Idols, the obscene and electronic music

Regardless of the work I am going to be producing over the course of my life. There's this interview that Vice conducted with Jonathan Meese which I enjoy going back to. Vice portrayed him as a crazy idiot but I totally get his point and I always enjoy going back to it. Art is this thing that is indistinguishable from artist to artist. There no such thing as ''my art or your art'' there's just Art. There's no talents, no processes, no abilities. Art is something vital like eating, pissing or sleeping. You just do it and continue. Sounds super simple and great, but for me it is the hardest thing. I want my art practice to be integrated in my lifestyle like his. 

Spawning from the idolatry I have for Jonathan Meese, I’ve been really interested with the idea of false gods since the beginning of the term. My painting for grad show quoted the Golden Calf, which is in the Bible in places such as Deuteronomy 9 and Exodus 32 where God is mad at the Israelites for worshiping idols. I’ve been interested in the various things people worship. Whether it’s partying, the idea of freedom, knowledge, money, art, a family; many desires guide our daily actions. The pairing of worship to daily life I first found through Farhad Moshiri's piece Kiosk de curiosité (2011) at the Martin Gropius Bau in 2012. The piece is a set of carpets onto which are printed covers of magazines thus pairing the Islamic prayer carpet to the western ritual of magazine viewing.

Farhad Moshiri. Kiosk de curiosité (2011)

Farhad Moshiri. Kiosk de curiosité -close up (2011)

I think I am going to continue investigating our idols. Whether it’s the stock market indices, new inventions found in convention centers, a shopping mall, museums, there is panacea of shrines revealing the many gods of our contemporary era. And images are the best evidence revealing what we worship. Since what we do is now made available for everyone to see through facebook, twitter, instagram… We assist in an age where people want to be glorified for what they adore in a constant feedback of praise. The hypermediation of our actions constitutes, I think, the lens in which we perceive our world today and needs to be integrated in the images we produce since the hypermedia is now the medium.

One way that I found to integrate this idea of hypermediation is through the use of the grotesque or the obscene. Like Baudrillard quotes it in Ecstasy of Communication (2013): “Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more illusion, when every-thing become immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication” (21-2). Without the separation of the private, “[w]e no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene” (22). The obscenity manifests itself in the “all-too-visible” where it “no longer contains a secret and is entirely soluble in information and communication” (22). http://www.yorku.ca/caitlin/futurecinemas/?p=116

So I am going to continue reading about social analysis of hypermediation. Now, as a conclusion, here's my own worship music. They are the various Djs headlining at the Boiler Rooms. I listened to those sets on repeat while painting in the studio over the past year. Those who have been spending a lot of time in the studio while I was there will certainly recognize those tunes.