Matadores & Toreros

Remember the first time you saw Wild Things, and as you watched Neve Campbell and Denise Richards smooch you were pretty sure it was the hottest thing you would ever see in your entire life? The Cruel Intentions kiss that came a few months later may have been sexier, but Neve and Denise will hold a place in all of our hearts for making big screen lesbianism okay. From Kevin Bacon's wang, to Bill Murray's cameo, at the time the movie seemed like the best film ever made....

Not unlike Maurice Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are... I remember reading it for the first time (actually, having it read to my class during Library) and thinking it was the most beautiful, amazing story every written. Seeing it animated for Reading Rainbow was even more spectacular (though I was in a Caravaggio stage, and the not even ...Wild Things could compare to the imagery of John Steptoe's Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters). Those things that we once cherished never changed, but we did. Maybe this is the only tangible explanation of time and flux we have, but it is neither tangible, nor an explanation.

When I saw a trendy, Speaker City t-shirt wearing douche-face trying to wax/revive Where The Wild Things Are a year ago, I knew that things had changed. Kids these days - they have Jenna Haze assfisting Sky Lopez at 384kbps, Wild Things is about as nouveau as The Golden Girls to these little bastards. Forget Where The Wild Things Are, kids can barely read the mission dialogue in GTA: San Andreas...

Wild Things was released shortly after I began taking pictures. I had never picked up a camera in my life, much less been in a photo, but I was hanging out with the pretty girls, and they asked me to take pictures at parties and dances a few times, and I knew that I was onto something. I'm no Cartier-Bresson, but the girls really enjoyed the pictures, and I had a role. When not taking pictures of my friends, i was taking pictures of sunsets and landscapes and flowers.... Vapid, superficial images are creamsicles & lollipops to vapid, superficial people, so everyone loved the scenic photographs! I was proud of the images because of the compliments they yielded, but I always knew that any chimp could point a lens into a New Mexico sunset and make something colourful and pretty. But flowers and landscapes were popular so I kept producing images of them.

I shot the picture above for my first Photography course in college, about three years ago. It is a black and white photograph of a sunset from El Matador Beach in Malibu that I have hand coloured, and it is the last sunset/landscape photo that I've shot. Soon after, I began to create more experimental, conceptual images. I recall showing a series of photos, Seven Ways To Commit Suicide In Your Bathroom, to one of my friends from high school. She responded with, "I like your old pictures more. You should keep taking pictures of flowers and sunsets." I prefer boobs and blow. Beautiful paintings and photographs of idyllic landscapes and vibrant still lifes decorate the walls of hotels and accompany the allegory, Footprints. They are mindless, they are tedious, they are practice, and they are not art.

Digital cameras destroyed the role of documentarian - with cameraphones and 6 megapixel point & shoots, everyone is a photographer these days - Matthew Brady, and Robert Frank, and Patrick McMullen wouldn't stand a chance in the digital errata. This is not the tired diatribe about visual overlaod and subsequent atrophy, but is rather about the quality of the image that we are receiving. Printed media is supersaturated with earthy vector corrosion - tricks and techniques that were beautiful and revolutionary a decade ago when they were brought to us by David Carson and Martin Venezky, but have become the signature of the one-click-pony who is sitting down in front of Illustrator for the first time. I cannot look at a magazine without seeing every single pixel of bad photoshop retouching (in four-toned offset dots, of course), or copycat technique stolen from german teenagers' on deviant art. I cannot watch a movie without cringing at every poorly rendered CGI element, wondering where the suspension of disbelieve has gone. When advertising and dynamic media (television / music videos / feature film / et al) are not stealing concepts from last generation's contemporary art, they are evoking faux sentimentality via kitschy retrospecticum - vintage t-shirts, mesh hats, horrible remakes of television shows that no one liked the first time (Scooby Doo, Starsky, Dukes of Hazard, Charlie's Angels), or worse - eroding the soul and charm of everything that our young generation cherished only a few years ago - Atari, Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, Care Bears, Revenge of The Nerds, and yes, Where The Wild Things Are. We have become a society of referential commodity - when VH1 produces an I Love The 2000s series, it's going to be a sentimental look back at a sentimental look back. Top Ten lists enumerate the best Top Ten lists, Roosevelt will be president, Ike will be in the white house (Turner, not Eisenhower), and Olivia Newton John will be running this country into the ground!

I make no pretense about my role in this structure. Afterall, those who can, do. Those who can't, jump... Are white men. Who can't. Jump.

Link