Art Wonderment Manifesto

Howling to a pixelated moon; ft artist Susanna Inglada

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ART WONDERMENT MANIFESTO

I have this nagging feeling that we’re about to loose something precious because we forgot how to be human: our metaverse banter. This connection we’re having right in this moment. I love the World Wide Web, and I love technology–a certain technology that is the continuation of the pencil, of mathematics, of the impulse to bring people together in an engaged way. I don’t see myself in the description of a person hunched over a smartphone, wasting away. I use technology for 5% of crap and the rest is work or reading, watching interesting things, surfing social media and platforms where I have fun and learn. I have to use screens to write, strategise, record, edit, and more, which is not great for my health; but neither are a lot of things people do, from certain sports to working in an A&E for uninterrupted twenty-hour shifts but you don’t see people complaining about that. Hypochondria emerges through the cracks of anxiety, but to be present is to erode and oxydise.

These mostly unregulated para-social tools seem to disproportionately turn hustling into grifting. A ocasião faz o ladrão, ‘opportunity makes the thief’. A Portuguese idiom, riddled with the atavism that crystallizes within the old, untouched borders for centuries, but which is not without wisdom. Art Wonderment challenges the current self-help craze, the general opportunism and Asian-wisdom-redux nature of self-development, life coaching, seen as accessible luxuries that turn out to be account-draining schemes, and some (the book I criticized in this last episode), well meaning projects with heavy-handed editing and PR.

I will concede that this sounds a bit grand but we’re not used to seing women proclaiming things. Art Wonderment is me, howling, in recognition, in celebration, in fear, in respect, in defiance. It appears necessary in a society that lives with and through images and yet doesn’t know what an image is; that praises creativity and yet has no idea what it means, what it requires and what it does; that focuses on self-growth but only knows how to instrumentalize. Granted, self-help, even a consumer-based society, even entertainment, can be good things if they aren’t scaled up constantly, deboned and processed, and sold as a universal truth for all, as if we were all the same. Art, on the contrary, singularises. I think of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Gay Science (1882), where he asked for wonderment but advised against martyrdom for the sake of enlightenment. Art Wonderment is joyful inasmuch as it finds substance in being. Greeks remained at the surface of things, he claimed, contemplating the spectacle of the world, out of profundity. Joy is a strange beast, its etymology points to sensuous pleasure rather than spiritual plenitude; to rejoicing–the embodied manifestation and consciousness of delight.

In fairness, art is not the safe harbor it could be, let’s not romanticise things. When it was said that art was for everyone, the marketing companies working for museums got confused and thought that it meant that whatever art’s “message’ was, it applied to everyone. They didn’t bother studying images and therefore didn’t understand that the relation between form and content is complex–so there was a lot of borrowing from adjacent literary fields, surfaced theories, terms and ideas trending at the time. “Conceptual”, “deterritorialising”, “anthropocene”, “intersectional”, “deconstruction”, “mixed media”, “trans-disciplinary” (the latest word)… Not that these concepts aren’t compelling, some of them crucial, but they’re either methods, rules of good practice, or vague definitions allowing us not to explain ourselves that much, especially artists who’d like the work to speak for itself-thank-you-very-much. Words that the general public doesn’t engage with on a day to day basis. Hence, art became aspirational and artists are measured by the pioneer / outstanding / ground-breaking yardstick, which promises **revelations**. In fact, art’s most striking difference with any other creative outlet, is its simultaneous focus on the image and what makes it, on the photographed thing-as-an-image and on the photographic apparatus, the paper, the inks, the frame and its relation with the space, the village, the city, the nation, the landscape where it is placed. Art has a tendency to disassemble systems, to bring them onto the fore of our conscious mind–to make the things we see visible, while conveying a story, a feeling, a theory, a history... It shows that the content is not separable from the form, that how we see is what we see–that YouTube has had an impact on the way we expect information and moving images to be, now–which is neither good nor bad, just change I would even go as far as to say that a lot of literature and poetry would love to play with the format of the book–and some get away with it–, a lot of film, even philosophical treatises are part of the mechanics of art, of this magical handling of materials as themselves and as ideas, dreams, colours, feelings.

Art reminds us that images are a sort of deal with the devil: whatever we look at, we become. Psychologically, there isn’t a stronger phenomenon than the tendency to incorporate what we see in others’ behavior. Humans imitate. Not in a literal way: watching violence does not turn a pacifist into a violent person, on the contrary, it will reinforce their position. Images convey structures of thought and systems that organise our lives. What I’m saying is that if 75% of the films you see on your Netflix feed have guns, war, violence, even if it is the “saving” kind where the police / MI5 /the FBI / the lone agent gets the bad guy, that’s the system you absorb: a punishing society that produces evil, chastised by the machines put in place. That’s where your ethical sense is exercised and your dreaming abilities are crushed. When encountering an artwork, however, the decomposing of the mechanics of shapes, sounds, apparatus, etc. there are less chances of monkeying what we see because we’re faced with something that requires total focus and yet a sort of distance, a conscious and often slow adherence to what is in front of us. Moreover, the artwork changes with time while remaining the same because it will resonate with different aspects of age and era.

