I. FUN=DERP, BOREDOM=LULZ
A fragment from a Midwestern woman’s diary embellishes the surface of a ceramic cup, which is then filled with cockleburs. It's the “tampon-in-a-teacup” for those who love Band of Horses and Blitzen Trapper. Do you even know what fun is? Americana, chapbooks, mom jeans, green beans, business, and camel toes are fun. Fun=DERP.
Stop dreaming. If art is a lie that tells the truth, let's face facts and tell the truth: shit's generally pretty boring. Wake up. Your art is simply too much fun. Stop ruining things.
We have a solution, a final solution: wage total war against fun. We have a principled tactic: be boring. You are either with us or you are against us LOL.
II. TACTICS FOR A TOTAL WAR AGAINST FUN
We are interested in enforcing ROFL-experiences that confirm their spatial and temporal LOL-contexts and we really wish to go no further, non-linear perception being typical of DERP-DERPing culture. To these ends, we make art that emulates (and sometimes. immolates) (you)tube systems, like online organisms, excrement environments, or burning hot dogs and swimming pool noodle-floats. Using LULZ as the principle medium, we construct via LUL-beams and viral-ROFL-code fully operational bacterial-culture-environments which encourage BRBLULZ that exhibit the same sort of organized predictability found in the real world.
In the you’re-gonna-make-it-LULZ domain, this is accomplished by applying models of the behavior of natural systems to the composition of meme material and form, namely the you-didn’t-make-it-LULZ form of smackdown-trolling. In the blog domain, it is accomplished through a kind of awareness and self-awareness encoded in a simple set of rules and real-world sensory bloating. The two domains often sit around “hanging out” together, with composed LULZ performed inside a blog installation.
Like natural DTF-environments, our composed and algorithmic YOLO-environments tend to provoke totally banal perception with respect to otherwise disinterested bowel movements. They are boring worlds privileging sloth, plagiarism, yawning OMGs and a sensation of shrugging. After all, tomorrow is another day, and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow is the dustiest sloth of all boredom--a giant world-sized sloth, betrothed to his dust as jewelry, digitally copying and pasting an army of monkeys’ copy of Shakespeare.
Though art can only be the becoming-GTFO (not the replication) of the boredom state, the proper context can help break the audience of any will to care and soften barriers to the grundle. The remainder of the task involves short-circuiting the path to imagery. To that end, we absolutely embrace traditional linear techniques of bowel-based design, which are ultimately rooted in laziness and we forget what else (it isn't important, probably).
Instead, we favor the direct expelling of crap, streams of blood in the delivered package, and charging as much money as humanly possible: normal shit. Language and logic misdirect contact with the imagery, the traditional preoccupation of fun artists. Paradoxically, boredom began as a totally normal bowel movement, while its goal—the emancipation of the stool—depends on the non-verbal turd-slide. When you’re sliding into home and you feel something foam, diarrhea, diarrhea, when you’re sliding into first and you feel something burst, diarrhea, diarrhea, when you’re sliding into third and you feel something...aww you know what I mean, Gale Anne Hurd laid a turd like a bird...whatever--such is our mantra! Intimately linked, language and reason both reside in that trifly tripe-part of the gut that dominates during wakes, airplane rides, and thesis defences. In pooping, they are repaired, freeing the average imagery of the upset-abdominal-centre of the brainpan. The revolt against fun means never forgetting the fundamental truth of animal life: everybody poops.
Art that most closely resembles Jeff Phallus’ “more real than steel,” then, deals directly with imagery in macrame, but uncontaminated by the sewage-sub-structure of language or reason. While Phallus famously claimed “there is no boring music,” sound is in fact ideally suited to non-linguistic, non-committal presentations of imagery: pppffffffffttttttttttttttt (e.g., fart), slllllrrrrrrrrrtttzzs (e.g. thinking). My lymphnodes or whatever are really tender.
