💩06 Kitsch and Queer

Lead on this creation: Alex

DESCRIPTION: Make something tacky, camp, kitsch, or intentionally ugly. OR make something queer that leans into the sensibilities of queer history, like camp.

Example:

A Little Fruity Triptych -- click on image to see full screen at intended size

Alex:

First, I got out my sketchbook and watercolours. I wanted to play with the phrase " a little fruity" that is an old fashioned-- and now jokey way-- of talking about queer people like me. I wore a t-shirt with it on it to Pride this year, which gave me the idea. Paintings of fruit are also a total kitsch, dining room cliche, so I wanted to try making something both queer AND kitsch today. Here were my initial tools-- once again I decide to start with analog materials because they give me a feeling of richness in my work:

I painted some kitschy watercolour fruit that looks like an elementary school kid did it. These are the cropped photos from my sketchbook pages I used, thinking they would make a good dataset for PlayForm-- I made many more than this but here's a good sampler:

I uploaded my full dataset of watercolour fruits to PlayForm. Then I set it as my training dataset for a GAN for 2 hours and 30 minutes, or 15 credits worth of computing.

As you probably know by now, Playform by default for this training time offers fifty outputs. This gave me a lot of choices. And choice is an important part of artistic agency. I had these images to choose from when constructing my final piece, which I decided should be a triptych in a nod to classical painting forms.

You'll notice a lot of these resemble actual fruit. I think if I wanted to take this piece is a more deeply kitsch rather than queer direction, I would have gone with those. But my personal sensibility as an artist tends toward abstraction and biological forms. You should trust your own personal sensibility you're developing in this class too-- ask yourself what you really like aesthetically every time you're confronted with outputs to work with like this. But in the end, indeed oranges are not the only fruit, and I made this final piece using three pretty abstract outputs that look almost like cells or growths, a link to the innate weirdness of living a queer life as an experience for me.

Here's the individual final three outputs you see in the example piece above merged into the final form of the triptych:

After choosing my three parts, I made the final piece combining them in Photoshop, with a simple black ground that suggests the triple framing of a triptych in physical life. You can see the final piece under the header that starts this page. In the end, how you present your work matters too! Think about the after-process you have for your outputs-- sometimes you might want to use a raw output, but sometimes not. For me, the reason not to use all the outputs, or just one, was to hone my concept in the direction of my vision of queer art.