a montage of torment
This is more of an ill-informed pseudo-philosophical ramble than an academic piece of writing, but being so isolated from actual human contact has been ruining my mind and I losing my grasp on the necessity of proper academic practice. It feels like just another arbitrary code of behaviour at this point. This work is a documentation of a series of processes. I have been exploring the materiality of two different objects, and how their materiality interacts with their original and oppositional contexts, which includes their physical location and additionally their utility or hierarchical ranking as an object – useful, or discarded.
One of the things I enjoy about art is considering what gives it value. It is undeniable that the aesthetic qualities of art play a part in its value, even in cases where the art aims to deliberately subvert and challenge traditional ideals of aesthetics. One of the things I particularly appreciate is the necessity of a sort of frothy jargon, a necessity to justify your creation with convincing reasoning. The value of art is widely accepted as subjective, but not necessarily recognised that it is transient, depending on context, and how well you have personally been convinced of the artworks value. I also enjoy the notion of a necessity for an underlying meaning, as if a work of art is of less value if it is to be enjoyed rather than to be a lense through which we may ponder other incorporeal intricacies.
The work aims to make comment on the value of art as that relates to its intended meaning. The outcome of my processes has resulted in an entirely unchanged metal disk and a broken shaving razor, which were both found objects. They have endured cyclical processes that are not evident in the final objects – these processes, and intended meaning, are invisible. The physical processes are evidenced only with the video, and the intended meaning is only evident in the framework of thinking I am communicating through text. The juxtaposition of the wordless film with this unnecessarily word heavy justification also aims to further highlight the absurdity of the context in which art exists. It is becoming increasingly apparent to me that humans are trying very hard to pretend we are not all just hairless monkeys, and we don’t know what is going on.
