CURA.

Timur Si-Qin : My use of commercial and technological aesthetics has sometimes been misread as insincere or ironic. In those cases, the work is misidentified as belonging to a type of mimetic critique in which these materials and images are seen to operate linguistically as signifiers of capital whose tensions are in some way dialed up in order to reveal its inner contradictions. The whole genre of “Post-Internet” art, a monolithic term for some art that emerged at the beginning of the last decade, was often assumed to operate in this neo-Warholian manner. When people encountered the work, they expected to see a legible critique, but failing to detect one in traditional form, they sometimes read it as naive techno-optimism instead. But this isn’t to say the work is not critical. The contemporary western cultural math factors most often into an attitude of detached irony, or guarded aloofness. Especially in art. It is a culturally-specific reading of aesthetics, a stereotyping of images that reduces objects and materials to species-embedded, human significance. Everything is taken as a referent of (human) power, desire, fetish. I don’t believe that objects, technologies, or even commercial products are exhausted by their commodity form. If one reduces all images to human meaning, what is hidden are the myriad of other dimensions, materials, organisms, and systems at play in the meta-materiality of the real.

TSQ: Today, facing irreversible environmental tipping points, we have to have the courage to express genuine concern based on a genuine sense of the real. This means expanding our level of analysis beyond the human, refiguring the human as just one animal in an interconnected community of organisms and systems within a flat ontology.

TSQ: My motivation for the use of these aesthetics is more anthropological in nature—an ethnography, or even an ethology, of contemporary homo sapiens material cultures. If one accepts humans as one among many organisms, then culture, economy, and technology are part of the extended phenotype of homo sapiens, contiguous with the rest of nature. The exo-cultural position I am claiming is the result of growing up multi-culturally. Accessing systems and modes of thought outside of the western mode is not necessarily mystical or exotic, but simply a matter of having intimate experiences with and in other cultures. In my case, growing up in different cultures and contexts allowed me to make the simple comparisons that gave me a sense of what signifiers are culturally bound, and which are species specific.

TSQ: The conversation at that point, during the Berlin Biennial, was still much more about branding, accelerationism, internet culture, and surveillance. Nature and environment didn’t become a popular subject in this generation of contemporary art until recently. I think the art world wasn’t even entirely comfortable with the concept of nature only a few years ago either, because to most it represented that which was pre- given and immutable—a reflection of the static and lifeless idea of nature endemic to the western perspective. The reception to my engagement with nature as a subject was met with apprehension. Of course, with the pandemic, the agency of nature has roared back into our cultural attention and I imagine this will only continue to accelerate with climate change. With New Peace, I take up the form of the logo or the brand in order to move them beyond their specific status as signifiers of capital, to suggest that they are also fundamentally continuous with the history of symbol making going back at least 200,000 years. Images of nature are another category that also have unique properties and capacities that interact with our physiology and cognition. The uncomfortable reception that the use of affective commercial aesthetics in art received reveals that the anxieties over the technological are related to the anxieties over nature and materiality itself. The humanist is suspicious of both nature and technology because they are ultimately the same res extensa of the soul-less. The humanist cannot conceive of life, intelligence, ethics, or value arising from mere mechanistic matter.

TSQ: The Premier Machinic Funerary series (2014) and Basin of Attraction (2013) featured 3D printed hominid fossils, like Homo neanderthalis, Homo habilis, Paranthropus aethiopicus. I was working with digital files of the bones of these real individuals who had lived millions of years ago, but whose form was in some way being reconstituted and reformed, metamorphosing from one stable state into another. I displayed them in ornate colorations and vitrines, thinking of them as anti-funerals for an ancestor worship of sorts. The specificity of using Hominid fossils was to feature a real being somewhere between a human and an animal, to confound that binary.  

TSQ: The concept that unites the organic and inorganic and that plays a prominent role throughout the work is that of morphogenesis. The tendency for matter, organic and inorganic, to self-organize and pattern itself. This is the life force of matter, that which gives form to both the biotic or abiotic. In my early work the blending of things like bones and advertising displays was to present them as results of deep morphogenetic flows. The shaping of bodies and morphology, as well as the shaping of cultural images and technologies. Now in New Peace, I am explicitly identifying morphogenesis as a source of a post-secular faith. A faith in the aesthetic grace of the self-organizing behavior of the material universe.

