Advanced Life Drawing : Matters

In "Matters," I wanted to explore apathy as a political position and explore my feelings towards it. I believe that our generation—and especially the predominately white, straight, middle class that I have been raised with—is especially apathetic. The exact cause of this is circumstance is unclear—though, I have a few ideas as to what has fed this attitude of “DGAF”edness.

I watched Lana Del Rey music videos to prepare for this project—to try to feel the melancholic, detached media that so many young adults seem to identify with. It took some time to get beyond the singer’s unique, sad beauty, but I eventually figured out her carefully devised perspective. She, in her art at least, embodies the sad, rich 50’s housewife. Her videos are all sub-par in terms of image quality in order to indicate that they are vintage, and she often incorporates Hamptonsesque locations. She sings of love, drugs, and a simpler life. Yet, the viewer knows that she has everything that our society values: beauty, money, talent, fame, gorgeous lovers, etc. Despite having it all, she is still so incredibly unhappy. This, for some reason, really resonates with a large portion of my generation. I believe it is because we have been plagued with a profound feeling of nihilism in our day-to-day life.

Maybe it’s technology. Our generation is the first to have grown up with electronic identities—careful performative constructions of our selves. They bear as much weight as our physical bodies—our place in our social network can be pinpointed by the number of likes we receive, and our essence can be characterized by the pages we follow. Yet, we grew up being told that there was a huge difference between our offline and online actions: our online actions are permanent. Once they are posted, they can never be taken back. They can never be changed. So what does that mean for our physical selves? How impermanent is our state of being in real life? As many of my peers have said, “if you didn’t post it on Instagram, did it really happen?”

Maybe it’s just a post-modern predicament. We live in an age of ambiguous meaning. There is no one single “truth”: art cannot be pinned down, religion is based on the individual, scientific proof doesn’t even bear meaning in our government. (For example, how many times has the proof for climate change been dismissed by politicians because the findings cannot definitively be traced to humans?) We have seen--or at least, we have been told of--instantaneous mass destruction. The atomic bomb showed us that everything we are familiar with can be gone in an instant.

So what does it all mean? Why does it make a difference what I do? Nothing is really tangible, after all. Nothing I do matters.

Yet, of course, everything we do matters. It causes physical or mental change. It morphs our environment. Perhaps our effect on the world is minimal--but we are so closely tied to our surroundings, that what we do matters. From an ideological nihilistic perspective, it may not. But on a physical level, we are matter--therefore we affect matter.

I chose to create my piece with our environmental connectedness in mind. I chose to make the foreground of my drawing with one, continuous, looping line. Even the fragmented, apathetic individual who says that "Nothing [they] do matters" is connected to the rest of the world.