Dray-Juk

So even if someone is technically/artistically able to create something on the level of a gallery piece (and, to be honest, I think substantially more people have that ability than anyone would be likely to admit) they do not exist in an environment where they have the financial freedom or recognition for that to be possible or worthwhile.

I assure you that there are millions of people who absolutely could and would want to make Pollock style abstract paintings or giant time-consuming sculptures made with garbage or whatever, but they're currently stuck in a low wage job and if they quit in order to make their masterpiece then nobody would bat an eye and they would go broke because they wouldn't have the sociocultural weight to impart that special numinous reverence that "high art" is granted, and which makes it financially viable as a thing to spend your time doing.

It is also true that a lot of people who have that cachet are able to spend their time making pretty much whatever, and will still be able to support themselves even if the art itself is fairly mediocre outside of the time dedicated to its creation.

I encourage you to have a seat and read this little ‘essay’ I wrote back in 2014 if you really want to understand what I’m doing today. I would be really grateful and I’m sure you’ll have a much better understanding of my whole work.

Digital walls, but walls

On the way to space and public art | came across the digital walls. They can be “painted” but they also have the function of limiting, of delimiting, of separating…

A change of paradigm has been happening for some years now with the arrival of the internet, which has completely changed some aspects and concepts that have to do with the world of art and more specifically with urban art or public art. From the beginning, this type of art has been carried out in public places with the aim of being observed by anyone on the street and thus making it free, accessible and free from any premise or institution when it is created. (not considering the “warlike coexistence” with the advertising).

The appearance of the Internet has changed it. A vast majority of the art is seen online on a screen, what questions that the street is the natural canvas of this art discipline. While it is for the one who creates the piece, it is almost never for the one who looks at it. Public spaces are no longer just physical, in the same way that the plastic arts are no longer just plastic.

Due to the access to technology and its cheapness, nowadays it is inconceivable to think of art without considering the whole digital sphere, whether as a tool, a method of creation or of dissemination. But at the same time, all these centuries of art history condition the understanding of art, sometimes acting as a burden in terms of understanding what art is.

The dragging of already preconceived ideas and the weight of the genetic inheritance makes us repeat concepts about what art is and was. In the face of such a rapid change of paradigm, it seems that we find it difficult to understand that this whole new digital world is still the world. Both virtual and augmented reality are also reality, but the fact that it is appreciated through a screen sometimes causes it not to be considered as something artistic or even real. Thinking that way we could say that looking at a piece of art on the Internet does not have its complete experience, since we are not seeing it in the place for which it was devised, and neither are we perceiving it in a direct way, but with a screen as an intermediary. But at the same time, I think about all the content that we consume today with these devices - movies, series, photographs, news, and even art, current and classic - and not because of that we think or say that they are unreal.

At this point, where the analog space merges with the digital space, a new artistic expression is born that is entirely digital, where the final piece is born and ends up in the digital realm. Conceived through digital tools and deposited in the public digital space. These pieces of art suggest skipping the step of "existing” first in the ‘real reality’ to reach directly the virtual reality, which is also reality, and once from there, to have an impact on the analog reality.

It would also be curious to reflect on the parallelism between urban art and digital art, since, being in public places, both are susceptible to being stolen, altered or appropriated by other people for different purposes. And also, on the idea of anonymity, always used by urban artists to be able to work in the street without risk of infringement, and now also used in the digital environment. Either by often using copyrighted content that we find on the web (street 2.0) for an artistic purpose or by the “erosion of sharing” in which at some point someone does not credit the work, but it is still shared. In this case there should be a new word to define those people that everybody knows, but nobody knows who they are. “Famonimous” characters or the concept of “famonimity”; people or artists who are known precisely because they are anonymous.

Since the beginnings of urban art, the idea was to use public space to express oneself freely, but we must bear in mind that public space is nothing more than the remainder of the space divided by the private, the “leftovers” after the developers pass, the worthless places left open to the common people by institutions, etc., etc….. With the change of social, technological and artistic paradigm, urban art has been normalized and is now used as a method of decoration of places in poor condition, as a complement to a public road or simply as a means of open artistic expression as it has always been. Because if the initial objective was to make art accessible, direct and open to everyone, that idea has moved to the internet and, in some ways, the radical idea of urban art would no longer have that sense.

