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I still feel like writing!
13 years ago
General
Yeah, may as well keep this ball rolling. I'm in a writey mood.
So I went to art school for my postsecondary education. In high school, most of my artistic output was drawing. I loved making comics. On the side, my whole life, I'd been doing little experimental videos. Just little special effects things, jump cuts and in-camera editing and fucking around with transfer speeds and doing animations and time lapses and stuff. I've been taking things apart, too, fucking around inside. Hardware, software, whatever. You know, classic hacker shit. I wasn't as good at it as most other people, but hey, you don't need to be to get what being a hacker is about.
So imagine my surprise when I got a chance to go to school and major in Fucking Around With Shit. They call it New Media... or they called it that, I don't know what they call it now, but it's essentially experimental art where time is a major component. That includes a lot of interactive art, film/video art, and performance. I... love that style of art, it takes basically everything that surrounds us and comes at it from a really meta direction. It changed the way I thought about making art, and that includes furry art!
But like, meanwhile, as you can tell, I've been drawing a lot of furry art! I fucking love this subculture, but it's so inherently Internet and weird and punk that bringing it into the Institution of High Art is kind of a joke. It's hard enough to get people to take furries seriously in their native habitat. I've tried writing about furries and contemporary art before and like... there's kind of nowhere to step. Internet subcultures in general are seen as the domain of cultural studies, and the writing about them has a detached, vaguely ethnographical bent to it.
Donna Haraway comes close to nailing the ethos of the subculture in the Cyborg Manifesto, but perhaps it only explains why it's so easy to be a furry feminist--maybe I can export the metaphor. We're all hybrids here, not just hybrids between humans and animals but hybrids of human and machine (our social context is very very very very mediated by technology, all the websites and forums we use, and occasionally our costumes) and hybrids of real and fictional. My name isn't actually Swatcher, I'm not a cartoon, but I also am! Plus, the basic fictional-ness of anthropomorphic animals makes it impossible NOT to play with the fluidity of our own identities, and by escaping from our human bodies we're unintentionally but harshly critiquing the structures of meaning we place on the body. We identify as animals because, maybe, the way we're forced to think about our own human bodies is kind of horrific.
However, it's impossible to ignore the fact that the fandom isn't a totally postmodern space, despite it being one in theory. Our actual identities bleed in through the conventions and our voices over Skype and the profile photos we post, and our identities implicate us in the systems that govern identities. I don't think any of us are totally living the dream of transcending humanity, which is what we're doing if we're up to the whole roleplaying-as-an-animal element of the fandom. Still though, the half-fictional, half-real, gender-bending and race-destroying post-scarcity imaginary world of furry makes way more sense than the essentialism of a lot of art discourse and cultural theory. When I look at the fandom, I think, hey... there's a nugget of Truth in all of this. This is actually kind of postmodern and it's actually kind of going in the right direction, that's super cool! Who the fuck knew it would appear here, right?
Now while I love drawing furry art and posting it to FA, since it's pretty fun and it gets me off and I'm going to keep doing it, there's just... that nugget, I can't let it go. I see the way we operate here and it's kind of great. On the flipside, as an Internet Subculture With a Bad Reputation, we're cloistered. Not just by our own persecution complex or by the media or anything else, but by a system where both we on the inside and the "mundanes" on the outside agree that we're a thing apart, the same system that is happy to categorize furry art as illustration or, maybe generously, outsider art. The art that gets into galleries is not the art that we post to FA, and there's a system in place to explain why that is. There's a nugget and I want to get it out and give it to people and say HEY, this is kind of working better than what we've got going on. That nugget is the way we act out and build and illustrate all of this imaginary stuff in order to explore different ways of doing things. That nugget is the fact that we're pressured to retreat from society in order to do this shit in private, like it's hurting anyone. That nugget is... not entirely clear to me yet. But I want to find out!
So yeah, tl;dr... I think there's something to the way we do things and think about things in the fandom that would be useful outside the fandom and I want to make art about that for people who aren't in the fandom.
So I went to art school for my postsecondary education. In high school, most of my artistic output was drawing. I loved making comics. On the side, my whole life, I'd been doing little experimental videos. Just little special effects things, jump cuts and in-camera editing and fucking around with transfer speeds and doing animations and time lapses and stuff. I've been taking things apart, too, fucking around inside. Hardware, software, whatever. You know, classic hacker shit. I wasn't as good at it as most other people, but hey, you don't need to be to get what being a hacker is about.
So imagine my surprise when I got a chance to go to school and major in Fucking Around With Shit. They call it New Media... or they called it that, I don't know what they call it now, but it's essentially experimental art where time is a major component. That includes a lot of interactive art, film/video art, and performance. I... love that style of art, it takes basically everything that surrounds us and comes at it from a really meta direction. It changed the way I thought about making art, and that includes furry art!
