “great” art as work, civil rights seems to be particularly threatening. The time taken to achieve “genius,” must be at the expense of unpaid, invisible, “natural” labor.

Identity and the Internet

New Media Art, art after the Digital Revolution, presents broadened, democratic modes to consume and produce art. Ephemeral, interactive, collaborative, replicable art and ideas shared on digital platforms certainly take a shape distinct from the art-object-viewer situation of European academic painting. However, tracing this type of art-making back to early printmaking and photography has made me reconsider how I evaluate mediums that pre-date the printing press. Life has become so swamped with instant, bright images, its easy to forget eras of human history where pigment and access to images had more weight and exclusion. With so many images, the extent to which a single image is valued has declined. An “audience member” may scroll in under a second and there is economic weight to their attention.

Global, instant, communication has altered the individuals understanding of themselves and the world in which they occupy. Instant communication, though, is facilitated through intricate systems monitored and constructed by governments and corporations. Writer Legacy Russell in Glitch Feminism and artist Stephanie Dinkins in Conversations with Bina49 (2014) point at social consequences to bias within these systems.

Russell presents the current ease at which people can shed and try on digital skins. Anonymity provided through online communication allows people to socialize without the assumptions, often disadvantages, made due to the look of their body. This makes the roles forced upon in the individual by their body more apparent in their everyday offline life, and thus more people are not wanting to participate in these social roles. Because these roles allow power structures to function smoothly, this anonymity is dangerous to certain social organizations. Russell shows that the already existing digital systems are encouraging social change.

Dinkins, meanwhile, asks a robot, as if they both were philosophers in conversation, questions about AI, algorithms, and racialized data-mining. From which there is the assertion, “…what we have is not a technology problem, but a race problem.” Dinkins explores the dangers of these systems being built by biased data and people unconcerned with the ethical, social implications of what is output. Dinkins questions what social change new digital systems will cause.

Art, Biology, Ethics

Art regularly finds itself reckoning with the mutating relationships between humankind and their tools, our collective machines. Art might find itself as a tool used to make sense of our seat in the cosmos, used to declare the future, or to appreciate the current landscape and changing light. Art is often political. If artists want to influence present culture, influence the future, what is the most effective way to do so in the contemporary moment? Jagodzinski and Olson describe two distinct types of discursive power.

Life in Art, Art in Life: Bioart Ethics Within the Anthropocene by Jan Jagodzinski looks to bioart as a key philosophy maker in the contemporary moment. With its unsustainable nature, Jagodzinski looks to art as a means to move past the human-centered decision making of the Anthropocene. As technology approaches trans-human fantasy and the energy production needed for such a fantasy must be realized, artists ask us to assess our relationships to the nonhuman. Discomfort created through half-living somewhat-human “art” points at the capitalist commodification of life and our tendency to anthropomorphize both non-human biology and machine. Physical, biological, and human lines are blurred in hopes that humans collectively adopt a more bio-centric worldview. Jagozinski, and the artwork described, was academic in nature but does not maintain obvious name recognition. However, artwork like Kac’s 1998 Humanized Flower push important boundaries, like human integration into other species, outside of the burden of good research outcomes our financial success. In other words, bioart, while not the most accessible “experience” to a large crowd, gives ethical questions a safe home for exploration within art.

Questions posed by AI and biotech, are the questions about the digital and “real” world. Outside of a disembodied experience, the digital, and social media in particular, offers instant mediated communication. Post-Internet by Marisa Olson describes a new era of “conspicuous consumption” that has left art informed with notions of ubiquitous authorship, attention as economic, and with concern for reproduction. Within this landscape, where the study and subtly of bioart doesn’t have time or place, more ritualized words like “frequency,” “repetition,” and “attention” are king instead.

While platforms are constructed for addictive consumption, the frequency, memetic energy, seems to still be an effective mode to share potentially good ideas. What kind of difference does passive consumption of art have on the human psyche when compared to the deliberate, diligently crafted disgust and introspection of bioart? While I would like to assume deeper thought is more effective at generating meaningful internal change and introspection, culturally, it seems frequency, the internet, memes, and so on are more effective messengers.

Can internet art be included in the gallery?

