Artist’s Date #53: Austin Thomas @ Municipal Bonds

The other day I was at this gallery and there were these beautiful images on the walls that were so simple they touched me. They were made of regular shapes in primary colors printed with ink on thin lined paper. The person at the gallery was a stand in for the gallerist which was probably why he was so chatty. 

“I was out late last night and had to move my car early this morning so I'm just hanging onto this cup," which was not coffee but hot chocolate.

We talked a bit about the show, about the artist, Austin Thomas, who used community block printing (which I hadn't even known was a thing but seems like an amazing thing) to make some of her work. We talked about what it takes to make work like this that seems so simple but is so sophisticated in its conceptual practice. 

“I love how the edges of the lined paper are brown from time,” he said, which I hadn't even noticed. But it did contribute a lot to the sense of something that was more like a smell: a childhood. 

There's a teacher's strike in San Francisco happening this week which I mention because at some point in our chat I glanced down at the artist's statement and saw that she had once been an educator. This made the whole show come together for me. I started understanding the pictures as being not simple but elemental, not handmade but actually explorative of a technology - the block print is after all a way to reproduce images at some kind of scale. The artist has a whole body of work, some of which is sculptural, but these seemed like both art pieces and exercises in how bringing a concept down to the fundamentals can shed light on the abstractions the same image explores. 

At one point I glanced down at the newspaper and saw a headline about Grok and the news about how insane amounts of automatically generated digital images of non-anonymous women and girls were being flooded into the internet space. The technology has allowed for portraying one face with an entirely different body (which btw women's magazines have been doing for decades) and in this case a body that is naked and or sexualized in some manner. I don't know exactly. I absolutely have not looked at any of these images nor would I ever intentionally do so.

"I have an unsaid thing about this headline," I said and then I said what I have been thinking – which was this: there are a lot of people talking about how we should be careful attributing these actions to technology. Like, for example, saying Grok undressed women. Grok, as many people have pointed out, did not do anything. Grok is a computer program that is activated by human direction. 100%. Also though, I wanted to add: Grok is also not undressing women. Digital files don't have layers that you can remove. There is nothing there to take off.

He balked at this which I get, because everyone I've said this to has balked at this because we want to talk about how what's happening is bad. But also it's important I think to talk about what's else is happening. From my point of view this digital harassment is being used to push women out of the most expensive, expansive and potentially empowering technological space that we've seen in our lifetimes. What I’m proposing that sexual violence is a tool for financial violence, rather than how we normally see things as the other way around.

People with ethics are getting pushed out of this space because we would call this bullshit out. We would potentially want to step back, consider more thoughtfully, and think this thing through. Guess who doesn't want that? The men who have collected money against a speculative idea that has been turned into a marketing phrase for a product that was pushed out way before it was ready for market. The rest of the next few decades is going to be regular people paying for that. 

Maybe I’m wrong. 

I do believe that now more than ever art making is a rebellious act. At this point simply divesting one hour a day away from the computer and into something that has no other purpose than to have been created is worthwhile effort. I don't think that the question is whether art will survive this next phase of technology. It's whether or not humanity will.

Maybe what I'm getting at here is that both of these things live inside me. An incensed person willing to debate whether propagating nude images of women who aren’t real but with real faces is a sexual crime when I think one of the analogous crimes is what’s happening within the technology space with respect to the products, the investments, the management of the money. There’s also the person that wants nothing to do with these things - that wishes I would turn it all off and make my own kind of art, quietly, simply at a table and find a way through with that work in mind. 

This, I’m learning, is called kāmacchanda or, the push and pull of life - a very specific milestone that one must cross over in a spiritual life if one is to be able to reach a higher level of enlightenment, the whole structure of which would send someone like me into an additional round of the same. 

Toni Morrison talks about how she found no use for anger. I think it’s because her presence was so great she was immune to insult. That’s why I love art and creative work because it makes up a body. The more of it you have the stronger you feel. Which is not the same as opinions or theories or anything else. When you get to the point that boundaries are not important because your self worth is so big that you can not be crossed.