On the overproduction of imagery in contemporary art and architecture. Everythingism, a response to the concept of content based lifestyles, where everything has become tokenized, recorded, made as fast-food, use-and-discard image and video for us to coonsoom. A lens with which to perceive the world less dogmatically and logically, but through a filter of a highly defined and personal sense, a system and rule of thought—a list of twelve rules to lay down for yourself when consuming content and choosing what to and what not to indulge.
And I quote, to start us up:
by:
William Blake
Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden'd air;
Hungry clouds swag the deep.
Once Meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along
The vale of death.
Roses are planted where thorns grow,
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees.
Then the Perilous path was planted :
And a river and a spring
On every cliff and tomb:
And on bleached bones
Red clay brought forth.
Til the villain left the paths of ease,
To walk in perilous paths and drive
The just man into barren climes.
Now the sneaking serpent walks
In mild humilty,
And the just man rages in the wilds
Where Lions roam.
Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden'd air.
Hungry clouds swag in the deep.
Plate 01 -
So its not perfect. It's not egalitarian, it's quite compliacted.''
- Stefan Simchowitz*, LA based art dealer // collector.*
''Basically, it's about buying and selling dreams. Simchowitz sells dreams, he's not buuying dreams. *gestures violently*, youu know. He's selling them.''
- Tarik Sadoumi, close affiliate of KIRACs Stefan and Kate, a Dutch painter, artist and social commentator.
You know, as a pimp, you have to create succsess stories. You have to get people laid for free...There has to be winners at the casinoes. You cannot do a casino with only losers.Thats not a good casino.
*-*Tarik Sadoumi,concerning Stefans role as 'artist' collector and relationship with artitst like Kour Pour and Oscar Murillo.
*Why do I read? *
*And why do I chose to read what I do? *
What do I not read, and which are the questions I am not asking?
1 - Coonsoom - to coonsoom. coonsoomer
A jaded consumerist, and a product of late stage capitalism cinematic and the Marvel and DC cinematic universe, who consumes content in a new, different way.
A skeptics framework with which to view the world and decided what is usefull and not so for the development of ones own personal aesthetic and design praxis - in whichever form it takes. Wheter it be film, writing, architecture or fine arts - The views of Everythingism is made so to seek through the muck and reach for the essence of the imagees we produce and show eachother- to imbue things with a proper meaning. One picture, not a series of one thousand pictures all kind-of-sort-of telling the same story. So how do we procede, and how do we strive for this sort of perception. I believe we should develop a scholastic system of thought, and in a very Dogma/Petersonesque way, let's lay down some rules, some 'benspæn'. But first, lets look at THE numbers.
Page 01:
Plate 01 - Sets the scene of the book, introducing the orincipal participants, the Angel (Reason) and the Devil (Imagination) uniting in the consumation of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, by William Blake, 1789. With an Introduction and Commentary by sir Geoffrey Keynes is published by Oxford University Press, London & New York, in association with The Trianon Press, Paris.
Plate 02 Digital Photos taken worldwide, InfoTrends.
Plate 03- Britney Spears while she still had her aura
photo source: https://slate.com/culture/2021/02/framing-britney-spears-gives-pass-to-free-britney.html
Plate 04- Britney after losing her aura to cameras
photo source: https://www.the-sun.com/entertainment/2279177/britney-spears-documentary-framing-shaved-head-meltdown/
Plate 05- Increasingly Steep and Frequent Peaks for Top 50 Twitter Hashtags, Image infographic taken from EurekaAlert! study by phD- students from the Technical University of Denmark.
Plate 06- Portrait of Stefan Simchowitz in his LA house.
Photo source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/magazine/the-art-worlds-patron-satan.html
Plate 07- If I was to draw a line, this journey started approximately 400km north of the equator, 2013. Stitched canvas, drawing, sculpture, film, copper sheets, beans, wood, plastics, steel pots, found objects.