But like, meanwhile, as you can tell, I've been drawing a lot of furry art! I fucking love this subculture, but it's so inherently Internet and weird and punk that bringing it into the Institution of High Art is kind of a joke. It's hard enough to get people to take furries seriously in their native habitat. I've tried writing about furries and contemporary art before and like... there's kind of nowhere to step. Internet subcultures in general are seen as the domain of cultural studies, and the writing about them has a detached, vaguely ethnographical bent to it.
Donna Haraway comes close to nailing the ethos of the subculture in the Cyborg Manifesto, but perhaps it only explains why it's so easy to be a furry feminist--maybe I can export the metaphor. We're all hybrids here, not just hybrids between humans and animals but hybrids of human and machine (our social context is very very very very mediated by technology, all the websites and forums we use, and occasionally our costumes) and hybrids of real and fictional. My name isn't actually Swatcher, I'm not a cartoon, but I also am! Plus, the basic fictional-ness of anthropomorphic animals makes it impossible NOT to play with the fluidity of our own identities, and by escaping from our human bodies we're unintentionally but harshly critiquing the structures of meaning we place on the body. We identify as animals because, maybe, the way we're forced to think about our own human bodies is kind of horrific.
However, it's impossible to ignore the fact that the fandom isn't a totally postmodern space, despite it being one in theory. Our actual identities bleed in through the conventions and our voices over Skype and the profile photos we post, and our identities implicate us in the systems that govern identities. I don't think any of us are totally living the dream of transcending humanity, which is what we're doing if we're up to the whole roleplaying-as-an-animal element of the fandom. Still though, the half-fictional, half-real, gender-bending and race-destroying post-scarcity imaginary world of furry makes way more sense than the essentialism of a lot of art discourse and cultural theory. When I look at the fandom, I think, hey... there's a nugget of Truth in all of this. This is actually kind of postmodern and it's actually kind of going in the right direction, that's super cool! Who the fuck knew it would appear here, right?
Now while I love drawing furry art and posting it to FA, since it's pretty fun and it gets me off and I'm going to keep doing it, there's just... that nugget, I can't let it go. I see the way we operate here and it's kind of great. On the flipside, as an Internet Subculture With a Bad Reputation, we're cloistered. Not just by our own persecution complex or by the media or anything else, but by a system where both we on the inside and the "mundanes" on the outside agree that we're a thing apart, the same system that is happy to categorize furry art as illustration or, maybe generously, outsider art. The art that gets into galleries is not the art that we post to FA, and there's a system in place to explain why that is. There's a nugget and I want to get it out and give it to people and say HEY, this is kind of working better than what we've got going on. That nugget is the way we act out and build and illustrate all of this imaginary stuff in order to explore different ways of doing things. That nugget is the fact that we're pressured to retreat from society in order to do this shit in private, like it's hurting anyone. That nugget is... not entirely clear to me yet. But I want to find out!
So yeah, tl;dr... I think there's something to the way we do things and think about things in the fandom that would be useful outside the fandom and I want to make art about that for people who aren't in the fandom.
I still think we're likely to see furry tropes such as vore or what not represented in a major gallery, but it'll be appropriated by a 'serious' artist like Roy lichtenstein knocking off silver age comics or murakami appropriating anime porn, which has the effect of 'laundering' outsider material and making it respectable to a serious art audience. And puts a few zeroes on the end of the price tag.
http://forum.xcitefun.net/sako-koji.....rt-t26125.html
http://www.geoffreypugen.com/index.php?/utopics/
See also:
Oleg Kulik - I Bite America and America Bites Me http://www.deitch.com/projects/sub.php?projId=79
Miru Kim's The Pig That Therefore I am http://www.mirukim.com/photosPig.php
What you're touching upon is a massive topic that would make a perfect PHD thesis for you or someone else, if they wanted to commit to it. There's just SO MUCH to discuss when starting with something like furry: the formation of identities, the mediation of identity via technology, the interface with the contemporary media and fine arts worlds, the maturation of a culture and its emergence in the mainstream and academia, the interface with queer sexualities, etc etc etc.
Where to begin?
Please keep looking for the nugget.
It is certainly not unheard of for people within the furry fandom to also work professionally as an artist. The number of pro illustrators, designers and animators on here is a testament to that. Can you elaborate on what you mean about taking what is useful in the fandom, and utilizing/showing that to people whom aren't in the fandom?
Whereas we, indigenous to this subculture, just draw whatever it is the fuck we want and who cares. We're expressing our identities and our emotions and it's all very raw and experimental. I fucking love that. But honestly, it'll never make the canon, and eventually, when the show is over, anything that we've come up with that's interesting and relevant to humanity will fade into obscurity and be forgotten, just because we're an Internet Subculture. That really bothers me!
