Hello friends,
I will be presenting some collaborative work I did with my friend Mike, from 2007-2010.
From the class readings, we can probably use all of these, so go crazy: Foster - “The Return of the Real”, Fredric Jameson - “Post-Modernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, Deleuze - everything, and Beth Coleman -“Race and Technology”
Please consider: these 20 pieces + installation
Please also read: Walter Truett Anderson, “Democracy’s Dilemma”
Some background on our work can be found here and here.
A note on the use of Christian symbolism:
We focus a lot on dominant western religions’ insistence on the inaccessibility of “god” (the sacred) vs the mystical traditions who all say, “No, dude. It is accessible. We don’t need a middle man. It’s in you”. For us, the sacred/spiritual is a philosophy, practice, and experience that has more to do with realizing one’s potential, depth of forgiveness, compassion, empathy, ethical responsibility, and respect for all life, than it does with the parts of those teachings that get scrutinized instead, because they don’t fit into the category of the “rational”, and because they have been exploited to an overwhelming degree to cause harm and maintain certain structures and systems of control within the dominant cultures where these ideas thrive (i.e. all of them!). While we are highly critical of this abuse, and make plenty of reference to it, our use of Christian symbolism is both a commentary on its over-saturation and perversion, while at the same time speaking to the ideas of salvation and self-realization as intended by those core teachings of the NT that make more difficult requests of us, reaching for levels of compassion and integrity for ourselves and our fellow human beings far beyond what the previous OT model would have ever considered — cause when it all comes down to it, if you take away all the stories/myths of creation/afterlife, what we are left with is a system of values that is very real, very human, and very much in trouble. This current stage of capitalism is in part, the manifestation of all those things distorted, repressed, denied, coming to this cataclysmic point of crisis, unraveling, and indeterminacy. What compels us to make this work, and leave it open-ended is precisely this breadth of possibility, both realized and unrealized…
(read into it what you will)
p.s. The Last Suppers are a nod to Andy Warhol, who was Catholic, btw. Some people have interpreted these pieces as “mocking” or “degradations”, but we love them, truly. We also entertain the possibility that the communion wafer was most likely a psychedelic substance (soma) - the dilated pupils (googly eyes) can be read in this way.