New Criticals


As Krauss asserts, the alternative to video art's narcissistic trappings is to 'exploit the medium in order to criticize it from within'. This is my artistic strategy for dealing with the contextual framework outlined in the above passages. I am a privileged white male video performance artist who uses computers to make art. I am the Dead Author, the flaccid male ego with a curved spine that pecks at his keyboard trying to understand the rhythm of the machine and the naïve Reader who still believes in meaning. Of all of these trappings I am critical, for I am the solipsistic bastard child of a digital mirror. Ultimately the only way to overcome this tragedy is to laugh about it, and so I ask the viewer to laugh at me laughing at myself. Indeed, what greater way to subvert the machine than to exploit the subtlety of one of our most human and illogical traits, the ability to laugh at ourselves.