Of Failed Interviews, Failed Landscapes, Die Antwoord and Nostalgia–We live in an era of terrible beauty and pop conceptualism.

 Of Failed Interviews, Failed Landscapes, Die Antwoord and Nostalgia–We live in an era of terrible beauty and pop conceptualism.

By xavier_lopez_jr  

Originally posted on July 1, 2014 | By xavier_lopez_jr

Sometimes interviews just go completely wrong, something gets said, misinterpreted or misheard, either the artist is in a foul disposition or as in the case with this one that I had not too long ago–the artist, in this case–me–was just in a wacky mood and probably shouldn’t have agreed to an interview at all that day.

Partially, I think it was a combination of me being in a smart-assed state-of-mind and partially it had to do with the fact that for awhile before and after the Sasquatch concert, where-in I and several local artists including Ryan Henry Ward, Andy Miller, TNGLR, the amazing Jonathan Wakuda, Hera Won, Blink, Curt Ashby, Sarah Jorgenson, Jack Shersky, Jan, Melissa Crosetto, Brandy Tomlin (basically, the regular gang!) and tons of other undercover artists  painted alongside live bands –including one Die Antwoord–I couldn’t think about anything except how amazing this South African, Zef-cum-hip hop-meets performance art outfit was and how everything seemed to be connected to them and they to everything else.

 

I decided to post the interview here, since the person who interviewed me made it quite clear that they weren’t going to ever use it–and I really think that there is a lot of good stuff in there. In any event, the interview really did start out, quite innocently enough!

Name withheld to protect the innocent:  Hey, Xavier, it’s Name withheld to protect the innocent, the Blankety Blank Blank who was asking you about doing an interview before. Sorry about never getting back to you on that, I’ve been pretty super busy lately.

Xavier:  Do you still want to do the interview?

Name withheld:  That’d be cool, yeah!  If you have the time!

Xavier: Want to do it now?

Name withheld: Sure!

When did you first start selling your paintings & stuff for money?  IDK, if I phrased that right, but, like, getting paid for art and stuff?

Xavier:  Any minute now, actually.

No, not really.  But I do want to say that for me, none of this, none of it has ever really been about making money. Honestly, I feel as though as soon as someone makes the artwork primarily about selling, that, that is the moment that they begin pandering to their audience and begin to lose sight of why they make art in the first place.

Name withheld:  But, what if you’re just increasing your productivity and focusing on making even more art because you don’t have much of any other way to support yourself and know that your art sells, so you go ahead and try to make more of it?  You don’t alter it in any way shape or form to make it more sell-able, you just make more of it.  Would you say that’s still pandering to your audience?

Xavier:  Essentially, all I’m saying is that selling is not my primary motivation, but rather experimentation and stretching the boundaries of what art is, is more of what I’m interested in.

Name withheld:   Would you like a career doing art for a living, or do you feel like that’d take away from your art in some way?

Xavier:  Hell, yes–I’d love to be able to live off my art!  Survival is a different matter all together– and lots of artists make amazing art during the periods in which they are hungriest.  I would love a career in balance, in which I can express myself and the way that I look at the world. Ultimately, it’s complicated.

Name withheld:  You can elaborate on that if you want!

Xavier:  And still make a living.

I will, I guess what I am saying with this is that creating art to sell leads to a kind of  plastination of art and leads to what I call the “Pretty Vacant“.  Which  is that we are getting–a screen.  A glossy covering that keeps us from seeing the empty center.

Do you know Die Antwoord?

Name withheld:   Sort of, yeah.  I had an ex who was a total hardcore fan of theirs.

Xavier:  I think that they are very important, that they give us a glimpse into the Pretty Vacant that, rather than being merely hollow gives us a glimpse into the void.

Name withheld:   I heard the “Fatty Boom Boom” song by them and really liked the visuals in the video but when I looked at the lyrics I really didn’t see much substance to their songs.  It sort of felt like just another diss track you’d see some other group put out, except with really creative instrumentation and stuff.

I haven’t listened to too much of their stuff, though, and if there’s an album or song that you feel especially reflects your view of them, I’d love for you to mention it.

