Pretentiousness Category Archives

I started making new collages several weeks ago. Now that my quarter of teaching at RIT is over, I finally have the spare time and energy to do so. It feels good. Images will be coming soon.

And, in many ways, I’m returning to image making with fresh eyes. Sure, the main focus of my work has not changed much since my thesis work several years ago, but I have learned much about art and also myself in even just the past few months.

Trust has always been a struggle. Granted, it’s never taken me long to complete a collage. Sometimes a few hours, sometimes over a week. There is no special technique or skill required to create them. But for even such small, simple works the process is daunting because all collage is, at its core, about destruction—the wholesale slaughter of images.

Here I have a magazine image. It’s beautiful. It’s perfect. That’s why I harvested it from my pile of magazines in the first place. Do I use this? Do I slice it up? What if I make the wrong cuts? Do I paste it down? What if it’s in the wrong place? Do I color over it? Anything I do to it could ruin it forever, this small piece of perfection. It’s too good to use. It’s too good not to use.

Here I have a collage. It has some interesting things happening, small places of perfection amongst the whole. I fall in love with these elements. How could I cover them up or change them in any way? But the collage itself isn’t finished. It’s boring. I can’t leave it there.

But in order to continue I must destroy what I’ve already done. I have to hack away and bury the things I love with the hope that something new and better will come of it by the end. The prospect is frightening.

Collage is inherently about loss. I feel sadness and doubt with every action as I am always finding something new to love, a little zone of comfort and happiness within the image and then am forced to ruin it forever with only the vaguest of notions that something better is out there.

Art is a lot like life.

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: a human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him, a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

—Pearl S. Buck

I had a minor revelation last night. While skimming through this site’s comment spam filter, I noticed that several spam comments, after the usual pornographic links, would be followed by paragraphs of words, text, and phrases seemingly randomly mashed together. “Aha!” I said. “This is some excellent Dada poetry!”

Disappointingly, I’m far from the first person to see this, but it seems most web sites have a need to edit the spam, to rearrange or even compile different messages together.

Then there’s this online Dada poetry generator, which will randomize the words from whatever piece of text you paste into the little box. Though this functions according to the rules of Dada poetry, as described by Tristan Tzara, I feel it’s very much against the spirit of Dada. The creation of this poetry generator is a way of formalizing and institutionalizing Dada poetry. The randomization of text and calling it “poetry” is now just a little amusement, a distraction which goes against the anti-everything, nihilistic spirit Dada was originally made of.

The reason I find spam messages more akin to the Dada spirit is that they are intrusive, a thorn in the side of everyone with an email account or a blog. Sure, we have effective filters in place to keep the spam at bay, but the spam will always be there constantly trying to destroy any sense of order on the internet by flooding every site that is found with links to pornography and cheap prescription medications.

So here are two examples from my spam filter. Each one had a large preceding section filled with links to porn but I’ve cropped them out. Not that these parts can’t be Dada poetry in their own right—perhaps even moreso—but, hey, there are children present. Enjoy!

Dada Poem #1:

Dada Poem #2:

The following was originally a response to 2005′s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe adaptation, however, having seen the film long after its release date it seemed silly for me to write this then. Now that the sequel is out it seemed a good time to revisit this train of thought.

I’m also writing this as a kind of test as I’d like to push the site away from being purely about “art” and I’m interested what, if any, kind of response I’ll get.

I find it interesting to see the kind of trends that develop in popular entertainment. Looking back, the patterns are quite plain—criminal forensics police dramas, reality television, superhero films, digitally rendered talking animals—there are whole strings as each new entry tries to ride on the successes of its predecessors.

One of today’s current fads is the fantasy genre. It started, of course, with the excellent adaptation of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy and the Harry Potter series and since then we’ve had to deal with movies like The Golden Compass, Bridge to Terabithia, and (of course) The Chronicles of Narnia.

Now I’ll admit that I don’t get out to the theaters much. I don’t rent movies or have a Netflix subscription. But I did go see the first Narnia film. The parents wanted to go see something and, frankly, nothing else sounded the least bit interesting.

It’s an odd choice for an atheist, I’ll admit that, and my parents warned me of the christian allegory that was not so subtly embedded in the film, but boredom does funny things to one’s judgment. I was already aware of all this, mind you. I’ve never read any of the books but I was prepared having read up on the movie already.

I’ll say one thing… They weren’t kidding about that christian allegory.

But one thing bothers me about the movie. Everyone talked about the Lion and the Witch representing Jesus and the Satan but, hey, isn’t there a third part to the title?

Oh yeah, that closet thing, right?

