The Year That Indie Died: Art School, Susan Sontag, and the Ready-to-Wear Self
Life in “the digital age” means living with the cliché that history is constantly happening, that technological developments which suggest a fundamental change in how we experience and define human life are constantly being seeded. As a result, it’s often difficult to ground this constant creep of the digital—fast and slow, diffuse and sudden—into specific terms, to forecast its consequences, or even to recall those moments when you first noticed that whatever world you called “yours,” whatever set of tools or system you’d come to define yourself within, carried a faint but irremovable stamp of expiration.
Part of the purpose of this newsletter is to unwind this sensation of “living in history” a bit—because it is as much a set of feelings as it is a set of facts. Luckily for you, dear reader, I can recall one of those minor moments where some future consequences of technological progress became visible to me for the first time. Like most of contemporary life, this moment of prophetic revelation was both deeply stupid and unexpectedly profound. The year was 2010, and I was in the third year of five of my undergraduate degree at an east coast art school (with my collection of learning disabilities, even my self-realization as an artist needed extended time beyond the standard four-year path).
Ritual Humiliation
By my junior year, I’d begun to learn the rhythms of the art school ecosystem by heart. For example, each Fall marked the annual ritual of the freshman class’s awkward assimilation into art school from their provincial lives across the country. Unless a student was from NYC or LA, their arrival on campus usually meant a bombardment with a vivid cross-section of ways of being and languages of expression which had no precedent or equal in their hometown. From this feast, they loaded up their plates and began to remake themselves.
Trust fund kids stopped bathing, dreaded their hair, gained stick and poke tattoos, and adorned their clothes with patches. For others (me), a black fog fell upon their closets, that universal palette of critical distance and self-awareness so crucial to protecting your heart and bolstering your claim to fair thought in your work. Thrift store finds, a sense of the absurd and childlike, and an abiding willingness to let your clothes speak more loudly than you—just as we were trained to do in critique with our work as artists—tended to form the common threads of what we might call the 2010’s art school look. Inevitably, transformations happened in the studio, too. For some percentage of each class, where once were high school portfolios of careful, photorealistic still life paintings or moody photographs of post-industrial ruin soon arrived a procession of works which were somehow even less mature: intaglio prints of pizza, paintings full of nostalgia for a bygone nineties’ childhood, or videos which served as little more than a greatest hits compilation of early internet aesthetics. Abstract painting was in vogue. Identity politics were in a deep cryogenic freeze. It was, looking back, a delicate moment of transition.
But the annual rite of costuming your artistic persona would come to a surprisingly neat end in the Fall of 2010.
Ready-Made Personas, or the Try Before You Buy Method of Self-Fashioning
The conditions for this end were seeded in the handful of years before. Thanks to a couple years’ worth of voluntary broadcasts of thousands of artists and culture agents, and of the hundreds of public profiles of my fellow college students, the freshmen class of 2014 arrived on our campus equipped with the power to surveil art school aesthetics from afar. And with the benefit of an ever-increasing trove of images of culture and its makers, to style themselves into not only artistic clothes but into artistic personae as well. To put it more bluntly: the class of 2014 arrived already looking like college art students.
For those of us observing the newest cohort of students pile onto campus from around the world, wearing cool clothes, the right haircuts, decorating their rooms with a myriad of niche cultural references, the effect was bewildering. How did they already know? Who told them? The trials and experiments of self-branding we all, to varying degrees, had conducted within the public of this community of self-conscious artists had been a battle which could only be waged in the halls of our school and in exchange with others, because, well, that was where our references and our intended community resided. But for the class of 2014, the fashioning of the self was a private affair conducted in the bedrooms of their childhood hometowns, a persona crafted not with direct experience of the world but with its images.
These kids produced contradictory feelings in the student body. On the one hand, their arrival felt like meeting a more advanced genus of human, one equipped with social media spyware and more encyclopedic reference points (these abilities, however, were and are a little embarrassing). At the same time, their cybernetic abilities left those of us who had already served our time—made our mistakes publicly, learned, grown, searched in books and, with more limited success, on the growing art internet for community, recognition, and inspiration—in a muddy mess of reactionary feeling which characterizes the newly obsolescent. I don’t think it ever occurred to anyone that they themselves had had any hand in producing this clone army through their own narcissistic broadcasts.
The Death of Indie Aesthetics, or Life in the Image World
The internet’s bountiful crop of images had grown large enough to allow these teens a fate without embarrassing missteps. But this small episode in what we might crudely sum up as the wider democratization and inversion of “indie aesthetics” held future consequences which could be sensed in the air even then. Now, with the benefit of time, it’s clear that this minor footnote signaled the coming end of many other things. Like a slice of pizza you fold in your hand, the edges of culture now laid on the same plane as the middle, and the ability to adjudicate status and meaning based on what you wore or what work you made would only get harder with time. But the coming flood of digital images would carry far stranger and more intricate consequences, consequences which the writer Susan Sontag prophetically examined in her 1978 essay, “The Image World” (yes, the namesake of this newsletter and a piece of writing you will certainly hear more about in future essays).