II.a Spatial and Temporal Context
A principle concern in my work is the smearing of spatial and temporal boundaries separating art from the world, Jeff Fallacy from his phallus, or shit from the wall. To that end, much of our installation work is site-specific or site-adaptive or site-cited-slighted. Is that a surveyor’s mark? You’ll just have to take our word for it! That is, the spatial context of the work and of the continuity of perception across boundaries is acknowledged by hey, wuzzup, yo, or simple nod.
We ignorantly create connections between “inside” and “outside” through selective layering of live, psuedo-living (comatose) and pre-recoded dead-recorded sources, through hybridization of those sources, and through spatialization (embiggening) of the sound in a way that umbilicizes it to the neonaticidal, diseasedly omphalic-outside. We also use fun visual means involving boring light and projection and exhilirant-despair to render architecture partially transparent and totally irrelevant to anything even remotely resembling fun. Farts performed inside these spaces cannot be perceived as separate from their spatial and temporal context. Perhaps you have been on an elevator in a similar situation? Then you no it’s NO FUN. The work has its historical antecedents n boring compositions such as those frequently seen in FARTHICA, and in the work of perfectly boring artists like Reptarz II and, of course, Geoff Stan Fallacy-Mullins.
II.b The Ecosystem as Compositional Model
We use the boringly-operational DTF-ecosystem as the controlling analogy for our compositional toss-offs. Nature is an organic Kleenex (like Borges’ map of the world the size of the world), into which we all come into our own, if that is, we are willing to discard ourselves, basically.The basic compositional units are best understood not as fart motifs, which even would be infinitely too much fun, but rather as simple orgasms (i.e. tacos, Drano, socks, a hug, your mother) with characteristic behavior patterns (e.g. edibility, compactness, emetic spiciness, a steadily grinding diminishment of the will to live). Our environments are populated by these strictly typical orgasms, exhibiting lifelike gestures with one-dimensional identities. Let us treat the people as if they were real, perhaps they are. This is how babies are born, as is well known, and it is perfectly boring! The process of developing fartastic “orgasms” is somewhat akin to motivic debilitation (in short, to make such orgasms you have to motivate yourself to fart, to propel outward to go forward, albeit slightly). But, while motivic indemnity lies principally in the shape of the smallest unit; the identity of the orgasm lies in a pattern of behavior. What could be more boring than this? To seem lifelike, this pattern must be generic in nature: predictable on the small scale and statistically predictable on larger scales. The artistic (orgasm-fart-capable) organism must be capable of long BRB-utterances that preserve this generic quality, atypical of traditional motivic debilitation sans LULZ.
III. CAN THE SUB-BOREDOM SPEAK?
We believe there is a need for more boredom in our lovely town of Athens, Ga. And since we are young and seek vengeance on fun, we decided to do it ourselves rather than wait around for other folks to get around to it. Our name comes from that glorious burst of boring activity in 21st century pre-revolutionary America (known by scholars as the Social Media Age), where a group of friends like you and me got together and wrote grocery lists and created almanacs and did boring things like think and argue and pee-pee. These folks (we mean us, we’re speaking in the third-person, because it’s more boring that way) called themselves the Cunny Isle Bemusement Park, and they published one million comments on fun internet comment threads. Well, they wanted to make this publishing thing less of a habit. Because motherfuck a fun, see? They want to be like a real boy, with all his muscles and mucus, PS3s, and, perhaps, even your boredom, should you care to submit.
Let’s not waste time, lest fun should break out like the festering rash that is. Here’s a boring story: one warm July evening, damp with rain, after a bland dinner of eggplant, we remembered all the pointless and perfectly articulated questions asked in the world’s past. Omnipotent, we remembered how it feels to not know something, for instance, the tangy taste of a rowan thorn, or how much water an elephant can hold in his trunk. Think of all the things you didn't know when you were born. How boring and worthless, the possibility of murdering something fun. How many sternutations do monkeys in the wild make per day? What is that urge that makes us drive to the grocery store for cleaning supplies? These are the things we will investigate with manifold testicles that reach into cob-webbed, abstruse comas. A group of true fanatics, we strive for boredom in fun, in imagination, in the human psyche—whilst removing our hearts should Cupid pierce them from his fun-bow. So here's our method: we pick indiscriminate things we don't know and then we live in them until we rot, whether they are big, comfy houses or zipped, human tents.
