Working For The Knife: Making Art Fit into Your Life.

Collaborating with Art History! a Digital Collage Challenge.

Hello and happy Friday! Before we dive into this week’s post I wanted to get a pulse check on our submissions for Dollhouse Prompt #1. Our tentative “deadline” is approaching this coming Monday, but no sweat! I can accept everything on a rolling basis. If you want to participate, I want to find a way to include you. If you are unable to send something by mail, submissions to the art challenge i’m discussing today are a totally acceptable (and completely digital) way that you could answer the question “what’s in the attic?” If you missed it, I dropped some additional clues in our community chat room that may help get your creative juices flowing.

I cry at the start of every movie
I guess 'cause I wish I was making things too
But I'm working for the knife

-Mitski

I strike the days and months from my dry-erase calendar in my cubicle, saying goodbye to January, February, March, and April before I've had time to settle into the year, to notice the leaves return to the trees and enjoy the fragrance of the lilac bushes. Each day, I come up short; my to-do list is pushed forward another day, and my life and worth are measured against it. Time for art making most days in minimal, and so, I have abandoned the belief that art needs to be difficult or strenuous to be legitimate.

Incorporating digital collage into my art practice has brought a level of clarity to both my purpose as an artist and my understanding of my own life and context that I have never been able to articulate before. You may recall a previous post where I shared a digital collage I made in response to digital overwhelm and anxiety. The collage features Jean-Antoine Watteau’s “Mezzetin” playing his lyre against a backdrop of remnants from my digital and physical lives. The collage juxtaposes an image of women working at a spinning wheel with an image of Sri Lankan workers in a sweatshop commissioned by Beyoncé's retail brand. Text from Steinbeck’s "East of Eden," hovers above the figure, questioning the direction of the future and the forces that shape our world, eliminating the things I hold to be good. Merging these disparate images from across time and space into one image illustrates just how much our modern lives don’t make any fucking sense. In resurrecting Mezzetin into the year 2024, we witness the enduring vitality of the artistic spirit, now contending with a world even more firmly under the heel of the aristocrats.

We have to make peace with a lot cognitive dissonance to survive in our modern contexts. We sacrifice our moral values to participate in the market. We venerate celebrities for their glamour and oppulence while they exploit workers on a global scale. We pay entrance fees to museums to see paintings of landscapes that are now likely leveled and polluted. We long to make art, but we often find ourselves constrained by the very systems that commercialize and devalue our creativity. We are working for the knife, and rarely for our individual or collective benefit.

This is a digital collage I compiled using a page I scanned of a “Jack and the Bean Stalk” illustration from a little golden book, a miniature stage from The Met’s Open Access collection, and a drawing of my art altar ego i’ve named “Patchy,” which I created for

Jacqueline Calladine

’s recent prompt. In procreate, I threw it all together in under 30 minutes, and asked chat gpt to interpret the imagery and symbolism. Here is the analysis Chat GPT provided:

This digital collage symbolizes a journey of growth and transformation, with "Jack and the Beanstalk" representing the ascent to greater consciousness. The jester figure, embodying the trickster archetype, introduces themes of play, unpredictability, and challenging societal norms, urging viewers to embrace creativity and spontaneity. The theatrical framing suggests life as an unfolding drama, where individuals navigate archetypal narratives to find personal meaning and authenticity. This interplay of elements highlights the tension between tradition and modernity, encouraging a reflection on the complexities of contemporary life.

The implications of artificial intelligence frighten me, but I cannot resist dipping my toes into the endless pool of knowledge it posseses. Symbolism is often dismissed by skeptics as arbitrary or subjective. However, if a computer can interpret these symbols in a similar way to humans, it suggests that there is a legitimate, shared symbolic vocabulary embedded in our collective consciousness. This capability of AI to reflect back meaningful interpretations based on aggregated data affirms the significance of the symbols we intuitively use, highlighting their universal resonance and the depth of meaning they carry across different contexts.

We are standing on the edge of time, and digital collage offers itself as an opportunity to collaborate with artists across history. Endless archives of imagery are now at our finger tips. Forage through them and find the work of the weavers, the potters, the embroiderers, the medieval scribes and painters. Use these relics of the past to create something new, something that speaks to your own experience and challenges the constraints of our modern world.

So let’s do an expieriement!

I have compiled a google drive full of public domain images from various sources. You can also use this resource outlining sources for Public Domain Images (shared by

Lauren Sauder

) to find your own images. You may also upload your own images to the drive if you would like to share your findings!

Heres some tips to get started!

• Select your images intuitively. Instead of searching for imagery to support a preconceived narrative, allow yourself to be surprised by what comes together.

• Add artifacts from your daily life to the collage. A reciept, a bill, a photo or screen shot from your phone…anything goes!

• Focus on tension between opposites, and then try to create harmony.

• This is not about creating an aesthetically pleasing piece of art. This is more focused on exploring imagery we are subconsiously drawn to and finding patterns. We will use this later to discuss themes and symbolism, and hopefully uncover deeper truths that your art is trying to express.

• There’s a variety of programs you can use. Photoshop and procreate is fine, or any free/open access program you can get your hands on.

When you’re done, post your finished piece on notes and tag me! I will include as many as I can in a future post so that we can explore the symbolism in them together.

Have fun!