Paredes frustradas

The new totality of the human, his new vital praxis, we can say that has been translated in this contemporary era into virtual nature: a modern “whole” that generates rationalities. In a modernity where generalized aesthetics predominate, where we have broken our own means of reception to give rise to the institutionalization of the avant-garde, what Peter Burger calls Neo-Avant-garde, where one is no longer an artist but a producer of a narrative tailored to the demands of consumer society, here, the only thing we can try is to bring back the political and critical character that a work of art can achieve, that work that was once an organizer of individual experiences. If somewhere we must attack, break and infringe, I believe it must be by dismantling this new nature and its new language: virtuality.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

On a technical level, my work does not present major complexities. The work is a 512x512 pixel canvas. You can see within the code of this generative image the plurality of quad() elements in different assigned gray values ​​and without any type of contours on these primitive figures. All this on a black background(). At the same time, there is a conditional structure that manipulates a text previously defined in the variable declaration that results in a constantly oscillating location due to the random() attribute, for as long as we do not decide to click on the canvas. If we do so, the condition is met and therefore the blendMode() attribute will be activated, which will conquer all the fragments of the work to alter their blending mode until the frames have just been printed on the canvas. A case that occurs due to the way the if – else conditional is constituted is that the first click we hold on the work we will be able to see its complete code, but we will not be able to do so again in the next ones because the fusion mode will be activated.

We will put the technical detail aside (don’t worry, it’s not going anywhere) to explain the aesthetic characteristic of the work. I think I can summarize my work on a visual level in the assembly of 3 elements. The spatiality represented by the black floor and walls, the chair that implores a shock effect, and the java script code of the work itself printing incessantly on the canvas. I could not say that there is an aesthetic inspiration in the pioneering artists of generative image since from the conceptual point of view the work imitates or inspires or tries to get closer to the production of an anti-artistic work.

This honesty provides the basis for discovering what I believe is my conceptual development of the work:

I start from the basis that Burger explains to us in “the avant-garde work of art” how the avant-garde movement is born from the rebellion against the institution of art. Here, Burger seeks to explain to us how, at an allegorical level, the work that falls within the parameters of the institution is the concept of “Organic Art”: a category of work that bases its structuralism on the syntagmatic, that is, on the objective level interpretation of living matter, the expression of a discourse with purpose. The only thing that the artistic technique of organic art will achieve is to cover the elements of a work to give it an appearance of naturalness that does not allow the work to stand out from the totality of the rational world as we know it.

The canvas is now digital. I define my space. This is where our art resides today. The natural is translated by a new logical-mathematical language that imitates every expression that we objectively indicate. We have given birth to a new totality, a new nature, where the field of vision is so wide that there is little room for subjectivities. Umberto Eco speaks in his book “Obra Abierta” of language as the basis of any other system of symbols, as the primary and essential phase: “language is really the very foundation of culture, related to language, all other symbol systems are accessories or derivatives.” Today, programming is our primal language, and if everything we can express today naturally depends on our previous knowledge of this language, then we will never see an inorganic work again, because our system of beliefs and rationalities has so little restriction that nothing can be brought back to the forefront. That is why I think that the evidence of the code as an aesthetic use of the work is just a small search to break down the production process of the work, inverting its facets and fragments, evidencing what Burger despises about the organic work, which is an attempt to disguise the artifice of the work, to allow me to give Eco’s hand in saying that each work is nothing more than an artifact that rests on language. Brea tells me: “Whoever wants to present themselves as anything other than a repeating chorus of a predetermined academicism, should invent a chorus less accommodating than that of the antithetical expression. End of the game for the Duchamp inheritance”, but as I know that as a good avant-garde he is only provoking me. But I also know that no matter how hard I try to understand the process, I will end up breaking it.

Where is the break in tradition? I now involve my chair. Not just any chair, my chair. My production process, my own language, my own limits, my own walls, where I try to appreciate my own subjective and individual universe is part of a larger whole as Eco mentions: “In every accent of a poet, in any creature of his fantasy, there are all the human destiny, all the hopes, all the illusions, the pains and the joys, the greatness and the human miseries, the entire drama of the real, which becomes and grows perpetually on itself, suffering and enjoying.” Yes Burger says that the mode The reception of the inorganic work must be based on the shock of the enigmatic or surprising elements of a work, at this point I feel like I am having lunch in my own electric chair, and there is a taste of nothing in my mouth.

That’s what I want “Frustrated Walls” to be about, but in the middle I got frustrated.

Artistic references: ready-made movement, René Magritte, JavaScript language.

Literature

BURGER, Peter. (1974). “La obra de arte vanguardista”

BREA, José Luis. (2008). “Redefinición de las practicas artisticas”

ECO , Umberto. (1962). “Obra abierta”