Week 3: The Closer I Look, The Stranger It All Becomes

Michael Salter finds “comfort in discomfort” and our consumerist and visual culture does not. We are constantly engulfed with the latest and greatest, the overwhelming amount of visual “junk” that serves no other purpose than to look pretty, or to denote your “status" in our culture. When Salter speaks about his departure from the materialistic and consumerist driven job he once held in his days as an icon designer for name-brand surfing clothing, to his arrival as an artist completely infatuated with discomfort and concise form,  we sense that he’s at peace now, with what he does, with what he makes, and with who he is. He seems unwavering in his own truths, and is deeply rooted in his consciousness and efforts to make art the way he needs to make it. As a self-proclaimed “obsessive observer” he challenges us to be aware of how we see things, how we assign meaning to logos, brands, or icons that represent something important to our culture, whether it’s a symbol of “status” (as Salter mentions his high-top converses and their “low” status) or a representation of some other emotion or feeling through a culturally constructed icon.

 

The main thing I took away from Salter is that  what you think is a direct product of what your brain is consuming everyday; photographs, ads, commercials, graffiti on the side of a bus, it all affects us negatively or positively, depending on the social and cultural construction of all the visual junk. He has this way of seeking the truth in his art pieces through simplicity and confusion. His images are so simple and concise stylistically, yet they bring this mass wave of confusion, multiple meanings and discomfort when we see them. And his ability to do so is brilliant, because I don’t know about you, but when I think about something being uncomfortable and confusing, I think of something super complex and complicated, full of details and other garbage that makes it hard to wrap my mind around what’s going on. But, with Salter’s work, he gives me a seemingly simple image in terms of aesthetics, and once we encounter it we are immediately taken for a ride: What does this mean? How am I supposed to feel about this? Why is this simple icon making me so uncomfortable? How can I make this uncomfortable feeling stop? Why do I want to stop feeling uncomfortable?!?! I found myself asking all of these same questions when I first saw his hand-in-the-mouth icon. When he showed us the icon of the tongue sticking out with a fork in it, I got really uncomfortable, yet I couldn’t look away. I kept imagining that the icon was me, that that was my tongue, that it would hurt a lot, that my tongue was now starting to hurt because my mind couldn’t get this image of  a sharp metal fork piercing my precious tongue like it was a piece of meat at the dinner table. How disgusting and uncomfortable and insanely brilliant all at once. I couldn’t look away. I wanted more!

Okay, so as if I wasn’t uncomfortable before, the animation of the body fluids really put my discomfort level over the edge. “Is it even possible for me to feel this uncomfortable? Why would anyone ever want to feel this uncomfortable? Is it even healthy? Will my brain implode? Should I be worried?” These were all the thoughts running through my head. And then, with the seeming flip of the switch, I discovered my answer: discomfort means you’re growing. So I watched that bodily fluids video, with every drop, ker-plunk, or fluidly spray, whole-heartedley convinced I was in the process of growing, and expanding on my notions of visual culture, discomfort, chaos, simplicity, and what they all meant together. And what I found was that I, indeed, was growing. I was expanding on all these ideas that had once held such, limited, un-challenging, and unsatisfying ideas of culture, art, and life. I’ve never felt so nauseated, intrigued, overwhelmed, and confused at the same time. But I’ve never felt so satisfied.

When Salter presented us with his styro-foam robots it was a sealed deal: this guy is brilliant in every sense of the word, and uses literal garbage to create something so beautiful, honest, and yet completely overwhelming all at the same time. I think it was at the Rice Gallery where Salter constructed one of his insane robots out of styro-foam, but instead of it standing 30 feet tall, as others had in the past, this one was crouched in the room, sitting on the floor with its knees bent. I thought this was a wonderful representation of what Salter was all about: taking some symbol or icon (in this case, the giant standing robots) and changing the form ever so slightly, so that an icon that you knew was still recognizable but in its new environment [the robot] takes on a different meaning. What were once intimidating, overwhelmingly large styro-foam structures standing tall in large spaces, had now been transformed into a more approachable, accessible, even gentle-looking robot. The impact and the meaning changed in an instant for me when I saw it. To what exactly the impact and meaning is to me, I’m still fairly uncertain. But I think that’s okay. And I actually think that’s the point of all of Salter’s work. To not get it, to not understand its meaning in its entirety, to have the “WTF?!?” moment, and to recognize that it has had an impact on you, whatever that may be, and to embrace the impact and discomfort that it possesses.