Photo source: https://www.artfund.org/whats-on/exhibitions/2013/09/20/if-i-was-to-draw-a-line-this-journey-started-approximately-400km-north-of-the-equator
Plate 08- Untitled (Mango), 2012 - Oil paint, plastic and dirt on canvas. 185 x 184 x 2 in (470 x 467.4 x 5 cm) - Oscar Murillo, Columbian installation - artist and painter based in Los Angeles.
Photo source: https://rubellmuseum.org/110-exhibitions/oscar-murillo-work
Page 02
Here we are quoting publisher and introduction given by Sir Geoffrey Keynes.
' - As a boy of only fourteen he had, according to his own statements, already read, criticzised and rejected the conventional philosophers and their materialstic views of the meaning of human life. He had become, in fact, a mature thinker, while he had by patient experiment and practice evolved a methos of presenting his thoughts in the entirely original and attractive form of philosophical treatise as can be conceived. He had rejected from the start any thoughts of mass production such as is achieved by the ordinary printed page. Everything he producedherem in the form of poetry, philosophy or philosophical poetry was to take the form of an attractive work of art made entirely by his own hands without the help of the materialistic society by which he was surrounded. Blake was individualistic to the point of crankiness, but his integrity as an artist thereby ensured.'
So according to Keynes, this specimen--like our dear Lewerentz--this spectacular specimen, William Blake, who'd refuted modernism, empirical thought and science for what he calls the Devil's 'Imagination'. He chooses not the Heavenly picture of order and Gods' 'Reason' but this evil stand-alone with my ideas and design kind-of-go-getter early bird energy. A man who's brain I would have loved to pick. He sounds to me like a man of old Sigurd Lewerentz'4 and Donald Drapers category. Who carries himself and his work with pride and destinction, and who doesnt need any fucking help cus he has it, its allright - he's got it all himself. He seems the world through his own lens, not the philosophers of his time school of thoughtweve. No he refutes it, and imbues his poetry lyric and writing with one very much of his individual spirit and creation.
[^]: Sigurd Lewerentz - Sweden Flower Kiosk Malmö Eastern Cemetery, Malmö 1968 - 196 9ttp://www.archipicture.eu/Architekten/Sweden/Lewerentz%20Sigurd%20/Sigurd%20Lewerentz_Malmo%20Flower%20Kiosk%201.html
So..from this we've learned what? That William Blake writes and paints through his own lens, refuting others teachings - Speaking to a sharp sense of categorization of qualities in objects of the world, and of peoples character. Lynch said on set of a film:
''If you're in it for the money, we're done. I don't want to work with you''.
How now to relate this to our own development and intake of constant consumer content, how to set the blinders on the horse and run straightahead .by way to refute modern imagery and scholastics is to to like world renowned art film director and collaborator with the likes of Icelands' Björk and famed actors like Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Defoe. He says, and I quote.
'I have done my best in life - And I am very dissapointed with my efforts.'
Even someone like Von Trier can feel this about his own visionary work, then what chance do us mere peoples stand against the writers block that can be artistic drought and that against-the-wall feeling we all get sometimes. He chose to take a violent stance on his contemporaries, and swore to only consume old content, things whom with time has developed themselves as fine-grotto cheese and have earned the title of literary classic. This way he knows that what he chooses to read and write and listen to or watch has stood the test of time so to say, to quote our own dear __, How do we then preceed to try and do something similar - do we also abstain from modern culture and what Reynolds from Paul Thomas Anderson calls 'Chique'.
'Chique! They want chique, I'll have them hang drawn and quartored fucking chique. What the fuck does that even mean.'
