The Artist is disintegrating

prophet, sensualist, medium, clown

The Artist is disintegrating, folkloric, and using oily liquids. Their practice is semiological, virtual, and an archive. Each work is hand-crafted, recorded, collaged, found, computer-rendered, or professionally-fabricated. These pieces are flags, lasers, research, ecological environments, reality TV shows, and poems. They comment on metaphysics, the futility of human ambition, networks of visibility, and the neoliberal narcissistic agenda. Works are made from glitter, tree bark, trophies, a discarded balloon, caramel, steel, enamel, hair extensions, stones, rawhide, glass, acrylic paint, foam-core, transit records, pvc, fish hook cactus, screens, bookshelves, reclaimed wood, architecture models, fur, photography, melting ice, Gortex, and zinc-plated chain. The Artist’s materials are whatever they need to be.

Over and over again, their work distrusts its own value while the Artist questions their own truth. Theirs is a practice of witnessing the unseeable, looking at both the past and the future at the same time. The Artist relishes context, luxuriates in nuance. Always intentional, they do the reading. Writing new worlds, they speculate fictions. They tease out conflicts, subvert historical connotations, promote non-linear intimacies, question binary conceptions, facilitate cosmic healing, highlight the opaque nature of power, investigate the potentiality of new technologies, and abandon the vertical thought system of reason. Whatever they say they’re saying, there’s sleight of hand, which keeps us looking.

The Artist’s practice is performative. They are a willful public figure, still sometimes they wear masks. And it’s always multiple audiences for which they’re performing. They serve the market offering their most colorful and digestible children. They intersect with the philanthropic needs of the patron as well as a civic desire for engagement, criticality, and openness. For the media and museums, the university and international biennales, the Artist inhabits a hybrid role: part expert, prophet, historian, theorist, activist, educator, entertainer, spiritual leader, role model, storyteller, sensualist, medium, and clown. The Artist helps us see ourselves. Especially when they’re young, they’re endorsed as an oracle.

Youth is relative. The Young Artist today is no longer under 30, but under 35. Perhaps they’ve had time to finish an MFA, the opportunity to make an impression. As a form of self-preservation, the platforms validating the Artist must prove their own relevance by discovering emerging figures. Patron satans create heat and velocity hoping to profit before market darlings crash. Biennale and triennial curators catapult the careers of breakout stars. The Artist must prove what’s unique about their contribution to compete.

A surplus of discursive posturing makes the Artist legible, though this textual armor can also leave them vulnerable. Whatever they’re wearing, we’re reminded that the Artist’s work could only be made by someone navigating the world in a body like their own. Today when institutions fear becoming outmoded, fashion designers and stylists become contemporary artists.

In Terminator 2, Sarah Connor knows the dystopian possibilities of the future. She’s birthed our savior but lies trapped in a sterile white-walled institution, screaming premonitions and illustrating her visions however she can. So much blank space, the psych ward looks a lot like a museum.

Co-authored by Robert McKenzie in 2022.