In Writing About Art: Considering the Work’s Historical and Cultural Context, written by Henry Sayre in 1989, Sayer outlines new modes of historical analysis and understanding that emerged with the development of contemporary thought. Sayre argues art should be considered in its historical time and place, from a geographic, technological, material perspective, but also a more socially focused human perspective that is mindful of personal and institutional bias. How can a female nude on the wall of palace, or an out-of-place ritual object from another continent, be analyzed without considering the suppression of female artists or Western colonial legacy?

Terry Smith, in Social Media, Contemporary Art, and World Currents (2011) extends Sayre’s mode of thinking and seeks to outline the social changes of the contemporary moment and speculates how new forms human thought manifest within art. Smith, in World Currents in Transition Beyond Globalization (2014), while talking to Saloni Mathur, critically addresses globalization and somewhat acknowledges trends within the global art market.

Critical analysis of curation, the history of curation, works to understand collective history in a more holistic, accurate way, and even to potentially redress institutional bias. As Smith and Mathur discuss briefly, the term “contemporary art” itself is label that, for decades now, has been lent to cooperate museums and wealthy collectors. Increasingly, I find myself in exhibits with names and biographies of collectors larger than the artists themselves or watching videos that not-so-subtly suggest philanthropists like Leonard Lauder are some sort genius, curating and protecting art they alone seemed to know was “visionary.” In terms of “bias” and “honesty,” disclosure and study of the collectors and curators themselves is important for historicizing. How significant the whims of a the wealthy collector’s hand is to our understanding of art history lets leak how closed of circuit fine art is.
I disagree with some of Smith’s outline of trends at hand (with the advantage of living through a decade of development after Smith was writing on my side.) Of Smith’s three purposed changes in contemporary thought, he suggests retro-sensationalism, the continued legacy of form and the enlightenment, is in dialectical tension with (his second point) a post-colonial “master/slave feedback loop.” Third, he gestures to new media and seems hopeful for it potential to foster a healing “planetary awareness.”

First, Smith still seems to adhere to a very western notion of what art is and its purpose. Here, I will label this mode “institutional fine art.” This art is focused on a western notion of “critical discussion” and building institutionalized, common, historic, cultural understanding. This art exists in conversation with itself and began with the practice of art collecting, with the invention of capital, in Italy, in the 1500s. Naturally, it seems this “market” association would manifest into $236.4 million at Sotheby’s. Second, and separate, there is instant global media. “Internet art” exists in its feudal state, compared to institutional art’s liberal capital. Artists are granted access to audiences, but must adhere to platform-standards of respectability, must perpetuate algorithmic attention farming, and are trapped within these rules by corporations or lose their audiences, their livelihoods.

Smith does an excellent job addressing themes in contemporary thought; “world-picturing,” “self-making as a central concern,” “quasi-historical persuasive narratives.” However,

I think it makes more sense to look at art as two sperate systems, now in dialogue with one another, and both subject to biased superstructures.

An email to my professor

Hello,

I apologize for this long email, but I would like to know if you have any thoughts about my current understanding of some of the concepts from your class. I agree with a discursive theory of art that begins in the 1500s, but I suppose have questions about the implications of this theory.

First, this firmly ties our current Western “art” practice very firmly to secular capitalism.

Next, it suggests that art is purely a conceptual, “meaning-making,” intellectual activity.

So, within this system “prompt-engineer” or a misunderstood Pepsi advertisement featuring a Kardashian, have more value to culture than the algorithm generating the prompt or the director of the commercial.

Society, faith, rules, and so on cannot fully be adopted/embraced through force/violence alone. Culture, then, acts a convincing narrative for our collective participation in society, and encouragement for our adherence to these rules, to these systems.

Discursive art then, art with labor and artist entirely removed from value, acts as cultural incentive to value brain over body. The biggest beneficiaries of a mind, divorced from body, are capital owners.

Do “we,” does “culture,” really benefit more from consuming art than making art?

All of my family, my coworkers, my in real-life friends, and my online friends all made artwork unprompted, for themselves or community, even in spite of time and money, which act as barriers. Very few of this long list of people, consume art from a gallery or know the fine art canon above a high school level. This “discursive” practice does not reach the average person. In fact, sometimes it seems to alienate the average person from their natural inclination to make, for fear of being “low brow” or “not really art.” Discursive art, sometimes, feels actively hostile to joy associated with labor and making.

A response to this might be that we are all engaging in craft, but I disagree with such a broad definition of craft.

If discursive art exists, then “craft” and “formal art” also exist. “Craft,” can apply to many things, and to me refers to ritual, repetition, and overall a more sport-like approach to formal “excellence.” “Formal art,” meanwhile, might differentiate itself as art made for the artist’s sake.

