Blog Time: Blog Bog Hack Hack

"The most fruitful artistic enterprises acknowledge certain characteristics of Modernism: the higher value placed on the present, the sense of adventure and critical relativism. Adventure, because being modern always means grasping an opportunity, the Kairos, in opposition to the prescriptions of tradition. Relativity, because the spirit of Modernism is to practice a form of critical comparisonism that takes no mercy on the certainties, to show that the institutional or ideological structures that surround us are nothing but historical circumstances that can be dismantled."

-Nicolas Bourriaud

I have a superstition that my best comics are the ones where I've slowed myself down intentionally, forcing them to be more considered. But that's not necessarily the case. It's the whole deeds vs faith thing. Sometimes you just get it right. It might be momentum. Keeping focused on one thing for a prolonged period of time but moving through it quickly can sustain it, make it so you don't lose your train of thought. There's something about speed and rhythm that intoxicates me. I don't like to sit still, I love drinking more coffee than I should, I can't stop myself from posting even the lamest images I make on my other blog to get it out, get some possible reaction.





Generally, when I start to make a blog post, I have this idea in my head that I'd like to express, and it seems really clear to me. I end up writing little bits here and there throughout a couple days and try and pull them together in a slightly longer burst. The process of writing my thoughts out changes them and forces me to make them systematic, to cram them into a linear structure. I become more concerned about making the system function properly than expressing all these disparate ideas. I can't help but try and subvert this by being sloppy and loose, expressing myself imprecisely so we can live up to our moniker and hash it out in the comments.

Sometimes I think I should just make more fucking comics, stop screwing around on this blog, but there is this type of instant communication gratification that cometscomets allows me that comics do not. I can indulge these impulses to document my movements without creating a concrete object I have to contend with years from now. This is meant to not be taken very seriously.





So I write about whatever bullshit comes to me mind, whether it's obviously comics-related or not - because it's all part of my cerebral landscape - there's no way I can disconnect the way I think about one topic from the way I think about another. It's why I've tried to apply the same rules to comics that I do to the rest of culture, and why I'm often talking about my dissatisfaction with comics. I can't simply compartmentalize. I'll quote Bourriaud again:

"...according to post-modern thinkers an artist should be judged by the aesthetic criteria that come from his cultural tradition. In other words, we refuse to permit him to belong to our own space; we deny that there could be a common space (which I call the space of translation) including me and the other. That also means that the artists are assigned to a lower position: judging them by their local tradition and their local codes means implicitly that these artists would be unable to free themselves from them and to achieve singularity; it means developing a critical discourse about the rules that dominate the cultural discourse, which is our criterion for judging contemporary art."





But I'm constantly changing my mind about what is "good" and what isn't. That's why I find this blog useful. For me, it's a way to process these capricious ideas I have. It's a space where many people can discuss these things and, though there is no final "truth" we ever really get at, the discussion expands my perspective and works in the way that time does: it slows down my spastic, sputtering mania and helps me form more well-rounded truths to work with.