DECOLONIZE YOUR MIND

This is a time of profound cultural change. We are coming to grips with our endemic societal repressive and exclusionary practices. Race is one. Art is another. Decolonize your mind.

Our adulation of the Renaissance West, which covers the walls of most any Western art museum, is a testament to a narrow axis of thought. This master narrative, which is Eurocentric, asymmetrical, White, and Christian, is a mask for historical violence. Self-hypnotizing Representational Spacetime has largely advanced the standing of white western males.

“Every reflex, assumption, starting point – from methods to concepts- is inherently Eurocentric, which means (when applied outside or beyond the European tradition) colonialist and worse.” Jas ́ Elsner. p18.

Art history, it seems, is a zero sum game. The space on museum walls and in history books seems to be finite. When the vast majority of adulation is given to the White male subset, it necessarily excludes many, many others. Incredible quantities of words have been assembled as a protest to this problem. Yet there is no alternative, accepted, narrative which would re-arrange and re-prioritize all of this. It gets tricky very quickly. So what can any of us do as an active response?

Decolonize your mind.

Draw Transparently. Oh, come on, you might say. How can Transparent Drawing serve as a tool to end centuries of historical deprecation? Well, for one, it stops you from writing more words. Transparent Drawing gives you all you need to visually engage with cultural icons. It gives you a different strategy. There is a path of structural change. As an example, we analyzed Brunell’s The Harvest. In that exercise, we broke down the hegemonist class narrative of that painting by analyzing the forms. Representational Spacetime, and all that it suffocates, immediately dissolves. In one drawing, the entire narrative is shifted from a communication of oppressive and exclusionary emotion to a knowledge of holistic form.

Other cultural icons that we have dissolved in these pages include:
–DeKooning (Willem)
–Altes Museum
–Picasso
–LeCorbusier (ad infinitum!)
-etc.

Cross Cultural

Transparent Drawing has, over the years, employed a wide range of Source Images. We have sought inspiration in indigenous cultures, ordinary buildings, Eastern philosophies, Islamic traditions, non linear spacetimes, etc. In this operative mindset, form serves as our meditative koan. TD is a tool with which visual culture can be observed, analyzed and internalized. It is effective for paintings, buildings, sculpture, etc. Form serves as a window to visual manipulation outside of our ingrained culture. And form gets us past colonial oppression.

Is this the only pathway? Of course not. But another way to say all of this is, stop writing all of the words decrying the problem. Instead, pick up a pencil and do something about it. This is open source. We need all tools which provide an active pathway out of the cultural rut that we have been in for the past 500 years.

What else you got? By that I mean, what else provides a simultaneous analysis and dissolution of heretofore inviolate repressive cultural icons?

I’ve said it before and I will say it again. With a transparent mindset, I defy you to walk into the Renaissance Masters rooms at the Metropolitan Museum and not realize how colonolizingly limited and dumb they all are. Plus, it looks like a bunch of visual mush. So if you don’t want this mindset, I advise you to stop reading now!

Change

Change, at the most fundamental, starts with each of us. TD gives a set of tools, along with an integrated historical grounding, so that an active, and interactive pathway is now available. Select your favorite cultural icon, pick up a pencil and start doing what you have got to do.

Draw Like a Byzantine! The Transparent Drawing Manifesto. Egyptian Spacetime.

1. Grant, Catherine and Dorothy Price. Decolonizing Art History. Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8365.12490. 27 Oct 20.