From the time that I emerged as an artist in the late 1980’s to the present, I’ve witnessed a tectonic shift in collective consciousness from somatic experience and tactile intelligence to its unmitigated mediation and usurpation by a digital device. This relentless leveling of terrain is not only occurring on the internalized cognitive level, but literally all around us in the built environment as gentrification, the by-product of the dominance of tech, spreads across city after city. Zones of creativity, non-conformity and independent thinking are in peril as we lose both our ability to live without digital intervention and the fringe: unenclosed margins where creativity and social action germinate and thrive in real space.
Needless to say, I’m rebellious, and I refuse to give up my commitment to slow looking, overlay, deep time, simultaneity in meaning, humility and universality, in that I seek points of linkage that many different people can enter rather than making statements about my singular identity.
At the onset of my career, I was inspired by geological time, creating heavily impastoed paintings that existed in space or leaned against the wall, echoing topography and seismic strata, and hovering between the classifications of painting and sculpture. Much of this was because my studio was on the beach in the Marin Headlands of San Francisco and the natural rhythms and ancient environment pulsing outside my window penetrated my thoughts and movements as I worked.
Then I moved to New York City, one month before 911. I lived less than a mile from ground zero and witnessed people jumping from the towers with my bare eyes. In the days that followed, ash and debris fell like the aftermath of a volcanic explosion, blanketing the streets in Lower Manhattan with layers of urban silt. Shortly after, as I worked in my studio in Brooklyn, tiny bits of street detritus and fragments mined from old typewriters and adding machines started to creep into the layers of paint. It was then that the idea of palimpsestual text, archeological middens, the compression of temporal sequence and embossed deposits of forces far greater than human existence saturated my imagination.
From then on, my work contained remnants of analog technology and engineering, partly from the simple and visceral fact that I think they’re beautiful and partly from the conceptual observation that they share many of the primal shapes found in early forms of writing world-wide.
Also at that time, I was thinking about the Fertile Crescent, where the Tigris and Euphrates meet, writing is believed to have originated and we had just gone to war, bombing the origin of civilization on a regular basis. The Euphrates is also the source of one of the world’s primary origin myths that involves a flood.
Then I read a news story that featured the testimonials of a handful of survivors from the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, which was the largest and most devastating on record. In it a man described a monumental wall of water that shattered his village within seconds and swept him and everything around him into its rapids that traveled inland for miles until it finally washed out into deposits of debris and mud. Miraculously, he emerged intact and lived to tell the story. Flashing into my mind was a palimpsest of biblical proportions, a kind of sacred, indecipherable text that merged the corporeal and the symbolic in one breath.It also reminded me of tossing entrails or bones to foretell.
That’s when I started the 14’ foot wide triptych entitled Nineveh, the ancient Assyrian city in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, which housed the largest library of cuneiform tablets in the empire and is still being excavated to this day. In my mind it’s a point of nexus, language and topography, word and flesh overlap. It’s now at the entrance of the Stanford Library of Law.
What began to happen was the thick layers of paint began to recede, revealing more and more of the text inscribed with objects and their contours that lay beneath, in the way the inlay of debris emerged as the water receded for the tsunami surviver. And over the next ten years, the topographical nature of my work, as if you were looking down on an archeological dig from a bird’s eye view gradually gave way to a nose dive into the deluge, to looking up beneath the water, or a molecular immersion in the a floating midden, conjuring the tsunami survivor’s perspective.
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“This washing away of physical presence echos the transformation of many technologies from the physical realm of mechanics into the digital world of electrons. Now, at the dawn of Artificial Intelligence Age, humanity itself is feeling the land wash away beneath its feet in much the same way, unmoored by the technologies it has created for itself.”
Greg Flood from the catalogue for “Contemporary Asian-American Abstraction”.
Greg’s reading of my current work echos my own thoughts: we’re now dealing with AI which mines data much in the way archeologists dig down through strata. They’re both middens, but the difference is that AI is generated by a machine, based on second-hand and at times, manipulated information, with no connection to context, meaning or accountability.
My work has always been an incantation calling out to the deepest and most primal pattern within a pattern that human kind will never see or fully understand because it is a part of it. Yet over the past three decades, as I have witnessed digital technology flood into almost every part of our lives and mental processes, the incantation has taken on tones of mourning. We are loosing our ability to think, interact, and ground ourselves on our own terms. It’s a loss of experiential, emotional, visual and visceral intelligence. After almost four decades of work, I have come to realize that it has always been about the midden, a kind of collective mortality that we can try to read and resounds back to us so that we can understand ourselves and perhaps eachother just a little bit better while we’re still here.
From Ben Davis - Art in the After-Culture-Capitalist Crisis & Cultural Strategy
“Aesthetic experience is a mixture of formal invention and social meaning, and the better AI gets at automating visual interest and narrative novelty, the more directly it will force into relief the question of what is meaningful in our aesthetic worlds. This includes the question of why our cultural energy is invested in technology that locks people ever more inside their customized taste bubbles at a historical moment when we need to be actively working toward a collective vision.
It is neither wishful thinking nor metaphysical delusion to say that there are aspects of artistic experience that are not amenable to simulation of a kind now insinuating itself into the cracks of our creative life, or that we are at risk of a surrender of those aspects if they are neglected. You can respect the wonders of technology and still believe that.
Do you know what the most popular type of art is-a genre so broadly loved that it is collected utterly apart from any market value or popular acclaim? Art made by children. Before art is visually splendid, before it is even articulate, it is valued as a connection to a consciousness in formation. It is preserved as a symbol of the care taken for that consciousness.”