Xavier:  I think that the problem with art today is that it has become very conservative and nostalgic for the simplicity and philosophies of earlier ages.  Groups like the Re-Raphaelites are desperately looking for and mining past glories, while claiming to be moving forward.  I think that it is a sign that art is going through a period of artistic “ideological fatigue” wherein it can’t recognize itself–that is why art has become so conservative, so simple and so nostalgic.  I see in Die Antwoord a way out of that.

Name withheld:   Did I just “diss” your favorite band.

Xavier:  No, I hate Die Antwoord and can’t stand listening to them.  The way that I see it, Die Antwoord is not about complex music or even about music in any sort of a traditional sense.

Name withheld:   Oh!?!

Xavier:  You need to think of them not as a band–not in any meaningful, traditional way.  The music they make is merely a vehicle by which they infect their victims with the emptiness of the void–or perhaps it is a failed attempt at inoculating against the terror of the void–of that I am not yet certain.  If that is the case, then in the end it will prove to be just as naive and fruitless as the attempts to deal with the “ideological fatigue” of this age–but then again it is all created by humans and that may prove to be the answer in and of itself.

The work they make taken as a whole, however, made by the band; by DJ Hi-Tek and especially Roger Ballen is, at once beautiful, terrible, horrible, tantalizing and wonderful–it is like Thanatos–both repulsive and impossibly compelling.  It is the artistic promise of the void–that which is by definition the most empty space and which is ultimately filled only with meaning.

Whether this is actually possible or not–they attempt to make art that is both filled with and completely devoid of any nostalgia.  And by "filled with nostalgia"–I mean the most heartfelt desire for a return to an infantile state of being–a personal nostalgia.

They succeed in creating art that has been made by and for the soulless.

Name withheld:   “Art made for the soulless.” I like that, it sounds really damned cool.

Xavier:  Does it? It is art that has been tailor-made for what we have become and what we are becoming.

Not art for who we have been.

Name withheld:  What have we become?  Dude you’re talking about them like they’re predatory aliens from another dimension or something.

Xavier:  Exactly, that is what art is becoming it is predatory, viral; it is turning on its hosts.

Us.

Let’s back up for a moment.

Name withheld:   Ok.

Xavier:  Awhile back, I lived in Germany for a year.  It was very interesting.  I had a couple of art shows there and I made many friends there as well.  The Germans are the kindest, sweetest people–especially the youth–at least they were when I was there.  I hope that they have not been poisoned like Eastern Europe has.

However, my friend’s hearts were broken when I told them that, as Americans, often we synechdochically use the word “German” to mean Nazi in most cases.  Especially in the movies.

The Germans are a beautiful people, but they were broken by their own history.  Something that history tends to repeat. Their psyches were shattered and now they suffer from amazing self-hatred and a collective embarrassment for what they cannot escape as being part of them. Part of their story.  Part of their skin.

There are no flags in Germany, very little examples of patriotism-especially on the boorish level that we might be used to.

One day, I was on the bus and this old guy wanted to apologize to me personally for what the Nazis did.  It was a very uncomfortable experience.  It was amazingly poignant and by the time I was getting off the bus, I realized that he wanted me to absolve him of the guilt of a child who had seen the Nazis as heroes.  Just as we are now taught as children to admire our policing agencies–as agents of order.  This now, grandfather was forced to view the gypsies, Jews and queers as agents of decay, as the very rats that they had been told to see them as.

In Germany, this constant self-loathing is everywhere, but it is very subtle and no one ever really acknowledges it, not to each other, not in the open–perhaps to strangers, but in a very real way as a nation they have lost their sense of identity as purely good human beings.  Initially, this was forced upon them from without, but ultimately it has become a part of them, but this happened long enough ago that now, many of the kids are running around in Nazi bike gangs.  I saw those as well, in Frankfurt.  They are kind of scary.

Borrowing a term, though not the same idea–from Friedrich Nietzsche, this move toward agency can be seen as being “Beyond Good and Evil.”  It just is.  In a way that is neither good nor evil–they have begun to take that anger and self-loathing and have started to make something out of it.