As an artist, soon to be replaced by machine, the discursive theory of art will forever keep me culturally disenfranchised.

Also, I think discursive art is really interesting if you broaden the definition of religion. If religious practice is how humans make sense of reality, create value systems, make decisions, practice life daily, process death and so on. Then a gallery, with its pedestals, curation, and expert guides, serving as a separate, elevated, discursive space, seems to be a religious institution. “Discursive art” itself is a ritual, is worship.

An email to my university

Hello,

My name is Rhea Schott, I am currently an undergraduate student in the studio art program at USF Tampa.

I hand wrote the Declaration of Independence and then attached portions of the text to bulletin boards around the art building.

I did this around 7:30am, by 9:00am the papers had all been removed by a security guard.

I understand universities have the right to control protests, but that USF is still a free speech institution.

Am I allowed to post public information in written word around the campus?

During my time in New Mexico, my mom had a big but modular storage shelf for all of my new younger brothers’ many new things, mostly toys. Some time after my dad had come back from deployment, she walked in on him, on a random afternoon, “organizing” the shelf.

“It was so clearly color coded, Russ!” My dad, completely oblivious to my mom’s more decorative sorting style, thought he was doing her a favor. She demanded he put everything back.

According to the rules of School Aged Services, you were to clean up your spot before going to a new one. Most kids were good about cleaning. Still, block section began to regularly bother me. I never would play over there, I liked Rollercoaster Tycoon and KidzBop better, but the fact the blocks never fit back correctly into their designated location, which was designed with these blocks in mind, began to nag at my fourth-grade self. Why did people leave the blocks in piles? Were they hard to fit back in? Why didn’t they get bigger shelves? The poor blocks are spilling over the edge!

I couldn’t take it anymore, and no one was playing anyway, “I need to sort.” I put the shapes in groups and neat lines. I took my time. Another girl, also bored and bothered by the blocks, started watching me. Easily, she could tell what block went where, and we worked together without needing words.

She got my sorting style.

The ipod shuffle set the precedent for my relationship to music. With no screen, if you wanted a particular song, it was nice to know where it was in the playlist. I usually had the “order” memorized. I spent money on individual songs. I was exposed to the ABBA (the band) / Mama Mia! (the movie) format. I can use any song for a soundtrack, obviously, and any soundtrack could be a movie in my head, obviously. The music is already written, it’s for me to discover, collect, and organize! “Creativity,” was found in how I looked for songs and how I ordered my playlist and how I begged for iTunes gift cards. I simply don’t like listening to an album. It’s too short, too long, tooo… “the same.” Too boring. It takes away my agency!

As an adult, three or four times a year, I spend a few days sorting, and throwing away, and weighing where I might land on the spectrum of hoarding. When working, my studio seems to always divide itself into piles. Every project needs its scraps, its collection, its sorting. Still, this studio “mess” makes me feel degenerate. Recently, though, I’ve come to find my favorite artists, Francis Bacon, John Long, my brother Robert, collect and keep their piles without any concern of “hoarding” or housing a “mess.” Of course, “its just a part of the creative process.” Is hoarding an advantage? Am I missing out?

Between watching musicians lately, and not spending much time with the digital, it feels obvious that traditional visual art requires the most amount of “scavengery.” Anytime I recognize an item from Michael’s or Amazon, even a pre-stretched canvas, it removes me from whatever fantasy the artist was trying to sell me. I think this is why artists, my favorites at least, seem to end up with insane piles of strange stuff from places unfamiliar to me. Their eye, their collection, a bead found within it, can resonate more with the idea of a “personal language” than, for example, just a decorative blue bead from an internet query. We have so much find and sort. I’ve been watching that new anime, with the trash planet and metaphysical gloves, can you tell?

And, sorry, dear, have you even heard of collage?? Collage, without widespread print media, is difficult. Luckily, these days, a lot of us have printers. Streaming music is a somewhat of a sick new thing for humans, so when will sorting music become its own art form? Obviously, we have DJs, we have set lists, mixtapes, but what about a playlist in a fine art sense? How seamlessly ordered and collected should a playlist be, before the “order” itself is the art? If we can steal photos, paintings, why can’t I steal a song? Will the human-made, narrative, personal collections of songs be obvious when compared to Spotify AI Metal Workout Mix type collections? Is a gallery a curator’s collage? Could my playlist be a gallery?

