Portraiture used to be about capturing the essence of a person, but that kind of blew up once everyone figured out that each of us is a messy blob of social conditioning and genetics with shiftable "selves". Now we pay homage to the blobs we perceive.
Life as a social construct is so precarious. And sometimes beautiful. When I get to know someone I read them like literature, as a refractive display of stories and motives and fears. I've always been confused by how people behave and what they want. Tone deaf even, and catastrophically so. Sorry.
A portrait makes the construct palpable, and the human in humanity becomes more apparent somehow. Still can't place it. Like an electron, it's everywhere or nowhere all at once depending on when and how you look. But it gives me time to think and consider, and if the artist is really good a portrait will offer something I haven't seen before. Seeing something I haven't seen before means I think of things I haven't thought of before, that I get a perspective I didn't have before. This is one reason I love "art" in general.
Today's unfocused reverie has been brought to you by sleepiness, Arizona Green Tea, and a portrait of someone I don't know by Henrietta Harris (who I also don't know). She's a painter from Middle Earth. She's great.
Thanks to Bryce Martin's bright idea, the king of insanely trippy fantasy/sci-fi (Jean Giraud a.k.a. Moebius a.k.a. Gir) has (finally?) met the kings of insanely trippy children's cartoons (Finn and Jake) by way of the right of artistic reinterpretation. Bryce asked a handful of artists, among them Brandon Graham (ISLAND, Multiple Warheads), to create illustrations that implanted Adventure Time characters in the worlds of French illustrator and comic artist Moebius. The resulting drawings work predictably well, given Adventure Time's infinite adaptability. Check out the art below, and #moebiustime for more.
I have nothing deep to say about Josh Ln, other than his last name seems to be missing letters, and he probably does drugs. I just think his art is trippy and gross and colorful, and I was smoking herb and my girlfriend found him, so just enjoy it and leave me alone, GOD.
Nothing goes together these days like youth entertainment, violence, and sex. It's like a sticky sweet mixed drink, 90% alchohol, tasting of both of adulthood, ectocooler, and mass consumption. And we here in the contemporary age like to be reminded of, and seek out, any trace of inevitable corruption in the children we, as a culture, watch grow up. that's why I love the Superflat movement - I feel like recent generation grew up slowly, holding on to their childhood stories and heroes long after they began realizing that life was tough and sex felt amazing. A lack of spiritual guidance in the age of information didn't help either. We are as simultaneously mixed up and homogenized as Takashi Murakami's tradmark creeps.
That's why I immediately bookmarked French designer X-Gum's website. The same techniques that made Superflat so good at calling out Japanese Americanization and Fetishization can work to reveal a repressed memory in our American history: that night we got really trashed and lost our virginity to pop culture. Nice months later what comes out is a manic young protean god resembling every toy or comic book or video game you ever pulled your mom's skirt to buy you. It's a bizarre and autistic child. It'll get your hands slimy if you touch it, but it's kind of cute, even as throws up neon all over the floor.
There are billions of these bastards, these multicolor goblins. They have no real face to speak of, only ubiquitous cartoon eyes that stare out through a hard plastic glaze. They have no stable shape or name. Some have teeth. Sharp teeth. And they take up a massive amount of space, crowding like those beak-less chickens in KFC poultry farms, leaving the basement of this great American insane asylum strewn with... is that chewed bubblegum and spoiled milk? Gross.
I'd do the shit in these videos. I've always wanted to live in a haunted house, but one that is truly fucked with ghosts, none of the Ghosthunters bullshit. If I could find a house that does things like the the following videos I would have house parties constantly. Deadly house parties. With a cover charge.
Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go rewatch The Crucible and pretend I live in a shapeshifting castle. Happy New Everything.
"Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable. That is why you are here. And now, for the first time, we are bringing to you the full story of what happened on that fateful day. We are giving you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimonies of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal. The incidents, the places, my friend, we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts about grave robbers from outer space?" *
Some nights, soaked in sadness and drunk with the lack of sleep which often precludes such revelations and reveries, I can sometimes stumble upon visions by prophets which crisply illuminates the edges of our bitter contemporary world. Thing is, these prophets are composed more of fictional memories and movie clips than anything "real". Luckily, there's artists such as those in the Austin, TX collective Totally Wreck.
I first came across this group via their YouTube channel, which features a collection of blurry and iridescent videos ranging from droney color studies of over saturated VHS tape to fabulously disorienting variety shows. Seemingly to do more with the past than the future, the video makes a strange, blissfully comfortable connection between the sedated psychedelic retro-futurism of the 1970's and the franticly connected, overstimulated present. No, this isn't new. Like so many others they seem to spring from the glittering entrails of the now mythical Rhode Island art scene. If nothing else, though, it provides yet another node in that seemingly endless chain of associations, and further proof that the mode is not yet dead.
The typically inflated exihibition blurb for the groups Berlin show, Totally Berlin, offers some thoughts and a quote by collective member Ciscneros:
"By pushing the limits of neon green screens and DIY costumes the group forces the everyday into a tense hyper-reality through their exploratory imaginations, which transcend time and space. Their zeal for hyper-infinities is manifested in futuristic narratives that portray fantastical characters striving to create alternate identities in the "digital age". Those characters are embodied by the collective’s overlapping realities. The work blurs the line between occult sub-culture and futuristic predictions. It draws upon references and inferred associations to archaic societies melded with technology to form a hybrid understanding of a world to come."
"Johnny Cisneros states: 'I believe in the unadulterated possibilities of the future and the development of a decisively post-20th century aesthetic and values. The belief in its ability to broaden man’s horizon of possibility of thought, to toss the notions implausibility and the laws of physics aside in an effort to break through barriers of mental, physical and spiritual human possibilities.'”
Though this just makes me think of a video I saw wherein MGMT's Andrew VanWyngarden stutteringly pronounces the beginning a new psychedelic generation of love and colors everything is colors everything is beautiful -- right of course, whatever -- it mimics the symptoms of most other art world advertisements: good points stated in atrocious language. My favorite pictures and videos from this group embody a playful contemporary mysticism. Like PaperRad or Ryan Trecartin they revel in hysterical (both manic and hilarious) juxtaposition, donning post apocalyptic vestments composed of accumulated childhood toy bin trash
or portray more silent understated lapses into folksy homages to hex signs and visual poetry -- or baphometic rituals as embodied in this article's opening image.
Like other the technicolor prophets it's hard to tell whether these works foretell doom or paradise. The collection entitled "Economic Crisis 20012" perhaps puts it in proper perspective. Baffled in a world where the president of the United States opens for Lady Gaga, massive systems of finance and trade which barely anyone can fully understand casts its shadows over middle class comfort, and Wikipedia articles on Sonic the Hedgehog and Abu Graib are of comparable length, there is perhaps only one conclusion to draw.
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