REMOTE HUMANISM
Thinking about the exotic from a middle-class American background brings trouble and ignorance to any conversation on the matter. But it's a conversation worth having, and when I'm examining preconceptions about the future, it pays to look at the other end of the spectrum. Reverse JQ takes the classically Western view of Jonny Quest and reinterprets things from an Indian POV. Hadji becomes the hero of this miniature style painting while Jonny is reduced to the naive stereotype. My work has always dealt with the duality between naturalism and the technological, but it's a stubborn comparison that needs to be questioned. In an increasingly digital world, can we safely compare everyday experience to a distant and seemingly more authentic one?
For every Sci-Fi cliche about the future, there is another one pertaining to traditional humanism. That's a poor name for it, but the subjects and styles of these paintings all point towards the type of experience heralded by everyone from Jean Dubuffet to The Sex Pistols: a nostalgic and unalienated place. When mentioning ideas like "black cool" or "primitivism", I'm not trying to knock down sterotypes but ask what they're getting at with their shared focus on authenticity.
Tropical animals. Worn textures. Exotic architecture. All of these have been exploited by Western culture as commercial signifiers for exotic allure (see Joe Camel in my piece Cool Cats). Modernism's appropriation of tribal art has been thoroughly debunked, but it's still easy to revel in the exotic and hard to understand exactly why we do so. The global popularity of Jamaican dancehall and other worldly music (especially "world music"), has proven that the culture industry is still hungry for what is read as authentic expression despite (or because) of the wide spread use of the ever growing influence of technology on the external world. The exotica I'm talking about is not an ad campaign selling point, but should be analytically separated into geography, artistic styles and historical past.
While never entirely inseparable, these elements can no longer be assumed congruent. A Malian woman can be insufferably materialistic, an old building can be futuristic, and tropical expression can be sold as a brand. The wood for HAVE AN AUTHENTIC EXPERIENCE was purchased at Home Depot; it's earthy textures fabricated in my studio. Nothing is simple, and the cultural assumptions propagated by commercial success should be enjoyed only when aware of their potential fallacy. I reluctantly admit that this subject is too big for my art-making (at least for now), but these works hover in the midst of an uncomfortable problem facing anyone interested in avoiding the technological future: what is there to go back to?
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