Therefore, if we understand urban or public art as a type of art accessible to everyone, free of charge and without any kind of condition, | believe that digital art fulfils this role today, since it inhabits all public places, whether analog or digital. Urban art needs this digital sphere to be able to expand and be visible. Because nowadays most urban art is seen through screens, not in the place where the piece has been created, which makes all these works more accessible to everyone at any time. And so, the ’paradox of the graffiti artist’ is born, the one who expresses his freedom in the walls that imprison him. These walls generate private spaces and what is outside them is considered public space by the mere fact of being spaces where people pass through. But it does not mean that this public space is open to intervention. Every public space is under the supervision of a privative entity, whether it is a municipality, a company or simply, the property of an individual. Public space does not exist, neither in the ‘real reality’, nor in the virtual one. It is always subject to something superior that manages it.

Within this dilemma, augmented reality becomes another alternative to the path of public art. It gives the possibility of creating art in public spaces, only seen on digital devices, and using the ‘real reality’ as the piece’s canvas. Until recently, photography and/or video were methods of capturing reality. Now, with this change of prism, these disciplines moved from being the purpose itself, to becoming raw material for the creation of other new artistic expressions. In this direction, | want to focus on the gif format. This format is strictly digital, so it gives us the option to edit, to add movement to pieces that, before, condemned to live still. We can spread in on the Internet and make it accessible to everyone at any time. When adding augmented reality, the two concepts intertwine, urban/public art and digital art, what gives rise to new artistic expressions that call into question deep rooted concepts such as museum, art and reality.

There are already many centuries researching, testing and creating the same type of art, whether sculpture, painting…. Except for the birth of new “isms” within these disciplines, it gives the impression that they are exhausted. At this point it would be convenient to think about the idea of unique work, copy, forgery, recreation… Thinking about the evolution of art we must consider that all new progress is born of the technological options that occur in each era. Nowadays, the difference is that progress happens every day, very fast, and it seems that it is difficult (or unwilling) to understand this change because of the speed of it. This cultural and genetic heritage blurs our vision and sometimes prevents us from conceiving new artistic expressions as such, since there are no previous references to support them.

But, at the end of the day, every new artistic expression, in its beginnings, was not art. “Science develops ideas that come from art that is inspired by science.” The world of classical art enjoys an aura of untouchable deity because when we are born it has always been there, but we cannot forget to think for a moment with perspective that all this classical art was created mainly by the entities of power of each era: kings, church, political powers…

This is why today (without underestimating the technique and the work of the artists) these types of classical art enjoy an invulnerability as, in the end, it was created by and for the power itself.

Then, this type of art collides with the urban and/or public art, along with digital art. In the public and digital space those who decide what is "art” are the people.

I am sure that the first Cro-Magnon who used a tuft of horse hairs instead of his own hands to paint was seen as an art/magic/belief apath.

Now we live in a new paradigm shift, but in this case it is not local or national, it is global and immediate.

"Abstraction is flying. Abstracting is ascending to higher and higher levels of conceptual generalization; soaring back and forth, reflectively circling around above the specificity and immediacy of things and events in space and time, from a perspective that embeds them in a conceptual framework of increasing breadth and depth, a framework without horizon, ceil-ing, or basement; a framework composed of increasingly comprehensive concepts that generalize over increasingly comprehensive classes of things, organize them relative to one another, unify them into a coherent tapestry, a dizzying object of contemplation the details of which stun one into panic by their connectedness, significance, and vividness.

Abstraction is also flight. It is freedom from the immediate spatiotemporal constraints of the moment; freedom to plan the future, recall the past, comprehend the present from a reflective perspective that incorporates all three; freedom from the immediate boundaries of concrete subjectivity, freedom to imagine the possible and transport oneself into it; freedom to survey the real as a resource for embodying the possible; freedom to detach the realized object from oneself more and more fully as a self-contained entity, fully determined by its contextual properties and relations, and consider it from afar, as new grist for the mill of the possible. Abstraction is freedom from the socially prescribed and consensually accepted; freedom to violate in imagination the constraints of public practice, to play with conventions, or to indulge them. Abstraction is a solitary journey through the conceptual uni-verse, with no anchors, no cues, no signposts, no maps, no foundations to cling to. Abstraction makes one love material objects all the more."