The delirium about AI corresponds to this scaled up, deboned capitalist system. It won’t kill creativity–it will migrate to new forms that will be the new joy of generations to come, and the despair of those who witness the change. It won’t take our jobs fully–it will take some, as the automated weaving machines in Lyon took the manual weavers’–because it can’t really do those things without assistance, unless we want a society that will reproduce itself in an endless variety of ways. It doesn’t seem like it: lots of people are getting bored of AI written Netflix series.

And that’s where image literate people like me–and perhaps you, reading this–come in: we know about images, we have studied their power, and we understand their poison. From my perspective the real problem with AI is that is a hyper-feedback loop, it was made as such: it creates and responds to, with us stuck in the middle. Culture–the generative mirror we recognize as objectified reality– becomes heavily edited. Let’s go back a little and analyse how AI was already blossoming as a system before it was fully developed and implemented on a large scale. How it was a mindset before it became a mindfuck.

Shall we? We had the incredibly creative and delirious Vine app and boom, Tik Tok (and then Instagram, they’re cousins) appears, unifying and imposing the same music, the same dances, the same behaviour. YouTube launches a TV for the people? Worry not, celebrity content is injected in there with sprinkles of conspiracy theories and there we go, no more personal expression beyond exploiting offsrping / oneself / a marriage to sell Christian life, Mormon aspirational lifestyles and any form of purity. This confuse us, the normies, convincing us that if we do create a channel and talk to the camera, we’re somehow trading in our personality for fame–thus art’s suspicion of social media technology. Social apps and platforms have done everything to contain human expression into 4 or 5 formats, tops, as it happened on the high street: no more local bookshops, or specialized commerce. But where Amazon may or could have had an incidence in the propagation of book sales, publishing houses started producing writers, rather than the other way round: after Harry Potter and the Hunger Games, a slew of sub-products arose, containing readers in those categories. Novels, poetry, theatre, are simply a format where anything can happen: not those ones, where specific paint-by-numbers narratives are produced so that the readers keep coming back for more. (I have nothing against YA or Sci-Fi, just against its commodification and hegemonic power over other types of literature.)

What AI - not the mindset but the mindfuck– is doing, is to both create and respond to scaling up. To up the ante, to keep on growing and being and producing, and consuming more and more, we need generative assistance. We cannot answer all our emails, we cannot make it to all the meetings IRL and online, we need a thing to do it for us, a thing that doesn’t get tired, doesn’t have a body, doesn’t have desires, to respond to our bodies, to our fatigue, to our wants. But the reality is that having a body, being mortal, fatigue and disease are part of the joys of life–and art can still say these things, these illogical and unforgiving realities of being human. Art reminds us of what it is to be human, what it is to be creative and propels exchange, dialogue, new horizons gazed at together or in solitary focus. It’s not about the aura; ultimately, the art object is not that important, although it is absolutely necessary. By the way, the emphasis that should be put on its necessity is how it is a need, first and foremost, for the artist, and how that need should be respected. As ever with Art Wonderment, that need is not an isolated phenomenon, it is articulated in mysterious and complicated ways to the human need to experience art made by others. But no, it’s not important to the point of idolatry, it’s the web it creates, the conversations it sparks, the daffodils it plants in our “mind’s eye”.

Art Wonderment is not a solution. It won’t fix anything, and it won’t solve the world crisis. No single thing will. Realities are composites. What it does is that it moves us with total presence, at times, not always (remember? art is not a processed potato)–it has good things, bad things, manifestations of some truth that cannot be said in any other way. It can be a bad truth, a terrifying one, a joyful possibility, it can be everything. Art does not tread in the aspirational–or at least it shouldn’t, and art professionals know it’s currently at risk of doing so. It’s a space of expression without a functionality-art objects do not dig holes or write policy, although they can incorporate all that. There are horrible artists sharing dreadful things and luminous artists shaping new worlds. In art, there is the whole spectrum of humanity, although only a certain part of it tends to be shown.

This awareness can be for oneself or for a community of people, which is why art is such an important thing at the moment: it combines the analog with the digital, and therefore it’s not alienating, nor is it deluded about technology. This happens through conversation, exchange, beyond the encounter with the work. The podcast, my writing, are precisely that. I must come clean and advise you that here, I’m delineating potential; the reality is that the art field is known for its luddite tendencies, and risks turning museums into historicizing machines, instruments of erasure of the present, and of an elliptical vision of our time for future students; provided our archives survive these trying times.

So, in comes Art Wonderment, which, first and foremost, refuses the idea of the universal, the neutral - it emphasizes the role of the viewer, of us all, in bringing our biases, our history, our personality, while opening up to something that is not us, that is new, that is other. It refuses to focus only on the art system, the artist interview, the curator point of view without contemplating the way we receive the work, from the perspective of someone with a specific cultural fold. It begs the art system to incorporate precisely that, rather than killing art before it even blossomed by stating its importance. Art is not important; or at least it’s not more important than biological research, or football. It has a specificity, which is to hold the contradiction of the relational, the dynamic: with it, we open up to others in order to build ourselves. But how does it do that? By embracing the discomfort of adapting / incorporating something new. By decentering the self in order to be more oneself. By moving to be more rooted–holding ambivalence, paradox, composite views that may seem incompatible–because they are.

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With thanks to the artist Susanna Inglada, who allowed me to include images of her work in the video version of the episode.

Susanna Inglada, “Way out”.