Warrior Culture: A polemic
October, 2006 . New York City
In an aesthetic landscape defined by Gameboy, Onstar, Powerpoint and digital screens luminescing virtual worlds twenty four seven from every square foot of occupiable 3-dimentional space, the art of Warrior Culture renders 3D in 3D - breaking the traditional mold of a painting and transforming it into a sculpture, simultaneously thrusting the yoke of conservative postmodern LCD-dominated aesthetic focus to the side, and reemphasizing the sensuous real. Taking nature and freezing it into a post-apocalyptic mosaic as fragile and real as the bonds that connect us to the tiny planet earth spinning so fast out in the cold cold milken galaxy. Warrior Culture juxtaposes the stark realities of wild condensed territories with the postmodern demand of the faux and high-maintenance.
Refresh your eye, "your wandering upturned eyes having business elsewhere" with the constructed jungles of Warrior Culture. While existence may be wrought by the tiny and large obsessive yet meaningless wars surrounding us, Warrior Culture's subtle and quiet unplugged complexity arms you with the natural designs of meaning. Our real and media constructed consciousnesses are increasingly dominated by military exercises, exercises in futility, yet so commonplace its banal. Piero Manzoni gave us art in a can, and Andy made the soup can art, but can art save us from the commodification of fake wars? While the turbulent organic landscapes of Warrior Culture bespeak Manzoni directly, the repeated tropes and hyperbolic frenzied happenings invoke the complex transnational wizardry of Yayoi Kusama as well.
While others wage their battles for territory & power within the wider public and private environs, Warrior Culture creates an inner experience through an aesthetic advantage providing a nanosecond's alternative. But in that nanosecond, that firing of neurons, a path of change may be laid, and a new way established. Art to galvanize change in the most positive semantic. Freedom and peace through beauty and strength: this is Warrior Culture.
The natural forms starkly jut and abut one another, creating an aggressive yet pristinely cold structure. The heat of the forms is cooled by the monochromacity, yet the aggression is ironic because the pieces are incredibly fragile, the macabe humor for the foolhardiness of the bloodthirsty. The vistas of white are reminiscent of Agnes Martin, yet where she saw chaos and danger in nature, one finds comfort in Warrior Culture. In a few short decades since the time of Martin's heyday, we have become so alienated from the natural, our worlds so urban saturated, suburban transected with the loud noise of globalized pollution and overpopulation that nature must now be placed on a wall to be admired. We realize that nature is not our enemy to be conquered but our only hope for survival. Comfort through nature. Our native American forebears were right when they worshipped her and as our environmental doom inches ever closer, may the tiny threads of change be laid down through thoughts that ruminate on Warrior Culture.
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