The internet is forever but also I’m so tired of losing years of artwork and inspiration because tumblr or twitter or vine or Instagram or CEO man had bad business practices. Apple already did a random delete of all playlists (in pursuit of new Apple Music subscribers.) If I were to lose, right now, all of the information on my Spotify, I would have to grieve. As a platform, Spotify is peak for discovery and collection and sorting. My little digital sound diary, though, is owned by a man who likes AI death drones, :( , and the British keep becoming more private, and I’m worried I may need to document these playlists somewhere else, for storage, safe keeping. Songs keep going grey. </3
Spotify is the most favorite field that I till.

As a teenager, I tried my best to grandstand by sacrificing Richard Serra. I failed the presentation. So, I had to, for a second, remedial, oral presentation, address Richard Serra. I failed, again. So, I pitched the idea one more time, in art class instead. I finally passed, but only with a C. I am here, a now decade later, still stuck. Still getting C’s over Serra, now in a less-defensible collegiate fashion.

Screaming, this time via a more timeless digital type, I am here whine that Titled Arc was a lame message, and I celebrate its removal. Surely there is a way to “agitate” the status quo, but in a manner that is utilitarian and community oriented, not so unsettling and highfalutin and philosophical.

An undoubtedly ugly rusty wall, Titled Arc was placed in an otherwise sparse plaza in New York City, in front of the Federal Court Building. Serra, in his self-interest (I project), saw urban spaces, with heavy flow and human eyeballs, as more ideal to explore his thesis statements than in “empty” (un-reacting) nature. Certainly, the wall is a “site-specific” concept and can only be discussed with its plaza in mind. The dark wall, diagonal and (evilly) deeply embedded in the earth, is redeemed, somewhat, by being so obviously obstructive while also sitting next to a state-building, while also being state-funded. How could one not wonder, “Who paid for this?” They may even keep bumping into it and realize, “Did I fund that artwork?” Who has the free time and gall to finance such a thing?

Artists in my life, talk about the removal of Titled Arc and the court proceedings with an air disappointment. Meanwhile, angry grumbles fill my head, “why is everyone so keen to defend anti-social public art?” Is it above me? Is there some message, some experience, so universally tasted by a group of others, that the steel is actually worth defending? The, at the time Republican, Judiciary seems to agree with me about nature Titled Arc, but why not academia? Why do I suddenly align with my political enemies? I am tired of anti-sleeping benches and ugly DMVs. I used to walk to school. If someone interrupted that routine, my normal footpath, with a depressing, rusting, purposeless wall, I would call it anti-social and insist it be removed. Is that not the expected, reasonable response Serra was seeking?

Influenced by “verbs” and “weight” and “space,” I find Serra’s position in art history be extremely unrelatable. Offensive, even, I might label “art needs no justification outside of itself.” Serra’s viewers sometimes talk of metaphors, of feelings, of conversations, found in his piles and spaces and I am deaf. I do not seek the experience he offers. I am already very aware of all the uncomforts in my body, and the all uncomforts in my room. Anyone experiencing a late train, or a pot hole, or trying to find parking, does not need Serra. We all know billboards are ugly. Why must Serra insist the public endure more?

A Yale professor, when given a public space in a large city, kept the space unhospitable. Not only do I see a wall where there was not one before, but I see money and time and labor that should have served human needs, flushed for a personal, “academic,” narrative. I live day by day with the expectation that I will never be allowed to have meaningful impact on my physical, daily space in the way Serra gets to, because of his status, in a major city. Serra screams at the public, we get no control, he assaults us with unsolicited metal, and he insists it’s his right to remain there, on site, forever.

Fake fetuses, from a 2018 anti-abortion wall are still burned into my brain. Normally, I would never have looked at those grotesque and doctored images, but they raised the postered fence along a foot-traffic choke point. For days, I could add ten minutes to my walk, or I could deal with violent images.

I recently built my own wall! My wall, cardboard not steel, and much more friendly, when compared to Serra and pro-lifers, unfortunately failed. Had I put it in the center of the Student Union, instead of pushed up against the side wall, far more people may have engaged with my words.

That same week, a classmate built not a wall, but a cardboard Mussolini. He chose to be violent. His art moved in the air like a hung body, had hot pink, and drew a crowd. Not many people even noticed my work, off to the side, acting like a wallflower.