So here's a thing: can you extract the values of furry and make them work within the structure of cultural studies, because that seems to be the only way in the present moment to have those values accepted into the canon and carried forward to the next generation of artists? It seems pretty hopeless, to me.
and it had a spread on Lorraine Simms from Montreal. The article makes her seem to be a painfully obvious outsider, but still might be somewhat relevant in the sense that its a glance from the fine-art establishment. http://lorrainesimms.com/images/into-the-wild/
The models mostly wear laughably bad dollar-store outfits, and the article interchangeably refers to everything as "plushies", but at the very least this one is adorable: http://lorrainesimms.com/2009/05/th.....ne-simms-post/
Have you heard the joke: "What do you call good christian music? Music." It's probably the same, "good" furry art is just "art." Off the top of my head, Picasso did stuff with minotaurs. There's plenty of stories and movies and whatnot with talking animal characters. I reckon that counts as furry art.
Another thing I've thought a lot about as someone who dabbles in writing and wants to write more than sex (serious stuff?) is that if I wanted to write an full-fledged story, having it with furry characters is superfluous unless the plot depends on them being furries or their furriness--that's "good" art. Like say a story about a bank robbery or drama within a family, having the characters simply be furries makes as much sense as having the stories simply take place on the moon and then nothing particularly special happens because of that.
Likewise, thinking about what the subjects of non-abstract art in museums typically are, if you painted a painting about say a battle in the 1800's, having anthropomorphic characters would be jarring. Art reflects life or says something about it or the human condition. There aren't anthros in the real world. A piece of art with anthros in it changes the emphasis from some meaning about the world or statement to the contrast with a non-human in a human place.
You'd have to specify whether you're talking about art about a world with furries versus art about humans who consider themselves furries. The second is definitely within the grasp of traditional art--like a minority making art about stuff from their perspective. Thinking about it, people imagine plenty of things about themselves and how they make their identities, like that they're great musicians, or heroes of whatever type, or important in someway and whatnot. I can't say I've ever seen "normal" art in a museum reflecting that--I wouldn't know how to depict someone's thoughts in a painting.
The 'world with furries' art is fantasy art. There are artists that make sci-fi art or medieval fantasy/dragon sort of art with plenty of talent as well whom I imagine feel plenty marginalized. They're not taken seriously by the high-brow people for likely the same reasons. I mention this because sometimes if you can sidestep to a neutral analogy sometimes insight appears.
Different media are good for different things. Taking steps forward, with technology whole new media have opened up and the culture landscape is changing and the old guards become less important. Video games for one thing are an outlet that work well with fantasy and sci-fi. Who knows what's up the pike in the next few years. Computer animation will likely become more powerful for less money. Maybe someday soon amateurs will be able to make their own high quality films for only tens of thousands of dollars. If the internet starts to spill over into real life, like with those Google glasses, then maybe making up an identity and fantasy sort of stuff and interacting with and as it will become more widespread and acceptable in real life. That in combination with globalization might shift stuff toward animal logos or mascots as a way to create unique identities without traditional discrimination or stereotypes.
Besides, we're a fan culture! The art we draw on for inspiration comes from outside the fandom, and we transform it into something to our tastes for reasons that we don't ever actually talk about. I know this sounds silly, but what does it say about the world that we've created a space in which people can be immersed in illegal images of Digimon fucking each other? What does it mean to non-furries that furries exist? Let's spin the question around. This isn't just about anthropomorphic animals. This is about the existence of a subculture whose growing popularity highlights... maybe a certain desire for immersive escapism? Maybe a growing sense of body dysmorphia? I dunno! It could mean a lot of things to different people. This isn't just about wedging ourselves into a category that already exists, because I don't think anyone wants us-- they would have come to get us already. What I'm trying to get at is a way of talking about issues relevant to the world outside the fandom using the fandom's existence as a springboard, not just using its language of anthros.
I'm not sure I even count as a furry artist. I write stories occasionally, but most of my time is taken up being an indie games developer. ^.^;;
Ever seen ads for that indie movie "Bitter Lake"? It's apparently a serious "Game of Thrones" type fantasy drama, except the characters are live action anthropomorphic animals. GUys in armor and fur suits, pretty much.
Thing is, No matter how hard they try to get us to take them seriously, they are still men in fox masks. You aren't expected to pay attention to it, it's just there for no reason. It loses some vermissilitude (uh...sic?).
I personally think being "taken seriously" is the wrong direction. Furry artists looking to get their art to mean something should instead use the inherently disarming nature of their subject to slip in their meaning sideways. You know, be subtle.
Not that I know subtlety, I was just rooting around for something to satisfy my effed up kinks when I found this journal.