--Adrian Piper

i see the disdain flash in my mother's eyes when she is compared to my grandmother. i watch as she catches the fury under her eyelids.

what frightens me is that a mother's hate is a mirror to a mother's love. but the stretched ropes and falling eyelashes hold me in place, as they hold her. she is the reflection of my shadow. in another day, in another time, her mother is a reflection of hers.

you could set fires to a forest, but what will you do if the roots remain intact? i know she tries to let it go. i see her try every day. but she is the mother she had, no matter where life takes her. and i fear i will be the mother i have.

I'm a linguist. The things I study encompass hundreds to millions of human lives. But there is no one great person who can be credited with their invention. The common fun facts about how many words Shakespeare invented are bullshit. If Shakespeare just made up the word "dawn," how would his audience have understood it? Shakespeare was at best the first to write down words that people on the street were already saying. Another common misconception: dictionary makers don't decide new words; they study people's communication to find out what words the public is already using. Educated and influential individuals are always riding on the coattails of collectives.

It's the same reason I love fiber arts. No one invented knitting or sewing or spinning, not as we know them today. Some prehistoric human was probably the first to attach a fiber to a sharp object in a way we could technically call a needle, but sewing encompasses hundreds of techniques, each of which is the product of hundreds of little innovations by thousands and thousands of people over generations. This is true of many daily objects. I heard a story about how soap was invented when people at a particular temple noticed plant ashes and animal fats from sacrifices mixing together, and I knew it was a fairytale not because it was implausible, but because it attributed soap to a single specific place and time.

Because these weren’t made as works of art, like paintings with titles made to be hung on walls and in museums. These were made to be lived in, to be danced in, to be worn to parties, to be worn at home wrapped in a blanket reading a book.

And, as is a well-established fact within dress history, most of those dresses were kept in the original condition were sentimental. These were wedding dresses. Debutant gowns. Worn to special events. Gives as a gift from someone special. And they were worn; plenty of these old dresses were altered, or have holes in the lining or the silk worn down in places. Clothing is such a personal form of art, holding memories in the way that few sculptures or paintings made to be admired and displayed ever could have.

And when you think about it, I’m sure some of, if not most of these dresses, did have titles. Simple ones, sure. Personal ones. “My blue silk”. “The brown dress with fringe”. “The white floral”. But they weren’t named as art. They were named for practicality, for ease of understanding. Because they weren’t made as art. But they are nevertheless.

Dress history is such an under appreciated form of art history, even with how closely it’s tied to so many other parts of history. And clothing is such a complex and undervalued form of art. Unlike so much of the other art in museums, we often don’t know who made these dresses, anonymous dressmakers with names lost to history, so instead we marvel at their craftsmanship.

As a consequence the Harcourt photograph is, for the young actor, an initiation rite, a guild diploma, his true professional carte d’identité. Is he properly enthroned if he has not yet encountered the sacred Harcourt Image? This rectangle which first reveals his ideal head, his intelligent, sensitive, or witty expression, depending on the role he offers to life, is the formal document by which the whole of society agrees to separate him from its own physical laws and assures him the perpetual revenue of a countenance which receives as a gift, on the day of this baptism, all the powers ordinarily denied, at least simultaneously, to ordinary flesh: a changeless splendor, a seduction pure of all wickedness, an intellectual power which is not the necessary accompaniment to the ordinary actor’s art or beauty.

Which is why the photographic portraits by Thérèse Le Prat or Agnès Varda, for example, are avant-garde: they always bequeath the actor his fleshly face and enclose it frankly, with an exemplary humility, in its social function, which is to “represent” and not to lie. For a myth as alienated as that of actors’ faces, this choice is quite revolutionary: not to embellish their lobbies with classic Harcourts — titivating, languishing, angelized, or virilized (according to sex) — is an audacity few theatre managers can afford.”

I know this isn't ninjago guys but I finished this 17 hour painting for my art class and I was proud of it so...enjoy.

"Nihilist Heron" 12"x16" acrylic, conté crayon, wax pastel on reclaimed support