Logically, I should look at my own art, I should look at Serra, and I should conclude that I should be more abrasive. As an artist, who wants to be seen, I should put myself on a proverbial stage. I should be obstructive. Anger and confusion are engaging, and get me my so sought-after attention. Perhaps, though, there’s a difference between being seen and being, what I consider, “valuable.” My TikTok’s only ever went viral if people argued in the comments. Attention is resource now scarce; everybody knows to be abrasive and start shoving and start shocking.

I want to see well-designed bike paths. I want to see metro maps mindful of vision impairment. I want green next to concrete.

Religion, politics, the economy, and so on, need the media and space to justify to the masses the righteousness and concreteness of their power. The visual is deeply connected to both space and information, and the visual can be manipulated.

Anti-human design, like Titled Arc, keeps us individuals, despite our yearning to be in a village. I like to imagine something like a playground, instead of Serra’s wall, in front of a court building. Would people bring their kids? Would lawyers swing on their lunch break? Is everything too atomized and too adult anyway?

i dunno comment emoji if u read this far <3 friend, do u like ugly wall ?

My computer came to me in 2017, and it has since become a frankenstein of parts via friends long having-had passed-through. It was obvious I wouldn't be able to ignore its slowing condition, but I was banking on this moment of no-return happening about six months from now, sometime when I was without assignments due. Windows 11 was far meaner to me than I expected. Five years is obsolete! Until today, I really hadn't considered what life might be without the storage room that is this particularly "old" device.

I am a digital artist! I am a digital hoarder.

Everything is saved everywhere and exists multiple times over and is always far too important for a final, permanent, delete. Now that I, once again, have to actually sit still and do work at screens, sifting had to begin. After weeks of file management, my explorer does not yet have a wonderfully clean floor, but now, I can at least walk through room.

What is so important about a bad sketch .psd or a history paper I wrote in high school that I keep these files around? Are these just trophies? Is this document a proof of time spent? Is it proof of labor?

Second, media is a void.

I fear I suffer with some sort of disease shared by the likes of Gabbie Hanna or twomad or whatever other ill internet personality clearly needs their phone ripped away, as to appropriately rest at night becomes against their addicted, ill, will.

Some social part of me is dependent on the internet, and it expresses itself in embarrassing impulses. I need some sort of interaction, some sort of reaction, that makes the digital feel, once again, living. It is not entertaining enough to consume, I find myself twisting and bending, frankly groveling, with hope to be consumed. I need to feel real. I need proof. Do they feel? Can I make them yell?

In my fever of self-documentation, self-reflection, self-obsession, self-whatever, nothing but my senses matter. Babbling, whining, compulsively I spam into an absurd network, engineered affirm my impulses. The spam echoes back, “No I’m just like you. Don’t feel bad. We should keep going.” Suckling nonsense, strangers spasm at each other for stimulation. My language decays, the web becomes too obvious, and I grow increasingly agitated and post-happy until I earn my, sought after, human feedback.

The internet has changed in a way that makes me feel nauseous. I keep suckling. I like to be a puppet. Sometimes, still, I do romanticize a still timeline with a reblog function. Content was a slower drip. I think about Chris-chan an embarrassing amount of time. "The most documented person in human history." I'd like to think so. Christina Chandler, "human like you and I," I assert self-righteously, “is a tragic victim.” It should be studied as not to be repeated. Instant communication allows the malicious a persistent, overbearing access to the naive, trusting, and neglected.

A good lot of people scratch at the idea of some sort of "influencing." Usually, people give up when they come to terms how competitive, how inhuman, the distortion is that you must assume in an over-saturated market of attention. Some, lonely and insecure, are not discouraged but rather affirmed by this system. Thus, their behavior escalates more quickly, and becomes more primed for consumption and social ruin. I love playing keno.

"The internet's forever," except is it?

I'm sure we, particularly social monkeys, will find ourselves spiritually ever increasingly tangled with one another and increasingly tethered to the means of that instant communication. Physically, statues of stone lose less to time than statues carved wood. Will my internet presence or my bones be more interesting to your great grandchildren?

Anonymous account after anonymous account, having played every role imaginable, it doesn't seem to matter. Accounts run by adult men and eleven year olds are frozen in public comment sections, but whose employment is actually effected?

Drama too, lately, seems to reflect a true loss of data. If you delete it before there are human eyes and brains to catch it, it does seem to be "lost." Until the right people hunt, until there are the right sifters, there will be nothing ugly to taxidermy.

