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An art show by Lorette C. Luzajic
Saturday, April 26, 2003
My work cannot be limited by cavalier academia, which inquires about such elusive
ideas as, “What is art?” Nor will my imagination be limited by mass
culture and its trends, here today, gone tomorrow, back next season, so last
season. My art spans the world of the intellect, the soul, the mystical, and
the shopping mall. Whatever I feel, wherever I find wonder, whatever I wonder,
I create.
I concede that these creations are clever, born
of a caustic wit and a need, never outgrown, to play, to play tricks,
to play with toys. They aren’t ideas formed in art school,
with serious labour applied to anatomical attention or to space
and light. They have a certain unschooled feeling about them, yet
my imagination is not uneducated. To the contrary, I devour voraciously
every aspect of as many cultures as I can digest. My education
began early; looking at dead insects, raising my hand fifty times
in Sunday School to ask questions no one could then or can now
answer. It continued in the Niagara Falls library, reading about
fish and poetry, about Michael Jackson, the occult, Indian tribes,
and other anthropologies. I am formally schooled in journalism,
but prefer the Enquirer to the Globe: it tells far more about human
nature.
Hence, celebrity finds its way into my wonder. The academics might
push away the importance of pop culture, striving for the higher
mind, yet I know what guerilla scholar Camille Paglia knows: that
academia has little place in ancient or modern anthropology, that
the clues and the cues for who and what we are begin with the commonplace.
Celebrity and shopping fills in a void where we have become spiritually
hollow. We seek to consume, in a desperate and almost ritualistic
manner, the fantasy that fame and wealth create. Celebrity fails
us, as religion did, but failing pantheons are all we have ever
had. We must question the failure of our gods, or our God, and of
ourselves, as they reflect too poignantly our own shortcomings.
If we have the ability to analyze, we can grow. If we lack this
ability, we can depend on artists and reporters and teachers to
show us the variety of signs, but there is no place where we can
find complete truth.
Andy Warhol was an artist who changed the face
of art completely and permanently. Whether we love or hate his
excessively simple works, and his often distasteful archeology,
we must see that his contribution to the changing of the imagination
was incredibly important. Andy didn’t live by any rules but those of his own neuroses-
the same rules by which we live our own lives! He pushed the boundaries
of what is art, because he didn’t care about the answer. He
bridged what we refused to link: mad with mundane, sacred with ordinary,
massive manufacturing with elitist craft. He was a creepy pervert
who loved speed and feet; he loved to observe the madness of freaks
and film it, with zero form applied. He believed in shopping and
barely felt the suicides of his friends; he wore sloppy shoes and
spoke so quietly no one could hear him. Much of his work was actually
made by others: without Photoshop, he couldn’t manufacture
his ideas fast enough. He had to manufacture, as if he were a company.
He couldn’t spend weeks on a piece when there were a thousand
pieces to be made, so he printed hundreds of replicas of his works
in hundreds of different shades. Repetition was the hallmark of
his work, yet the things he captured weren’t mundane. Monroe,
electric chairs, dollar signs are far more reflective of Western
religion than the exquisite and carefully rendered works of the
Renaissance.
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Inspired by the things
I love and the things I loathe about Andy Warhol meant using some
of the cues from my own imagination. Unlike Andy’s work, mine
might contain a commentary. My take on the electric chair comes
in the form of Canadian psycho Karla Homolka. She occupies a special
place in my personal archeology because I went to high school with
her, attended the memorial for her sister, whom none of us knew
then that she had killed. Using digital tools to colour my portrait
of her, I call the piece, “I Shop Therefore I Kill”,
demonstrating my belief that too much reverence for objects leads
to a narcissism special to the 21st century- the inability to differentiate
between object and human. Traditional religions, both monotheistic
and pagan, did not lose the way we have lost, the sacredness of
the thing: objects were ritualized in ways we have lost touch with
and seek to recover by buying more of them.
The desire to fill an emptiness created in part by our culture extends
to all sorts of addictions. The ancient shamanistic act of vision
questing is also a hunger in these times, but we use magical substances
to escape reality rather than to transcend the ordinary and recover
the real.
When we lose our sense of wonder, we cannot glean the satisfactions
that we require from our objects and from our consumption. We have
removed all of the spiritual and literal nutrients from our excavations.
We can recover the nourishment that our soul demands simply by stopping
to look into the madness of our creation, to see the way a star
glitters on the Cartier in the window, to chew the hell out of boring
old poets to get at the heart of what they were trying to say. The
classroom and the supermarket forget that this is how to edify the
masses, but there is no way around it. We must open our souls to
the life and decay around us, to play with portents as if this world
were a playground, to twist back the ideals sold to us into their
original, or into new shapes. We must go back to the way we discovered
things as children, and ask millions of questions, to tease the
living daylights out of our authorities, to revel and reveal, to
laugh and to sob and to wonder.
I might go shopping
Just to buy those things that are eluding me
Just to buy something from the mall
I feel so empty, so I might go shopping
Just to buy those things that will make me feel
Just to buy those things from the mall
-from Go to the Bank by James
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