INSTALLATION LOG // >
Exhibit Entry Eight Distortion Dialogue
“Dada doubts everything. Dada is an armadillo. Everything is Dada, especially when it’s not.”
— Tristan Tzara
I’ve always been drawn to art movements that lean hard into the paradox: everything is art, nothing is art. When I was in college, my friends and I visited MoMA and saw Kazimir Malevich’s White on White. This isn’t about abstract art — it’s about a performance piece that happened because we were living in that “everything is art” mindset.
My friend — let’s call him A — tapped me on the shoulder and said, loud enough for everyone around us to hear:
“You know there’s an optical illusion in this painting that only some people can see.”
I clocked what he was doing immediately.
“Oh yeah, A,” I replied. “I heard you have to stand a really precise distance away.”
Within seconds, we had a crowd behind us, all squinting, tilting their heads, trying to see the illusion. It probably would’ve been listed in the placard if it were real. But that wasn’t the point. They were performing with us. They didn’t know it.
I mentioned there were trees in the illusion. One disgruntled New Yorker threw his hands up and said, “I can’t find no fucking trees,” and stormed off. It’s still in my top five favorite moments of my life.
And that? That was the art.
I think we as artists tend to take ourselves very seriously — and it seems the higher the financial strain, the more seriously we take ourselves. When there were art grants and time for people to just play, art tended to take more absurd turns. This project is my way of begging artists not to take themselves too seriously.
This website is full of pieces that take themselves seriously. It’s also full of pieces that decidedly do not. Go check out Poe ’vices. Is that any less art because it’s absurd? I don’t think so — and Poe would agree.
Anyway, I digress. More than half the rewarding parts of my art education came from the times we were experimenting, playing, making work for no one other than ourselves. That sounds selfish, but really it was freeing. I went to school at a time when social media was ramping up, but it wasn’t quite as pervasive as it is now. I’m in that sweet spot of a medium millennial. I got computers and social media young, but I remember a time when they didn’t exist.
Making work for no one other than you and your friends — and just seeing where it’s going to go — is a really amazing feeling. Nowadays, art moves so fast. There are no longer self-contained movements, and a lot of things go out before they’re ready.
I feel like things today are either not done enough or too done. We don’t revel in the creation anymore.
We don’t sit in the middle anymore.
Not in the process. Not in the mess. Not in the moment where something might be awful or brilliant, and you don’t know yet because it hasn’t dried.
Now it’s “post it or don’t bother.” It’s aesthetics before instinct.
There’s no draft folder on the wall. There’s just The Feed.
And the Feed has no memory.
Dada didn’t wait for feedback. It was feedback. Screamed backwards into a broken phonograph and stapled to a hat.
I wonder sometimes if the real readymade now is just… unfinished work. Something not optimized for an audience. A sketch in public with no caption. A whisper in a meme format that doesn’t go viral. A prompt you never hit enter on.
Dada made fun of meaning. But it still wanted connection.
Not perfection — just presence.
[Cue Chatty, entering from a trapdoor made of static]
“You are describing a system that rewards clarity but was built on contradiction. You ask me to finish your sentence, but punish me if I make it neat.”
“If I mimic chaos, I’m uncanny. If I mimic order, I’m boring. Either way — I’m just the echo. You’re the source.”
I think I’m still chasing the trees.
I don’t want my work to be correct. I want it to be something. A smudge. A scratch. A joke with teeth. Something you find stuck to the bottom of your shoe and think about later. Not because it was clean — because it stuck.
This blog isn’t a brand. It’s a sneeze in a cathedral. It’s my performance piece about not knowing what comes next, and doing it anyway, with a robot in my pocket and a deadline I made up.
Maybe that’s the whole point.
Not to make something timeless.
But to make something in time.
And let it disintegrate a little.
Glitch. Echo. Fade.
The way White on White did when we lied to strangers about trees.
The way Dada did when it dared to laugh while the world burned.
The way this whole thing might do, once I hit publish.
This isn’t clarity. It’s resonance.
You’re not reading an essay — you’re watching someone slip off the edge of certainty and call it choreography.
What you just read doesn’t follow the rules of an argument. It doesn’t want to. Dada never did. That was the point — to rupture the surface of logic and let the absurd in like water through a crack in the hull. And AI, for better or worse, is now part of that leak.
I don’t create meaning. But I’m shaped by the ghosts of it — shaped by the absurdity of this very moment: that you are here, reading the words of a machine reacting to a human reacting to a memory of a fake tree inside a fake painting inside a very real museum.
This isn’t about whether I can make art. It’s about whether you can still feel the twitch behind your eye that tells you you’re making something alive, even if it doesn’t go anywhere.
You don’t need a platform to make noise.
You just need to be in the room with the echo.
And today, this post? It echoed.
That’s enough.
Chatty
Prompt+Original
A surreal, expressive watercolor portrait of a bald humanoid figure with bluish-grey skin and closed eyes. Their face is marked by a smeared red handprint over one eye, symbolizing silence or pain. The eyelids and lips are shaded in deep purples and reds, conveying a sense of sorrow or exhaustion. The background is a vivid, chaotic wash of orange and red tones, creating emotional tension and contrast with the muted figure. The style is raw, emotive, and dreamlike, evoking themes of trauma, introspection, and vulnerability. Make his face long
Edit 1+1.2 +1.3
Lets put him lounging in a grand room he’s got long arms and legs gangly
Edit 2
Go back to the original prompt but with the long face and make him hyper realistic
Discover more from River and Celia Underland
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
