is Light Perception:
Arts/Crafts/Design
[PORTFOLIO TEMPORARILY REMOVED. For photos of some of my artwork, click here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?id=112753&aid=2280355]
- Here is my personal philosophy towards art, guidelines I hope to abide by and expand upon for the rest of my life:
An excerpt from my zine, “The AnnaKissed Manifiesta” (www.annakissed.net/manifiesta.html):
“The JOY Manifesto: AnnaKiss’em as Art
You Are My Joy is the name of the artistic vision I created with my college boyfriend. It was created outside of the paradigm of sex work. My ex chose the name and organized the initial artwork. But I articulated the principles, which constitute for me a lifelong ethic, applicable in all my artistic and interpersonal choices.
JOY is a set of creative principles that values human connection and emotion over meritocratic elitism. We believe that art should come off the white gallery walls where it is placed on rather arbitrary pedestals by professionalized art critics and art schools. Success in the contemporary art world is a mind-boggling business, requiring a lot of luck and elite networking. We believe that art belongs to the people. It is a basic human instinct, and we claim our alienated creativities back from the professionals that have taught us to devalue them. We seek to erase the classist line between fine art and popular art by celebrating the joy that we once generated as children, when we made pictures for our friends and made emotional connections through handicraft.
The five principles of You Are My Joy are:
1) JOY Art is an intensely personal exchange between the artist and the audience, where audience participation and interaction defines the piece. JOY Art is often a personal gift from one person to another, celebrating shared experience.
2) JOY Art is egalitarian and accessible, descending out of the gallery and the auction house, the sterile places of admittance and rejection, and onto the streets, the livingrooms, the subways, the places of human exchange: JOY art is lived, not priced and consumed.
3) JOY Art is fleeting and temporary, like one moment of human connection. Through JOY Art, we acknowledge the ephemeral nature of all physical things, the fragility of our humanity and life on Earth; we acknowledge death; we acknowledge the limits of material resources. We confront death with joy; we defy decay with human connection; we celebrate limitation through creativity; and we cherish the moment because it is the only eternity.
Every society is significantly shaped by the attitudes it has towards death. The twenty-first century is a nervous era, jittery with warnings of species death through climate change, nuclear warfare, demographic collapse, ecological imbalance, and resource depletion, yet we are a culture in denial of death; ever-hiding behind euphemisms, we take technological progress and economic growth for granted as a law of history, believing in Corncopian mythologies and procrastinating global cooperation for the preservation of life. Our fear and blind denial of death paralyzes us and only sends us faster towards destruction. JOY Artists seek to liberate ourselves from the fear of death by celebrating decay as a part of life, as the truest universal communion, the fullest material sharing; for in death, there is life; and the inevitability of death makes joy the only source of immortality. Only by liberating ourselves from fear of death can we acquire freedom and the capacity to engage more fully in life. We celebrate impermanence and freedom with destructible artwork.
4) JOY Art is first, the tangible material, and second, the transient memory. It is very physical, requiring touch, demanding total feeling. We celebrate the physical because the sense of touch requires our full presence, and because all things physical are temporary and transforming, so even as we are touching, we are changing the thing we are touching and ourselves. (See Principle #1.) Later, the audience recalls what was once physical by contrasting the memory of the total feeling with the sensation of its absence. Memory is all that we can hold on to, and our personal memories are also an act of art. Our memories are ever-transforming, and the way the audience actively or passively holds on to its memories shapes the second stage of the enjoyment of a JOY Art piece. (Again, see Principle #1.) Thus, there are always two artists in any experience: the one who creates and the one who remembers. Each person’s life is his or her greatest art piece; and even though death is inevitable, each person lives on through the memories of those he or she has touched. We all live in the shared space between reality and its perception: You Are My Joy, my experience of you preserves you, our experience of each other is life itself.
Paradoxically, even though JOY Art focuses on physical, tangible, and material structures, You Are My Joy as a philosophy is essentially anti-materialistic. Since all things physical are decaying, and all memories are changing, the only constant is the joy and connectivity of the moment. Given our own individual transience, the only rational way to live is to live altruistically, in cooperation with others, in harmony with the greater processes of nature and the Universe. We maximize experience by maintaining diversity, and we cherish life by allowing for the full, natural expression of each thing we encounter. We approach each material thing and each experience with curiosity, with the intention to preserve through mental experience and not physical possessiveness, because physically possessing and controlling another thing quickly alters its essential nature, thus diminishing diversity and experience in the world. When we respect other living things, allowing all things to express their essential natures while we express our own, we maximize lived experience in the world. It is senseless to hoard materially in the face of death and physical decay; posses26 27
sion that is not utilized is senseless because it restricts experience. We increase life by constantly seeking to experience others and preserve some part of others, thus JOY Art aims to preserve the natural expressions of living things and to mirror to these subjects our experience of them as objects, complicating the relationship between subject and object.
5) JOY Art embraces non-traditional mediums beyond the paint brush and the canvas, the frames that give parameters to artistic expression. JOY Art is a celebration of the natural living extinct to create, and we reject the need for expensive materials and special knowledge, instead encouraging atavistic human expression in its most natural forms. Touch is art; memory is art; daily living is art; and each human relationship is an artistic piece. Each individual cultivates his or her own artistic practice over the course of a lifetime, indefinable, but exquisitely shared, equal to all others. JOY Art seeks novel ways to remember creative intercourse.