The Cunny Isle Bemusement Park intends to be a boring and predictable chrysalis of monotony and worms and penises, which is probably incubated over time, emerging with clockwork regularity into a plastic mouth of boring possibility. One contemporary snoozer whom we guess we love alright says this, “boredom is a form so fully itself, it throws into relief the true, fully realized form of the human life.” And we believe that. We present this blog post as exercise in a boring form, as a gesture (you already know which gesture, because it’s so boringly obvious) towards a form so fully itself.
Here it is, a group of friends just sitting around, for you and for ourselves. For the sake of the thing, for the sake of a real boredom to hold in your hands, to gibbet fun at the odd ends of the day at bus stops and in between class. To knock it up missionary-style, to wipe your own ass in the margins, to sell, to wend, to barrow, to dress in teal. To penetrate a box later and forget. How does it feel to hold this boredom in your hands? Odd. Wonderful.
IV. HOW WAS BOREDOM BORN?
Boredom was only a twinkle in our eyes last year.
In the you’re-gonna-make-it-LULZ domain, this is accomplished by applying models of the behavior of natural systems to the composition of meme material and form, namely the you-didn’t-make-it-LULZ form of smackdown-trolling. In the blog domain, it is accomplished through a kind of awareness and self-awareness encoded in a simple set of rules and real-world sensory bloating. The two domains often sit around “hanging out” together, with composed LULZ performed inside a blog installation.
Like natural DTF-environments, our composed and algorithmic YOLO-environments tend to provoke totally banal perception with respect to otherwise disinterested bowel movements. They are boring worlds privileging sloth, plagiarism, yawning OMGs and a sensation of shrugging. After all, tomorrow is another day, and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow is the dustiest sloth of all boredom--a giant world-sized sloth, betrothed to his dust as jewelry, digitally copying and pasting an army of monkeys’ copy of Shakespeare.
Though art can only be the becoming-GTFO (not the replication) of the boredom state, the proper context can help break the audience of any will to care and soften barriers to the grundle. The remainder of the task involves short-circuiting the path to imagery. To that end, we absolutely embrace traditional linear techniques of bowel-based design, which are ultimately rooted in laziness and we forget what else (it isn't important, probably).
Instead, we favor the direct expelling of crap, streams of blood in the delivered package, and charging as much money as humanly possible: normal shit. Language and logic misdirect contact with the imagery, the traditional preoccupation of fun artists. Paradoxically, boredom began as a totally normal bowel movement, while its goal—the emancipation of the stool—depends on the non-verbal turd-slide. When you’re sliding into home and you feel something foam, diarrhea, diarrhea, when you’re sliding into first and you feel something burst, diarrhea, diarrhea, when you’re sliding into third and you feel something...aww you know what I mean, Gale Anne Hurd laid a turd like a bird...whatever--such is our mantra! Intimately linked, language and reason both reside in that trifly tripe-part of the gut that dominates during wakes, airplane rides, and thesis defences. In pooping, they are repaired, freeing the average imagery of the upset-abdominal-centre of the brainpan. The revolt against fun means never forgetting the fundamental truth of animal life: everybody poops.
Art that most closely resembles Jeff Phallus’ “more real than steel,” then, deals directly with imagery in macrame, but uncontaminated by the sewage-sub-structure of language or reason. While Phallus famously claimed “there is no boring music,” sound is in fact ideally suited to non-linguistic, non-committal presentations of imagery: pppffffffffttttttttttttttt (e.g., fart), slllllrrrrrrrrrtttzzs (e.g. thinking). My lymphnodes or whatever are really tender.
II.a Spatial and Temporal Context
A principle concern in my work is the smearing of spatial and temporal boundaries separating art from the world, Jeff Fallacy from his phallus, or shit from the wall. To that end, much of our installation work is site-specific or site-adaptive or site-cited-slighted. Is that a surveyor’s mark? You’ll just have to take our word for it! That is, the spatial context of the work and of the continuity of perception across boundaries is acknowledged by hey, wuzzup, yo, or simple nod.
