Satan inspires us to shoot polaroids of the empty shit hole American landscape.
It’s strip malls, one indistinguishable from the next.
Why is this reality, our trailer parks, not the subject of gallery shows?
Do we not photograph everything obsessively to prove to ourselves that we exist, that the reality of the horror we shoot is really in front of us? Is our subconscious telling us to record this hell because it is not below us but around us? Or are selfies us turning away from this hell where we can all smile and pretend everything is great?
The woods into which Hansel and Gretel gayly skipped have turned from trees to skyscrapers. Beautiful young women are stabbed to death by early age teens. Do we obsessively visually record the quotidian out of some existential dread that our memory’s are already in ruination? How can anyone be looking closely and carefully and analysing anything when what we are really doing is displaying how lazy we are to journal? Is reading and writing dying or already dead in our hearts?
What profound repressive mechanisms we must have to wave goodbye to our beloved children in our gingerbread house suburban driveways as they traipse off to live in Manhattan or Chicago.
Bad shit always happens to other people our subconscious soothes.
The detourner, the flanuer, the situationist’s derive, are these now a death defying activities? To continue these once essential activities to be human require the ambulatory to be armed with deadly weapons? Seems to give the lie to the assumption that progress and time are attached at the waist.
As we wait for the polaroid to develop is there some hope that it will not reveal what we shot? At least we still have, and it grows exponentially, the images produced for us in advertising and media culture, that same empty, shitty, vacuous message that we can buy our way out of our collective misery. Every day we become more estranged from ourselves, somewhere deep inside of us we experience a rape from which we emerge with contempt for ourselves instead of the rapists who await us at the malls and online to sell us something to soothe our soul. This cycle continues for our entire lives.
vignettes 