My current use of social media seems to be fixated on "documentation." I realize, now, why would anything on social media be considered "documented?" Why would I feed the sacred photograph or print or painting into a cooperate, aestheticized, dissociated format? Do I care about accessibility? Should I contribute to all this instant information? Am I stupid? (Yes.) The fact my full government name is next to the instagram post means it's, to history, attached to and authored by me, right?

I have been focused on the notion of "process." Artists are often not forthcoming, or even dishonest, about the pace of their production or methods of their practice. As someone who learned online, I have always wanted my old artwork to be public and accurately dated. Unfortunately, "honest" documentation, no longer is worth the pursuit. I can’t remedy dishonesty.

It's finally time to be intentional, to be in active curation. I wish upon a star to be less forthcoming. It seems anything non-generative is applauded. What proof of competency is asked of the artist but their final product? I am freeing myself from constant progress shots, but I do so biting my nails. I still want everyone to be very aware of my, superior, human, messy, process.

Sometimes what I collect is proof my experience; is proof of me having observed, having acted, on earth. Deleting seems to be my ultimate of curation. Unlike Chris-chan, there is no mob monitoring me. Without a voyeur, am I in control? As the only monitor, the only curator, do I have agency in the angles of my personhood’s legacy?

My painting process, anyway, is explicitly long-term. I don't need day-to-day records. It makes more sense to record everything "art" week by week, rather than by completed "product," to keep documentation private, and to begin organizing my photos based on subject and aesthetic, not date. Rereading the previous sentence makes me wince, surely I can’t actually remove the art from time and place. Idk, end writing.

I, an uncomplicated painter, am addicted to mindless painting. Instead, this week, I have had the spiritual obligation to write the Declaration of Independence, now three times, by hand. All I have are words, they do not mean anything to anyone, and I have nowhere to put them. I, a simple painter, a hater of lazy collage, find myself actually uncool and uncollected in the wake of fascism when compared to Ms. Hannah Höch. Cut with the Kitchen Knife, a photo-collage created in Germany 1919 by Höch, has changed my technical approach to political art and my willingness to approach the political at all.     

My art-making, for the last five years, has been a slow, painful breakup with digital art, and a marked selfish return to art-for-my-own-sake. Artwork created by artificial intelligence is profound in a communal sense, like a movie or a building or a game or a spaceship. But, alas, I am the only person; I can’t steal that many images. I, alone, don’t have the time or money to train like the computer can. Disillusioned with the idea of proving any sort of technical skill on a digital platform, I now treat oil painting like sport. I still can still usually tell when someone paints from a photograph or real life, and that distinction, still being “clear” brings me comfort. My oil painting process is very long and personal and sticky, while my digital art was fast and reactive and forgotten.

How could I “care” so deeply, be so “outraged,” by the state of the union, and not make art about it? Can activism be art? Is this art for my sake or everyone else’s? Who sits with an image for more than a minute? Is painting obsolete? The oil painter is as effective as the opera singer. Simply put: a painting is not always effective. Just because I enjoy the tactile painting process does not mean it is art that needs to be made. Oil painting, itself, is made to be seen in the gallery setting; the very intent of the invention of the medium is for the Art Basel gallery crowd I report to be “uninterested” in. So, with the state of the world and the Dadaists, I prompted me to refocus on the visual as communication and medium as a tool. Naturally, I have re-arrived at digital art and photography.

Höch’s collage, all collage, involves attention to photography, creative composition, meticulous cutting and pasting. Cut with the Kitchen Knife destroys and reconstructs the historical narrative presented by the press. Cutting the images with a kitchen knife is laborious in some ways, but far timelier than drawing a painting. So, Höch can communicate her complex understanding of gender and the social hierarchies quickly and without much cost. Timeliness and cost should be considered when approaching the political.

Never, have I thought to myself, “Maybe I should make a collage.” If I am willing to play with most trash, why am I not at all drawn to collage as an art form? I suspect it's simply a matter that Höch already had photographs around, almost pre-selected for her by the newspaper. Collecting and printing the images would be a task in itself for me.             

After seeing Cut with the Kitchen Knife, I reopened digital art software and have slowly stopped screaming nonsense into the online void. Instead, now taking cues from Hannah Höch, I take screenshots, crop, and rearrange these images. I try to be more intentional with my message, but less laborious in its delivery. Thanks to technology, I can do this in under an hour and it is forever public and reproducible. Traditional oil painting is therapeutic, yes, but for me, and not for society.

