Sometimes, when I look back at the drawings I make, I see something hidden in them which I wish to explore further. In this case, I noticed a synchronicity between my DeFi history drawing of Jiro, a Sushi core dev, and the forlorn looking bartender of Édouard Manet’s 1892 impressionist masterpiece “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.” I didn’t intend this by any means, but now that I have noticed it, it seems a little uncanny; their postures, compositional motifs and even expressions seem in conversation. I think a closer look may uncover something hidden in the margins of these works.
I’ve been making DeFi history painting images for a month or two now, spurred by making illustrations for the yGift team at Yearn. I enjoy making these artworks, there is a goofy realism that I’m pursuing, trying to make images that communicate something about the groundbreaking technology, organizational dynamics and anonymous contributors that are powering what feels like a novel age. The technique has become fluid, and it is enjoyable to interact with the communities while cataloging projects and advances along with the passing of blocks. While often the genesis of one of these works is simple, the content allows for compositions to be quite freewheeling, and poetics to emerge.
When I look at Manet’s painting, I see a depcition of late capitalist labor relations in the Western world. The bartender seems half asleep as she talks to a vacant eyed customer (visible as a reflection). Her posture and expression reveals a deep dissatisfaction, despite the plastic elegance of the scene. The accoutrements of elegant Parisian café culture are quite intense in this painting, bright and overwhelmingly cumulative — it feels claustrophobic and inescapable, framing the subject in a glistening cage. The atmosphere of the café, with its refractory repetitions, are kaleidoscopic. This invokes Walter Benjamin’s discussions of the Parisian arcades’ phantasmagorias, of the same era as Manet’s work, which was channeled later by DeBord to illuminate the distracting façade of post modern spectacle.
In contrast, the image that emerged of Jiro and the Sushi team is quite open, allowing the landscape of transaction to be imagined as a nocturnal hot spring, using the Onsen metaphor which the Sushi community chose for their exchange’s new apparatus. The developers and designers depicted are laconic (this is how they appear in their avatars), impassive and cool. They do not seem imprisoned by their work, as the barmaid does, rather the atmosphere of exchange is neutral and graceful, a fluid extension of the landscape itself.
Jiro lingers in the foreground, just as the barmaid does for Manet. He has been remade as an android, of course (re-imagining an avatar is one of the best places to summon negative capability in these works). Here, however, unlike the Parisian café, capital material is not overwhelmingly present. It is only sensed in the sparsely arraigned sushi offered on plates and trays. A path can be traced from Jiro’s chopsticks to Maki’s bento box, then further back to the design maps held by Kastrye, and finally the greater architecture of DeFi, depicted as a city sized machine upon the background cliffs.
Work and consumption are both referenced, in those elements. But yet, unlike the unnerving psychedelia of Manet’s café, there is an elegance at work here. Perhaps this is the imagined potential of trustless, decentralized systems, to be minimal and automatized once deployed, rather than desiring of endless repetition of form. All of this is compatible with nature, perhaps, even in its image. The reflection of the moon seems to charge the setting with a graceful, beatific glow.
I don’t like to be overly excited about DeFi or tech in general, I remain cautios about our future, and there are many ways in which decentralization, virtualization, anonymization of communities, etc. could spin way off the rails. However, its hard not to notice the potential and beauty of the space that is being created in DeFi, radically separate from the allegories of capital exchange we are accustomed to, yet visible in their light, as a shadow from the sun.
“Sushi Onsen” is available as a limited edition NFT on Rarible.
https://app.rarible.com/token/0xd07dc4262bcdbf85190c01c996b4c06a461d2430:119802:0xc61288821b4722ce29249f0ba03b633f0be46a5a