- Reynolds, Paul Thomas Anderson 'Violet Thread'
These men of vision, William Blake, PTAs Reynolds, Von Trier . They separate themselves from the present and look back to our history - why? And if we do so ourselves, can we better understand the connection these people derive from this relation, and from there reach inwards to ourselves and see how this new gained knowledge can help us distinguish ourselves as designers in the 21th century. The modernist expression resolved itself after the war in central Europe, Germany Italy and France. It replaced a classisistic architecturedictators tradition and historicism was tainted by proxy through the propaganda of such dictators as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini - First now perhaps we can reconcile all the similarities modernism own its debts to in classical architecture - and finally look back and reconsidering the heavy, the monolithic and the religious and spiritually imbued edifices and pictures of renaissance and middle age architecture, all the way back to the holy Roman empire and ancient Greece.
Page 03
Photos, Photos Everywhere. By Stephen Heyman, July 29, 2015.
Plate 01: Digital Photos taken worldwide, InfoTrends.
Stephan Heyman: ''*Flash back to the glory days of film photography: 2000. That year, Kodak announced that consumers around the world had taken 80 billion photos, setting a new all-time record*. The explosion of digital photography has since rendered such statistics almost quaint. This year, according to the market research firm InfoTrends, global consumers will take more than one trillion digital photos.''
Heyman, expanding: ''The growth in the number of photos taken each year is exponential: It has nearly tripled since 2010 and is projected to grow to 1.3 trillion by 2017. The rapid proliferation of smart phones is mostly to blame. Seventy-five percent of all photos are now taken with some kind of phone, up from 40 percent in 2010. Full-fledged digital cameras now represent only 20 percent of the tally, and are expected to drop to just 13 percent by 2017, InfoTrends said.''
Page 03:
New research held by the University of Arakab has shown that the old belief of cameras ‘stealing souls’ to form pictures may not be entirely false after all.
Dr. Sresanathaswammy Venkataramananaan, Head of Paranormal Sciences at the Arakab University explains "The fact that the human mind and soul connect to create an aura has been well established since generations. This aura is sensitive to our moods, and in turn, to everything that connects to us. Cameras function by snatching all the available light of its subject and in the case of people and other living things, a part of their aura."'
Placeholder photo for Dr. Venkataramananaan, who refuses to be photographed
He adds "This is why people who are constantly photographed, end up living empty and aimless lives."
Dr. Venkataramananaan points out that this may be the reason behind the dissatisfied and shallow behavior that celebrities are infamous for. The new research uses famous personalities like Britney Spears, Lindsey Lohan, and Nicole Ritchie as case studies, which highlights the drop in their personal and professional lives soon after they started getting photographed ‘more than the recommended average’. Example:
*Plate 02:* Britney Spears while she still had her aura,
Photo source: https://slate.com/culture/2021/02/framing-britney-spears-gives-pass-to-free-britney.html
*Plate 03:* Britney after losing her aura to cameras
Dr. Venkataramananaan concludes by stating “The aura needs time to heal. If you continue to get photographed after completely losing your aura, the camera will take a toll on your soul next.”
The University of Arakab is currently working on a 'Gaia Refill Filter' (GRF) for cameras that should hopefully reduce the effects of soul snatching cameras.
This is all of course a little suspect and I don't believe is based in peer-reviewed phD- research, still interesting, and worthy of further investigation as it looks into what the 'long-term' effects of the mass-proliferation of imagery has on us and our society. As enough time hasn't gone for us to truly know the reprocussions our lifestyles have on our psyche; What we do know is our way of life is starting to have studyable effects on us.
Abundance of information narrows our collective attention span, peer-reviewed publication, Technical University of Denmark, 15 april. 2019 - EurekaAlert! - EurekAlert! is a science news-release distribution platform, operated by the nonprofit American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), as a resource for journalists, public information officers (PIOs) and the public to communicate and engage with scientific research.
*Plate 04:* Increasingly Steep and Frequent Peaks for Top 50 Twitter Hashtags (Taken from the article in EurekaAlert! Infomatic from study made phD students Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, Bjarke Mørch Mønsted, Philipp Hövel, Sune Lehmann from the Technical University of Denmark).
Recent monopoly-coom1monopoly-coom1 research from phD-students from the Technical University of Denmark is proving that the, and I quote; from the abstract of the research paper.