I can’t ever get away from words in my artwork, or overt symbols. The question “what does it mean?” is a sign that my personal work is failing. The inclusion of type by Höch in the composition I really enjoy. A trend that came out of the pandemic, “core-core” evokes similar feelings to some of in this still artwork. These images, all together, relating to and covering each other, are what years of overwhelming, uncomfortable news, all the time feels like. Hoch is burdened by all this large amount information in such little time, as such a simple collage might explore, sort, destroy, simplify, and regurgitate a complicated political climate.

Tonally, I feel I should also learn from Höch. Her work, to me, feels dipped irony and humor, but in a subtle enough way. Unlike other male Dadaist work, Höch photomontage feels restrained and deliberate. Seemingly, unable to just yell directly about how she feels, she opens her mindset to us through reconstruction.                  

The highest form of art in my whole state, the “only good art” according to my professors, is Art Basel, curated by Swiss bankers. I, a simple painter, found the event foreign and disassociated from the public, and I felt like a naive, poor eyesore disrupting a business casual crowd of tourists. Ogled and out of place, I became angry with no clear grievance other than that I could not afford food around the convention, while the elderly European couple behind me debated “investing” Kehinde Whiley. Why paint, only for it to be used as an unseen tax break? Is the audience I am supposed to please to be successful? I have been self-satisfied, comfortable, with my natural light and my selfish studio approach to personal painting. New York, London, Paris and LA are somehow supposedly the only destinations for a “real” painter. Even with information all at once, instant communication, and obvious wealth inequality, for some reason you still must strive to enter the gallery clique. “A successful art career comes from sixty percent networking.” Emotionally, maybe, I might achieve more in another setting with a different more deliberate way of communicating ideas.

My paintings, the ones I really like, are over-sized self-indulgent wastes of time and space. I love that oil paint is translucent, and I love that traditional art is tactile, and I love that paint takes time to dry. So gross and so brute is the hairy paint brush, is the paint thinner, when placed in opposition to the stylus and screen, when compared to a delicate clean lens. I like that I can paint really large. I like that there are no pixels. I like that color is a chore. Canvas and paper have memory; thus, I should be more respectful when I choose to make a mark.

Painting is my excuse. Painting is a spoil. I get to ignore with profound focus. What comes out of this process is condemned to live and die as some strange reverberation of myself, so I am forced to love and nurture the art with a maternal sense. To present such art to a crowd, is to show my diary, my dirty underwear, to the room.

I saw the type “meat computer” (stream meat computer on Spotify or Soundcloud) in 2021 and have been stuck on that particular phrase since. We are monkeys dancing with tools. These days our tools can hear and see and imagine*. I find it charming how similar mechanisms in our eyes and our ears look next to speakers and camera lenses. 

The light would flicker above aisle 34, and every time I would stock the shelves I couldn’t help but watch for a pattern, and start to wonder how the light might try to communicate with me.  It was either “on” or “off.” Overtime and at all time, it can only be “on” or “off”. How does my brain tell my hands to move? “Scan the ones and zeros!”

I hate that painting is always all at once. With time-based media, movies and music and animation and speaking, there is linear time and natural narrative. In time, there is always first and last. Upon a single frame, the viewer's eyes stop and start and move and focus on the image only through suggestion. It's hard to hold the attention of a gaze. Proper inspection, of something still and flat, is hard to sell.

When it came to “Meat Computer”, I could never structure this dream animation. 

Presented with this large canvas, how might I communicate, without getting to do it over time?

Once I began painting, it became obvious the feelings I wished to catch had morphed anyway. The point, I would say, in 2021, of being alive, is just to “experience living.” To me, this means watching, and feeling, and listening. Content to watch and react to life, why not worship the notion sound and vision?

Is a tree still beautiful if I’m the only one who feels that way? On whose rubric do we measure beauty? Unable to control myself, unable to follow through with my intent, the painting that has come out says “I’m too nervous to do talk to my classmates,” “I’m worried I have cancer,” and gasps “what if I couldn’t hear?”

The idea, the feeling, for “Meat Computer” seems to have been some sort of anxiety about machines. What was produced seems to end somewhere more human, more squishy.

*Despite our protest, creativity is reconstruction. I, too, am limited to the images I have trained on.