For my final project I will destroy (with documentation) all my works from this semester and then erect online monuments to each one. What are the implications of this kind of project? For some reason, all of my recent considerations of art have begun with the premise that its value is tenuous and short lived. Certainly my art. I can’t hold an interest in it for long at all, and when you no longer care about what you’ve done it feels rather excessive to have the remainders, drained of spirit, still scattered around. These dull mirrors create a habitat of introspective anxiety. My work this semester has offered a snapshot of a peculiar and fleeting attitude toward the subjects I have become interested in; and each piece an episode of “destabilized” subjectivity, because I’ve neither approached nor left one with any political or philosophical conviction. These works often allegorize their own construction, incorporating disinterest, lack of artistic skill, limited resources and general brattiness toward all serious considerations, especially the gravity of world events. I’ve put a Hitler Mustache on Obama and labeled it Chaplin, in an attempt to enflame ambiguities and skirmishes of signification, to cross the wires, and did so with reference to events, persons and histories in which people most seek the clarity of moral and political conviction. I’ve made collage poems from an arbitrary system of operations between Google Earth and Google. This was perhaps a minor exploration of the possibility of spacial and linguistic contiguity between and within these two new technologies. Again this was done with a large dose of the arbitrary, but also some reckless glee about language and with a taste for its pure materiality. I won’t recall all the work now, but I hope I have made the spirit of my work (which people have been ambivalent, even suspicious toward) somewhat clear, no matter its contradictions. I don’t pretend, however, to master any interpretation of the work itself. My ultimate project is to extinguished these images and operations from their animated form and make them to be contained within their neat little monuments.

In thinking about monuments, I’ve arrived at one hypothesis in particular which interests me: that a monument acts as a surrogate for the emotional stress which humans would otherwise carry with themselves. Ourselves. Some monuments mark a single death, many deaths or mass deaths. It is historically necessary, in the case of events such as the Holocaust, Vietnam War, Rowanda, Cambodia, and all wars and genocides, that we remember and at the same time forget them: we must have a “memory for forgetfulness,” as Darwish put it. But even figurative deaths, like the death of the author, the death of God, and the death of an artwork influence thought and, therefore, events. Of course I’m citing global traumas, traumas of the human spirit, and by contrast the loss of my work is a  trifle. But the loss of my work is also my work. And these petit morts carry an alternative significance. What that is should remain open to interpretation. To be honest, the art is a bit of a nuisance too, so perhaps like those other events, the pleasure partaken in the acts of destruction is not estranged from the relief given by the monument. In fact the creation, destruction, and sanctification form an arc that I’d like one to also consider.