'' The negative effects of social media and a hectic news cycle on our attention span has been an on-going discussion in recent years--but there's been a lack of empirical data supporting claims of a 'social acceleration'. A new study in Nature Communications finds that our collective attention span is indeed narrowing, and that this effect occurs - not only on social media - but also across diverse domains including books, web searches, movie popularity, and more.''
So in so many words, we don't read anymore - and the movies and content we consume is becoming increasingly fast paced and edited, commercials are louder, snappier and more in-your-face. Hollywood has finally reached its ultimate monopoly-coom'1 state of ultimate money-grabbiness and climax in the form of the never-ending money bag that is the Marvel and DC cinematic universeses of what is refered to as capeshit'2 on certain film/tv-forums on the internet. Filmdirector Scorsese (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull etc.) believes, and this is taken slightly out of context, but, that these films are 'not cinema', as compared to the cimena of someone like Bergman, Felini or Hitchcock.
[^]: To coom - A coomer is an internet meme based on an illustration of a scraggly man joked about being an excessive masturbator. [^]: Noun. capeshit (uncountable) (slang, vulgar, derogatory) Tiresome, derivative films about the exploits of superheroes.
What can we do to remedy this soon to be Black Mirroresuqe'3 reality of fat, dumb Wall-e type fatsoes or electrolyte-'water? what, you mean that stuff from the toilet??'- boneheads of the comedic dystopia of Mike Judge's 2006 film Idiocracy. How do we undumbify ourselves and start moving in a more betterer direction??
[^]: An anthology series exploring a twisted, high-tech multiverse where humanity's greatest innovations and darkest instincts collide, creator Charlie Brooker. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2085059/
- https://www.dictionary.com/e/memes/coomer/
2 - Noun. capeshit (uncountable) (slang, vulgar, derogatory) Tiresome, derivative films about the exploits of superheroes.
-[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/capeshit#:~:text=Noun,about%20the%20exploits%20of%20superheroes](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/capeshit#:~:text=Noun,about the exploits of superheroes).
Plate 05: Portrait of Stefan Simchowitz in his LA house.
La based, South-African art-dealer/collector Stefan Simchowitz has this to say on the production of images, and the role of the arrtist as part of the economic model the images they produce concerns themselves with, and how it can lift an artist into the 'one-percent'. In this dutch documentary made by KIRAC (Keeping.it.real.art.critics), we explore the world and world view of this man, Stefan Simchowitz.
Stefan: ''Simchowitz is semi obsessed with the art of Oscar Murillo. And he's not the only one. Within 4 years time, his paintings went from costing 2000 dollars to 300.000 dollars. So then you start to ask yourself: Why are people putting so much money on this artist. And why are they speculating with this kind of art? Why did this explode in such a way?''
So lets explore the work:
Plate 06: Installation view of 'If I was to draw a line, this journey started approximately 400km north of the equator'. 2013*,* by Oscar Murillo at the South London Gallery. Photo: Mark Blower. Image courtesy of Oscar Murillo and David Zwirner, New York/London, 2013. Stitched canvas, drawing, sculpture, film, copper sheets, beans, wood, plastics, steel pots, found objects*.*
Photo source: https://www.galleriesnow.net/shows/oscar-murillo-if-i-was-to-draw-a-line-this-journey-started-approximately-400km-north-of-the-equator/
*Describing the installation 'If I was to draw a line, this journey started approximately 400km north of the equator'. Seperating produce into seperate containers. Long wooden containers hold a myriad of beans, catagorised and separeted in the middle into black and white. In the middle, a plastic bucket and a pot, both filled with beans. All this is placed on canvas, thrown around on the floor of the gallery, dirty with mud, shit and paint - like a Pollock painting.
Stefan: ''You see a fascination with divisions - between certain catagories. So here you see a black catagory, and a white catagory. And they are sort of, split in the middle - seperate from each other. At the same time, these catagories are beans. So he's talking about the basic materials. The essence of life. And then you have these buckets, in which they are being contained and transported. And below it, you see canvasses. And on these canvasses, you see dirt and things that drop down on the bottom.