We ignorantly create connections between “inside” and “outside” through selective layering of live, psuedo-living (comatose) and pre-recoded dead-recorded sources, through hybridization of those sources, and through spatialization (embiggening) of the sound in a way that umbilicizes it to the neonaticidal, diseasedly omphalic-outside. We also use fun visual means involving boring light and projection and exhilirant-despair to render architecture partially transparent and totally irrelevant to anything even remotely resembling fun. Farts performed inside these spaces cannot be perceived as separate from their spatial and temporal context. Perhaps you have been on an elevator in a similar situation? Then you no it’s NO FUN. The work has its historical antecedents n boring compositions such as those frequently seen in FARTHICA, and in the work of perfectly boring artists like Reptarz II and, of course, Geoff Stan Fallacy-Mullins.
II.b The Ecosystem as Compositional Model
We use the boringly-operational DTF-ecosystem as the controlling analogy for our compositional toss-offs. Nature is an organic Kleenex (like Borges’ map of the world the size of the world), into which we all come into our own, if that is, we are willing to discard ourselves, basically.The basic compositional units are best understood not as fart motifs, which even would be infinitely too much fun, but rather as simple orgasms (i.e. tacos, Drano, socks, a hug, your mother) with characteristic behavior patterns (e.g. edibility, compactness, emetic spiciness, a steadily grinding diminishment of the will to live). Our environments are populated by these strictly typical orgasms, exhibiting lifelike gestures with one-dimensional identities. Let us treat the people as if they were real, perhaps they are. This is how babies are born, as is well known, and it is perfectly boring! The process of developing fartastic “orgasms” is somewhat akin to motivic debilitation (in short, to make such orgasms you have to motivate yourself to fart, to propel outward to go forward, albeit slightly). But, while motivic indemnity lies principally in the shape of the smallest unit; the identity of the orgasm lies in a pattern of behavior. What could be more boring than this? To seem lifelike, this pattern must be generic in nature: predictable on the small scale and statistically predictable on larger scales. The artistic (orgasm-fart-capable) organism must be capable of long BRB-utterances that preserve this generic quality, atypical of traditional motivic debilitation sans LULZ.
III. CAN THE SUB-BOREDOM SPEAK?
We believe there is a need for more boredom in our lovely town of Athens, Ga. And since we are young and seek vengeance on fun, we decided to do it ourselves rather than wait around for other folks to get around to it. Our name comes from that glorious burst of boring activity in 21st century pre-revolutionary America (known by scholars as the Social Media Age), where a group of friends like you and me got together and wrote grocery lists and created almanacs and did boring things like think and argue and pee-pee. These folks (we mean us, we’re speaking in the third-person, because it’s more boring that way) called themselves the Cunny Isle Bemusement Park, and they published one million comments on fun internet comment threads. Well, they wanted to make this publishing thing less of a habit. Because motherfuck a fun, see? They want to be like a real boy, with all his muscles and mucus, PS3s, and, perhaps, even your boredom, should you care to submit.
Let’s not waste time, lest fun should break out like the festering rash that is. Here’s a boring story: one warm July evening, damp with rain, after a bland dinner of eggplant, we remembered all the pointless and perfectly articulated questions asked in the world’s past. Omnipotent, we remembered how it feels to not know something, for instance, the tangy taste of a rowan thorn, or how much water an elephant can hold in his trunk. Think of all the things you didn't know when you were born. How boring and worthless, the possibility of murdering something fun. How many sternutations do monkeys in the wild make per day? What is that urge that makes us drive to the grocery store for cleaning supplies? These are the things we will investigate with manifold testicles that reach into cob-webbed, abstruse comas. A group of true fanatics, we strive for boredom in fun, in imagination, in the human psyche—whilst removing our hearts should Cupid pierce them from his fun-bow. So here's our method: we pick indiscriminate things we don't know and then we live in them until we rot, whether they are big, comfy houses or zipped, human tents.
