Self portrait during a culture war

(2020, mixed media on paper)

‘Self portrait during a culture war’. (mixed media on paper)’.

 In a sense I think I’m making this work for social media, for our over dependency on it during a time of restricted physical socialising, for the way it is shaping physical reality the more we rely on it.  I made “Self portrait during a culture war” trying to find a way to critique the increasingly dividing arguments within social media, in the only way I could think of: making myself the object of critique, in a drawing that exaggerates the contradictory, and often ugly, emotion-cum-identity ‘matter’ in my own ego make up.

It’s the contradictory stuff that all of us carry (?), yet that cannot occupy the same space at the same time in our current forms of communication, which make it hard for us to find language that doesn’t ‘corner’ us against another side.

I put a big emphasis on the contradiction between having strongly held desires for social change, and many reactionary elements. They are divided into blacks and whites (metaphorically not literally!) because they cannot recognise one another, and this makes them ever more extreme in their differences.

The progressive side tries to ‘teach’ the other side, but the more it does so the more the ‘other’ side becomes entrenched around the beliefs/feelings it stands accused of having. This is because the progressive side, in all it’s good intent, overlooks both the way language travels over a space like social media, and also overlooks the emotional wounds, pride, even humiliations (relative to that person’s social/historical experiences), which I believe are prodded when progressive language makes us feel guilt.

Equally, I think that one of the illusions seen through the prism of ‘identity politics’ gives us the painful impression that it is we, out of all peoples, who have been ‘left behind’/’not cared about’, which I believe is a shared experience that connects the majority of us beyond the idea of ‘identity politics’.

Again, to prevent pointing this finger at others, this is why this is based on an exaggeration of my own contradictory feelings, and the raging internal arguments that flare up upon encountering the crossfire of social mediation.