So, from this proces, that is a little like farming, you produce paintings.
Further, speaking about the untitled series of paintings on basic materials titled (mango), (coconut water), (milk), (pollo).
Stefan: You see that he's kind of *stumbling*... - Theses works are very simple and cheap to make, with basicc materials. And they associate with. *Accentuating speech, forward leaning* - Good food! Not Coca-cola, like Andy Warhol, but mango. You know?
*Plate 07:* Untitled (Mango), 2012 - Oil paint, plastic and dirt on canvas. 185 x 184 x 2 in (470 x 467.4 x 5 cm) - Oscar Murillo, Columbian installation - artist and painter based in Los Angeles.
Photo source: https://rubellmuseum.org/110-exhibitions/oscar-murillo-work
You don't drink Coca-cola, but you drink Coconut water. Milk, comes directly from the animal. Pollo, something you eat with your hands. You know, it's this kind of thing.
-Stefan, Speaking on Steafan ´Simco´Simchowitz and his relationship with artist Oscar Murillo.
link, with timestamp: https://youtu.be/dK5zh8ZTKO0?t=1416
And you know , Oscar Murillo - is using his background, coming from a poor Columbia...*making a point, gesturing* To sell to this sort of perverted higher class who feels alienated and decandent''.
''**...Within the one percent you've got a lower class, a middle class and an upper class. I think in the art world, that's what we deal with. We deal with that one percent. Wer're not dealing with, maybe we are dealing with the five percent - but you are dealing with a very specific...I mean Oscar
(referring to Columbian artist Oscar Murillo, and artist Stefan helped with his career and who now has cut all ties with Stefan after becoming an international star-artist represented by an even richer patron than Stefan. The two had a falling out, and Stefan is now litigating Oscar, and attempting to sell all his art, a stock sale wich could plummet Oscars prices and create a over-representation in the flow of his paintings on the secondary market. Stefan says he is not doing it out of spite, allegadly, but simply beccause he doesnt enjoy the pictures, as they were made by an untrusting individual with a sordid and untrusty character.)
*Continuing quote ''...is part of the one percent. Any artist who gains succssess in the system becomes immediately part of the one percent. Rirkrit, Douglas Gordon. (*Rirkrit Tiravanija - contemporary Thai artist based in New York, Douglas Gordon - Berlin based Scotthish installation artist and Turner prize winner. ) They participate. Immediately they have some value an success, they position has changed, they become part of this establishment.
So its not perfect. It's not egalitarian, it's quite compliacted.''
When ansked by the press, Oscar denied his friendship with Simco. And although this was awkward on a personal level, the idea that Oscar 'got out' and grew bigger than Simco's sphere is a also a beautiful dream for Simco to sell.
Artist Tariks Sadoumi's theory on the matter of the realtionship between Stefan Simchowitz and the artists he represents, or used to represent - like Oscar Murillo:
Tarik: ''Basically, it's about buying and selling dreams. Simchowitz sells dreams, he's not buuying dreams. *gestures violently*, youu know. He's selling them.''
Stefan: ''Don't you think he bought a dream from Oscar Murillio?''
Tarik, in response: ''No, I don't think so. He sold it. And I think he's still selling, by saying, that Oscar Murillo got out.
You know, as a pimp, you have to create succsess stories. You have to get people laid for free...There has to be winners at the casinoes. You cannot do a casino with only losers.Thats not a good casino. You have to create legends...And even if most of the legends go on drugs and fuck themselves over, you know, because of the lifestyle. So in a sense, he wants to create winners. Because he needs them. I think he's still selling at that point, I don't think he's buying.''
Tarik again: ''I think he's an artist, in a way (speaking about Simco) - I think he´s more of an artist than the artists he's selling. Basically....I think he's mor eintelligent also,, than most of them.''