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DEATH AS DECORATOR

2019 - Present 
Artworks + Publication 


 


Sterbewert WirtschaftSwerte 

Metal shelving, metal rotaing display cases, cast glass panels, bio-wax tchotchkeys, LED, and paintings
Work in Progress



Death as Decorator
Intro


aes·thet·ic/es
aesthetics


  1. a set of principles underlying and guiding the work of a particular artist or artistic movement

INTRODUCTION //

Death as Decorator (DAD) attempts to dissolve the hyper-marketization of contemporary making. Decorating with fragments of the eternal past, identity and material constructs— DAD performs an exorcism of aesthetics. Death as Decorator becomes less about death and more about the death of western ideologies and their aesthetics.These ideologies are rooted in agrarian patriarchal #moods of late capitalist progress. Ideological ghosts resurrect this decorative performance in the embalmed archive of predetermined aesthetics. The Wheel of Fortune orbits around this static energy while modern technology sends new pixilated life to its feed. Cannibals for information. The aesthetic past spews into the future, passing by the present at lightning speed, and yet the future is already dead and gone. Everything heats up. Burning up. The world is getting too thin - too hot. The human desire to consume prioritises the murky waters of capital before life itself. The body of the Empire sheds the weight of accountability; time debting into the future—if only it could lose those 20 pounds! Finally, it makes the world fit into the party dress, through an Instagram filter — who can tell the difference? The final party! A theme for celebration, who will make the party decorations?

This project started in October 2019, in the MFA studios of Goldsmiths University of London. I found myself up against the making. Trailing behind me, was my New York aesthetic - the disinterested haunting ghost of the precious hyper object, and it’s scene in tow. In london, I found myself defending the decorative and the making. With night sweats and studio visions I began to ask: Did western capitalism and patriarchal demands kill my father? Was it killing me? Was it influencing my practice? What WAS in fact creating my surfaces and my structures both physically and spiritually? Our school’s strikes, Brexit, and Trumpian-life played in the raging backdrop of my studio hallucinations. The school strikes cut off our resources to classes, to formal crits, and to making. The only space left open was our shared studios. This climate created a divisive academic stage, and in this survivalist setting I was able to grasp hands with Death as Decorator and hone in on the essentials. Channelling Death as Decorator became a guide. A ritual. An exorcism. A way out. A way in.

Death as Decorator arrived in my energy stream, both a warning and a mirror to the instability in making, producing, and consuming in the interstellar shopping mall of life. Death as Decorator at first was an abject symbol of ANTI consumption massaging my shoulders through the terror of a looming ecocide. This project reached a head culminating within a Global pandemic. In this setting, Death as Decorator became a healer, saving lives. A surgeon, covering something, cutting into something, hiding something, and protecting something. Death as Decorator shields me from the homogenized flatness by providing the tourniquet; a window, a barrier, a veil that when let loose dips in and out of every surface. Panicking, everything gets sterilized in the pandemic, the bodies stacked in the parking lot waiting for the freezer trucks next to little dolphin-shaped hand sanitizer on Amazon.com. Death as Decorator battles the horrific and mundane all mashed together on the front interface of the news. Trapped and Possessed.

I became lost in the great lake of the Universe and swam away with Death as Decorator. Western ideology is just a stone’s throw away from needing to be hospitalized, resuscitated, and resurrected yet again. This patriarchal scarcity economy is baptized and born again through the revolving door of radical individualism, a divisive yet sparkly tool of permanent indifference. Too HoT + Too THin. The decorations drip from the seams of the Empire’s hyper-productive cannibal weighted in the bogged-down-flesh of hyper-acceleration; a crystalized swan song. Time for margaritas! The mixing of the blender goes so fast, heated by the great expectations of sustainability; FIT into the party dress!

In this project of hybrid abstractions and informalities, I put forth the theory of Death as Decorator as a response to the potential of something that could be right but never will be. The acronym of Death as Decorator is DAD. There is no more will in DAD’s will-fed economy. Death as Decorator decorates DAD’s grave, a mirrored experience; they are one and the same. As his will is read out, the ghost of DAD rises to reveal that there is nothing left, all we have is each other. Death as Decorator
attempts to create an aesthetic of The Commons that is at most, self-aware, and at the very least always composting. In this essays I grab the hand of Death as Decorator and join this exorcism, moving and shaking with DAD. Feeling these convulsions, the spirit breaks into a feverish exorcism of the hyper-capital. Sweating it out. Pouring out of the pores. Dunking my body in the celestial lake to wash away the false progress, a promise no one could keep.

Death as Decorator swims with me in the hot springs of the Commons. This Commons is a mineral bath of shared suffering; shared pain; shared joy. Death as Decorator’s ideology of the Commons is an edible of socialism. A soothing aloe for the afterburn of neoliberalism’s’ rude awakening, the Empire’s hypnotic self-destructive blandness through the channel of its consumption. I pull the plug. Death as a Decorator becomes a performative action, a daily practice of throwing a wrench in the aesthetics of the Empire’s gaze. The Empire’s gaze—a Medusa who now looks in the mirror of her own conformity, feeling cheated she turns everything into stone. A stone that Death as Decorator carves into a story of abandonment. Dancing down the hallways of the institution and turning away from the progress of hyper-productivity found in the contemporary dialogue of making. This new making is really anti-making, leaving things left undone, and to rot. What new vines will grow over and out of these rituals of turning away?


Publication Designed by Ari Sawyers

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