TSQ: I am not aware of a deep connection between imperialism and secularism. There is however a connection between imperialism and grain. (I’m half-joking.) There’s maybe an over-identification of rational empiricism with the west, thereby denying the very rational and empirical knowledge of non-western cultures, and also the very non-rational and non-empirical tendencies within the west itself. Again this is related to the intellectual history of Christianity which irrationally defined itself as the measure of rationality. It is for this same reason that westerners see science and technology as purely western creations, somehow ignoring the science and technological achievements of everyone else.

TSQ: New Peace is syncretic in the sense that “post-secular faith” is a move beyond the cynical closures of secularism as well as an embrace of a certain scientific truth, which—in the specific way I am using it—is a universal materialism not a western ideology. This universal materialism expresses truths that are present for me in Indigenous thought. But this remains a connection, not a substitution, and my concept of “post-secular faith” is not some kind of “back to the earth” fetishization in which Indigenous cultural content is copy-pasted as a balm to western woes. Indigenous spiritual traditions are not available to everyone, nor should they be. It’s also important to maintain the necessary nuance about the different meanings of Indigeneity, from Indigenous worldviews to particular contemporary Indigenous peoples. The problem I see is that we need to articulate and normalize a way of feeling spiritual reverence to the natural world in a secular western world. This is the New Peace project. I don’t think that our task is one of rational conversion alone, but rather seduction, aesthetics, community, narrative, and ritual. As generations Y and Z age, and climate change progresses, the demand for spirituality will grow, because spiritual emotionality is an innate psychological need, especially in the face of adversity. New Peace is a post-secular project because I think the traditional bounds and definitions of secularity and religion do not apply so neatly outside a western context.

TSQ: When my mother first got involved with Native American civil rights issues as a German living in Berlin in the ’80s we encountered a very interesting social network of Germans who were passionate about Native American culture. Many were genuine rights activists who organized resources for Indigenous American causes, and some were living out their Karl May “Winnetou” Fantasies, white German men and women, who would dress up as “Indians” and set up tipi villages in the German countryside together. Even as a 7-8 year old kid before we moved to Arizona, I could tell their cultural translations were based on cheesy stereotypes of what they imagined Native Americans to be.   When we moved to Arizona, we moved to the city closest to the prison my stepdad was held. The first four years of life in America involved going to the prison every weekend, until finally he completed his sentence and was released. After his release we attended all the pow-wows, dances and ceremonies around the southwest. It was during this time that my only religious upbringing occurred. My stepdad was part of the warrior society, a Native American gang in prison that was also historically connected with AIM and through which Natives like him were able to practice Native spiritual ceremonies, like the sweat lodge, during incarceration. What followed upon his release, were some of the most beautiful, but also the most difficult years of my life, as my stepdad was ultimately a damaged man who became increasingly abusive to my mother and me over the years, until the day my mom and I fled to a women’s shelter. While I have no quantum of Native American blood, my life was touched by the same darkness Indigenous people have faced for 500 years, as I was also touched by the light of their spirit and resilience. Being genetically Mongolian, growing up I looked like a native kid and everyone assumed I was, because of my stepdad, and I was treated that way too. We traveled around the southwest to different pow-wows and ceremonies to sell Native themed novelty trinkets, like mugs and t-shirts. Beside the wrath of my step-dad, I also grew up tasting the economic hardship and the employment dead-end faced by Native people, especially for convicts like my stepdad. So my work is not insincere. Through this life experience of mine, I felt I have paid a price, but I have also received a gift, which was the experience of being raised in the native spiritual tradition by the community I encountered. In the 1970s, through the Native American Civil rights movement led by AIM, it was Lakota traditions that had an outsized influence, and through Lakota medicine men like Leonard Crow Dog became a wellspring of the pan-Native American spiritual tradition. So it was Lakota traditions that we primarily practiced through the sweat lodge and sun dance, along with some Apache traditions. It is uniquely beautiful and very different from the experience of western religion. It centers nature and relationships to nature at its core. This is no stereotyped idea of the noble savage (my stepdad was far from noble). But this concern for nature is real. It is only a reflection of the cynicism of the west that the resonance of this fact is so muted and desaturated.