Begin again, and continuing

Just to continue on from what I wrote yesterday - and to try to make sure I keep up this new effort of sustained engagement with the overarching project - I’ll add some stray thoughts. First of all the traumatic encounter with Hunters work, which indeed I have gotten over by now, but only through a kind of retreat, a loss of ambition, what might be called disillusionment. Under the pretence that I am in a stage of preparing have I found myself not beginning, but that is getting less tenuous as time goes on, especially since I am out of art school and find my soul being harrowed by the day-job -- student-debt shackles. I feel a need to tear up some scar tissue and go deeper into the patched over wounds because this semi-functional bandaged up life is feeling bleaker than it has for a while. I am not quite sure what concrete things I will do, but as long as I am writing about it I am thinking about it, and that’s great, that’s where it will have to start.

One idea, which to some degree was my original idea for the Grand Work, was simply a huge piece of art incorporating a large array of mediums, dissolving the boundaries between them, which would give the grand vision of cosmic history up until the Singularity / Transfiguration of this world into the Kingdom of Heaven and as such be catalytic of public consciousness. This is what APOTHEOSIS and EMANANCEA was after. I’ve been sketching on the Next One for well over a year. This was from before my encounter with Hunter, and indeed with Scriabins work as well. Now I have started to doubt the form itself, of making a big physical object which risks becoming the kind of flashy theme-park art which Venice Art Biennial 2019 was full of. I am fearing that this vector is a dead end, and thus I feel hollowed out and disillusioned. Not to mention the fact that neither APOTHEOSIS nor EMANANCEA had the explosive impact that I imagined, indeed, which I expected ALECTROPA to have as well. Maybe it is not simply a question of going larger and more mindblowing, maybe the trail will simply serpentine into a forest of dark confusion.

I’ve been floating the idea of going for something digital. Music-video — Opera — suggests itself. Also videogame or website or digital art, and yes, maybe that is the path. Around 2013 I had a sense of turning away from digital art towards the physical for the tactile sense which seemed so superior to me, as someone who for years and years had been working with a tablet in Photoshop. Later I started to float ideas of a kind of resistance towards AI consumption - the idea of being replaced by a machine, and the ideal of making art that threw off algorithms of reproduction - further highlighted by the debacle of printing 1000 posters of ALECTROPA and sensing the awful debasement of the original that came with that. Now the 2014 -15 Neural Network scare seems a little silly and overblown, and I am not so concerned any more with that humanistic conservatism, so maybe a digital return is in order? I am thinking of buying a desktop computer again to have a proper workstation, and maybe get a proper camera. This prospect has been discouraging before, I’ve mourned the problematic of the physicality of the artwork, but right now I am feeling quite optimistic and keen. HOWEVER, as I was writing this, the past paragraph in particular, I felt something of a rekindling of excitement and I guess faith in the idea of the grand physical work, the - as I have imagined it - large wooden panels with digital components of light and music snippets - perhaps tying into a performative - narrative aspect. It doesn’t have to turn into a theme park, or a miniature railroad, and only being able to share representations of it with the world isn’t so bad. There is a dimension of suggestion there which can cause more movement in the viewer than simply the aesthetics of the representation itself. On that note one doesn’t even have to actually craft the object as it appears, but can do it as a sort of chimera, a facade, which sounds pretty devious and shifty, and it’s not something I am directly compelled by - but it is a form that could be used in a good way, in a way which isn’t simply pretentious.

What writing this has made me feel is that naturally I should pursue both of these paths, the digital and the physical. The exlusive binary choice is a false one.