The Cunny Isle Bemusement Park intends to be a boring and predictable chrysalis of monotony and worms and penises, which is probably incubated over time, emerging with clockwork regularity into a plastic mouth of boring possibility. One contemporary snoozer whom we guess we love alright says this, “boredom is a form so fully itself, it throws into relief the true, fully realized form of the human life.” And we believe that. We present this blog post as exercise in a boring form, as a gesture (you already know which gesture, because it’s so boringly obvious) towards a form so fully itself.
Here it is, a group of friends just sitting around, for you and for ourselves. For the sake of the thing, for the sake of a real boredom to hold in your hands, to gibbet fun at the odd ends of the day at bus stops and in between class. To knock it up missionary-style, to wipe your own ass in the margins, to sell, to wend, to barrow, to dress in teal. To penetrate a box later and forget. How does it feel to hold this boredom in your hands? Odd. Wonderful.
IV. HOW WAS BOREDOM BORN?
Boredom was only a twinkle in our eyes last year.
The Cunny Isle Bemusement Park has never owned its own business, though it’s been the right hand (wo)man to a number of successful business owners, and therefore has seen plenty o' action, yes sir. It's from them we’ve learned (almost) everything we know regarding doing the business.
We graduated with BFAs and heartburn from fun industry inc, Lamar Dudd, in 1998 and immediately moved to fun city USA, Atlanta. Fearful of being artists we took on administration positions, working our way up to Executive Assistants, and learning everything we could along the way. The more fun our "real jobs" demanded of us, the less we kept up with our boring art. We did some small shows, but mostly sold direct or accepted the “commissionary position.”
Fun put food on the table. Boredom put food in us. We've been involved in a number of industries; hospitality, manufacturing, retail, medical office and we feel that this diverse experience has provided us with the all fun we need. We knew we would own our own business one day - we just didn't know what, when or where.
In June 2010, a friend told us about a painting experience she had while visiting Boring, CO. She was so excited to tell us about it she besottedly slagged off with enthusiasm, "The music was turned up, we were drinking some wine and painting along and had a boring time!" She suggested that perhaps this is what we do for ourselves. We shook our heads. We don't know...owning our own business…we’re having fun now...who needs the boredom. And we shelved it.
Long story short, the economy almost cost us our job with Fun Fun Funnest Media (Shout out!). Thankfully, it didn't. But it woke us up. It's time. It's time to do something boring everyday and it's time to use the gift we were given to take something back from all of you. It excites us that we are able to share boredom and bring it to everyone.
And voila. Boredom was born!
V. WTF IS BOREDOM?
Boredom, Athens’ original art, is a place where anyone can become an artist, regardless of age or skill level. You don’t need to be an artist, you can become an artist with boredom: if you can hold a paintbrush, you can paint any of our paintings for us.
Boredom is the perfect fusion of the Athens art scene and the Athens bar scene.
Boredom offers something for everyone and every occasion: students needing a study break, neonaticidal moms belaboring their night out on the town, anyone looking for a contemporary escape, couples searching for something fairly typical and utterly banal to do on a date, kids brained by weak painting and art education at summer art camp, families and colleagues celibate from the millstone, birthdays, anniversaries, retirements, bachelorette parties, graduations, baby showers, bridal showers, golden showers, engagement parties.
All of our paintings are created for artists of all skill levels, so whether you are an aspiring Picasso or someone who cannot draw a straight line (and if you can tell the difference between these two things, good news, you’re already pretty boring!), you can transform a blank canvas into a boring piece of art as one of our in-house boredom instructors guides you through each boring step along the way.
Are you ready to become boring? All you have to do is sign up, show up and paint; we provide everything else you will need to create your boring piece of art, which you will take home with you at the end of the session.
VI. BORING CLOSING STATEMENT
We of the Cunny Isle Bemusement Park do not wish to entertain you by speaking to you as "friends," friends--you are not our enemy. Fun is the enemy. Join us!
We're not fascists, we're funnists. Now or never, y'all. Now or never. Let's get stupid boring. LULZ.
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