Scout McCloud and the concept of an icon and the confusion and complexities surrounding it all took a lot for my brain to wrap around it all. What I really got out of McCloud’s cartoon is that symbols and icons are so much more abstract and complex than we even realize, and yet they are considered so “normal” in our culture.  The “These are not separate moments” icon on page 26 blew my mind. But they are separate! At least that’s what my mind tells me, because his hat is on and then it’s off. How can those not be separate? The icons of science, language, and communication blew my mind as well. I’ve never, ever thought about letters as icons. Letters as language? Sure, you bet. But letters as icons? Never! How insanely simple yet completely uncomfortable it makes me feel when I think about the words I’m writing write now are actually are symbols or icons of their own, and yet I have no idea what the icons really mean. I just know that they go together to form a word, and then a sentence, and then, ultimately, an essay. I don’t know how or why they really go together, but they do. The idea of non-pictorial and pictorial images and fixed versus fluid meanings also intrigued me, as I’d never thought about symbols and icons in that way. McCloud says that an “M” or a peace sign will more or less always represent what it stands for, regardless of the shape/form it takes, because it is inherently an “M” or peace sign. The meaning is fixed. It won’t change. But pictorial images, such as drawing a face (as represented on page 28) can have a multitude of different meanings and representations depending on how it is drawn. I find it fascinating that until this point in my life, I’d never given much thought to this notion, and I’d never given much thought to how much symbols and icons are embedded so deeply into our every day lives that they become so normal and accepted, without challenge or confusion.

Chris Coleman provokes us. He owes us something! We want to know more! We want the bunny to take off his bunny suit and actually be the owner of the house hopping around in his backyard. We want the grass in the front yard to suddenly grow really tall and then engulf the house so it turns into one big ball of weeds. And then we want to Weed-Monster to overtake the neighborhood, leaving the nearby police station to save the day with a weed-whacker. We just want something! Anything! Same goes for the “Collusion” video. Three uncomfortable minutes of watching smoke billow in and out of a rooftop pipe. In and out. Out and in. In. Out. Back in. For three whole minutes. We want something to happen in his videos, but nothing does. Or does it? As seemingly “boring” videos in disguise, I think the thing to take away from it is this: Why do we feel an inherent need/entitlement to see something happen in his videos? Why can’t we just watch the video with no expectations of what’s to come? Why are we constantly waiting for something “better” or more exciting, the latest and greatest, if you will, to come along? Because we are so culturally conditioned to feel this way. We are bombarded with videos, television shows,  and ever-evolving technology that tells us faster is better, more is better, more is exciting and worthwhile, more, more, more. And the reality we face in Coleman’s videos is that there’s nothing going on. We can’t accept that someone would “waste” five minutes of our time with some dorky, dull, downright boring video. But why do we think it is it boring? And why do we think it isn’t  worth our time? Because it’s uncomfortable to sit through five minutes of watching an animated tree ruffle in the wind, and a little bunny or bird scoot by every now and again, that’s why. Because, as a culture, we don’t know how to embrace the discomfort, and we sure as hell don’t really know how to be alone for five minutes watching some video without a smidge of interaction from the other side of the screen. We have this need to be constantly stimulated with our environment and we engross ourselves in the latest technologies so that we don’t have to ask the tough questions, so that we don’t have to interact and think and do the work for ourselves. We want things to come easy to us. We want it handed to us on a silver platter, wrapped up neatly in an aesthetically pleasing package with no room for  confusion or discomfort. Through all this, what I mean to say is that Coleman’s works, especially the “My House is Not My House” series, challenges our notions of what it means to really be uncomfortable, and to be aware and fully conscious that you are doing so.

There is a clarity and a peacefulness about both Salter and Coleman’s work. They seek to find peace and truth through their works despite the chaos and visual overload of our culture. They challenge us. They make us uncomfortable. They bring the conscious to the forefront, kind of yanking it through all the visual junk of our culture, and bringing us to a more simple and concise, and yet ultimately much more uncomfortable place.  “What does it meaaaaaaaannnnnn???” I kept coming back to this question throughout Salter’s presentation, Coleman’s videos, and McCloud’s abstract cartoon explanations. And the questions never got any easier to answer. However, what did get easier was the discomfort. I began to find ease in the uncomfortable. I began to accept that the discomfort is a beautiful thing. That the discomfort causes me to look at my visual world, in all its icon-laden and symbol-filled glory, with a closer eye and a clearer conscience. That’s not to things got any easier, because they certainly did not. Instead, dare I say it, I embraced, even relished in the fact that the images where strange. I had no idea how to react or respond to them, and that was okay.  Because I was conscious of what I was seeing, and certainly hopeful that maybe I’d find some ease in the discomfort and strangeness of it all. And I did.

I think Michael Salter said it best: “The closer I look, the stranger it all becomes.”

 



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