Art

Creating Across the Centuries

by

Art Connects us, art is part of bigger things.

Digital collage is one of my artistic media, and one that I didn’t expect to become such. I originally picked it up for my work in zines, and then it just became “my thing.” Now I regularly examine public domain art resources, usually museums, for interesting images and such to work into my mashups.

My collage work is, for those aware of it, rather surreal. This originated out of my early zine days, punk, and the Church of the SubGenius. It was honed by an interest in alchemical and spiritual diagrams of yore and the Surrealists themselves. I combine images from across the centuries to create something new – many times something that surprises me as Surrealist work is Rorschach blots in reverse.

Once when poking around for some backgrounds to work with and inspire me, I searched the Welcome Collection, I stumbled across a lot of lovely, colorful prints. These were meant to be part of something called a “Toy Theater,” which I’d never really heard of. So I took a break from my art-searching to learn a little history.

Toy Theaters, to judge by the Wikipedia article I found and the art I had discovered were “a thing” in the 19th century, with interest surviving to this day. You could buy backgrounds and kits at theaters and operas, scripts were available, and there were of course fancier and self-made versions. Imagine going to the theater and then your parents buy you the kit so you can reenact the story you saw!

Toy Theaters, to an extent, were the same as merchandise and action figures we know from our mass media movies, albeit more personal. You’d assemble your own theater, you might customize it or alter it, you may even have cutout actors based on people you had seen the night before. They were also stages of the imagination.

Despite having scripts and the like, we all know people like to create. I’m sure over the decades that there were romances and battles and skulduggery among casts that would never have met. I’m sure people got silly, had fun, or got serious. They could mash things up, do things there way.

Then, across the decades, I realized they were like me.

Here I was, looking at images of Toy Theater backgrounds, finding inspiration just as someone would unpacking their Toy Theater kit. I combined disparate elements in a fury of inspiration, no different than someone playing with the Theater or taking a stab at the equivalent of fanfiction. There, across ages, I was doing the same thing that those people with their Toy Theaters did – creating my own world out of the parts.

Every artist who’d made these backgrounds and printer who’d printed these prints was having their work still used by people like me. Every parent who lovingly saved their child’s toys, toys which eventually were donated to museums, were seeing their effort live on in how that art was seen and used.

I felt both small and large, part of something bigger but also just me, there, a guy behind a computer playing with graphic programs.

Art, art has so many connections that it lets us feel the largeness of it all. A hundred years ago a family happily assembled a Toy Theater. Now I create strange and wonderful surrealist work. And we’re all the same, part of the same thing.

–Xenofact

Art Is Unstoppable

by

We’re all used to hearing about how oppressive governments crack down on art. They don’t like free expression. They want to control information. They also like to destroy joy because they are controlling assholes.

But I’d add something else to these control freaks – art is terrifying to them. Art is something that is a threat to dictators and they must control it.

Think about what Art is – not even good art, but sincere art. Art is personal expression, thoughts and feelings turned into another form. It often combines different media forms, like sound and visuals together, or penmanship and words. Art is a bundle of ideas, of feelings, that works it’s way into your head – that’s what art is, and even intentionally obscure art can intrigue people to actively engage.

Art spreads. Art infiltrates. Art infects. Art can be symbiotic with the people who encounter it. This is the kind of thing that unsettled a would-be tyrant.

A play, a stunt, a book, a song can soar across the radio waves and the internet and change people. Art is communication, and communication will go as fast as it can (and sometimes as slow as needed). A piece of art can change people fast and dictators don’t like change and they aren’t happy with fast either.

And you might not know they’ve changed. Someone may have become changed by a book or by a TV show or a bootleg tape and you won’t know! People become different people but you can’ tell. Well, can’t tell until too late, and dictators fear people not being what they seem.

People infected with art might even make more art. They get inspired to do things. Art combines with the appreciator’s own ideas to make something new. That fast-spreading art can produce even more art that risks the control a dictator wants. Von Neuman’s catastrophie with bright brushes and a poison pen.

Finally, dictators are not creative people. They’re not imaginative. Art is creative. Art is imaginative. Dictators can’t understand it, can’t deal with it, so the have to destroy it or control it.

(Some Dictators even posture as artists, but you know, they never really are.)

So of course they feel threatened by art. They can’t control it, can’t stop it, can’t do it and it’s lurking right behind them.

Of course that means if we keep doing art we keep breaking dictators. And as I’ve noted art and spirituality are pretty much the same thing, who knows what you can do to would-be tyrants with just some innocent art with spiritual elements . . .

-Xenofact

Religious Art Without Either

by

My own experiments in surrealist art and how art connects with spirituality have graced a few of these pages. Until I started doing my own art I hadn’t given much consideration to art and spirituality – as most of my interest was written work and meditations. Some art inspired me and I did find “project plan” type diagrams like The Six Realms useful, but I hadn’t thought of it until my own work.

But as I started doing art I started viscerally appreciating the power of art and spirituality. I appreciated my own inspirations much better, as I got them. There’s something powerful about art, bridging all those gaps between feelings and ideas, going where words cannot. The hyperdetailed art of the Six Realms of Buddhism, awe-inspiring pictures of gods, hilarious art of the Eight Immortals – all of those can be rationally analyzed and felt.

Just as spirituality connects things together so does art. No wonder they go together – and are really inseparable.

Which is what brings me to religiously kitschy art. You know the kind, the stuff that is standard, pandering, sometimes pseudo-realistic, and where the message is extremely obvious. The kind of stuff that Queen Coke Francis mocked in one of her videos (also she’s just hilarious and here makeup is on point).

Kitschy religious art kind of fascinates me. It feels dead to me. It’s message is obvious, sometimes in the title or spelled out. The look is often cartoony but without that “edge” where the style brings a benefit of inspiration or feeling, or so realistic it might have well been a photo. The kind of stuff AI churns out because so many people churned it out. I mean I’m talking still work, but I suppose it applies to media like TV.

I always wondered why people would enjoy this art because there’s nothing there. There’s no inspiration to it, nothing to fire you up or inspire you. There’s nothing stylized, no edge to the art to catch on your mind and make you think. It’s just so simple . . .

. . . and then I realized that’s the point.


Kitschy religious art is not about helping you feel or get inspired or go deeper.. It’s about reinforcing what you’re supposed to feel and what others want you to think and feel. In most cases I think about signaling, showing who you are and what you think, it’s not there to help you you think anything deeper.

Which is the point.

In fact, this”art” has to be short of any detail, any extra, any edge. If you take any liberties, get a bit stylish, etc. you risk inspiring people. Anything playful, any attempts to be really artsy risks getting people to feel something, to speculate, to feel something. Kitschy religious art has to avoid any risk because for all you know it might actually do something for you. No wonder so much of it is simple.

Of course this leads me to wonder how kitsch can be used to conceal inspiration or how one might inspire people to put a bit more into their kitsch that may produce deeper thoughts . . .

–Xenofact