Artist Statement

Artist Statement
by Robbt
The mediation of a symbolic culture creates a separation of our selves from our creations and environment. We are cut off and separated into cubicles, classrooms and bedrooms. The natural world is dissected, boxed and transported around the world for sale on a global marketplace. The logic behind the dominant technology and economy are seen as inherent in the human condition.

I am 25 years old. I have lived in cities and experienced the life of the spectacle, the drudgery of a corporate existence and commuter, the long telephone conversations in a cubicle attempting to fix some cog in the machine of global industry. Then I broke free and lived in the shadows, the dumpsters, the underground and found that life was still despondent and disassociated but there was a certain magic to be found scrounging for survival, a luxury of freedom, still caught underneath the logic of empire and the smog of industry.

Then there was the period of reconnection, discovering plants and frolicking in the fields of the organic farm. The question of how sustainable is sustainable agriculture.
The persistent usage of fossil fuel and outside inputs is of consideration.

Stepping further away from the status quo one finds the ideas of primitivism. In some senses a romantic retreat to the hay day of free living as scroungers in the bountiful harvest of nature. In other senses a devastating critique of civilization and its promises of progress and technology.

The bike trip, a chance to escape and travel without being dependent upon fossil fuels. The artist and partner head South and end up in the Georgia woods at Salamander Springs a permaculture ecovillage with a infrastructure built entirely from trash.

The houses were made of bamboo, the walls were made out of cardboard, the roofs were made out of cardboard layered with sheets of plastic from a furniture store dumpster melted together via candle. Everything was free and all that was required was to participate 20 hours a week in infrastructure building activities for the land.

Inspired by living there for a few months, the artist returns to Ohio to radically homestead in the woods of his family farm. Living in a tent scrounged back in Chicago he and his companion start a natural garden using the Fukuoka method of do-nothing agriculture. It is a smashing success and grows wildly out of control resulting in exciting foraging each time.

What then of the art of this so-called artist engaging in the proposal with this so-called university and these so-called statements of something or another. I can speak nothing of the spectacle and its blasted horns of disaster. For without our lives painted by the spontaneity of desire where would we be, certainly not here reading this cooped up in a office staring at a computer or what was formerly a living tree.