Does the wardrobe really matter all that much? It can’t seriously add anything to this religious metaphor, can it? Likely the wardrobe has been looked over due to the role it plays in the story—much like the train that takes Harry Potter to Hogwart’s, it’s merely a device, for transporting the Pevensie children to Narnia.

But unlike in Harry Potter, the Narnia universe begins and ends with the wardrobe. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the four Pevensies spent years in Narnia—they grew up and became adults—only to find themselves reverted back into children as they stumble back into our world. In fact, everything physical the children had gained from the Narnian universe was stripped from them on their way out—their ages, heights, weights, the effects of puberty, and even their clothes were rendered null.

Contrast this to Harry Potter’s universe: Even though the action in the stories in focused around his time at Hogwart’s, the time spent there is real and, more importantly, everything Harry gained returns with him when school is not in session, including his magical abilities. To the point: While the Harry Potter universe is a contiguous one, the Narnian universe is trapped in the container of the wardrobe and the only things that can be taken out of Narnia are the memories and experiences one gained there.

Though we experience it as such, Narnia is not a magical, alternate universe. Narnia is a story. And the wardrobe is the book itself—the cover, the pages—the physical object the story was recorded in.

This metaphor is perfectly suited for the original novel. Pulling open the doors of the wardrobe is just like opening the cover of a book and, of course, one is already reading a book. However, the effect breaks down in the movie adaptation as there’s no film equivalent to the book cover. (The opening of a DVD case? Perhaps this would work but certainly not when viewing the film in theaters.)

For those of you interested in The Chronicles of Narnia’s christian message, here’s where you need to pay attention—or maybe plug your ears and close your eyes—because the wardrobe-as-book metaphor has huge ramifications.

Firstly, to make it clear, the wardrobe isn’t just any book. It, in fact, represents the New Testament, as any allegorical retelling of the story of Jesus of Nazareth would. And though the New Testament and Narnia contain powerful moral messages which may, in fact, spur one to be a better person, the ultimate truth is that Narnia and the New Testament (as it is implied through the Narnia allegory) are just books.

Aslan, the lion, may be the savior in Narnia. It’s possible even that he is real, that he isn’t a hallucination and that he continues to exist inside the wardrobe even when the Pevensie children aren’t inside—but this isn’t relevant. What’s relevant is that Aslan is powerless outside the wardrobe* and therefore, as implied by the christian allegory, Jesus Christ is powerless outside of the Bible.

Thus, while The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe may have strong Christian undertones (or is it “overtones”?), it doesn’t have the message that most Christians would prefer: that there is an all-loving, all-powerful God who watches over us and helps us in our daily lives. That God only lives in storybooks.

*Remember that I am discussing only The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in this essay. I am well aware there are events in later novels that contradict my main point here, notably in The Silver Chair, but this is far from the first example of retroactive continuity. Cf. Arthur C. Clark’s Odyssey series and the Star Wars prequels.

This is snippet from the comic Sexy Losers.

It’s totally not safe for work. It might not even be safe for home. But for those of you foolish enough to click on this link, don’t come back complaining that you can’t un-see certain things or that you have a new-found appreciation for Pollock.

The truth is never pretty. But it’s not always this…uh…sticky.

I always try to keep an eye out for any crossovers between art and psychology. Of course, it’s not any sort of general interest—I do have quite a personal investment in both subjects so finding a combination of the two can be exciting because I’m always looking to learn more about myself and my depression.

I’m pretty self-absorbed.

But this particular example has been troubling me. Maybe I’m just “too” inside, maybe I’m taking this a little personally. (more…)

(This is part 2 of my rebuttal to Peter Bagge’s comic “Real” Art.” You can read part 1 here.)

I find the concept of “shock art” asinine and ridiculous. The art itself is fine—it’s the label “shock art” I have a problem with. And that’s all it is—it’s not a style or methodology, it’s a label. When people encounter a work of art that, superficially, violates their sense of morals or decency, whether from religious beliefs or elsewhere, that’s where they stop—at the surface.

(more…)

Several years ago, shortly after I began grad school, I came across a cartoon commentary on art and the art world entitled “Real” “Art” or “Mr. Grumpy Goes to an Art Museum and Comes Out Belaboring the Obvious,” written and drawn by Peter Bagge. It’s presented by Reason Magazine, which is a libertarian publication. That alone is reason for pause. And even just glancing at his other comics on the Reason site is enough to make me want to dismiss him outright.

But even though I can rebuke most of the criticisms Bagge lays out against the entire contemporary art scene, I fear that simply having found this comic was enough to help drive me down the road towards Cynicism City, where I now rent a one bed/one bath apartment.

So, to help expel the Bagge demons I’m being possessed by I’m going refute some of his arguments here. Due to space and time and spacetime constraints I’m not going to discuss the entire thing which you may want to read yourself to get the whole picture. (more…)