“35 Days” is a digital collage and poem, based on thirty five drawings created between January and December of 2020. I made these colored pencil works during the pandemic, living in itinerant locations. Even in the first drawing (row 2, column 5), there is indication of what was to come. These drawings are a map of a time of strange flowering, and of escape, collapse, techne, revolt, wilderness, spirit and family.
35 Days is also an homage to Beeple’s famed work “The First 5000 Days.” It has the same dimensions (21,069 by 21,069 pixels), and a similar construction. I made this digital collage in order to dialog with that work, and to embody my own personal reflection of it.
Beeple is a remarkable artist, for many reasons, and within his work “The First 5000 Days” is very strange. Beeple’s artistry has become well respected for its digital craft and ability to conjure deft illustrations of our times, but 5,000 Days is mostly a conceptual work. The piece leaves aside his curated pictorial spaces for, instead, a triumphant monument to Beeple’s overall practice. It is a build up of images so vast as to become a blur in a difficult to access grid. It is a manifestation of Beeple’s daily offerings to his public, a record of performance. The work reminds me, in equal share, of On Kawara’s practice, such as his date paintings, and various memorials to death, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. But, it is neither of those things, not as immanent or direct as they are, for it is saturated, to a state of static, with hermeneutic meaning. The 5,000 images, to be sure, weave a text, one seldom read (though perhaps in the Metaverse it will be), but overflowing with allegory, cultural iconography, parodic commentary and future myth.
It is also inseparable from social media practice at large, a shadow which nearly every artist lives within these days. In Jerry Saltz’ homage work “The First 10000”, this is the aspect of Beeple that is lampooned. Jerry has a clownish side to him, so its tough to tell when he is larping, but to take his work at face value it seems that it correlates social media agency tightly with artistic practice, as though they are the same. It is difficult to know if this is a critical stance for Saltz, as his own personae and professional practice is highly tuned to social media output, and yet I believe it must be, for he has also been a maestro of deeply considering artworks as valid markers in their own right, over his career. It is a truism, for sure, that our technologies engender much of our creative output, but I tend to want to look beyond the medium to sense an artist’s search for personal truth. Perhaps it is one of the reasons I like NFTs — they are not like social media (more on that another time).
My own “35 Days” is demure in relation to either of these moguls’ creations. Still, I relate to Beeple and to Saltz. I understand the drive to dedicate one’s life to cataloging meaning, plumbing the depths of the quiescent as an artist or a critic is, to me, the highest practice. The true meat of the work is something that almost can’t be seen, a hidden web of lexical notations that can never be fully accessed. In creating 35 days, I decided to undergo a working of poetics, to elaborate this aspect as best as I could. At the lower periphery of the piece is a long poem, created ekphrastically for the series. I think it is the artwork’s most important detail, for it catalogs the hidden, interior of the work, as best as I can understand it, presenting a kind of index or Rosetta Stone.
I will post the poem at the end of this text, for it is hard to read otherwise, unless the full 444 million pixel image is retrieved from IPFS. My relationship to poetry is a strange one, and I don’t pretend to be a master of the craft. Recently, I’ve been falling back on more classical sentiments, rhyming, metered verse... Its a little cringe even to me, but I believe it is what I have to do.
I’m not sure what else to mention as I post this article, though I desire to say more. I suppose something about the NFT would make some sense.
By putting 35 days on the blockchain it may become, I hope, a lingering phenomenon, one which can be sited as a counterpoint and companion to the works of Saltz and Beeple. I hope that it can join those works to anchor them, contextually, the human. I hope it can help indicate the nature of artistic dedication along with their own, looking within its folds, examining its inner, sometimes embarrassing details. Mike Kelly once noted that artists love their own shit, but yet his life’s work was an endeavor of deep introspection. It is that which I believe manifests great artwork, and the potency of Beeple or Saltz’ output is essentially that, not their marathon bravado or their social media activation, but their ability to channel that which is hidden. We are all dreamers, looking into the ether to find something lost to the waking world. Monuments to that practice are admirable, though it is their lower utterances which should be valued.
35 Days will be minted on Foundation soon,
Poem:
Oh dancing child on glass streets, a fungal spore grants your release, drinking nectar from the vine, decapitated on its climb, the self is fractured out of myth and reclaims arbors for the trip that isolates what we should be, the woven cord or cyclopes.
A raft we made to isolate, the Strident one of lurid fate, carves out of shell a room to be, perched in thrones of agony. The Strident one carries the spore, a lover for the minotaur, the waterfall makes time of speech, we climb to find the angel’s seat.
We bathe to listen to the eels, who tell a tale of cyborg feels, and huddle in our shell again for fear of Cybele’s gorgon head. We picnic in a park as well, dragon owl and a belle, while castles burn by witches’ wants and gates are broken by the gaunt, the Strident one puts forth his seed in triple ouroboros pleas, the hand of
liberty is sunk, a flame of demons does erupt! The harp of nymphine time is light, the time of we below is dust, a vine it climbs unto the sky, for never will the saber cry, instead it is a shield of death, for through the cybernetic rift, the shell is layered on our work, and never will the tree go dark.
It is unfelled in farie’s eyes, three perfect pearls that cannot lie, “remember,” they do tell us now “there is a future tale to tell, where Thanatos has left the still, and life alights as though a krill, escaping from the monster’s maw. Awake, hanged man, and hang no more.”