In a similar way, Die Antwoord are from South Africa…

Name withheld:  I fail to see what you’re trying to communicate.

Xavier:  Good, that means its complex enough not to be boring.  Do you know what South Africa is known for?

Name withheld:  Suckyness?  Apartheid?

Xavier:  Exactly! It is known for being the last place on this planet in which humans openly enslaved humans and in which this was culturally and civically allowed and encouraged.

Name withheld:   Continue, please!

Xavier:  In the lifetimes of these artists (the artists of Die Antwoord) they have witnessed humans doing the most horrible atrocities–under the guise of society.  They know how cheap and meaningless life is or can be.  They understand in a way that we are only beginning to get a glimpse of–just how easily money trumps life.

The baby talk they spew is deceptive of the most vile, evil, shit that they are trying to warn us all about.

The simplism of their form is like standup comedy.  It is like the bright, multicolored blotters that acid used to come on.  A pretty, simple, wrapping for something that takes away your innocence and imparts knowledge of the shape of the universe and gives you a taste of the darkest and brightest candy-colored parts of your mind.

That is why I believe that Die Antwoord is so important–they are the best example of what is created after we as humanity have lost our souls and after we have lost our faith in everything– and believe me when I tell you that as a collective species–we have very definitely lost our souls.  I thought it would have to wait until humanity realized that the universe was approaching heat death, for us to realize this–but at least in one way, we are a rather bright collection of animals.

But, I will say this.  That because we are humans–and because everything we do and say is always deconstructed and creates a universe in which its opposite is true–that Die Antwoord is also a band that is equally about hope.  I know it sounds like a contradiction and, in fact, it is–but it is just as true.

Name withheld:   “Here we go girl, don’t start chickening out You look real cute with my d*ck in your mouth.

B*tch you make a Ninja wanna f*ck, b*tch, you make a Ninja wanna f*ck you make a Ninja wanna f*ck…

I think I know what he’s saying.

Xavier:  Yes, you’ll find it in Balzac!

The fact that we as humans need to have things wrapped in shiny, plastic is why I also believe that something like Pop is the most perfect medium for conveying the things that art needs to say in this day and age.  It, like the obscene, baby talk rap lyrics–it is the perfect form for communicating the nature of the void.  In baby talk expletives and candy-coated color-fields.  To answer your earlier question, though–yes, artists need to live–but artists also really need to be able to convey their meaning–they are all blind men and women describing an elephant view of the universe.

I think that things evolve–different things make sense in different eras–in the era of the Pre-Raphaelites (which in itself was a conservative reaction [alors--you now have groups of artists seeking inspiration from a movement that was already retrospective in its original incarnation]) or the Mannerists, etc. the “Pretty Vacant” was invisible (just as there are forces that are at work now, that we can’t see, because the connections are not yet visible)–it was there, but could not be seen–meaning then was conveyed in purely narrative forms and by way of symbolism–but as happens in any system–entropy increases and things that once did–no longer make sense.  We are beyond mere narrative; we are beyond mere representation, we are in an era of terrible beauty and pop conceptualism.

We live in an age of unprecedented change–things are dying off every day–not making it to the next era.

8-tracks, Xerox paper, the clicking sound of movie projectors, film-strips, forty-fives.

If you see any of these it is because nostalgic forces are in play.

Last night I painted a landscape, it was a very nice landscape.  But, I wanted it to be more–I decided that it just didn’t have the gravitas that I wanted it to.  So I decided to rectify that and I gave it a title that conjured up images of not just “sturm” but also the mightiest “drang” that anyone has ever experienced!  In words, I threw in allusions to Herakles and Ovid, I forced everyone who read the title-card of this piece to ponder their own mortality and question the meaning of not just their own, but everyone’s existence.  However, despite all of the poesy of my heroic words, despite the finest ink and most expensive acid-free paper, ultimately, what I had created was really just a fucking landscape.  A very lovely landscape.  But a landscape all the same.

We live in an age of unprecedented change and there are nostalgic forces in play.

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