With the Class of 2014, my art school welcomed its first post-digital cohort, a generation which, without much recollection of a device-less world, also carried in them an extremely distinct experience of, well, “experiencing the world.” Now, we might characterize the last 200 years—roughly the lifespan of the camera—as one of a rising tide of virtuality—which I might very broadly define as information and sensation arriving to your body and mind as representations, like looking at a photograph of a concert versus attending the concert in the flesh. For hundreds of years prior to our own time, our means of delivering virtual experience to others grew at relatively slow, digestible rates in the forms of the printing press, printmaking, and painting. But while virtuality has been a feature of human experience for millennia (Sontag reflects that people have been concerned with the infringement of the virtual into the “real” since at least the time of Plato), for the class of 2014, the proportion of their conscious experience which was virtual was certainly larger than at any point in the history of human consciousness. Where life was once principally experienced as a series of moments in which the world unfolded directly before our sensing skin, by 2010, “the image world”—that is, a world marked by the ubiquity of cameras and of photographic images—had grown large enough to turn life into an artifact we increasingly experienced indirectly as a photograph, a video clip, or a livestream.
Beginning with the class of 2014, subsequent art school students could now choose to make work—and themselves—less as artists in the traditional sense and more as curators, arriving at their final pieces through some technical, hands-on experimentation and chance, but also, should they choose, by shopping and gathering together an unprecedentedly precise network of reference images. Of course, this was always a practice in the making of art and visual culture. The masters of European painting closely studied and created copies of one another’s work, and cultural production has for decades been one characterized by the postmodern “remix”—combining various existing works and influences into original pieces and perspectives. But 2010, to me, marked a distinct acceleration of this state of affairs with the ballooning of the quantity of digital images, an exponential increase in the availability of reference images, the growth of online user bases, the diversification of online image-sharing platforms, and the democratization of image-manipulation and inventory tools. The iPhone, as my boyfriend recently reminded me, had come to market just three years prior.
But there was another consequence to the class of 2014’s increasingly virtual lives. It wasn’t their fault per se, but the outfits of the class of 2014 suggested that the practices of online image spectatorship were just the beginning of a larger extractive phenomenon.
Sontag, from her oracle-like perch in the late 1970s, proposed that not only do we take and consume photographs to add depth and breadth to every fundamental aspect of human existence—to experience more beauty, more connection, more wealth, more justice, and so on—but the practice of accumulating and consuming experience in the form of photographs, paradoxically, makes life outside the photograph feel, well, less interesting, complex, and vital. In one of my favorite passages, Sontag writes
The attempts by photographers to bolster up a depleted sense of reality contribute to the depletion. Our oppressive sense of the transience of everything is more acute since cameras gave us the means to 'fix' the fleeting moment. We consume images at an ever faster rate and, as Balzac suspected cameras used up layers of the body, images consume reality. Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and a means of making it obsolete.
For all its ecstatic potential, the frenzy and adrenaline of taking and sharing photographs is a thinner, more impoverished world. The world is not only knowable but already known, and all of its intricacies and irregularities have been smoothed into articles for trade. The result is a feeling that reality has been infinitely duplicated and is forever being compiled into what Sontag calls “an interminable dossier”—a phrase I like for its connotations of drab bureaucratic organization and a practice of collection which is punishingly devoid of any libidinal force. Think of your own experiences of endless internet scrolling, or of uploading your own photos to social media—how often do you put down your phone feeling that the world is a richer, wider place?
Making art and the self from within the confines of the image world thus contains a central paradox. In our attempts to extract value, beauty, and meaning from the world around us through the simplifying technology of photography, we, in fact, further deplete our ability to divine the world’s essences and complexity. In other words, in our attempts to create the real, we only make the world ever more unreal, and the distance between ourselves and organic, immediate transformative experiences of beauty and power grows wider and wider.
One of the worst effects of the transposition of life into instantly available photographs is its abundance. A diminished sense of scarcity, serendipity, fate, surprise—or the ability to publicly flail in our attempts to author ourselves—all deprive us of something even the most cynical artists need: the egoic fuel that is a belief that we might be, or create, something—anything—original. That we might make something which would carry more life force than just another file in an “interminable dossier.”
The ready-made looks of the class of 2014 signaled a coming depletion in the resources which allow making art and expressing yourself to feel vital or even possible. With hindsight, it is easy to trace the growth of the image world with the decline in my own ambitions to become a visual artist (the reliance upon acceptance into a gallery system, which I felt bad at, the entrepreneurship of being an artist, which I also felt bad at, and the need to endure a potential lifetime of economic precarity, which I also also felt bad at, were important factors, too).
The Trouble with Finding Pivot Points
It seems that, among my generation, within a few years of my age up or down, there is a macabre pastime of naming inflection points like these, which, if nothing else, bolster our sense that the most important milestones of our biological development pair fatefully with those of digital technology. I have certainly been guilty of this little game of claiming a special kind of technological victimhood. And who knows? My microcosm of millennials may indeed have special claim to a particularly strange, bewildering developmental synergy with some of the most consequential developments of the digital image world. But Sontag’s essay offers a larger lesson: while one group or another may or may not rightfully claim a unique historical synergy with the envelopment of the world in digital images, they are only the latest inheritors of a much longer struggle. Generation after generation, we have always grappled with untangling the consequences of living in a world populated with images, from cave art to twitch streams.
If you’re curious about what power photographs may be exerting upon your reality, beyond your conscious awareness, I highly recommend Sontag’s essay. I will give this advice often in the weeks and months (YEARS?) to come, but if you get stuck on an esoteric turn of phrase, just keep going. I can’t say I myself understand every line of her essay, and I’ve read it countless times now. Often times writers will restate a complex idea later on in the piece, and sometimes it will be in phrasing you can actually understand, or you’ll be able to “get it” with the additional context you’ve read. So just keep going. You’ll still take a lot away, trust me.
As always, if you have any thoughts or questions about the text, or this topic, I’d love to hear from you. Let’s get to the bottom of everything together, ok?
Talk soon,
Chris
Suggested Reading
Susan Sontag – The Image World
